Top 15 Sales Method

What is Business Development?

15 sales methods...

How do you know which one to use?

In 1968, Xerox created the first modern sales method.

It was called "Needs Satisfaction Selling."

It tiggered a dozen more Sales Methods also called Sales Models or Sales Methodologies.

Sales methods are used to guide salespeople (Capture Managers).

During the 1960's, the Information Age was born.

Telecom tech rapidly enabled buyers to share their customer experience.

B2B became a lot more competitive and execs scrambled to respond.

Sales people used to highly scaled order-taking now had to listen.

They had to personalize solutions for prospects.

They now had to advocate for their prospects and not simply advocate for their corporation.

Otherwise, poor experiences would permeate rapidly and revenue would tank.

Executives at Xerox scrambled and created a new customer-centric sales training program to turn sales people into business developers.

• BD = customer and community advocacy that creates corporate growth.

• Sales = a transaction in which the buyer receives goods in exchange for money

1923 the first business developer was hired by the San Francisco.
1968 is when the BD profession began to skyrocket.

Since then, there's been a lot of confusion between sales and BD.

Some companies have a clean separation between the two roles...

• BD = Prospecting in the Activation Phase of customer journey

• Sales = Qualifying and closing in the Conversion Phase

Other companies combine both roles as Full Cycle (also called Full Spectrum business developers who conduct both prospecting and sales activities. This is the typical scenario in startup organizations that don't have sufficient resources to separate the two roles.

There's a lot of debate about the best sales method.

Which one's your favorite?

Tony Gray, BDP
Author of the Business Development Body of Knowledge

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