40 Minute Sales Training: The Customer Buying Process
Sales people may have a process that’s been taught for along time, but customers have their own process for buying. It’s important to know the difference.
Mike Cammarata has extensive experience as a sales manager and director selling life science instruments. He joined me on the podcast to share his expertise. Both sales and marketing folks will benefit from this conversation as he makes recommendations on how marketing can be most helpful to sales in terms of literature and leads.
Traditional sales training will tell you that if you do the process correctly, at the end of the process, a sale comes out. Those of us who have been in sales long enough know that’s very rarely the case.
Mike explains how a sales person should interact with a customer when they’re meeting for the first time. He talked about why that relationship is so important and the amount of trust a customer places in the sales person once they have decided to buy.
It turns out, “there’s a lot more buying processes going on than selling processes. There are customers everywhere.”
If you are in marketing, “whatever the company can do to uncover potential customers, whether it’s trade shows, or brochures, or websites, or any other electronic media, go and please do it.” But make sure you get enough qualifying information about the customer before you pass it on to the sales person.
Mike addressed common objections and what they really mean. Often it’s a signal the salesperson is missing a step.
There is no black market for product literature.
For example, regarding the classic objection that the salespeople hear all the time, “I was only gathering information,” Mike said, “Well, it’s funny, but I don’t know that there’s an international literature collector’s club, and I’ve never seen people go to a hotel room and trade an HPLC brochure for a microscope brochure, or anything that indicates that there’s some collectibles activity going on in this.”
About My Guest
Mike Cammarata is currently retired, but has extensive experience in life science instrument sales. He's been a sales manager or director at Pharmacia Biotech, Perkin Elmer, and Teledyne Isco, He has previously had a consulting company for 10 years, and now is generous enough to come on and share his experience about selling and how marketing ties into that.
