Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 7

This 7th Part of this short video course looks at additional ways you can add value to your prospects and clients to ensure that if they do business, they want to do it with you.

Our Sales Training always focuses on You Adding Value, and using the way you sell, not just what you sell, as your differentiation.

Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 6

Working closer with specific members of your sales team can help you become a better individual sales person.

This video suggests a technique that will help you perform better.  It’s simple to implement and won’t take up too much time, but will increase your sales output if you stick to the process.

Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 4

Businesses “Sweat their Assets” to gain the maximum return on everything they have at their disposal to make profitable revenue.

The Sales Techniques covered over the next few videos shows how you, a sales person, can do the same.

In this video, we look at how you can leverage the relationship with your Sales Manager.

It provides 3 sales tips you can apply to show your manager your intent to be successful in this Recession and how to get their help and getting sales training from them, as your coach.

There are some rules to follow to make this work most effectively which are covered in this sales training video, so watch it now…

Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 3

This video looks at a few things you can do differently to improve your sales performance.

Applying some fundamental sales techniques and going back to basics can break some bad habits we might have developed while selling during the not too distant boom time.

Not all sales training is about finding the latest and greatest sales skills…

…there aren’t that many new techniques in selling, quite often the most successful sales people are those that consistently apply the basics with the greatest accuracy.

So listen up as I give you some sales tips and the benefits of applying them…

Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 2

In this video we’re going look at getting your mindset right.

Are you aware of “The Law of Attraction”?  It’s a law that states you may be attracting things you don’t want, and in a recession, that could be impacting your ability to find and close deals.

This video might not be a typical piece of sales training, packed with tangible sales techniques…

…but what it does discuss could have a profound impact on your sales performance.

Complaining about the recession doesn’t help, we’re stuck with it, so get over it and look for the opportunities it does potentially offer.

Blaming others isn’t a core sales skill, so don’t.

So watch now, get your head right and leave us comment.

Selling in the Recession Sales Training Part 1

We’ve been getting lots of emails asking for tips and sales training to help with selling in the recession.

So we shot a 9 videos to cover some simple sales techniques that will help you close more deals and earn more commission.

This first one is an introduction to the series and explains what you can expect from this series of videos:

Sales Techniques That Improve Qualification and Save You Wasting Time

As a salesperson, do you ever get busy?

Of course you do. Have you ever spent weeks talking to a customer about a crucial project, just to find after all your effort they aren’t going to spend any money? We’ve all had that experience at least once.

As salespeople the most valuable asset we have is our TIME.

One of the things that can keep us busy is chasing prospective customers in the hope we’ll get some business.

In this post I’m going to look at your most valuable asset – your time – as we take a look at…

…Sales Techniques associated with Good Qualification.

In this post I’m going to:

1. Define the process of qualification
2. Identify why qualification is important to how you manage your time and your territory
3. Describe qualification as an ongoing process

First, let’s define what we mean by Qualification.

“The process of determining a buyer’s intent to complete a defined transaction.”

In any Situation this will depend on a number of things. We can use SERIOUS to help identify this level of intent, to help you plan where and how you spend your time for best effect.

In the first part of SERIOUS we’ve looked at the importance of knowing something about “your customer”. Even at this early stage you can apply sales techniques that quickly help you make a decision about whether your time will be well spent with a given prospective customer.

Let me give you an example. At Skills Connection we sell our services to a number of large enterprise customers. One of our services involves classroom training programmes, based on this SERIOUS methodology. One thing we look out for is any prospective customer who may be getting involved in any Merger or Acquisition. If so, we know from our experience that this prospect is highly unlikely to invest in any training until the merger or acquisition is completed. So we just make a note to review them in 90 days and go through the process of checking their Situation again.

This means we won’t waste any time.

So why are qualification sales techniques so important and where can they help you?

• Having too much ground to cover

If a sales territory or list of potential customers is more than you can cover – Qualification techniques can help you cover the ground more efficiently.

• Time-wasters!
  

  Goog Qualification Sales Techniques Can Save You Time and Help You Earn More

Making sales calls often puts you in contact with people who are not in a position to buy your product or service, but will waste your time anyway. Good sales skills can help minimise

this wasted time

• More Sales = More money

If you manage your time more effectively, you close more sales and make more money in less time.

There are actually two ways you can look at qualifying – you can qualify out or qualify in.

Most traditional sales training teach sales skills that are based on qualifying out. This means you follow an opportunity until you see something that makes you realise its not worth following any further.

Instead we prefer to apply sales techniques that focus on qualifying in. In other words we let the prospective customer persuade us they are worth spending time with. This sounds a bit arrogant but it’s not if you do it right. So always look for a reason to Qualify In.

This gives a number of benefits to the salesperson.

• It makes you more effective earlier in the sales cycle, that is, less busy!
• Mentally, it puts you in a stronger frame of mind, or mental state.
• You come across as more business-like. In other words, you look like you mean business and you’re not there just to waste their time or annoy them!

So think about using these sales techniques as Early Qualification to decide if you even want to engage with a customer, or to quickly decide if you should take a sales conversation forward; at this time.

Sales Techniques to Make You SMARTer!

I’ve had a number of emails about my last post and the sales techniques I described for setting “SMART” objectives.

One in particular was…

“Do I share my Sales Objective with my customer?”

Well there’s no hard and fast rule with this, I always say there’s an artistic license you have to use in selling.

If your objective was to get the customer to sign an order, then some people wouldn’t feel comfortable telling the customer that. And there are certain buyers who, if told that, would put up their defences straight away.

Whereas, I can think of numerous customers of ours, where I could literally tell them that my objective was to get them to finalise the contract or to sign off a programme design and commit the money to it so we can start planning the deployment.  So, you’ve got to decide whether you would or wouldn’t in any given situation.

Plus it’s also dependent on the relationship you have with any given client, which takes use back to some of our earlier posts; this one in particular where we looked at a sales training model we use called “PEG”.

Top Tip

What’s more important when setting sales objectives, is to “Have a fallback objective”.

For example, if your primary objective was to invite your customer to an open day you’re company is running, with the intention of introducing them to your newest service offering, what would you do if they genuinely couldn’t make that day, perhaps they were on holiday or something?

You’d have to have a secondary or fallback objective.  You wouldn’t just give up on the idea, you’d need to have an alternative option.  This however, probably isn’t something you would share with the customer, because you wouldn’t want to give them this option initially, but you should have thought about it, and have this alternative ready.

So there you have it, these last two posts discussed sales skills associated with “Being SMART”.

Great selling is about setting sales objectives as part of your preparation to ensure you have Situational Fluency.  Using the SMART model as part of your sales techniques will ensure you are efficient with your time and with customers’.  In fact, being efficient is one of the key benefits of using the SERIOUS™ framework, which leads us into my next post where I’m going to discuss  some sales tips on “Qualification”.

Sales Skills That Make Your Selling SMART

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “Work smarter, not harder”, which is all about being efficient in what you do. As a sales person, I’m sure you’re always busy and need to get the most from every activity you carry out, without having to work harder.

So in this post I will help you do just that, because I’m going to discuss…

Objective Setting Sales Techniques that Make You SMART.

Assuming we are now prepared and about to move into the next phase of our framework, where we Engage with somebody we hope will have a need for our product or service, we need to ensure this engagement is efficient and that we work smart.

So we’re going to look at Setting Sales Objectives and 5 sales techniques that will help you know exactly what you want to achieve from every client engagement. To do this and to do this effectively, we’re going to use best practice, as you’d expect, by using a framework called SMART. Some of you reading this will have seen this before, but honestly, when was the last time you used it?

The acronym refers to the following words:

The key is to ensure that any objective you set yourself has a clearly defined outcome, and in this instant we’re talking about what want to get from any customer interaction. The value in applying this sales technique is that it ensures that you’re not misguiding yourself in believing you can achieve more than is feasible.

So let me give you an example to show these Sales Techniques in action.

Firstly, our objective needs to be Specific

Setting an objective for a meeting that says “I want to find out more about her business” is too vague. You need to decide what specifically you want to know and then think about how will you know you’ve got it i.e. how will you measure your success? Your objective therefore must, by definition, be Measurable:

So you might say I want to get the names and contact details for 40 people within this organisation, to invite them to a corporate event your company is running. That’s specific, and measurable i.e. you’ll have the 40 names or not.

But, is it Achievable?

Well assuming the company has 40 people or more working for it, then in theory it’s achievable. But, in order to be a true objective it must also be Realistic:

What if the company only had 40 people working for it, would they literally close their business for a day to have a day out with you? Probably not. But, for the purpose of this exercise, let’s assume there were 40 people who could attend, then you’ve got ask yourself, is it realistic to get all this information? i.e. all the names of those who might attend within the time we have available in our meeting. In other words the objective needs to be Time-bound:

Since it’s probably not achievable within the time boundary we need to be more specific. Suppose, instead, we said we want to get the customer to commit to sending via email a list of names after the meeting. Now the objective is about the commitment not actually getting the names and is specific and measurable, plus achievable and realistic within the time boundaries we’ve set ourselves.

It sounds like we’ve cracked these Objective Setting Sales Skills and have ourselves a SMART objective!

But, what if this was your very first meeting or conversation with this customer; it’s probably not even achievable at this stage of the relationship! It might be more realistic to set yourself the objective of getting 4 names per meeting for the next 10 meetings for an event in 3 months time.

I hoping you’re getting the idea and you can see how these five areas are interdependent and must all be considered to get this right.

So the key to successful and efficient selling is to make sure you have an objective and then use these sales techniques to ensure it is SMART.

3 Personal Branding Sales Techniques

Because in my last post I’ve been talking about how YOU are the differentiator in many sales situations…

…I felt it was important to introduce the concept of Personal Branding, and provide a few sales techniques you can apply.

Did you know it only takes 5-7 seconds to make a judgement about someone you meet for the first time?

In those first few seconds you send out a range of signals that will affect the relationship you create with that person. This is the same whether you are on the phone or face to face. These signals are part of what we call your Personal Brand.

We previously spoke about how people make emotional decisions about the person they buy from, not just logically looking at the “Product” or the “Enterprise”

Personal Branding influences how a potential customer feels about you and therefore has a massive impact on why they might buy from you (or might not).

Everyone has a Personal Brand whether you know it or not.

I’ll go into the sales techniques associated with Personal Branding another time when I talk about differentiation and I’ll describe a framework we call the ABC of personal branding.

This will provide the Sales Techniques to help you build your own Personal Brand.

For now recognise that your Personal Brand is often telegraphed by you and therefore your mental readiness is an important part in any sales situation.

So here are 3 top sales tips to help manage the marketing of your Personal Brand:

1. Treat each call as a special event, make your customer feel special– if your selling becomes routine for you, your customer will be able to tell. It means you’re just going about your job for your own benefit – not theirs – Make the Customer feel special.

2. Have a plan for every call and do the right amount of preparation for it – So Plan each call

3. Be in a positive (or peak) state when you make your call or have your meeting. A positive attitude, projects a much more likeable Personal Brand.

People are very much like an iceberg – only 10% visible, the rest is hidden. People will make judgement based on the 10%, so apply the right Sales Techniques at all times magnify what you want the customer to see in first few all important seconds.