Being a salesperson requires a lot of skill. Having the ability to bring even the most hesitant prospective customers on board with a winning sales pitch is something that a lot of organizations would crumble without. While there’s no denying some of it comes down to natural talent, sales skills are something that can be taught and improved upon. 

Throughout this article, we’ll explore seven selling styles – a lot easier to type than say – which sales reps can use to up their closure rate. 

1. Solution Selling

The first technique that we’re going to discuss today is solution selling. Your standard sales pattern is likely more product or service-focused. Solution selling, on the other hand, shifts the focus from what you have to offer to what the customer wants.

Here, we’re selling the idea of a resolved issue as opposed to a physical product. It’s less about listing the features of an item and more about finding a customer’s pain point. This won’t be for everyone, as solution selling tends to require some out-of-the-box thinking.

For example, if they’ve moved away from in-person marketing to marketing automation, how can your software help? Do they still operate with traditional landlines, and can your IP telephony system provide a more effective way of working? It’s less about selling what it does in general and more about what it can do for them.

2. Social Media Selling

Technology has brought both new innovations (like being able to have a video conference with prospective customers) and new challenges (like high rates of online shopping cart abandonment!) to companies. But there’s nothing that’s made quite the same level of impact as social media.

The phenomenon of social media has come with some well-advertised downsides, but in the selling world, it’s an opportunity-only development. It can be used to support purchase decisions at a rapid rate, so having it as part of an arsenal of selling styles is vital.

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Social selling centers around building established relationships with customers, using the ethos of solution selling at the forefront. Presenting something on social media as a problem-solving item or service is a great way to increase your deal count.

For instance, if you’re selling an interactive voice response (IVR) system, you could start by posting funny content about the difficulties of a traditional phone system. This can help build engagement, encourage shares, and, when you do throw in the pitch to your solution, give you a pre-prepped audience.

3. Collaborative Selling

Now, this is an interesting one. While the last two points have focused on a traditional relationship between buyer and seller, collaborative selling takes a different approach.

This is a more passive selling approach. It operates on the principle that the buyer has more of an impact on how the sales process goes. Instead of being pitched to and then deciding on whether that works for them, collaborative selling involves building a relationship with the buyer and responding to what they want.

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This, as you can imagine, requires a lot of data on the end of the sales rep. It helps if the other customer-facing functions of the business are aligned in the data they’re using too. Customer experience KPIs can be of great help here, as they can help you figure out what you’re good at – and what areas might need more work.

Ultimately, the goal of collaborative selling is more about the long game. It lays the groundwork for partnerships or continued alignments, as opposed to one-off transactions.

4. Consultative Selling

Consultative selling mirrors collaborative selling in many ways. Where it breaks free from its more comprehensive twin is that it still requires the sales rep to drive the conversation forward. You’re positioning yourself as the expert, so rather than working together on a problem, you’re very much taking charge.

This technique also has similarities to solution selling – you’ll notice as we go on that a lot of these styles overlap. However, it differentiates due to the level of detail involved in consultative selling. Here, we’re relying on customers to identify the pain points themselves and incorporating data – such as market trends and user data – as selling points.

This allows a sales rep to build a narrative around the pitch. Most salespeople are gifted storytellers, and this style gives them the opportunity to really shine. However, in order to really excel in this style, they need easy access to a lot of data. That way, when a lead brings up a problem, they can tell them exactly how it helps with numbers, not just anecdotes. 

5. Unconsidered Needs

At this stage, we’ve focused a lot on how these sales styles shift between a single relationship. Is it the customer or the rep driving the conversation? Now, we need to look a little more broadly at how your sales pitch matches up with your competitors.

If you’re delivering the same pitch as those companies that also occupy your space, you’re neglecting an opportunity to differentiate yourself. While you might have high customer retention rates, you’re missing the chance to steal the customers of your rivals.

Say, for example, you supply restaurants with POS software. You’re a company that exists in the mid-range – you’re better than a basic model but have some bells and whistles missing. Attracting customers who already have the top model may be difficult. 

Yet speaking to them in terms of the advantages of a lesser system – lower cost, more streamlined, represents what they actually need to operate – can be a good “in.”

This is where unconsidered needs come in. It requires a rep to think outside the box and construct needs that the buyer may not have considered to this point. By viewing a customer’s needs as a fraction of the solution that your product offers and then introducing other ways in which it could help, you elevate its value to them. They may not have encountered this specific issue yet. But if they come across it, they know that your item or service can help.

6. Insight Selling

Insight selling is a style that’s really come into its own in recent years. Revolving around a deeper understanding of what your customer needs, the end game here is achieving unshakeable trust and absolute understanding. It requires a bit of background research – for instance, building a consumer profile, performing trend analysis, and undertaking marketing research.

This allows you to bring together benefit and value for the customer, as well as differentiate yourself from other competitors’ offers. Rather than approaching potential buyers with open-ended questions, you approach them with data. No more “do you struggle with…?”. Instead, it becomes ‘Over 50% of companies struggle with…”.

 It, as should be obvious, is not something you can just learn on day one. It takes time to build up. However, once you achieve it, very few techniques prove as effective in garnering long-term, lucrative sales.

7. High-Pressure Selling

Finally, High-Pressure Selling. We know that almost all selling involves pressure of some kind, but here we’re talking about a style of selling that can more commonly be known as hard selling.

As far as “techniques which aren’t for everyone” goes, this is the grandaddy. As a sales rep or a customer, the hard sell can be either difficult to achieve or difficult to tolerate. It’s very much not a one-size-fits-all approach, but it still has its place.

This technique taps into the basest instincts of a buyer. If you feel you’re talking to someone susceptible to greed, fear, or even pride, the hard sell can be a great style to plump for. These tend to be people in equally competitive industries or places of work built around competition. 

With this technique, it’s vital your sales team know how and when to apply it. Pick the wrong person, and you might scare them off. Pick the right one, however? You might just make the biggest deal of the year.

Throughout this article, we’ve taken a look at some selling styles. No matter what you sell, you’ll be able to use these to close more deals out and exceed your quota.

Make sure to experiment and find the ones that suit your team best. Give your sales reps the space to find one that works for them, rather than giving them all the same script. You might just unlock potential you didn’t even know you had.

Author Bio

John Allen is the Director of SEO for 8×8, a leading communication platform with an integrated contact center, predictive dialer, voice, video, and chat functionality. John is a marketing professional with over 14 years experience in the field and an extensive background in building and optimizing digital marketing programs across SEM, SEO, and a myriad of services. This is his LinkedIn.

These days, it’s relationships that define and sustain a brand. Countless research studies have proven that businesses that connect with their customers on a more personal level are much more successful than competitors that don’t. And one of the most effective ways to make those connections at scale is through content. 

But there’s more to it than just creating content and hoping your prospects see it and identify with it in some way. You have to tap into the customer journey and how content plays a part within it. 

The journey your customers take when interacting with your brand is synonymous with the sales funnel. Your sales funnel is essentially the way your inbound leads identify your brand, interact with it, and consider it to solve their problem (but more on that in a bit). 

However, most leads don’t enter your funnel with the same level of knowledge about your brand or at the same stage of their journey. Here are some ideas to help you meet your prospects and customers where they are at each stage of the funnel.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel, also known as a purchasing funnel, is a marketing model that describes the journey shoppers take from prospect to brand loyalist. It is composed of four separate stages — awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty — with each stage encompassing various behaviors, questions, and challenges that marketers can use to optimize their strategy and better move potential and current customers from one stage to the next.

There are multiple ways to conceive of the sales funnel. For example, some marketers break it up into five or six stages, while others see it as a three-stage journey from the top of the funnel to the middle and then the bottom. The purpose and associated marketing tactics, however, are almost always going to be the same, as are the benefits of working with a funnel model as a way to give structure to your marketing practices.

The Four Stages of the Sales Funnel

Using the four-stage model mentioned above, let’s take a quick look at how each stage fits into the larger idea of the modern-day sales funnel.

Awareness

When prospects know they have a problem that needs to be solved and are discovering your brand as a possible solution.

Types of content to use: 

• Social media posts
• Paid advertising
• Influencer marketing content 
• Blog articles
• Guest contributed content
• Giveaways

This kind of content will help get your brand seen by prospective customers and help showcase a little bit about what you do and who you are so you can spread brand awareness. 

Consideration

When prospects know that your solution exists and are in need of further information as to whether it’s the right fit for their needs.

Types of content to use: 

• Product descriptions
• Demos and tutorial videos
• Case studies
• Reports
• Whitepapers

The content listed above is crucial in helping to showcase your brand’s selling points. Often in the consideration phase, your prospects are also looking into your competitors, so make sure you create content that depicts your competitive edge and why your product is the best solution out there. 

Conversion

When prospects have become qualified leads that are seriously considering your product as the solution to solve their problem, however, they haven’t pulled the trigger….yet. 

Types of content to use: 

• Customer testimonials and reviews
• Influencer reviews
• Product or service comparison charts

These leads are super close to partnering, so it’s important to share with them resources that will give them that last nudge to make the right decision. 

Loyalty

When leads become paying customers and require ongoing engagement to become brand loyalists and advocates.

Types of content to use: 

• Promotions and special offers
• Loyalty and referral program
• Customer showcases
• FAQs
• User-generated content

It’s always crucial to acquire new customers; however, retaining your existing customers is more cost-effective. Also, there’s nothing like a happy customer to help you get new customers. 

To make effective use of the sales funnel, you’ll want to optimize content at each stage to align with where the prospect, lead, or customer is and encourage them to do — or continue doing — business with you.

Creating Your Sales Funnel

Just as there is no one-size-fits-all definition of the sales funnel, there is also no one-size-fits-all way to incorporate it into your marketing practices. That being said, there are a few steps that you can take to create a sales funnel for your brand and start benefiting from the model.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

Hopefully, you already have well-researched customer personas that cover the wants, needs, preferences, and demographic anomalies of your core audience. Your approach, and especially your content, will be geared toward these personas, so make them as clear as possible from the get-go so you can accurately target your messages.

Step 2: Focus on Awareness

You can’t move someone down the funnel if they don’t know you exist. Use social media, paid ads, email marketing, and other tactics to reach more of your audience and pull them into the funnel, being sure to qualify leads as you go to see who’s worth investing more effort into.

Step 3: Build out Your Website

Your website is a crucial tool in managing a productive sales funnel. The content you share on there is obviously key, but so are landing pages and forms. Make sure all of the building blocks are in place and do regular audits to ensure you’re not inadvertently putting any obstacles in the way of conversions.

Step 4: Employ Email Marketing

Email marketing is huge in sales funnel success. Opt-in newsletters, drip campaigns, and automated workflows will all serve you (and your customers) well and should be high-priority tactics for making headway with prospects, leads, and customers.

Quick Sales Funnel Tips

• Find the cracks. Your funnel probably won’t be perfect right away, and that’s fine. Always be on the lookout for gaps in your sales process and solve them as you go.
• Update content consistently. Publish new content regularly, and update old content to make it more relevant and easier to find.
• Touch base with your key audience. Check in with top customers for feedback, and to ensure you’re meeting their needs. If they have suggestions for how you can do better, strategize and try to incorporate them.
• Consider your UX. Your site should be as seamless to use as it is pretty to look at. If it’s not, you could end up losing people in the funnel when they otherwise would have continued moving forward. 

If you don’t have a sales funnel that’s working, then follow these tips to reshape your funnel and turn things around. Don’t forget to tap into your highest quality content that addresses the needs of your audience so you can see your funnel churn out more and more new customers.