July 19, 2022

1076: Service-Led Selling Differentiates You, with Jim Irving

40 minutes

Jim Irving is the CEO of Merit Consulting and the author of the bestsellers The B2B Selling Guidebook and The B2B Leaders Guidebook, as well as his latest book, The B2B Sales Top Tips Guidebook. He shares some insights he learned while gathering sales tips for this guidebook on how to realign how you sell with the prospect's buying process. They talk about a more streamlined definition of it, and how service-led selling sets you apart from even your biggest competitors when the norm today is all about conformity.

HIGHLIGHTS

A prospect's buying process and conformity

Buyers don't want to talk to sellers, but they have to

Differentiate yourself with service-led selling

QUOTES

Jim: "How often do you ask your prospects what their buying process is? And almost every time, there's silence. And I think I have a concern about our profession generally in that way and that there seems to be a big move towards process, towards AI, towards dividing up sales roles and I'm concerned that we're forgetting about how people want to buy."

Jim: "I've called it service-led selling, and when I was working for a smaller vendor against a giant, we thought our product was better, we thought we could do this. But it was the service that we gave and the responsiveness that made them think, we like these guys and we're not so happy with the big name."

Andy: "Rule of thumb is your chances of winning a particular piece of business are in inverse proportion to the number of times you ask the customer to tell you their story or their problems."

Find out more about Jim and get his guidebook in the links below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimirving/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/B2B-Sales-Top-Tips-Guidebook/dp/B09LZNXH46