In the late 1980s I had the privilege to attend IBM’s vaunted sales training. We learned techniques for rapport building, need finding, objection handling, and closing, even including, and I kid you not, the highly praised “assumptive/alternative close” which went something like, “Do you want that mainframe cabinet in White or IBM Blue?”
Many of these techniques, while feeling dated today, were backed by the sound principles of solution/diagnostic selling, which was the dominant B2B selling philosophy from then all the way through the opening decade of the new millennium. Then a funny thing happened called the Internet…