Few Steps to sucuss in Sales !! .... To Know steps Click Here...
1. Do Your Homework
In Sales, Its important to know who you are talking to as well as what they are about. The best way to do this is to do your homework.
If you are meeting a client for the first time, it is essential that you know their industry at least. Knowing their business structure and size is also a clear advantage as it can help you to understand the dynamics of their business.
The main thing here is to be resourceful. The more you know about them before you engage them, the better your chances are of being on the same page with them. Places to find out about the businesses you want to engage with are plentiful.
If you are selling into a business, start with their webpage. Gather information about their service offering, people and values. You may also want to Google their service offering to find out their competitors. Reviewing their competitors will also give you an idea as to what they are up against and help you learn about the arena that they play in.
Things like industry editorials are a fantastic way to learn about current changes and industry challenges that they are faced with. The best place to find these are on industry leaders webpages or through industry associations.
Social Media is also a great tool to learn about companies. You can manually search for a company using the company search tool. The information you will get here is highly valuable. It will give you the short and sweet on the company as well as an insight into the company size, even a directory of staff members that work there in some cases. Social media will also help you to understand the person you are dealing with. Is also another fantastic tool that people use to learn about others. Its more of a personal website though, so be wary that the information that you will gain here should only be used for finding out if there are any personal similarities between you, not to judge this person.
2. Build Relationship
Through the information that you have gathered on the organization and the contact you are speaking tmeeting with, you have enough resources to find a suitable entry point for conversation. This should NOT be the first place where relationship starts though. Relationship should start in a suitable environment and level of engagement.
The best way to built relationship with someone is to know who that someone is. Are they the boss? What sort of personality do they have? What is their position in the company and where do they focus most of their attention? These things all fall into the preparation category but relationship is all about adapting information you have.
Dress the part: - Know who your dealing with and make sure you dress appropriately. Dress also includes accessories and grooming. If your meeting with someone more mature then yourself, understand that their generation. Its either clean shaven or you have a full beard. For woman, understand that wearing. It may encourage conversation as its attractive but they wont recognize you as a professional.
Talk the talk: - If your prospect is fast spoken, speak fast. If they are soft spoken, speak soft. Adapt to their level of speech and make sure to use keywords and phrases that THEY use when describing things. Also adapt to their body language, expressions and gestures.
3. Heart over Head
You may want to make the sale. You might be struggling financially actually and really need to close that sale in order to sustain a positive cash flow. Guess what? If you let your head lead your intentions with that meeting, it will show in the meeting and the prospect wont do business with you.
Have you ever been called up by a telemarketer and instantly felt pressured and irritated? Did you feel like the person on the other line even cared about you or your interests or did you feel like they were just trying to make a sale?
If you think that holding the intention of making a sale isn't as bad as in this example, your 100% wrong. People buy from people they like. People like people they trust. People trust people they can relate to. People relate to other people so aim to be a person again, not just a sales machine programmed by pitch and product features.
Heart over head means understand what it is that you really offer. Understand the results that you provide.
4. Be Real, Don't be Scripted
Scripts are based around control and quantifying the words that lead to a favorable outcome.
A conversation that pushes the boundaries of what is expected is sure to create ample opportunities and give you an insight into your prospects emotions and feelings towards different topics. If they are highly resistant to a particular topic that you mention, you know that there is some guarding around that area so may prefer to steer away from that topic or, probe deeper to find out what is really going on. Being real with someone develops credibility and allows you to truly understand what it is that they are after.
This by all means does not imply that you should go in without a structure. Think of a sales meeting like giving a speech in front of an audience on a topic that you know really well. If you read from a script word for word, you wouldn't sound like you knew what you were talking about. If you went up there with no structure, you may find that you speak fluently and well, but miss key areas of your presentation because you get caught up in the moment.
5. Understand the fundamental issues
In the example given above, there is mention of having a real conversation that is something you will only get if you are unscripted in your conversation. The other area that is implied, is the understanding of their underlying issues, hence why I was able to offer them a solution that on paper looks like a considerable investment, rather then a cost saving. So how is it that you uncover the underlying issues?
Up until now, you should have mastered the first 4 steps that is the backbone to understanding what is really going on with your prospect. The next step is understanding further the difference between a smoke screen objection, a suitable strategy and an underlying business objective.
A suitable strategy is when the prospect genuinely has an issue they want sorted and have devised a suitable strategy to resolve it. Most of the time they are doing your job for them and are telling you what areas of your service they require. You can either take this information and run with it, and may achieve some levels of success OR you can probe deeper to find out what they are really about. The difference between the two is by taking their recommendation and giving them what they request, you are putting them in the drivers seat as the expert in your field. If they are right, then things will be OK. If they are wrong, the blame will be on you as the person that delivered it to them regardless if you made the recommendation or not.
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