Business Skills

Selling

Summary: Effective and flexible selling

There are many ordinary sales training courses that teach the old, standard sales techniques. My training courses incorporates these techniques with completely new ones within a common framework that shows when to use each approach. This leads to significantly higher closing rates because sales people can adapt their techniques to each situation and each client.

Before meeting:

  • Set goal: Inexperienced sales people and sales trainers focus exclusively on selling the product. This is often a mistake. Experienced and successful sales people realize that setting broader and more long-term goals, such as building trusting relationships with clients, usually leads to greater success than an obsessive focus on short-term sales.
    • Two women and a man look at computer
  • Manage emotions: Customers will sense nervousness or false bravado and see it as dishonesty or aggression. This hinders the development of rapport and use of humor. Use the techniques of self-control to ensure an effective emotional state.
  • Create proposal: A sales proposal should be framed in terms of the client's goals. The customer will buy a product if and only if it helps him achieve his goals. Empathy will enable you to discover these goals and the underlying interests. A good sales person will sell to underlying interests not stated positions. For example, if the client's interest is to reduce costs, he may demand a lower price, but might also be satisfied with improved reliability.
  • Develop persuasion strategy: Frame the discussion in terms of how the product helps satisfy interests and plan how to maximize influence. For example, recommendations from an expert or case studies of other customers can illustrate the value of the proposal.

During meeting:

  • Establish rapport and command attention: Many salespeople make customers uncomfortable and hence lose sales because they are unaware of uncomfortable body language being sent by buyers and fail to establish rapport with buyers. Successful sales people can capture the attention of the customer and keep them fascinated.
  • Use language effectively: Successful salesmen adapt their language to the situation and the client. If they need to make a logical case, they will use clear language. If they need to stir emotions, they will use inspirational language.