What Sales Technique Kills More Deals than Any Other?

Do you know which sales technique kills a deal faster than any other does? Do you know what this sales technique is so that you do not use it and blow deals?

Before considering the methods of selling that are most effective, it will be well to get rid of a mistaken idea that is all too common.

A great many people regard reasoning power, or the force of pure logic, as an important selling tool.

There are sales representatives who attempt to "argue" prospects into buying. Unthinking sales executives sometimes instruct their representatives to employ certain "selling arguments."

The methods and language of the debater have no place in the sales techniques used by a truly artistic sales representative or sales manager.

One debater never convinces the other. At best, debaters only defeat an antagonist.

In a skillfully finished sale, however, there should be neither victor nor vanquished.

The selling process is not a battle of minds.

There is no room in the sales process for any spirit of antagonism by a sales representative. When thinking about your best capabilities that you have to sell, do not emphasize the value of logic and reasoning. If you use them at all in selling yourself, you would be wise to disguise their character.

Never suggest that you are debating or arguing your qualifications with prospective buyers about your (or your companies) mental or physical capacity for service. You cannot browbeat your way into opportunities to succeed.

Most employers buy the expected services from sales reps to satisfy their own desires for particular capabilities. Few will buy against their wishes. You cannot make someone buy from you.

In order to sell your qualifications for success, you first must make the other person want the benefits you offer. Usually both the mind and heart must be stimulated to produce the desired results.

The most skillful salesperson does not use the words, tones and actions of argument. In preference to cold reasoning and logic, a good salesperson employs the art of mental suggestion and emotional persuasion.

Suggestion is especially effective in producing DESIRE.

A suggested idea is unlikely to provoke antagonism or resistance. A suggestion has power because it has ready access to the mind. Usually a suggestion gains access to the consciousness of a person without this individual even realizing it.

This is why suggestion via subliminal motivation techniques is so effective.

When people become conscious of an idea that you have suggested, they likely will treat the suggestion as one of their own ideas and not as an intruder. Naturally, they are less inclined to oppose a desire prompted by their own thoughts. If this person felt the idea had been planted in her subconscious, her resistance level would accelerate considerably.

All of us know the great power of suggestion. However, too few people use words, tones and movements to make use of the influence of suggestion. Suggestion is always more powerful than stating the idea directly.

Probably no tool of salesmanship will be of more help in assuring your success than a fully developed facility in the use of suggestion.

Suggestion is the skillful process of getting your ideas into the unsuspecting minds of others.

The 3 Rules of Proactive Sales Managers

A proactive sales manager is a successful sales manager true or false? I think you have guessed the answer already.

Take a look in your company. How is it that the top performing sales managers always seem to stay ahead of the game and the top of the sales league?

Below are three rules that all successful and proactive sales managers implement on a regular and consistent basis.

Anticipate Needs

This is easy as long as you are organised and measure and analyse the important stuff.
If someone in the team is in line for promotion and its likely they might get it you have made plans already. Checking out the best candidates speaking to the hiring agencies. If there are new people on the team more resources in training might be needed or an extra mail shot to help in prospecting.

Brain Storm Ideas

The successful proactive sales manager is a source of a constant stream of new ideas. Why because they are flexible and open and are always asking questions.

You see questions stimulate different parts of the mind. The subconscious particularly. By asking questions and being open, in this way the answers come. Just remember the time you went to bed turning over a question in your mind? Maybe you have noticed that when you woke up the next day the answer was there?

Another great tip is to write down a challenge and then write at least twenty possible things you can do to over come it. Don't stop till you have all twenty. Then implement just one and you will be way ahead of most sales managers and their creativity.

Manage your time and energy

This is the one commodity you will never get more of. There are two parts to this one manage your time and in many cases and more important manage your energy. So many things sap our strength as sales managers.

Not the proactive sales manager though. It is easy to be distracted by things that don't matter. Petty arguments and gossip. Doing other people jobs as well as your own. Answering irrelevant e mails. Be strong have a plan and stick to it.

If you have set some major goals. Commit to the big actions that will move you further towards these and get rid of the rest. It takes some getting used to yet after a few days you will be amazed at the difference.

Top 3 Strategies For Selling Services

Selling services is quite different from selling products, even though some marketers might disagree with me. Therefore, it is important to develop a strong and unique service selling strategy.

Top 3 Strategies for Selling Services:

#1 Strategy: Focus your service business on a specific segment of customer (for example, the real estate market, doctors, banks, specific industries, etc.). Marketing professional services to a specific customer group must focus on why the customer needs those services and how outsourcing services fulfills the customers needs.

For example, if you are a graphic designer and you target residential property developers as your clients, you need to develop a strategy and approach that communicates why the developer should select you to design his/her project campaign and how your specific services will help sell the project. Focus on what you deliver. Prepare a budget for total cost (not hourly costs); or break your budget down into specific categories, such as advertising - television, newspapers and magazines; signage; and promotional brochures and direct mailing.

#2 Strategy: Focus your service business on what you, and your business, can deliver. Your customers are buying your skills, your experience, your training and education - in effect, they are buying what you are capable of delivering. Often they are also buying your reputation and credibility: service selling is about building strong relationships. Customers who buy financial, legal, medical, business services need to trust in that relationship. It is challenging to convince customers to switch from another service provide to you without first building a trust relationship.

If you have staff that are delivering services for your company, your customers are buying the services of your staff. Be careful that you treat your staff well - if they leave, often the customers that they have been working with will also leave.

#3 Strategy: Focus on pricing your services on a project basis (if possible). Pricing by the hour or showing the cost on a per hour basis often leaves the customer wondering about wasted time or excess billed time. So, when you prepare quotes for your services show the price as an all inclusive price. For example, for legal services for the incorporation of small businesses, quote a flat fee. If you are concerned that you will need to provide extra services at no charge, make sure that you detail what service you provide for that price. And show what the extras might cost as additional notes on the price quote. Most service businesses believe they need to bill for every hour (or quarter hour) spent; but the reality is that if the business builds its price structure correctly than hourly charges can be incorporated into a flat fee structure.

Selling service is like selling a product in one key way: satisfied customers will mean return business and often will mean increased business through referrals. Service businesses are difficult to sell because they're typically owner-dependent, with little in the way of capital equipment (like manufacturers have).

It is more difficult to 'prove' the value of the service you provide because service, by its very nature, is intangible, whereas a product is tangible. When you develop your marketing plan and selling strategy, you need to focus on referrals, on satisfied customers, on samples of your work whatever is most appropriate in your business. You want to, and need to, communicate the quality of your service.

Recognize that selling service in a business-to-business environment is generally a longer cycle than selling products and therefore your selling strategy needs to focus on a strong marketing program. Customers will need more information, more points of contact, and more time to make their buying decision. Selling service in a consumer environment is typically a short cycle (for example, hair styling and cutting). Be consistent with your selling strategy, focus your efforts on strong and relevant business ideas that support the service you are selling. Do the follow-up. Make another contact. Build a communications cycle for your service that makes sense.

Finally, because your success is so dependent on your relationship with your customer and on your ability to satisfy expectations, you need to survey your customers on a regular basis and ensure that they are satisfied with the service you provide.

Sales Team Development - What are Your Options?

In to-day's highly competitive selling environment, there is less room for apprenticeship, as organisations need to see a swift return on their investment.

Therefore, Sales Directors need to allow sufficient time to enable their investment in training and development to “pay off”. Introducing ongoing reinforcement programmes will help accelerate the benefits gained from the training and development investment.

A Variety of Development Solutions:

Skills development can take many forms, including:

? Formal and informal mentoring

? Sales coaching by managers or professional consultants

? Classroom training,

? Distance or e-learning,

Mentoring:

In mentoring, salespeople choose a mentor (usually a high-performer or more experienced person within the organisation who can serve as a model and/or guide) and consult that person periodically for advice on a range of issues from strategy for handling a particular sales situation to advice on long-term career development. Since the best way to learn something well is to teach it to others, mentoring programmes offer organisations a win-win proposition: in addition to enhancing the skills and performance of the salespeople, they help mentors develop their sales skills while improving their coaching and management skills as well.

Coaching:

Today, more and more organisations are waking up to the value of building a strong coaching culture. Analogies to athletic coaching are common but especially apt. Training alone does not guarantee that a great athlete will deliver a gold medal-winning performance. This can only come from continuous daily support and guidance from an expert coach. Equally, top sales professionals need expert coaching support from their managers to stay at the top of their game. Whether coaching is delivered face-to-face, on the telephone, or via e-mail, those organisations that have a strong coaching culture attract and retain the best salespeople.
The challenge for Sales Directors is to provide the support that sales managers - all of whom are hard-pressed for time - need in order to provide the kind of support their salespeople must have. Successful Sales Directors have found a range of supporting tools, resources and kits that save managers' time and enhance the impact of their coaching time.

Whatever coaching framework is chosen by an organisation, it must be easy to use, flexible so that the coaching sessions are tailored to the needs of their team, participative so all of the salespeople are engaged and, above all, fun. The fun factor encourages salespeople to become “hooked” on their own continued development.

Training:

In many companies, very little systematic thought is given to the design of a sales training programme. Very often one of the following fallacious schools of thought is encountered.

? “Salespeople Are Born Not Made”- therefore the selection process is the only step to getting the right man. Having been chosen, the new recruit is then either successful or not, without any help from the company. Research does not bear out this theory.

? “Must Know The Product From The Ground Up” - all training is therefore devoted to lengthy product training, working on the shop floor, progressing paperwork, etc. Whilst product knowledge is very necessary, it is questionable whether this is the right way to learn it or whether this is sufficient on its own.

? “Watch Me Son” - the new Salesperson is sent out with an old hand to watch (and thus learn) the experienced person's techniques. Thus the new salesperson may not only pick up bad habits from the experienced person (who usually is not as trained as a trainer), but also mere observation will not teach.

If a successful training programme is to be developed, it must be planned with careful thought given to the following questions:

? What are the key objectives?

? What should be taught?

? Where should it be taught?

? By whom? And most critical

? How?

For Example: Typical Objectives Of A Training Programme:

? Increased sales

? Reduced individual selling costs

? Increased individual earnings

? Reduced personnel turnover

? Reduced need for supervision

? Improved employee morale

? Stronger customer relationships


Therefore, the objectives have to be formulated in these terms, i.e. turning the company's investment in personnel into an asset producing an increased return on that investment.

Summary:

Training is an essential part of the profession of selling, as it is in any other profession.

Training, particularly sales training is a lengthy and complex process if true learning is to take place (i.e. if behaviour is to be modified) Too often, insufficient thought is given to what is to be achieved, by whom and how. The whole situation firstly needs careful analysis with regard paid to the limitations of training, as well as to its value. Then the programme can be formulated and, very important, evaluated against specific objectives. Only in this way can we be sure that the training is in fact achieving positive results.

Finally, formal training can also have a huge influence on skills development, especially if it is implemented with two additional ingredients:

? The training must be based on what the salespeople need and should be tailored to address diagnosed performance gaps. Using a diagnostic approach - a formal sales team skills audit, saves an organisation money and time because there is nothing to be gained from teaching people something that they are already doing well or, conversely, that they don't need to do in the first place. A well-targeted programme is far more likely to engage participants' full interest because they'll see its immediate relevance to their daily results.

? Any training programme will be more effective when the skills that participants learn are reinforced on a regular and continual basis. For maximum impact, every level of management must reinforce training. Such reinforcement can come in many forms, but the best way is for the sales manager to serve as a “model of excellence” who provides an ongoing demonstration of required skills so salespeople begin to live and breathe them.

Sales Management Training Facts

You have lots of sales management training programs to choose from that can be tailored to your companies needs. Sales training is used to help your team with their sales skills. They must be trained to be excited about making sales. It takes a special type of person to be a salesman, but most of this can be learned with the right training program.

When you are not getting many sales and your team is not trying as hard as a result you can focus on the reasons why this is happening. Finding out why sales are down will tell you what you need in your sales management training. If no one is visiting your site or place of business then you will need to find better ways to make your business more attractive to customers. You will need to get it out there where people will notice and find ways of making them want to check out what you have to offer.

If plenty of people are coming around but not buying anything then you need to think about connecting with them and getting them to buy. It's all a part of sales management training, learning how to interact properly with people so they will be likely to buy from you rather than someone else.

If they are wanting to buy but don't go through with it, then your sales training needs to involve getting them to go ahead and buy. You can learn training methods to help you make the customer feel more at home and confident about buying. Being honest is very important; you need to build trust with your customers. It is also important to learn to pick up on the type of person you're dealing with and what makes a person want to buy.

The sales training management programs are designed to help your team learn to sell better and not to give up. The training program goes through the basics such as finding interested customers and getting the sale made. Whatever sales training program you use it should move your sales team to action, make them want to get out there and try, and show them how to do it.

Teach your sales team the best ways to achieve their goals. Give them a mission statement and discuss it with them to get their feedback. Everyone needs to have a common idea of what they want to achieve. You sales management training program should teach a good attitude, developing personally, team goals, individual goals, staying motivated, and sticking with it.

Sales managers need to learn from the training programs also so they will be able to teach the sales team effectively. Set goals and talk about ways to achieve them. Have them set a goal for them self and reward them when they reach it. Give special rewards for certain types of sales. Draw up some plans for achieving sales.

Always stress the importance of honesty whether selling or promoting in your sales management training program. Developing sales skills, truthfulness, and growing with the team as well as yourself should be talked about among everyone so they all realize the importance of it.

What to Do When You Hit the Invisible Sales Revenue Ceiling

Have you ever hit a level of revenue that you just couldn't seem to break through?

If you have, then you know how frustrating it can feel.

You may even spike above this ceiling periodically. But, like water seeking its own level, your revenue results seek a sub-par level.

I once walked into a situation much like this. I assumed the position of Vice President in a relatively young company. I was immediately tasked with making the changes needed to solve the revenue problem.

The company, after nearly 2 years of business-to-business selling of their service, had met only 40% of their revenue expectations.

Finance told me they were "behind" projections and needed to catch up. And the executive team wanted to know how long it would take. And the CEO said we didn't have much time.

In this case, corporate had created a unique and valuable position in the marketplace. They had a sustainable competitive advantage. The service application worked, the product was needed and their offering was dramatically different from its competitors. Their Strategic Positioning was in place and healthy.

So why the invisible ceiling?

Sales leadership had failed to understand their meaningful business metrics. This was the primary reason, as it is in most cases. They had not isolated the essential competencies and components. Therefore, their people couldn't self-compete to reach and maintain revenue goals.

They failed to develop practices and processes that allow an individual to identify, train to and measure their own competencies and performance metrics.

In other words, they attempted to shortcut the "Blocking and Tackling" process to routinely meet revenue goals.

When you hit a revenue "ceiling," you have to go into diagnostic mode.

Ask the critical questions:

Which one of your Key Performance Indicators is causing you to fall short?

There may be several, but only one is the main culprit. As an example, the company I mentioned was fundamentally fine in turning first appointments into proposals. And they were maintaining an "average" closing ratio. Their sales cycle was within acceptable benchmarks.

Both competencies had room for improvement, but they were not the "smoking gun" at the scene of the crime. So what was the one culprit in this case?

What if I told you they were only generating 2 new appointments per week per sales rep?

Their average revenue per sale at this level of activity, when related to other competency and performance numbers, produces a 40% return.

Anyone can understand that something has to change operationally to grow the revenue. And what one item jumps off the page? In this case, as in many others, activity is the path of least resistance. They just needed to be taught how to generate routine opportunities in the least amount of time.

Everyone settles to his or her own level of "result".

That may be OK, but only if your comfort zone is consistently at or above the company's expectations. And when it's not, "Houston, we have a problem."

These kinds of problems cause a shortfall of revenue and unnecessary employee turnover, both of which carry "hard-dollar" consequences. I attribute it to having a "comfort zone" that is not all that comfortable.

So, there you are. You're having a hard time figuring out where it hurts. So you take an aspirin and hope it goes away.

Seek to understand how to break through this undefined ceiling. View your job as a business, your business, and evaluate it. Use the kind of diagnostic lens entrepreneurial business people use to scrutinize their enterprises.

Now, you can develop your own systems and processes, if you want. But maybe you'd rather not try to re-invent the wheel.

In which case, invest in mine.

Either way, the first step in busting through an invisible revenue ceiling is to identify and measure your essential core competencies. Then, develop powerful training systems to improve those competencies.

And you'll outperform your "comfort zone," your peers and your competitors.

what is sales managemnet?

Sales Management includes features for creating the sales force; organizing sales force, sales forecasting and planning, identifying potential customers, maintaining client information, and creating and managing schedules.

Sales management’s key functions are contemplated around procuring a clear perception into the activities of direct reports as well as the sales activities of the enterprise.

Key functions maintained by sales management are managing organizational sales structure and territories—crucial enterprises turnover; sales reporting and forecasting; quota management—handing assignments to sales representatives, implementing changes, etc.; and incentive management—producing compensation plan.

An organization’s sales management is enhanced through their workforces’ active participation to internal and external programs like symposiums—meetings or conferences conducted to discuss an issue; trainings—coaching people to a mode of performance in introductory, learning and transitional periods; and seminars—a gathering where there occurs information exchange and discussions.

These customized activities indulge the personnel’s yearning to gain more knowledge on individual productivity, team work, streamlining the sales process, sales performance precision, hiring sales champions, motivation methods that work, mastering the art of sales and sales coaching and tools, tactics, strategies for improvement.

The role of the sales manager is to provide an atmosphere where their subordinates can perform. They play a critical role in analytically examining, questioning and settling the sales productivity problems by creating structure and conscientiousness in the sales process.

To be good in these aspects, a sales manager must equip himself with the methodologies for planning sales activities and the know-how in using sound key performance indicators for managing the selling process. To increase sales productivity, concentration must be allotted to the sales process rather than consuming full focus on business outcomes.

Another character in sales management is the sales people or sales representatives. These are the people designated to solicit business in behalf of the organization in a specific territory.

To build successful sales relationships, a sales representative has to identify and attend to two necessities. These are the prospect’s psychological needs—intellectual concerns as to what makes him happy; as well as the prospect’s objective or business needs—the products, materials, equipments that are related to his profession, way of life, or hobbies.

In sales management the things that are taken into consideration are: the sales process—right variety to suit the business’s market and value delivery to consumers; psychological assessment—revolves around understanding and researching on the business and consumer needs; pre-approach planning and prospecting—understanding maximum value prospects and generating referrals; opening—engineering business affinities, establishing plausibility and gaining interest; and strategies—development of long- and short-term sales cycles.

A profitable sales management requires the comprehension of the prospect’s needs and the source of customer value. Active listening and questioning techniques should be applied to collect information on ways to further service and product value. And there should also be continuous personnel information upgrade to equip sales people with the right strategies and methods to top-notch sales and sales management skills.