What Is a Way of Selling?

In complex B2B sales, your Way of Selling is what differentiates you from other organizations in your market. It is much more than just your sales process, strategy, or what your salespeople do on a daily basis. It includes culture, mindset, professional development, marketing, and positioning. Ultimately, your Way of Selling defines the experience your buyers have, your reputation, and the sales outcomes you achieve.

Achieving an effective and consistent Way of Selling isn’t easy, and few teams do it well. But those that do, win. Here’s what you need to know to establish, maintain, and grow a Way of Selling that sets your company aside from the rest.

What Is A Way of Selling?

A Way of Selling is a coordinated system that defines how your organization sells. It drives how your team thinks, behaves, communicates, collaborates, and interacts with buyers. Ultimately, it is an integration of culture, strategy, process, methodology, marketing coordination, and professional development that determines the total experience that buyers have when engaging with your team.

A well-designed and executed Way of Selling creates a consistent experience for buyers, speeds sales team onboarding, builds trust and reputation, and results in exceptional market performance.

What Are The Components of A Way of Selling?

Your Way of Selling includes every aspect of your company that impacts the experience that buyers have when engaging with you. A truly comprehensive Way of Selling includes everything from product to marketing, from training to onboarding to the actions, behaviors, and conversations that your salespeople engage in every day.

Within the sales organization, the primary components of your Way of Selling are:

• Sales culture

• Sales strategy

• Sales process

• Sales methodology

• Marketing and sales coordination

• Sales management

• Sales technology

• Sales team professional development

Sales Culture

Sales culture lies at the heart of everything your sales team does, how they think about what they do, how they view themselves and their role, how they collaborate, learn, and grow, and–how they think about your buyers.

Every sales team has a sales culture. The only question is whether it is deliberate or not. If you don’t drive your sales culture, it will drive your team. You may have a highly conflict-oriented team, where every salesperson is out for themselves and what they can gain from each customer interaction. In such an environment, buyers will feel the tension and lack of care from your team, leading to low trust, longer sales cycles, and poor performance.

Your Way of Selling determines how well your company will grow.

Or you may have a lackadaisical team culture, with an attitude of seeing how much they can get away with, leading to a chaotic experience for customers.

A healthy complex sales culture, on the other hand, will be collaborative, growth-oriented, and focused on helping buyers solve problems and achieve positive outcomes. Sellers will understand themselves as catalysts for decision-making, and grow in their commitment to provide a consistent, stellar experience for each buyer they interact with while simultaneously increasing your company’s revenue growth.

Sales Strategy

Second only to sales culture, your sales strategy serves as the foundation of your Way of Selling. It includes everything from go-to-market strategy to your company’s ICP, voice, storytelling, market segmentation, positioning, and marketing. When you coordinate all of these components in a cohesive way, in alignment with the sales culture you have created, you have the underpinnings for a Way of Selling that is highly effective, reaching the right people and engaging with them in ways that benefit you and them.

Sales Process

Your sales process is the execution arm of your sales strategy. It’s the step by step, milestone by milestone, stage by stage actions your sales team takes when interacting with potential buyers. Much more than just a dropdown in a CRM menu, sales process should tell your salespeople what to do at each step in order to move each sale forward. It forms the heart of the experience that buyers will have when interacting with your team.

Methodology

Your methodology is the methods and tactics that your sales team uses to move sales through the pipeline. Alongside the sales process, a well-executed methodology defines the experience that buyers have in each interaction with your team. It includes conversational style, discovery approach, the questions salespeople ask, and how they interact with each stakeholder within the customer organization.

Marketing and Sales Coordination

When buyers interact with your company, they aren’t thinking about whether they are interacting with the marketing arm or the sales arm. To them, your company is your company. When the sales and marketing experience doesn’t line up, it erodes trust and detracts from your differentiation. For this reason, your Way of Selling must include how you coordinate between sales and marketing to ensure seamless handoffs and a cohesive experience for buyers.

Sales Management

How you divide territories, incentivize salespeople, hold them accountable, and run your teams is a part of your Way of Selling. Sales managers are a key player in defining sales culture and ensuring that everyone is rowing in the same direction. They also can serve as the hub of professional development for your sales team, ensuring each salesperson gets the support and resources they need to execute on your Way of Selling.

Sales Technology

The technology at the heart of your sales organization directly impacts how well your Way of Selling can be executed. A tool like Membrain ensures that your salespeople always know what to do next, where and when to get support, how to engage with salespeople, and how to collaborate with each other at each stage. It also helps you analyze and dynamically update your Way of Selling to continually improve overall sales performance.

Training And Development

Your Way of Selling includes how you are training and developing the people on your team. In a “sink or swim” environment, salespeople may be on their own to figure out how to “win.” For buyers, this creates an inconsistent experience, where one salesperson might help them, another might try to push them, and another might be ineffective altogether. In sales environments where the organization is committed to training, coaching, and employee development, the Way of Selling will be consistent, high quality, and create a valuable experience for the buyer.

It is the critical component in ensuring that the Way of Selling you want to executing is the Way of Selling that your company is actually engaging in.

Your Way of Selling is How You Win

We often say “how you sell is how you win.” Your Way of Selling is the critical determiner of how well you will perform against competitors, and how well your company will grow. Most companies content themselves with a rudimentary sales process and some sales training. Winning companies go to the effort to develop a complete and effective Way of Selling that puts them ahead of the competition, not only in results, but also in the hearts and minds of buyers.