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When I first began as an accidental salesman over 15 years ago I quickly discovered that my communication and influencing skills were lacking.
Don’t get me wrong, I could get on with people but found it all a little awkward, especially meeting new people and knowing what to say and what not to say!
I soon discovered that developing communication skills is probably one of the most important things that we can do to boost our sales results.
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‘Make Customers Love Your Marketing' is a short e-book packed full of tips on how to use your marketing to improve relationships with your clients.
Well worth a read.
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Many times when I am coaching someone on their business proposition I find that they are missing massive opportunities whilst pursuing a line of business that they are struggling to sell. I tell them of a story called 'Acre of Diamonds' which makes the point very nicely and gets them to focus more on what they REALLY should be selling.
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Being able to present is essential in sales. Whether you are presenting to one person or a room full of people you need to develop the basic skills or you will be missing out on opportunities to get your message out there.
Giving talks and seminars is also a good way of generating leads for accidental sales people. I now speak regularly to large audiences when once I was terrified of even speaking to people I knew really well. Speaking is a learnable skill and the more you learn and practice the better and more confident you will become.
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Think and grow rich is a classic motivational book. Written by Napoleon Hill and inspired by Andrew Carnegie, it was published in 1937 at the end of the Great Depression. It is not a book about sales by any means yet it contains many lessons for developing our thinking for success in sales.
It is a classic book about the use of the power the mind in order to achieve personal goals. It is one of the first personal development books I read. The language is a little different to what we use today but the things covered such as visualisation and affirmations are well accepted today.
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Thomas Power, Chairman of online networking organisation Ecademy.com, has written a number of books on Networking. One of these books, 'Networking for Life', I consider to have the essence of the mindset needed to be successful at using online and offline networking for business development.
Thomas Power is widely recognised as a visionary in the world of online business networking and he co-founded Ecademy.com years before Linkedin and Facebook were on the scene.
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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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