The Selling Newsletter for Sales Professionals
SALES QUOTE
“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
–-Iroquois Nation Maxim
For Salespeople…
What about serving your customers for the next 7 weeks or 7 months? What should you anticipate to avoid creating problems that you know you will have to address later? If you have had a problem with one customer, be sure you have modified your sales process to avoid that problem with other customers going forward. Too many salespeople think the sale is over once the customer agrees to buy. That is not true. Your sale has just begun because now that customer can become a reference for other future buyers, can buy more from you or can become the biggest headache for you. You get to create more positives and avoid the negatives if you have anticipated and considered the impact of your sales decisions.
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THE BLOG S AND OTHER COLUMNS
I’m now writing The Real Deal, a column on women in business for Allbusiness.com Hope you’ll read more ideas so you can achieve your success in business.
You can get RSS feed for the blog.
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THE SELLING IDEAS FOR THE MONTH TO SELL MORE NOW
Turn Each Sales Call Into A Sale
Selling without a crystal ball makes the sales outcome more unpredictable. Your sales strategy can make your sales results more predictable. Here is what you can do to be sure that each sales call results in a sale.
Is doing nothing an option?
All too often sales professionals think their competition is another competitor. That may be true. There is another competitor. A prospect often has a supplier of the product you’re selling unless the company is brand new. In today’s busy business environment people have limited time for additional work. Changing suppliers is not an urgent to-do item for many prospects. That means that customers also have another option. They can do nothing.
How much does the pain cost? There are two factors that motivate customers to buy.They are pain or pleasure. Pain motivates more than pleasure. Unless your customers are experiencing enough pain there is no reason to do anything about it. Yet, just experiencing pain is insufficient to motivate a customer to do something about it and buy. You have to be very clear about how much pain he’s experiencing. ItÕs unlikely that you will motivate your customer to buy unless you’ve
quantified how much the pain is costing your customer.
If you sell financial products, you’ve questioned to learn that your prospect needs $75,000/ year to maintain his lifestyle. When you examine his current investment strategy you can see that he’s deficient by $15,000/ year. You have just quantified the pain. You can also quantify pain in hours wasted, or other metric if you can’t quantify in dollars what the pain is costing your prospect. The most important predictor of sales success is that you do quantify the pain.
How is the customer going to decide? Now you get to gauge the likelihood that your customer is going to actually buy something. Ask the question about how they’re going to purchase. Ask your prospects,”How are you going to decide?” You’ve got work to do when your prospects don’t have an answer. Either they haven’t thought it through or they’re not really going to make a decision. Both mean you have work to do.
If prospects haven’t thought their decision through, you can show them how to make the decision. If industry knowledge sets you apart, make sure you suggest that it should be one of their criteria. If past performance is your competitive advantage, suggest they also include that. Using the word “because” makes your suggestions more persuasive. After making your suggestions, ask how they’re going to decide. If the response doesn’t include any criteria, you are kidding yourself to
think this is a viable prospect now.
When you execute a successful sales call, you listen for the opportunity to influence the sales call outcome. Forget the crystal ball. Your job is to influence a customer and show him that there is a compelling reason to buy from you now.
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ACTION ITEMS
1. During your next sales call, quantify the value of your customer’s need or want.
2. Next sales call be sure to ask the question, “How are you going to make your buying decision?”
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DID YOU KNOW?
Here’s a tip this week for your sales success.
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Programs
You can check for current programs.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Here are some selling tools to help you sell more now. Click on the photo to find out more!
Monday Morning Sales Tips : A book that has quick ideas for you to be more successful in sales. Real-World Selling: A book with selling skills and strategies that work in the real world of sales. Secrets of Persuasion: Audio CD for the clues to use to speed-read people and close more business.