Suffering from a Transactional Mindset?

Are your sellers focused on closing deals or creating clients for life? In this video, I unpack why a transactional mindset limits growth and what you can do to shift toward long-term, relationship-driven success.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: The One Sales Metric to Rule Them All!

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

So I’ve got to admit that I’m really disappointed in something. I read a statistic that said that 84% of decision makers want us to show up as trusted advisors. Yet only 72% of us do show up as trusted advisors, in their opinion. Why am I disappointed by this?

Well, I started selling enterprise sales about 30 years ago, and my very first sales training program then was about being a trusted advisor. Every single major training program that I know of teachs trusted advisor status. Every client that calls me says that they want trusted advisor status with their customers. And so what's gone wrong? Why are decision makers still thinking that we show up as transactional?

Well, I think there's a few things going on here, but one of the things that we really have to think about is, are you managing the whole company, or are you just managing the opportunity or the PO or the project or the product or the service that you sell? If you think instead about managing that whole customer and you think about their strategic goals, you think about what's driving them as a business, what they're trying to accomplish. And you talk to them about solutions to those problems. If you go into the conversation with a completely clean slate, your eyes wide open and only prepared with questions, you'll truly understand the value you can bring at an operational level that can help them drive towards their strategic objectives. And then you become a trusted advisor.

When you go into that customer with the mindset of, I'm here to sell a product or a service to that customer, then you're viewed as transactional. And so let's do ourselves one favor right now and make that shift going forward. And let's not let another 30 years go by where we talk about something and say we want it, but we don't execute it with our customers.