Do you remember that feeling of starting fresh when you headed back to school? This is the perfect time to revisit that attitude for sales even if you are not off to school. Why not take a fresh look at your selling?
Take another look at your ideal prospect.
Your ideal prospects should change as you gain more expertise and the market changes. What might have seemed like the perfect prospect before is now not going to get you to meet your sales goals.
This recently happened to a salesperson who started selling a new healthcare product. She was interested in getting word of mouth publicity for her healthcare product when she started her sales process. Word of mouth from businesses who could recommend her to others was a key criterion. Business size didn’t matter at that point. She called on small physician practices and large practices. Each were evaluated for their ability to recommend her product to other possible prospects.
Her business grew after a few months. She reevaluated the time it was taking to serve the smaller offices. She was able to determine that serving small businesses would never be profitable for her. They wouldn’t be able to purchase enough product to drive profits. She changed the criteria for her ideal prospect and added office size as a criterion and removed word of mouth.
Why not take a fresh look at your ideal prospect criteria? Are the criteria you using driving you to reach the best prospects to make your sales goals? Are the prospects profitable for you? It might be time to revise your list of criteria to include new criteria or increase the results of a specific criterion for your ideal prospects.
Take another look at your pricing.
Your business may be very precise in its pricing and not have any room for any negotiations other than quantity discounts. What if you are able to customize your products so you offer a unique product to customers and that costs you additional service or support dollars? Are you still going to price the product the same based on the quantity purchased? I think you shouldn’t. Why not take a look at how you price your products and services.
Start by looking at the cost to you of each aspect of the product and services you sell. Then determine the perceived value to each prospect of the entire offering as part of your sales process. Price what you offer based on the value your customer sees in your offering. For example, some prospects need more flexibility on delivery and would pay for that service when they need deliveries in a rush. Others who have more products in inventory don’t have emergencies so won’t want to pay more for same day service if that’s what you offer. This examination of customized pricing requires you to ask specific questions during your sales process to learn what your prospects perceives is valuable. Prospects won’t want to pay more for something that they don’t perceive is valuable. Your job is to have your pricing reflect the value you deliver to each customer.
Take a look at what you’re missing.
You are vulnerable to competition even if you just won a new piece of business. Sure your new customer doesn’t want to change suppliers at this point. But competition is always calling on your business. Think about what you don’t know about your customer that you do want to know.
You’ve built up rapport with your existing customers. You now get to ask questions that might have been difficult to ask in an earlier stage of selling. You might ask about competition. You could preface the question by saying you are doing market research. Do you know who is calling on your business and what your customer thinks about them? Wouldn’t you want to know that? Now would be a good time to ask.
School is going to start soon for many students. They start their year with a clean slate. You can almost do the same with a fresh pair of eyes looking at your selling.