Part 8 of 8 Premature

Premature

I can’t tell you how many deals I’ve seen get lost before they’re begun because a sales person starts a meeting with a canned slide show without ever truly understanding what the customer is looking for.

Your first job is not to present your information. It’s to listen to the customer. Only once you’ve completed a thorough needs analysis can you create the right customized presentation for your client. Customized presentations close more business, more often.

Remember the old adage: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” This is true in relationships, and it’s true in sales.

I hope these highlights gave you a few ideas to think over or try out in your own sales routine.

Part 7 of 8 Lacking Personal Presence

Lacking Personal Presence

How you say something during a sales meeting can be just as important as what you say.
How you look, how you act, how you move and how you look at the prospect all send powerful messages about who you are and whether you can be trusted. Up to 80% of sales people ignore the non-verbal part of the sales meeting, which is why they lose 1/3 of the opportunities available to them. Once they discover how to use their personal presence to close more business, their closing ratios begin to soar.
Here are a couple of small hints for improving your personal presence:

• Shake hands.
• Look people in the eye.
• Dress one notch better than your prospect.
• Arrive early for every meeting.
• Leave your cell phone/pager/PDA in the car.
• Don’t smoke before a sales call.
• Be organized and prepared.
• Take notes.
• Say thank you.

Sure, none of these are exactly rocket science. But I can guarantee you that more business is won or lost through these and other simple non-verbal cues than through all the fanciest, most complicated presentations in the world.

Whether it is golf, playing a musical instrument, learning to dance – or closing business – the basics are always the hardest and most important thing to master. Tiger Woods still sinks hundred of putts every day in practice, because he knows that mastering the basics is what it takes to win.

Part 6 of 8 Failure to Understand

Failure to Understand

What the prospect needs and what they want are two entirely different things.
Wants are more emotional, and are generally based on things like whether or not the prospect likes or trusts you more than the other sales rep.

A prospect might need to buy a screwdriver to fix up his house, but he wants to buy it from Home Depot instead of Ace Hardware because he likes Home Depot better. It’s not always a logical decision. Customers buy what they need from a sales people who know what they want.

How can you determine what a customer wants? By asking questions such as:

• Why is this problem important for you to solve?
• What value do you see in an ABC solution (solution like yours)?
• What will happen if this problem does not go away?

Part 5 of 8 Hiding

Hiding

Nobody ever built a great career just by sending out a whack of collateral after every first contact and then waiting for the deals to come rolling in. That’s a good thing, too. If collateral alone could close every sale, we sales people would be out of a job.

Yet so many sales people still hide behind the material they send out, thinking they’re making progress with a prospect when they really haven’t got a clue what he or she actually needs. Surely you’ve used the “just send me some of your information” ruse to get off the phone with a few telemarketers. So why do you keep falling for this trap yourself?

Never send information without doing a qualification first. Okay, okay – if you have a simple product and a sales cycle you can measure in days instead of weeks or months, sending information may be the right thing to do. If so, do yourself a favor and send as many testimonials as you can that might be relevant to your prospect.

These testimonials are the proof your clients need to trust you. No one or nothing sells better than another customer saying that they’re happy they did business with you.

Part 4 of 8 The Wrong Focus

The wrong focus

Your focus during a sales conversation shouldn’t be on “pitching” your products. It should be on getting the client talking about their problems, so you can figure out what you can do to help solve them. If you’re spending more time crafting the perfect product pitch than you are establishing the right questions to ask, your sales will suffer for it.

Instead of creating statements about your products, create a list of engaging questions you can ask during every sales call. Remember, you are at your most productive – and most profitable – when you are talking only 30% of the time, and spending 70% of your time just listening to what your client has to say.

Pt 3 of 8 Outdated Tactics

Outdated tricks

Here’s a simple rule every sales person should commit to memory: If you’ve heard it on TV, seen it in the movies or if it has a really cute name like “the puppy dog close,” don’t use it. Period. End of story.
If these outdated tactics have made it to your local Cineplex, odds are, your prospects will know them just as well or better than you do. This is particularly true if you’re selling to someone from an older generation. And as soon as your prospect realizes that you’re trying something they consider to be a sales tactic, you’ll lose all the trust you’ve worked so hard to earn.

Instead of trying to show how clever you are, try focusing your time and effort on building rapport by asking questions, creating customized presentations based on your client’s specific needs and aligning yourself with their buying process. In short – as you’ve probably heard me say a thousand times before – be nice, stay focused and get to work!

The top 10% of sales people spend 100% of their energy during sales calls on building the customer relationship, not trying to figure out which tactic they’re going to use. Tactics build resistance. Focusing on the customer builds relationships.

Remember: rapport leads to like, like leads to trust, and trust leads to a profitable relationship. In every sales call you make, ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing right now enhancing or eroding my relationship with the client?”

Stay Tuned for Pt 4