Optimum Sales – Acquisition and Nurturing Process – Machinery Sales with LinkedIn
Manufacturers and distributors of machinery, in order to sell their products, must implement consultative sales processes, where the salesperson sells a productive optimization solution to their client, making a significant value contribution. The more sophisticated and technological the machine, the greater the value contribution the salesperson must make, and the longer the decision-making process will be for the customer.
The sale of machinery is a commercial process with a long maturation period, both in securing the first sale, expanding the fleet, and replacing old equipment with new.
The possibilities of selling a machine are limited and spaced out over time, so the seller must generate many opportunities to be able to close a deal and must exert a high level of influence in the decision-making process and with all of the client’s stakeholders.
The average commercial maturation periods we have measured in machinery sales range from 8 months to 36 months. Obviously, during this time the salesperson makes visits, demonstrations, and different application proposals until the order is generated by the customer. During this time, the sales impacts generated by the salesperson in person are spaced out, giving an opportunity for the competition to be introduced or for the customer not to consider the salesperson’s offer and their company in its entirety because they haven’t had the time to get to know the salesperson and their company in all its breadth and strength.
LinkedIn is the most powerful sales tool available to machinery salespeople to accelerate the process of acquiring a new customer and to generate influence and impact in the various nurturing or commercial follow-up processes.
(In machinery sales, there are three basic nurturing or follow-up processes:
- Nurturing process or follow-up with the target customer prior to the launch of the offer by the client but to whom the value proposition has already been presented.
- Nurturing process or follow-up while deciding an offer
- Nurturing process or follow-up after losing an operation and to be able to win the next operation
So that salespeople can increase their commercial productivity using LinkedIn, in such a way that both they and the companies they work for can exponentially boost their sales results, they must incorporate it into their daily work routine.
To effectively incorporate this activity, the different business processes that machinery sales companies have on LinkedIn must be defined corporately so that all salespeople execute them uniformly.
It should also be considered that the activities for acquiring a new customer are NOT identical to those for the different nurturing processes, and this implies that all phases of each commercial process must be defined and how the salesperson should act in each of them and in a corporate manner.
This definition of sales processes LinkedIn implies an operational implementation process and a training process for the sales team.
Although the sales team has basic training in using LinkedIn as a tool, training programs should be established on how to develop sales skills in the different machinery sales processes on LinkedIn for each company.
This situation is no different from those that occur in the implementation of business processes in an offline environment. In these latter situations, no matter how experienced a salesperson is, they must also be trained on how to act in the different commercial processes of their company.
Ultimately, for companies that sell machinery, to sell more units, they must ensure that their sales teams work on LinkedIn, with defined commercial processes and a clearly determined methodology, which allows them to contact more clients, with more contacts within each client, more frequently, in a planned manner, and by increasing the visibility of the company and the salesperson, they will achieve increased productivity and, as a result, increased revenue.
| David Galve | General Director www.linkedin.com/in/davidgalve |  |
