3 Musts for Sales Success
I believe Sales is a competitive sport. As we enter 2010, the successful sales professional will look at the economy and say-this will be a great year! In other words it doesn’t matter if we are or were in a recession and it doesn’t matter if the forecast for 2010 is iffy or bleak. Successful sales people always find a way to win despite a very competitive market where customers have many options to consider. Today customers are more intelligent about solution offerings than ever before- thanks to the Internet. In today’s economy companies want immediate results and incredible response to their needs. The definition of P & L has now become “profit or leave.” The terms customer service or satisfaction have been thrown around like a commodity, yet if we don’t take care of customers to their satisfaction they’re gone in a nanosecond.
Whether we are looking to win new business with new companies or build our existing customer base there are three musts for sales success in the future. The first one is to have a mindset of building long term business relations. In other words if we want to develop a customer for the future we must be strategic based on their long term needs and not for the immediate sale. The first sale should be the start to gaining credibility, trust and respect as we move forward and prove ourselves over time. Proving ourselves starts with the customer’s needs and not ours. We need to understand that even though a customer is asking for a specific solution it is based on two needs-business and personal. When more than two decision makers are involved we need to understand that their individual personal needs can be quite different. So how do we find them out?
Finding out all the needs of the decision makers comes down to the second must which is asking critical questions. Asking questions that go deep makes the difference. Presenting a solution in the beginning of a sales cycle is solution suicide. You don’t know what they need until you get all the information. In other words you need to be strategic in the questions you ask. We need a plan that shows the customer we are more concerned in understanding their needs than selling our products and services. If you want better answers from the customer-ask better questions!
The third must which is the result of asking critical questions is-differentiate or die! This happens to be one of the titles of Jack Trout’s books. If we don’t differentiate ourselves from all the options the customer has, we’ll lose every time. If we can differentiate our solutions based on asking excellent questions, we can propose a solution that will more closely meet the needs of the customer. Each time we obtain a critical piece of information it can put us a step ahead of our competitors and earn us the right to come back and ask more. Decision makers respect sales professionals that ask the tough questions. Proposing the right solution is directly proportional to better performance thus leading to repeat business. Remember that products don’t develop relationships, people do. You the sales professional make the difference in a world customers have many options.
If you want this next year to be your personal best, have the mindset of building long term relationships, prepare and ask the critical questions and remember we must differentiate or die! Sales is such and exhilarating profession where you the sales person makes all the difference in the world to the customer. We are the quarterbacks, the first person the customer always calls when there is a need. What a privilege we have to nurture and help our customers to improve their business environment!
Most Recent Articles
- What Do Customers Really Want-Really!
- Characteristics of the “A” Player Sales Professional
- Are You Customer Centric?
- Is Your Value Irresistible
- Is Your Value Proposition Compelling
- 3 Components of Customer Value
- What Drives the Customer to Buy-Pain or Gain?
- 3 Musts for Sales Success
- Social Awareness and Selling
- Self Awareness and Selling
- 5 More Critical Mistakes of Cold Calling
- 5 Critical Mistakes of Cold Calling
- Is Cold Calling Worth it?
- The Three Elements for Sales Success
- 3 recommendations for your negotiating strategy
- Anticipating your negotiator’s style
- Negotiating with inside information
- The four critical elements for negotiating
- Negotiating-It’s all about power
- 3 considerations for exceeding your sales budget
- What’s their decision making style
- The power of influence
- Momentum: The key to a winning sales team
- Positioning customer value
- Three realities of prospecting
- Emotional intelligence & “Four People You Should Know”
- Maximizing your team’s performance
- Identifying personality from a conversation
- Four key questions that aid in identifying the customer’s personality style
- How knowledge of personality style helps with conflict
- The Strategic Seller
- Streamlining Customer Buying Decisions
- Anticipating And Handling Your Customer’s Objections
- How Do You Identify Someone’s Personality
- What Motivates Your Customer To Buy?
- Leveraging Perceived Value For Sales Success
- The value of identifying personality styles
- Maximizing your team’s performance
- Your lifelong personality
- It’s not “what” we do, but “why”
- Left Brain versus Right Brain learning
- The Company’s most important asset
- Customer Benefits
- Do You Know Why Your Customers Buy?
- Responding to Customer Objections
- The Sales Process
- What does Affability have to do with Sales?
- Resilience: The Antidote to Failure
- Enthusiasm Breeds Success
- Persistence: a Key to Success
- Fuel Your Attitude with Optimism
- The Power of Value Propositions
- A Positive Attitude Wins Customers
- Are you motivating your sales team?
- Bringing your Customer Value
- The Truth on Sales Training
- The “Cold” Call
- Today’s Hi Tech Sales Environment
- Selling in the new Millenium
Subscribe to Articles
Competitive Excellence offers readers the ability to subscribe to new website articles — you’ll be instantly notified whenever a new article is available.
Subscribe to Competitive Excellence Article Feed
Questions about subscribing? We’ve got the answers to the ‘What?’, ‘Why?’, and ‘How?’.
Questions about Subscribing?
- What are feeds? I don't know how I might use these links when I find them.
- Feeds are a way for websites to distribute their content beyond just visitors using web browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a news reader.
- What Does This Mean?
- You may recognize the universal feed icon from your favorite websites. This icon (among others) represent content in any format - text, audio or video - to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader.
- Why would I use this?
- This way, whenever new articles are written at Competitive Excellence, you'll be instantly notified.
- How do I read feeds?
- If you want to browse and subscribe to feeds, you have many choices. Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications - here are our three favorites.
- Do I really need to bother with this?
- Absolutely not. Visit http://www.competitive-excellence.com/ regularly - you won't miss anything.
