Sales Techniques

When you’re creating any sort of communication aimed at a potential buyer, you want them to do what?

When I ask this question, I typically hear a range of answers like:

• Know more about our business

• Understand how we’re better than our competitors

• Wonder if we’re the right fit for them

And of course….

Today's smart consumers are shopping around, chasing value but also expecting better customer experiences. In most sectors barriers to entry are low, new entrants are coming along faster and copying the best offers.

So a sustainable business needs to get the basics right, through efficient and consistent processes; it needs to surprise and delight customers at key customer touch-points by understanding what will engage customers and make them choose you.

Here are the three steps to selling that have supercharged my success:

1. Make sure your clients are clear on the result they desire

Are you a personal trainer selling a weight loss solution? Your first step is to actually get your clients to articulate what they are looking for. Do they just want to loose five kilos for health reasons or do they actually want to look like Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider?

Traditionally sales people are viewed as being able to convince, persuade, handle objections … a very provincial view. Michael Bosworth, in his book ”Customer Centric Selling” says it best:

There a host of things you can focus on to master to improve your sales execution and results, but none more than the need to master time.  We all start with 24 hours at the start of the day, and how we use it will determine our success more than anything else.  I have never heard a sales person, no matter how good, tell me they have run out skills, but at one point they have all run out of time.

Most business owners are good at pitching clients or reaching out to new customers. It’s the follow-up where they fall down. Why? Because they figure, “If they wanted my product, they’d finish the transaction,” or they worry that, “If I bug them too much, I’ll come off as needy.”    

When you’re selling the same products as everyone else online, it might seem the best way to compete is on price and price alone. When all you focus on is having the lowest price, however, you tend to attract a certain type of customer (known in some circles as “bottom feeders”) and find yourself in a race to the bottom, serving fickle, price-sensitive customers who are here today, gone tomorrow.    

Cold calling is very hard to do. Simply picking up the phone takes courage. But turning cold calls into actual sales calls — that takes confidence and thick skin as well as skill. Here are some tips to help your cold calls yield some hot results: