The industry of sales has changed a lot over recent years. It’s important we understand we are professionally helping people to buy, we are not forcing people to buy what they don’t need. We are not the product pusher or the over-seller. As sales people (and we’re all sales people) we need to be the problem solver.
1. Mindset
What’s your first thoughts when you think of sales or sales people?
Many people have a negative view of sales people. Maybe this is because of a bad experience they’ve had in the past or their parents view of sales. Whatever the reason we need to get past that if we are going to excel at sales. If we have a negative view of sales people, we will project that in our sales meetings.
Fear is a strong emotion in business and can hold you back. We need to understand that FEAR stands for False, Expectations, Appearing Real. Situations are never a bad as we think they will be. Our brain is hard wired to protect us from danger which is why we don’t like to step out of our comfort zone. When we step out of our comfort zone, it becomes bigger and those uncomfortable things become less uncomfortable. We must be prepared to step outside that comfort zone if we want to grow.
Remember – Some will, some wont, so what, move on! And on to the next one.
2. Know your numbers
Fear of rejection can hold us back. In his book Go for no, Richard Fenton talks about embracing rejection. Know how many No’s you need to get for every Yes and it stops being about failure and starts being about a journey to get to the yes. If you know it takes you 10 sales calls to get one meeting and two meetings to get a client. You know you need 19 no’s for one client. If one client is worth £1900 then each no is worth £100. This transforms each no from a rejection to a reward and a step closer to your next client.
Map out the sales process and understand the conversion percentage each step of the way. So from web site click to inbound call and from inbound phone call to sales meeting. Or from out bound sales call to decision maker and from decision maker to meeting. When we know these numbers we can work on the strategies to improve the conversion rate in each area.
Most think you need to get more leads or improve marketing for more sales. If you are already getting leads a lot of work can be done to improve your conversion rate (which is also much cheaper than getting more leads) and converting more of these leads into customers.
Numbers are the language of business and we must understand the numbers to improve them. Just by measuring the numbers they will naturally increase, that’s before you start working on strategies to improve them.
3. Know Like Trust
You’re prospective customer needs to Know Like and Trust you before they will buy from you. This can be done through marketing on social media and building up your trust. In a sales environment people need to trust you before they are willing to even listen. Finding a point of connection between you is a great way to build rapport and trust. People like people like them. Understanding different personality types will help you with this. A dominant personality will want you to get straight to the point. Whereas a compliant or detailed personality will want a lot more information. If you mix those types up one will be bored with you and the other will think you are rude. We want to be able to understand what our prospect needs are in order to point them towards a solution. To do this we need Questions…
Once they feel at ease with you they are more likely to open up. We do this with Open ended questions, like who, what, where, how etc. The idea is the get them talking about their number one subject, them! Then funnel them towards their biggest priority or challenge. This should be a challenge that your product or service solves. As you hit a key subject, say “Tell me more” or “What does that mean?”.
If you can’t help them be prepared to tell them you can’t, and recommend them elsewhere. Understand the problem and provide a solution.
If you’d like to know more about how you can improve your sales or any area of the business email me on nikgray@actioncoach.com or call me on 01473 438680
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