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How To Achieve Excellence in
Sales And Salesmanship
Most people are always striving to better themselves. For proof, check the sales figures on the number of self improvement books sold each year. This is not a pitch for you to jump in and start selling these kinds of books, but it is an indication of people’s awareness that in order to better themselves, they have to continue improving their personal selling abilities.
To excel in any selling situation, you must have confidence, and confidence comes, first and foremost, from knowledge. You have to know and understand yourself and your goals. You have to recognise and accept your weaknesses as well as your special talents. This requires a kind of personal honesty that not everyone is capable of exercising.
In addition to knowing yourself, you must continue learning about people. Just as with yourself, you must be caring, forgiving and laudatory with others. In any sales effort, you must accept other people as they are, not as you would like for them to be. One of the most common faults of sales people is impatience when the prospective customer is slow to understand or make a decision. The successful salesperson handles these situations the same as if he were asking a man or woman for a date, or were applying for a new job.
Learning your product, making a clear presentation to quality new prospects, and closing more sales will take a lot less time once you know your own capabilities and failings, and understand and care about the prospects you are calling upon.
Our society is built upon selling, and all of us are selling something all the time. We move up or stand still in direct relation to our sales efforts. Everyone is included, whether we’re attempting to be a friend to a co-worker, a neighbour, or selling multi million pound engineering projects. Accepting these facts will enable you to understand that there is no such thing as a born salesman. Indeed, in selling, we all begin at the same starting line, and we all have the same finish line as the goal - a successful sale.
Most assuredly, anyone can sell anything to anybody. True, some things are easier to sell than others, and some people work harder at selling than others. But regardless of what you’re selling, or even how you’re attempting to sell it, the odds are in your favour. If you make your presentation to enough people, you’ll find a buyer.
The problem with most people seems to be in making contact to get their sales presentation seen by, read by, or heard by enough people. But this really shouldn’t be a problem, as we’ll explain later. There is a problem of impatience, but this too can be harnessed to work in the salesperson’s favour.
We’ve established that everyone is a salesperson in one way or another. So whether we’re attempting to move up from forklift driver to warehouse manager, waitress to hostess, salesman to sales-manager or from mail order dealer to president of the largest sales organisation in the world, it’s vitally important that we continue learning.
Getting up out of bed in the morning; doing what has to be done in order to sell more units of your product; keeping records, updating your materials; planning the direction of further sales efforts; and all the while increasing your own knowledge - all this requires a great deal of personal motivation, discipline and energy. But then the rewards can be beyond your wildest dreams. Make no mistake about it, the selling profession is the highest paid occupation in the world!
Selling is challenging. It demands the utmost of your creativity, and innovative thinking. The more success you want, and the more dedicated you are to achieving your goals, the more you’ll sell. Hundreds of people the world over become millionaires each month through selling. Many of them were flat broke and unable to find a ‘regular’ job when they began their selling careers. Yet they’ve done it, and you can do it too!
Remember, selling is the surest way to all the wealth you could ever want. You get paid according to your own efforts, skill, and knowledge of people. If you’re ready to become rich, think seriously about selling a product or service (preferably something exclusively yours) - something that you write, manufacture or produce for the benefit of other people. Failing this, the situations vacant ads are full of opportunities for ambitious sales people. You can start there, study, learn from experience, and watch for the chance that will allow you to move ahead by leaps and bounds.
Here are some guidelines, or Strategic Salesmanship Commandments, that will definitely improve your gross sales, and your gross income:
1. If the product you’re selling is something your prospect can hold in their hands, get it into their hands as quickly as possible. In other words, get the prospect ‘in the act’. Let the prospect feel it, weight it, admire it.
2. Don’t stand or sit alongside your prospect. Instead, face them while you’re pointing out the important advantages of your product. This will enable you to watch their facial expressions and determine whether and when you should go for the close. In handling sales literature, hold it by the top of the page, at the proper angle, so that your prospect can read it as you’re highlighting the important points. Regarding your sales literature - don’t release your hold on it, because you want to control the specific parts you want the prospect to read. In other words, you want the prospect to read or see title parts of the sales material you’re telling them about at a given time.
3. With prospects who won’t talk with you: when you can get no feedback to your sales presentation, you must dramatise your presentation to get the customer involved. Stop and ask questions such as, ‘Now, don’t you agree that this product can help you or would be of benefit to you?’ After you’ve asked a question such as this, stop talking and wait for the prospect to answer. It’s a proven fact that following such a question, the one who talks first will lose, so don’t say anything until after the prospect has given you some kind of answer.
4. Prospects who are themselves sales people, and prospects who imagine they know a lot about selling something present difficult selling obstacles, especially for the novice. Surprisingly, these prospects can be the easiest of all to sell to.
Simply give your sales presentation, and instead of trying for a close, toss out a challenge such as, ‘I don’t know, Mr/Mrs Prospect - after watching your reactions to what I’ve been showing and telling you about my product, I’m very doubtful as to how this product can be of benefit to you’. Then wait a few seconds, just looking at them, and wait for them to say something. Then, start packing up your sales materials as if you are about to leave. In almost every instance, your ‘tough nut’ will quickly ask you, why?
These people are generally so filled with their own importance that they just have to prove you wrong. When they start on this tangent, they will sell themselves. The more sceptical you are relative to your ability to make your product work to their benefit, the more they’ll demand that you sell it to them. If you find that this prospect will not rise to your challenge, then go ahead with the packing of your sales materials and leave quickly. Some people are so convinced of their own importance that it is a poor use of your valuable time to convince them.
5. Remember that in selling, money is time! Therefore, you must allocate only so much time to each prospect. The prospect who asks you to call back next week, or wants to ramble on about similar products, prices or previous experience, is costing you money. Learn to quickly get your prospect interested in, and wanting your product, and then systematically present your sales pitch through to the close, when they sign on the dotted line, and reach for their cheque book.
After the introductory call on your prospect, you should be selling products and collecting money. Any call-backs would be only for reorders, or to sell related products from your line. In other words, you can waste an introductory call on a prospect to qualify them, but you’re going to be wasting money if you continue calling to sell them the first unit of your product. When faced with a reply such as, ‘Your product looks pretty good, but I’ll have to give it some thought’, you should quickly jump in and ask him what it is they don’t understand, or what specifically about your product they feel they need to give more thought.
Let them explain - that’s when you go back into your sales presentation and make everything crystal clear. If they still aren’t convinced you can either say you think they’re procrastinating, or that overall you don’t think the product will really benefit them. Spend as much time as possible calling on new prospects. Therefore, your first call should be a selling call, with follow up calls by mail or phone (once every month or so in person) to sign customers for reorders and other items from your product line.
6. Review your sales presentation, your sales material, and your prospecting efforts. Make sure you have a ‘door-opener’ that arouses interest and ‘forces’ a purchase the first time around. This can be a £2 interest stimulator, so that you can show prospects your full line, or a special marked down price on an item that everybody wants. The important thing is to get the prospect on your ‘buying customer’ list, and then follow up via mail or telephone with related, but more profitable products you have to offer.
If you accept the statement that there are no born salesmen, you can readily absorb these ‘commandments’. Study them hard. When you realise your first successes, you will truly know that ‘salesman are made - not born’.
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