What is your most important sale? It’s not one of your existing customers. It’s you. Even a slightly higher salary will compound upon itself over the years when you get raises at work. So a lower salary hurts you a lot. Now do you see why you are your most important customer? You need to sell yourself at work. Don’t be modest when you sell yourself. Some people think that … [Read more...]
What is Your Sales Call Score?
The formidable, former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, was famous for asking his constituents a question. As he walked the streets of New York, he would ask, "Hey! How'm I doing?" Being typical New Yorkers they would tell him quite directly. What about your sales? You know how you are doing when you make a sale. What about when you don’t make a sale? How are you doing then? Here’s … [Read more...]
What do you need to know about your customers?
Who knew that a U.S. household of four people opens the refrigerator about 15 to 20 times a day? That’s according to LG research. People also spend 10.4 hours a year just staring into an open refrigerator. That might be useless information for you. It’s not if you are a refrigerator manufacturer and want to develop products that best suit your customers’ needs. These … [Read more...]
3 Simple Rules for Sales Success
1. Plan ahead. Sales strategy is good. But, what do you do if your strategy doesn’t work? For every sales strategy you plan as the A plan, you should have a B plan, too. That way if your A plan doesn’t work, you have a plan right then that you can do. It’s a better way to attempt to salvage the meeting when you’re prepared. It’s often too difficult to think on your feet about … [Read more...]
Quick Tips for Writing Better Emails for Sales
Email is a sales tool. Are you doing all you can do to get your emails read and useful for selling? Here’s what you can do. Be strategic with subject lines. Make it easier for other people to read your emails when you write them. Here’s what you can do. Write a better subject line so it’s clear what you want. You can take a page out of the military. Here’s what they do. Their … [Read more...]
Avoid These Sales Mistakes
You know that hindsight is 20-20. What if you didn’t have to rely on hindsight to be more successful in sales? Here’s how you can save yourself the hassles in selling when you know what you need to know early in your selling. Prevent sales results from going dead. I was talking with several sales professionals and a common complaint is with what happens after the salesman … [Read more...]
Sales Tips
*Begin your selling by uncovering your customer's emotion for the sale. Prospects need to feel (emotion) before they can act--buy (logic). *Have an objective for each sales call. Your sales call success is when you achieve your objective. *Make effective referrals. When you refer someone, include in the referral WHY you are referring them. Reference their work that's … [Read more...]
Keep Your Selling Simple
I find that keeping things simple keeps the stress down. That rule applies to selling. Here are some simple ideas that will also help you sell more. 1. Sell to the easy prospects. You might have many different types of prospects like most salespeople. You may also find once you do the analysis that it’s easier to sell to some prospects over others. I recently met with a … [Read more...]
How to Sell to Customers Who Don’t Know
Have you ever thought that your job included educating customers? A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted some interesting information about what some people don’t know. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found in a 2016 survey that 31% of respondents couldn’t name a single branch of government. As if that’s not alarming, there were the 10% of college graduates who … [Read more...]
Forget Resolutions: Think Differently. Sell Differently.
New Year’s resolutions work for some people. For others they are a waste of time. For those of you who want to get different results, but don’t want to waste your time on New Year’s resolutions that you’ll break, why not try some new ideas and sell differently? Here are a few ways to think differently next year. Sell Differently: Be more patient. Patience is a virtue when it … [Read more...]