1Many outside factors influence the decision-maker.	2Social trends and new technology affect buying habits.	3Clients expect higher levels of convenience now.
The telecom sales process is a confluence of disparate factors, where rapid technological developments have the greatest impact on customers and purchasing behavior. Telecom selling is made more challenging by the divergence of cultural influences and social trends from business to business across all regions. Creating the perfect balance ensures sales streams that deliver robust sales revenues—but what does that really look like?
Clients have their own criteria for determining the value that products and services give to their businesses. They attach a set of buying signals, commonly known as hot buttons, for their preferences. Telecom sellers need to be watchful for these signals to better recognize what appeals to clients most and to better offer a solution that will meet the buyer’s criteria. Sellers with this mindset will have the competitive advantage of clinching increased sales over their rivals.
If there are hot buttons, there also are pain points that are part of doing business. Telecom sellers need to dig deeper into business stresses caused by dissatisfaction with other products or unsavory experiences with other vendors. Detecting unmet needs and identifying viable options can help sellers turn these pain points into opportunities to win client loyalty and generate more sales.
The telecom sector has grown into a complex market that has created a deluge of options for buyers, making selling even more complex. Selling has been transformed into an interactive process that ends in the meeting of the minds of two active principals – the seller and the buyer – resulting in the closing of a sale.
The seller-buyer equation has branched out into multi-pronged, often interlocking processes. Leveraging people, groups, and events that have a big influence on the client can help sellers offer solutions that matter. For instance, knowing the client’s association memberships and non-competitive suppliers will help sellers get to learn their client’s needs better and offer more improved products and services at more competitive prices.
Telecom selling is here to stay with renewed force in both mature and growing markets. Integration, convergence, acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships should brace the telecom world for increased competition within the industry and from other sectors. Newly competing goals will be about expanding into new markets and battling for increased share in existing markets.
Unique value propositions will need to be crafted for each target market segment as technological disruption continues to change customer expectations. While bigger telecom companies can buy into smaller ones, smaller ones can opt to enter into partnerships on a local or regional level to take advantage of the economies of scale.
Technology changes will pressure telecom employers to make major changes in the way their employees work, starting from the leadership to the lowest echelon. This will not be easy to do because of traditional hierarchies. Even so, the change will have to be made.
At the center of it all are the clients. Clients have nothing to do with technology, but they have everything to do with convenience. They will only settle for unfailing convenience of usage of the device or service they want wherever and whenever they want to use it.
Finally, a telecom sales strategy is not just about selling. It is about building relationships and forging alliances that generate revenue and build businesses’ bottom lines.
This article was written by Cameron Bell and published on the Telecom Channel Blog, presented by Intelisys.
Intelisys is the nation’s leading Technology Services Distributor of business communications services including voice, data, access, cable, collaboration, wireless and cloud.