However innovative your product or service is, however desperately your export market might appear to be crying out for something like it, however much positive noise you are creating about it on social media – the fact is that you still need to be able to sell it. At some point you or your colleagues will be face-to-face with prospective customers – at a trade show, as part of an overseas delegation, on a site visit, via a Skype call – and you’ll need to persuade them why they should be buying from you rather than your two main threats: your competitors and their inaction.

Selling is all about exploring and amplifying a customer’s need to make a change of some kind and having done so, to build value for your solution – the one that will make that change pay off. A little of that is about the strategy you set and the plans you make, but the most important skill is to be able to pitch your business to a prospect, to showcase your knowledge and to be persuasive.

Huthwaite International has spent nearly 50 years helping international businesses from every industry sector and every region of the world to do exactly this, in the form of detailed, experiential learning journeys based on a unique research-based success model. In this session, participants will gain an insight into some of the elements that make successful salespeople successful. Together we will explore:

• The Buying Cycle and where your customers are on it – the psychological phases that a company and its people go through in making a purchasing decision, from before they are really aware that they need to buy anything, to the point where they recognise your solution as the most important change they can make to improve their business.
• The Balance Model – analysing what makes people decide to buy, through weighing up the factors operating for and against making that decision.
• Showing how your solution delivers value by meeting the needs you have uncovered – using a popular tool for analysing and describing your company’s value to a customer, drilling right into the detail of your products and services, matching the details of what you offer to the details of your customer’s needs or ambitions. This is a tool that can help in the planning of any real-life sales meeting, and in devising a successful capture plan.
• Uncovering and growing customer needs through questioning – how over-concentration of the technical excellence of your products or service can create a barrier to selling successfully, and how gaining a deeper understanding of what Is behind your customer’s problems is a better route to proving the value of what you can offer.

There will be a participative element, where you’ll be able to practice some of the verbal behavioural skills and work with some of the tools, so that you can apply them in your real business world.