Selling as a SNAP

The fact that buyers are already "super-busy and frazzled," as "SNAP Selling" author Jill Konrath explains, has negatively impacted the profession of selling. But it is not the main reason buyers will not entertain us as readily as they once did. In the age of the Internet, they simply don't need to deal with us. That's why Konrath argues that our interactions with buyers need to be wholly relevant.

"Wholly relevant" means using our knowledge—our complete knowledge—to justify our right to be part of a customer's purchasing process. As we move up the food chain, our ability to speak different "languages" becomes increasingly important. We have to become commercially multilingual because C-level executives, for example, rarely use the same language as members of an information technology team. And both groups naturally have different sets of buying criteria. As salespeople, we need to guarantee our survival by building our "commercial bandwidth"—and that means our knowledge.