The advent of digital information has fundamentally changed the role of sales professionals, particularly in the technology industry. In many cases, the sales function in technology may be obsolete altogether. The key to understanding how to be an effective seller today is to examine the different types of customer buying modes.

Transactional Buying - requires low cost transactional selling

Because technology products have merged together in the eyes of consumers, i.e. they barely differentiate between technology companies because the products carry out similar functions, it is hardly surprising that a lot of technology customers simply want to buy the product with the cheapest price.

Something of note however is that recent studies have shown that many of these transactional buyers would forgo the cheapest option if they saw value in the sales process.

This was clearly proven by a US Technology Company who a few years ago told the industry that they werent going to be competing based on price any more. There prices were fairly high compared to some of their competition, but they were willing to earn the premium.

At the start of this new regime, their business did drop, but as the salespeople focused their efforts on providing customer value beyond simply adding new functions to their products, the results stunned the competition. In only the first year their profits went up by 11% and their revenue was up by 6%. The year before, when they were competing on price, both of these figures were down.

Consultative Buying " selling value with the product

In every market, there are also customers willing to go beyond a purely transactional relationship when the seller can offer more than just quality products and good customer service. For these buyers, an important element is having access to the expertise of the business.

This type of customer will welcome new relationships with your business if you can make them sure that you will become useful assets and that they will have access to your knowledge and expertise. To ensure that your product holds value to a customer, the seller must tailor their selling process for a particular customers requirements, and throughout the sale process, describe ways in which their solutions holds the answers to the consumers problems.

There are two facts that sellers must remain conscious of at all times while selling: People will value their own conclusions over what their told. People will value what they ask for over what theyre offered.

It is very important that companies recognise these different buying modes in potential customers. Also, its important to know the difference between telling and asking. A lot of salesmen will ask the potential customers questions to get a good picture on their needs, but what sellers must consider is whether or not the questions being asked are creating value in the customers mind i.e. can the customers gather information about your solution to their problem from the questions being asked?