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    The Augmented Salesperson: B2B Sales in the Digital Age
    The Augmented Salesperson: B2B Sales in the Digital Age
    The Augmented Salesperson: B2B Sales in the Digital Age
    Ebook70 pages52 minutes

    The Augmented Salesperson: B2B Sales in the Digital Age

    By Chris Gerretsen

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    About this ebook

    The traditional sales representative is no longer. His extensive product knowledge, in-depth understanding of the customer's situation and excellent personal relationship with his accounts have proven to be insufficiently distinctive. A growing slice of the sales process has been taking place online since the end of the 1990s. Inbound marketing is gaining ground. Inbound & Online Marketing is not the Holy Grail, however. The need for personal sales remains, particularly in a business-to-business context. This is certainly the case for innovative and/or complex products and services. When selling new and multifaceted products or services, a salesperson is a deciding factor in the process, whereby his / her input goes much deeper than the mere provision of information about the new product or the new service. The prospect expects to be inspired by the salesperson … But how do you achieve this?
    The answer to this question is: by building a sales organization consisting of "Augmented Salespeople".
    This book discusses the four crucial ingredients for the Augmented Salesperson. Furthermore, it provides insights in how to recruit, train and manage the Augmented Salesperson and it explains how a winning sales organization can be built around Augmented Salespeople.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateDec 31, 2018
    ISBN9781543959284
    The Augmented Salesperson: B2B Sales in the Digital Age

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      Book preview

      The Augmented Salesperson - Chris Gerretsen

      Plan

      Prologue

      We are great supporters of equal treatment of men and women. Therefore, any person indicated in this book may be male or female. This does mean that whenever we mention salespeople, we are forced to specify whether they are male or female every time. The same is true for customers discussed in this book. This immediately introduces the two main players in this book in one fell swoop: salespeople and customers. We have opted for an honest division to maintain easy reading: salespeople are men and customers are women. If you want to reverse the roles, please feel free to do so in your mind.

      Chapter 1: The sales representative

      When I was young, very young, about 8 or 9 years old (this is the 80s of the previous century we are talking about: Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, Champaign’s How ‘bout us was number 1 in the charts for weeks and Aston Villa won the Europa Cup 1), an extraordinary man lived in our street. He stood out, because he was different from the other people in our street. It was a very respectable street, in a respectable village, where people dressed respectably and certainly not flashily. The street was home to a science assistant at the local secondary school, a carpenter, a lab technician and a care institution HR manager, whose position was still just called Head of Personnel at the time. However, the gentleman I am referring to was very different to these people. He was dressed immaculately. He always wore a suit, often with a checked pattern. With the exception of Saturdays, he always wore a tie, held in place by a gold tie clip. His dark brown, wavy hair was so meticulously styled that even the strongest storm wouldn’t put a hair out of place. He drove a large green Mercedes that never seemed to have a speck of mud on it. Twice a week, he drove this Mercedes out to the local tennis club, where he and his wife were much-loved guests who participated in the bar shifts too. He wasn’t the athletic type and would never be club champion, but his impeccable reputation commanded respect nonetheless. He had two sons, both equally as respectable as their father, who would eventually both become business economists at a bank, after a fairly hassle-free (though rather boring) time at university.

      As predictable or even boring as Roland’s - such was his name - life may seem, as a child I thought it was fascinating. And despite the fact every house in the street was the same, I felt that Roland had the best job out of everyone and earned the most money.

      My father told me he was a sales representative. What a special job that must be!

      Later, I understood that Roland was a sales representative for paint. He needed the large green Mercedes to transport the tins of paint he showed his customers. He made his daily rounds through his allocated area and ensured that his customers - mainly paint shops and decorating businesses - all received exactly the right amount of attention. This had been Roland’s job for years and he knew his customers like the back of his hand. In turn, the customers knew that they could depend on Roland: he knew everything about the various paints his company Stibio had developed and sold over the last 20 years and was always on hand to provide reliable and informed advice. His most important customers even had his private number, so they could reach him at home in the evenings. Not that this was ever necessary, by the way, but they felt reassured by having the option. Every now and then, Roland had to have a difficult conversation with a customer, such as if another paint manufacturer tried to convince the customer to change suppliers. Roland would have to use every trick in the book and his product knowledge would be put to the test. He would be expected to refute the competitor’s claims as to why they would be

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