Building an effective sales program is critical to the success of professional service providers, businesses selling products, nonprofits seeking funding or volunteers, school districts in search of teachers and/or administrators, and most other types of organizations.
We have summed up a few lessons learned about sales in seven key InspiredbyAction Steps.
Step 1: Prospect. You should clearly identify the markets that are appropriate for your products or services. This is accomplished by spending a considerable amount of time researching potential buyers. Google, Yahoo, and company websites are your friends because they are chalk full of key information!
Step 2: Build Trust. Successful sales programs are built on trust. Trust is built on the prospect buyer’s belief that you possess and exhibit four key characteristics: Candor, Competence, Credibility and Compassion. This is such an important topic, I periodically teach a teleclass on - “Building Trust: The Game of Collaboration”. Visit us at www.upwardactioncoaching.com for a schedule of upcoming teleclasses and pre-recorded teleseminars for purchase.
Candor: You must be a straight shooter because prospective buyers can smell an insincere sales pitch from miles away.Competence. Develop a through understanding of your products or services, which includes both their strengths and weaknesses.
Credibility. Your credibility is based on a potential buyer’s confidence that you will say what know and, most importantly, know what you are talking about.
Compassion: Develop the capacity to understand your prospective buyer’s needs and emphasize with their challenges. Developing concern and compassion will help to make you a member of the prospective buyer’s team.
Step 3: Listen. The most successful salespeople spend most of their time asking questions and then really listening to the answers. This will provide insight into your prospective buyer’s concerns and ways your product or service can provide an effective and viable solution for those concerns.
Step 4: Recognize the power of emotions. People often make purchases based on emotion and then support their decision with logic. Making the sale sometimes comes down to the power of your personality.
Step 5: Focus on Buying -Selling. Effective salesmanship requires building relationships and being focused on the buyer’s needs. You should be buyer-focused and not merely service/product-focused. UpwardAction Growth Tip: When selling, lead with your potential buyer’s need, not your product or service.
Step 6: Be Innovative. Innovation and creativity are important elements when matching a prospective buyer’s need with your product or service. You have to know the many ways that your product or service can effectively service a variety of needs. Remember, you are not just selling products or services … you are providing a solution.
Step 7: Don’t Give Up. Studies show that it can take seeing your product, service or name 7 to 10 times before a sale is made. Therefore, develop methods to stay in touch with your contacts and prospective clients. In a nutshell, successful organizations listen to what buyers want, identify their needs and then present your solutions to those needs!
InspiredbyAction Step: Create a written plan detailing how you will implement each of the seven steps into your sales process. (Remember - you must have a process if you want to accelerate your achievement - see our earlier entry for more information). UpwardAction Coaching (www.upwardaction.com) can help you create both strategic and tactical plan of actions.
Until next time … Take Great Care!
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