Industrial selling is based on the concept of technical selling or solution selling. The selling concept for the business enterprises of industrial buyer is to define the needs of a target market and modifies the organization’s product or service to satisfy those needs more successfully than its competitors.
The solution selling firstly includes selling an appointment over telephone. The references for the new customers will be obtained from the existing satisfied customers. We need to find out the customers in the same segment of existing satisfied customers and sharing similar kind of problems. This increases the probability of buying. This is termed as selling with focus on application or benefit segmentation. The next step in the solution selling is identification of what customer needs? We need to be very careful in this stage as there is high probability of getting confused between “what customer wants” and “What customer needs”. If we try to sale “what customer want” in solution selling then the same results in to the customer dissatisfaction. In this case there are rare chances of retaining the customer or any repeat purchase behavior. All the technical presentations should focus on what customer needs to do? And why?. The customer sometimes don’t understand the exact solution of the problems. Technical presentations should be made to fill this GAP. Technical presentations should not be made for the sake of selling features or benefits. This is followed by implementation of solutions and measuring the effects of solutions as well as customer feedback.
In solution selling, it is essential not to sell the solution without understanding the customer's requirements. Otherwise you may unwittingly sell him on how ill-suited your solution is to his requirements. If we patiently learns what the clients need, we have a much greater chance of successfully selling services. Understanding the type of re-buy situations (Straight, Modified, New) in Industrial Selling is of prime importance. If customer is reburying (re-purchasing) the same product again without any request for modification is termed as straight rebuy, however product rebuy with modification is termed as modified rebuy. Modified rebuy has more potential is solution selling. Solution selling should not be concentrated only on the present problems faced by industry however solution selling has its magic in working on potential and futuristic problems in Industry. This adds benefits to the product and value (which is the ratio of benefits to cost) is created. Creating, communicating and delivering the solution and value is the Industrial Selling.
Solution selling also needs identification of various alternatives as a solution. If we offer less choices to our customers then there is more probability of customer accepting the solution due to the hidden constraints. Customer always prefer the critical selection process if the value of order is high. This requires identification of right set of well trained trained sales force.
Industrial marketing focuses on the sales people who are order getters and not order takers. When customer is in need of your product and is ready to place order due to prior experiences or references. Then your customer is buying, you are not selling. In this scenario sales people become order takers. Identifying, communicating, convincing and ease of delivering solution gets converted in to the order.
In this scenario sales people become order getters.
The purchase decisions in industrial marketing are based on many factors, such as compliance with product specification, product quality, availability, timely supply, acceptable payment and other commercial terms, cost effectiveness, after-sales service, and so on rather than on social and psychological needs. The time required to convert the opportunity or inquiry to order is more in Industrial marketing and involve many individuals from technical, commercial/materials, and finance departments. Industrial Selling is one of the interesting filed of management and has tremendous scope in the coming future.
Source - Prof Mahesh Bhanushali
Assistant Professor, DR VN BRIMS
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