As a follow on to Seven Steps to Composing a Compelling Business Mpact Statement, Business Mpact Selling is a philosophy and approach to sales that will provide clients with solutions which truly improve the clients business outcomes, differentiates the unique characteristics of your offering, increase close rates, and provides increased sales margins. Working with thousands of sales professionals with companies across six continents, these organizations have realized an average of a 9% increase in sales margins by following a Business Mpact Selling mindset.

The companies desire to hire sales professionals that possess these skills and experiences and today we will describe the main attributes to look for.

The Business Mpact Selling attributes can be grouped into three areas – Client Engagement, Behaviors & Actions, and Meaningful Outcomes.

Client Engagement

Sales professionals who are steep in the Business Mpact Selling approach:

• Engages with their Clients at the C-Suite and executive level within both the IT and the business stakeholders.
• Demonstrates genuine curiosity about the Client’s business.
• They have great level of knowledge of the Client’s business, their competitors, the industry and their target client profile.
• Demonstrates a good understanding of the current state of people, processes, workflows, and technology as well as desired state or outcomes.
• Are Client-centric and engages in dialogue about the Client’s business and the Client’s measurements of success.

Behaviors & Actions

Business Mpact sellers operate with the following behaviors and actions:

• They take on advisory behaviors by probing, questioning, and getting to the business objectives. They ask questions which are “points of clarification” on information they have researched about client. This helps build credibility.
• They expand the Client’s thinking by bringing new thoughts or concepts, challenging and adding value.
• As a problem solver, they are able to articulate and quantify the business value of the solution or offer.

Meaningful Outcomes

The return on investment of your solutions is quantifiable and, when sold and deployed properly, will contribute towards your client’s overall business goals and objectives:

• Clients will realize the quantifiable business benefits and qualitative improvements due to the efforts of these sales professionals. The solutions are better mapped to the Client’s desired business outcomes.
• Companies will see larger sales opportunities, increased sales margins, and greater strategic relationships.

Business Mpact Selling supports the Client through every aspect of the lifecycle from purchasing and implementation to maintenance and upgrades. Success in the Mpact Selling model is measured not by a product’s performance to specifications, but instead by improved client business outcomes. Mpact Sellers need to have the mindset of sharing equal accountability for delivering the end result. This differs from the approach that many transactional sellers take today; in which benefits realization and improved business outcomes become the client’s problem after the sale.

In the next series, we will spend time on how to hire the right person that possesses the fundamental skills of Business Mpact Selling.