Individual sales people, as well as sales managers and business owners, all share the same concern. How to sell more without burning everyone out, or paying too much for marketing.
That's a dilemma that has certainly been solved, quite scientifically, and I'd like to share it with you now ...
Executive Summary
Everyone knows that 95% of businesses fail within 5 years. Not so many people realize that even in the top 500 businesses in the world, within 2 years if history is any judge, more than 50% of them won't be there!
So size is no guarantee of survival, let alone success. To survive, a business must continually grow its sales, and the only way it can do that is to remain relevant to the market, and retain the capacity to communicate its relevance in a meaningful way.
Whereas one of our previous reports covered this question from the business marketing perspective, this short report now looks at how the sales person should integrate his/her own activities in order to leverage the whole sales process!
It's true that the notes provided in this report are necessarily simplistic – such a subject demands a book! But at least by reading you'll see the steps that are required, and you'll certainly be able to make positive changes that will result in a better understanding of what it takes to achieve your sales goals, together with some solid steps to get there.
You Need to Understand, Much More Precisely, What Parts of What You Do Actually Work
We have shown over and over again that in every business there is a Unique Selling Equation (USE) that provides a kind of secret recipe for success.
Via brainstorming, either in-house with your team, or perhaps even by sitting and analysing the return on each sales activities you engage in, you too can discover that predictive USE.
This automatically achieves 2 important agendas.
- Firstly most sales people find they save an enormous amount of time that they were previously spending on unproductive activities. It's very important to literally dump activities that don't "earn their keep"!
- Secondly, once you have an equation that gives a predictable result, you have complete control over sales levels.
Do the Important Things More Often
This might sound simple but in fact it actually describes a cycle:
Schedule it >>> Track it >>> Analyse it >>> Refine it >>> Schedule it, etc.
For this to work, it means that there must be a documented system and that system is inviolable. For instance if you have scheduled in a crucial activity like networking, you don't go booking a client for that time!
Why? Because if you keep allowing clients to book over the top of scheduled selling activities, you'll soon run out of clients! A client who doesn't understand that is sabotaging your business, and that's as bad as winning a client who doesn't pay!
Sure, from time to time it's a necessity, but only in an emergency, such as a client leaving the country and needing to see you NOW. Don't allow your schedule to be upset because you'll literally "ruin the recipe" for reaching your sales goals.
Do it Better
To be more effective you must, without doubt, commit to being a learner. In particular give your attention to:
- Learning more effective ways to describe your product or service.
This means getting inside the mind of your client and really understanding the true reasons he or she is buying from you. It also means understanding and using the exact same language as the client. To get a better handle on this, take a look at our free report "Why Better Marketing Strategies Add Up to More Customers Calling YOU".
- Learn to understand body language and other non-verbal communication from the client, so well that you can:
- Gain fabulous rapport even with tough clients
- Identify an objection coming even before the client is aware of it and "cut it off at the roots"
- Respond appropriately to more and more subtle buying signals
- Dump "closing" and substitute "wrap-ups" instead.
These are much more natural and respectful ways of completing the sales transaction. Trust me, people are sick to death of closes, which often didn't work anyway. In addition many of them were quite offensive to the intelligence of the listener!
- Learn how to replace cold calling by finding out how to get masses of interested and qualified clients calling YOU.
There are so many strategies to achieve this, and I recommend the above report, as well as our article on intelligent networking, also available free from our web site, in order to achieve this step. It's much easier than you think!
It Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune to Get This Knowledge!
Believe it or not, all of this and very much more is contained within what is the most up-to-date, and also the cheapest, book on intelligent selling that you could possibly consider buying. Hot off the presses is "How to Double Your Sales in 30 Days – and Keep Doubling Them".
This incredible 127-page manual comes complete with assignments for your progress, case studies, trouble shooting, and even tracking pro-formas to get the quantification/systemisation part down pat.
If you want, you can even get on-line personalised help, not only from me but from a working party of peers. If you're a business owner or sales manager, there's even a special forum just for you to deal with issues relating to team management and development.
Take a look at the contents and see for yourself by visiting http://www.speedbusinessnetworking.com/speedbook.html/.
Please let me know what you think!
Christine Sutherland is the CEO of Speed Business Networking, a membership-based site dedicated to providing hands-on help to SME's who are seeking a more immediate and responsive alternative to expensive consulting services.
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