Sales Tips & Techniques Blog

Transactional Sales: Understanding your sales force

For transactional sales the sales force adds little or nothing for them, since they already understand what they are buying and know how they want to use it. Viewing it as a commodity, they simply want a favourable cost, reckoned either by price or by ease of acquisition and they resent the time they have to spend with salespeople. Such customers call for transactional sales techniques that should be as risk-free, hassle-free and efficient as possible.

Wal-Mart, for example, deals with relatively small suppliers, but it refuses to meet regularly with their salespeople. As a Wal-Mart spokesperson noted, it would be better if “their salaries and commissions were taken off the price. Why should we pay for something that takes up our time without providing anything in return?” And it is no longer only traditional industrial commodity suppliers that sell in this way; such professional service providers as lawyers, accountants, consultants and doctors—people who never dreamed that their activities might be regarded as commodities—find that more and more of their clients want to purchase transactionally.

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