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Here’s a little story about a brush salesman called Martin. It includes quite a bit of the soft selling philosophy in it and is applicable to cold calling, professional services as well as selling brushes door to door!!…….
SPIN selling, Solution selling and the many other flavours of consultative selling are very powerful when used as intended. They are ways of being able to help both prospect and sales person to think through the problem at hand, discover the underlying factors and together arrive at some conclusions. The sales person can then make an informed proposal as to the remedy to the problem.
I can remember a time when I would try and sell to everyone and anyone. Those were in my early and naïve days of selling before I had begun to study people getting consistently good results. I can remember one time driving 5 hours down the motorway for a ‘hot’ meeting only to find that my prospect that I was pinning my hopes on was on holiday! 5 hours there, 5 hours back! What a total waste of time.
Sales training is important in developing sales teams but there are often other issues that can have a faster impact on sales growth and a larger return on investment. Indeed, with the five areas that I discuss below, each will amplify the likely returns from any future investment in sales training: These areas are more to do with the approach to sales rather than selling techniques and are written, mainly, for a business owner with a small sales team. They are also applicable to:
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Consultative selling is essential for anyone selling business services or solutions. It will enable you to turn small opportunities into large opportunities, avoid price objections, and eliminate time wasters.
But how do you do it properly? In this consultative selling video mini-course I created through my sales coaching and business development coaching company,
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If you are having trouble justifying your fees then you need to REALLY understand Return on Investment (ROI) – it’s the key to earning higher fees and your clients still thinking you are excellent value.
Here is an outline of key concepts and I will be writing more about how to approach your sales meetings from an ROI perspective. It’s simple and painless and actually makes selling easier! Why do I need to think about ROI?
You are in an unfamiliar part of town. It’s cold, dark and the street lighting is next to useless. You know where you want to get to but you are finding it very difficult to find the right way forward……….
There is a question where I come from that goes ‘Who wears the trousers in this household?’. It’s really a reference to who makes the decision in the household. It is based on the assumption that the person who makes the decisions must be the man of the house. An outdated notion – even then – but it a great metaphor to get us thinking about decision makers when we are selling.
There are two fundamental philosophies in selling. There’s push selling and there’s pull selling. If you hate selling and want to make it easier on yourself then you should definitely be pull selling. Push selling is where you decide what the customer wants and then you persuade them to buy it. Pull selling is where you find out what the customer wants to buy and you sell it to them. It’s based on making your products and services sound highly attractive – just like a magnet!
When engaging in sales activity it’s easy to assume that clients and prospects understand what we’re talking about. We are taught that if we just stop talking about features and start talking about benefits then everything will go swimmingly, right?
Well actually it’s wrong. Talking about benefits is a good start but that doesn’t mean our clients and prospects will actually understand what we are saying!
The following are 5 of the most common reasons why accidental sales people fail to get their sales messages across:
