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You are here: Home / Newsletters / Reasons Customers Buy & Become a Sales Visionary: February 2014

Reasons Customers Buy & Become a Sales Visionary: February 2014

July 11, 2014 By maurasf

Monthly Newsletter with New Ideas to Sell More Now

February-2014

The Selling Quote for the Month 

customer reason to buy
What reason is your customer giving you when you sell?

“A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.”

–Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist (1795-1881)

For Salespeople… 

Listen carefully to your customers’ answers to your questions. Some are too afraid to tell you that they are never going to buy. Do you listen hopefully thinking that a maybe is a yes when really it’s not?  Instead, make sure you’re hearing your customer’s real reason. The only way you will know is when you ask for clarification. A successful salesperson is able to skillfully uncover the real reason, deal with it, and either make the sale or move on.


Get RSS feed for my Women In Business Blog: The Real Deal from Allbusiness.com


Read some recent columns.


The Selling Ideas for this Month

  Are You a Sales Visionary?

Do you know successful entrepreneurs? Ask them what they think made them successful.  You’ll often find lots of reasons. I recently did that. I heard everything from coming to work every day and working hard to doing a better job of reducing risk. All of the answers are right—after all these people are all successful. So what’s the common denominator for success?  I think it is that they are all visionaries. They saw what other people didn’t.  Here’s what sales visionaries see.

plant seeds to sell
Are you planting the seeds to sell?

Plant your garden. Managing a sales business is like tending a garden. Gardeners plant seeds and help them grow.  Savvy gardeners start with good quality seeds.

Salespeople find prospects and help them grow.  Sales visionaries start with the right prospects. The right prospects are the ones who have the potential to grow.  How do you know you’ve got them? These prospects are able to make decisions quickly. Customers who take too long to make decisions miss business opportunities.  The right prospects have plans, too. When you ask them how they’re going to grow, they are thoughtful. It may be a simple plan and that’s fine. People who have no plan make me nervous. Winging it has never worked for any successful business I’ve seen.

Can you make things grow? I’ve found that business visionaries need one thing to be successful. They thrive on possibilities and languish when needless obstacles are in their way. If you want to slow them down, create unnecessary work for them. Sure, they’ll get rid of the obstacles, but that will frustrate them.

Sales visionaries are the same. They remove obstacles for their customers. These sales visionaries make it easy for customers to work with them. How do they do it? They ask their customers about what gets in their way. They know their customers’ businesses. Then they look for ways to make it easier for their customers to work with them. One sales visionary created an easy to use order form that saved his customer time when ordering. Another sales visionary made sure deliveries were stocked on the customer’s shelf. Both did work that the customer would have had to do. These visionaries sell more because they make it easy for their customers to buy.

They’re creative listeners. Visionary salespeople solve customer problems.  They solve problems, not just by using logic, but with their creative thinking.  They are able to connect the dots of information in ways that will help their customers. Here’s what I mean.

One visionary realizes that if he could reduce risk for his customers, they would make more money. So he created a grid where he rated the risks they face. He evaluated risks based on the financial impact on their business and the importance to the company. He identified the important risks for his customers which had a big financial impact on their business.  How did he do it? He reads many different journals and read about a financial tool that he decided to apply to his customers’ business.  That’s creative thinking.

Being a visionary is key to business success.   Start looking at your prospects and customers if you want to be a sales visionary.  Are they growing? If not, you may need to take another look at what you’re doing.


 

Action Items

1.  Are you calling on ideal prospects or those most likely to buy from you based on your past experience?

2.  How are you making it easier for your customers to buy from you?

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DID YOU KNOW?

Here’s a tip this week for your sales success.

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So I never assume, here’s a brief list of services I offer.

A. Consulting/Coaching/Mentoring

By hour or by project.

  • Plan sales call strategies
  • Develop effective proposals that prevent “low price” shoppers from picking your competiton
  • Reduce the stress of working for a difficult manager
  • Shorten the time for a new hire to be productive
  • Design customized selling tablet app
  • New ideas to sell more now
  • 90 Day Performance Plan for new sales hires to be productive faster and increase retentionFor info, please see Consulting/Coaching.Call 972 380 0200 for a free initial consultation.

B. Speaking at Sales Meetings to Improve Sales Performance

Present Sales Performance improvement programs at sales meetings and conferences
RECOMMENDED IF:

  • Your salespeople lose proposals based on price.
  • ​You have underperforming salespeople.
  • Your salespeople have too many deals that they say are closing and they don’t close.
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Filed Under: Newsletters Tagged With: customer reasons to buy, Listening, questioning, Selling

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*What was your last “mistake?” Did you make it before? There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes in sales provided you are making different mistakes. (You are learning from them!)

About the principal

Would you take auto mechanics classes when you buy a car? Maura did because she wanted to be able to work on her car. She takes that same approach to selling. She can show you how to get below the surface of selling to learn why and how different strategies work. She will show you which skills to implement that will shorten your sales cycle and increase your sales. She was Mobil Oil's first female Lubrication Engineer in the United States and one of Chevron's top 5 salespeople in the country. She knows what works for sales.

"I would recommend your work to other sales organizations who want to get better results from improved selling strategies."
Jamey Rootes
President
Houston Texans

Sales Expert at Allbusiness.com

Selling is the easiest job in the world. Just ask anyone who is not in sales. Read Maura’s ideas on “more brain…less mouth” selling to make your selling easier and more successful.

Maura’s Allbusiness blog posts

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