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THIS WEEK
The 10 Secrets to Sales Success
ALSO IN THIS EDITION
The 10 Secrets to Sales Success
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If you are selling a product or service there are just 10 "rules" that you need to live by in order to be a great sales person. Everything else is just window dressing. Get these 10 right and you will have a profitable business.
- Love your product. If you don't love your product and feel that it genuinely adds value to people, you are in the wrong game. You can only truly sell what you believe in.
- Know your product. You need to understand every nuance of your product – how it works, what makes it unique and what makes it different from other products on the market. Know every part of the package, every piece of marketing and every way you can use it – and share this knowledge with your customers.
- Know your competitors. Unless you know what your competitors on the market are doing and selling, how can you highlight the amazing features your product or service has that are different to your competitors? Buy your competitors product, read their marketing materials and analyse their strengths and weaknesses. You can be guaranteed your customers are doing this research before they buy from you – you need to know what they will find.
- Know your customers. Each product or service has an ideal customer. Have you ever considered placing a photo of your ideal customer in your office? It can be a stock image or a composite image made up of words, the important thing is you know everything about your ideal customer and what makes them tick. You need to know their gender, income, personality, colour preferences, where they shop and what they find important. Do your research and embed your ideal customer into your psyche. Some businesses I know have a framed portrait of their ideal customer on the wall, and they leave a seat for their ideal customer at every team meeting. What are you doing to know and attract your ideal customer?
- Back your gut feel with statistics. Visualising your ideal customer from your gut is a great start, but what if there are only a small handful of these ideal customers in each country? Have a company such as Heart Harmony run some statistics for you on how many people per day in your target country are looking for your particular product or service. Find out the words most people use when they are looking for you. Find out how many competitors there really are, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Unless you have statistics to back up your gut you may be heading out to do battle with a massed invasion force armed with a peashooter.
- March in front of the parade. Once you know where there are the most customers, get in front of them, and share your product or service with them. The way I look at it is if you have a product or service, you believe in, you need to get in front of people who are actually looking specifically for your product or service and share this information with them. Don't waste your time trying to sell to people who are not interested in your product or service – find people who are interested and sell to them instead. Being on page 100 of Google is not doing you or your potential customers any favours. The most important marketing expense in any business is the expense involved with improving your search engine rankings.
- Tell people why you are great. Unless all your clients are psychics, you need to explain why you and your product or service is brilliant. Don't just focus on the features of your product or service, explain why these features solve some of your client's most pressing problems. People want solutions – not product features.
- Take away the risk. People are naturally worried they are going to be taken for a ride. By removing the risk and placing it back onto yourself through guarantees, then you make people more comfortable with you and your product.
- Ask for the sale. Many people peter out at about this point. Unless you clearly and specifically ask for the sale and tell people how to buy, then you will be losing sales.
- Learn from feedback. There are no mistakes in life, only feedback. Put in feedback loops into your sales process – both qualitative from your customers, and quantitative from tools like analytics from your websites and split tests from your marketing. Look at this data and learn from what it is teaching you. Take steps to fix things that are not working so well and to celebrate what you are doing well. Unless you test and measure, you won't be able to know how far you have truly come.
| HR Tip of the Week: How to Manage your Sales Team |
 Salespeople are a unique group unto themselves. Confident, extroverted people who love getting out there and talking with people may make good salespeople - but are usually appalling at doing paperwork (and may be a bit on the average side at doing follow up).
People who are meticulous at detail, and religiously follow up customers, may spend more time in the office than actually out selling.
The trick with salespeople is to hire someone with massive resilience (to deal with the inevitable knock-backs), who is optimistic and positive and who has no fear of speaking with people.
You then need to put systems around them to help them to do what they do best. Yes, you need data for your business, but only measure what truly matters. Numbers of calls may not be a good indicator for your business - activity may not necessarily be a good predictor of bottom line results.What you do need is the handful of measures that truly reflects the success of each salesperson.
So how do your manage your sales team? Hire the right people and measure the right things in the right way at the right time.
After my experience in buying a car, I went hunting for simple, accessible training for sales people in how to close sales, overcome objections and create powerful sales questions.
You see, everyone is in sales ... your clients may vary and your industries differ ... but every business (even government departments) are in the business of selling something. It may be a physical product like a car, or an intangible product like advice or a service. You all need to sell something in order to survive.
In my experience sales is partially about core skills and partially about confidence. This e-book contains a whole pile of great techniques and sales scripts to make even the most reluctant salesperson more confident. These scripts apply no matter the business you are in and no matter where in the world you are.
If you want to become a better salesperson, then a sales skills reference guide like this one will certainly help.
Ever wondered what your salespeople are REALLY like? In this post I share my recent experience with 3 car dealers - and their sales skills (and lack of skills).
exuberantly yours
Ingrid
Heart Harmony
PS: This week's Small Business Tips blog included a post about "Does your car get more attention than you do?"
Legal stuff: This newsletter is intended only a general guideline for Australian businesses. You should seek specific advice for your situation rather than relying only on this newsletter
Earnings disclaimer. Some of the content may include advertorial information, which means I may receive financial compensation for the products I recommend. But - unless I know and trust the product, I will not recommend it.
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