Business is all about profit, and sales training can help create that profit. But sometimes profit opportunities are built in the long-term rather than the short-term (despite shareholders' and others' strong desire for immediacy).
Building goodwill with your customer base is an excellent business building activity. Depending upon the specifics, the return can be immediate, but it is most often delayed due to consumers' preference for experiencing multiple acts of goodwill. I believe we can all do a better job of tuning into opportunities for sharing goodwill with our customer base and prospect communities.
If you have a retail store, might there be a non-profit group that could use your store for a meeting or special event? (Perhaps a district meeting once a month at 8:00 am before your store opens?). Find someone who could use your real estate and offer it to them.
If you have a restaurant, hold a cooking class after (or before) hours. Foodies would love it. You already have the restaurant; couldn't you afford to develop raving fans with a 90 minute cooking class once per quarter? (Does anybody detect some PR opportunity here?)
If your company installs products in customers' homes, how about offering to pick up gently used clothing and contribute it to a local charity? Your installation crew and its vehicle is already at the house, would it be terribly difficult to pick up 2 or 3 bags of clothes and drop them to an organization like Goodwill? And could your installers knock on one or two neighbors of your customer asking if they have anything to contribute?
Goodwill can build a strong following.
How good is your goodwill?
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Sales Trainer and Speaker Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers, a consulting
company whose clients are companies and individuals who sell to
consumers (in-home selling, retail, financial/real estate, etc.). Get
free Selling to Consumers email sales tips in your inbox.
Today a brand new sales eBook is available from the Customer Collective.
Featuring authors Charles Green, Jill Konrath, Dave Stein, and myself and seven other writers, "Selling Through a Slump" offers industry-by-industry advice to help inspire you and your sales team to grow sales even in time of recession.
My contribution is for the retail industry, but you'll also find other articles for those who sell services, insurance, technology, telecommunications, etc.
Register for the free eBook at the Customer Collective and download it. It's superb.
I absolutely love observing sales interactions between salespeople and their prospects. Indeed, much of my personal learning about selling has occurred because of my passion for this type of observation.
Rarely do I see a salesperson engage prospects to a level of intensity that will propel the sales relationship into a category of a high probability sale. Most interactions between salespeople and their prospects lie at the shallowest depths, where trite language and ineffective sales techniques live.
The better you engage your prospects, the more you will sell. That's why I'm on a mission to teach people how to engage their prospects in a more authentic way, and with increased depth and richness.
But individual salespeople aren't the only ones who can engage their prospects and customers. Companies do that, too. Some do it well and some don't. Companies that emotionally engage their customers and potential customers have a much higher likelihood of being distinctive in their market.
I interviewed Martin Lindstrom, author of "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy" for my sales training podcast series. Martin is a global brand futurist whose constant travels around the globe allow him to work with some of the world's biggest companies on branding and customer engagement.
Sales employees may be easier to come by in retail and other B2C industries right now given the state of the economy and the number of unemployed workers. But this doesn't prevent a hiring company from needing to sign on the best candidates they can find for all job openings.
A friend of mine applied for seasonal retail positions at three different department stores a few weeks ago. She made applications online on the same afternoon.
One of the three companys' websites took her to a "schedule your interview" screen after her online application had been successfully submitted. A message announced to her that a preliminary review of her qualifications indicated that she qualified for an interview. She scheduled the interview on the spot for later in the week.
Her interview day arrived, she had her interview, and she was hired at the interview to start in a few days. A week later, the two other retailers called and left voicemail messages inviting my friend to an interview. Their problem was this: She was already working for the retailer that had scheduled her interview online during her employment application submission.
The best practice in selling is to "close the sale today because tomorrow may never come." The same principle holds true in recruiting sales employees to work in your company.
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Sales Trainer Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers, a consulting company whose clients are companies and individuals who sell to consumers (in-home selling, retail, financial/real estate, etc.). Get free Selling to Consumers email sales tips in your inbox.
With the world becoming frantic about what to do about the current economic crisis (understandably), companies and individuals are searching for every possible means of increasing revenue and cutting costs. Many are in survival mode.
It makes sense to look for opportunities for market diversification, broadening of product offerings and new alliances and partnerships, but while you're exploring those options, don't forget to look at what's right in front of you: improving the selling skills of your salespeople. In my opinion, it's back-to-basics time.
Because of my job as a business consultant, writer, and sales trainer, my radar is always picking up deficiencies in salespeoples' selling skills. I see these weaknesses almost every day. A back-to-basics selling approach will help solve the following problems:
- Jumping to conclusions
- Talking more than listening
- Presenting product or service solutions before doing a thorough needs and desires investigation
- Failing to engage customers to a sufficient level
- Failing to close the sale
- And many more deficiencies.
We all need to tighten our belts, to be more efficient with our resources, and perhaps even cut back. But while we're doing all that retreating, we'd better also get our people focused on the basics of selling, because those basics can help close business with the [perhaps all too few] prospects you have right now, today.
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Sales Trainer Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers, a consulting company whose clients are companies and individuals that sell to consumers (in-home selling, retail, financial/real estate, etc.) to maximize sales performance. Get the free Selling to Consumers sales knowledge newsletter.
Face-to-face selling skills and prospecting skills will never be replaced by online social media.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of social media and online networking with LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, and all the rest, but these are tools to the salesperson, not a replacement for sales skills. Yet, I see lots of chatter on the internet about traditional selling methods being replaced with social media instruments.
Sure, you can sell items online, but not everything can or will be sold online. As long as human beings are buying from other human beings, skills that help turn shoppers into buyers will always be in demand. No amount of whiz-bang technology will every replace those skills.
There's no shortcut to selling; if you sell for a living and want to do it better, learn how to do it better. Use all the web 2.0 sites you want to supplement it, but learn how to sell.
Maybe sales training is the answer! Read a book! Listen to a podcast! Subscribe to a sales blog! Soak up the sales knowledge that will help you be more effective with people.
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Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers a sales training and consulting company whose clients are companies and individuals that sell to consumers (in-home selling, retail, financial/real estate, etc.) to maximize sales performance. Get the free Selling to Consumers sales tips newsletter. Visit www.sellingtoconsumers.com/subscribe.
Banging your head against the wall is not only painful, it's also not a very good strategy to dealing with prospects who won't buy from you. What will work better is understanding why customers won't buy from you, so the next selling opportunity you have can have a better results.
Here are six reason's your customers don't buy from you, and solutions for dealing with these frustrating people:
1. They don't need or want your product/service.
Solution: Ignore them.
2. They don't like you.
Solution: Be more likeable. Smile. Be friendly. Have some charisma. Iron your shirt.
3. They don't have [enough] money for your product/service.
Solution: Find out what they're comfortable spending. This is not the same thing as asking their budget, because prospects will often tell you they don't have a budget, or they'll lie. Always difficult...often vital.
4. They don't believe your solution provides value relative to price.
Solution: Find a different solution, or raise the value from the prospect's perspective.
5. They won't accept your logistics proposition. [e.g., they need the product sooner than you can get it to them, or they don't want to drive to your warehouse to pick up the product, or they won't pay for shipping.]
Solution: Negotiate a solution with your prospect, explore alternatives, or raise value of your product/service in your prospect's thinking.
6. They won't make a decision.
Solution: Find out what it would take for the prospect to make a decision "yes" or "no" rather than falling on the default stance of "we can't decide." If the answer is no, you've got to get the prospect to tell you so.
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Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers a sales training and consulting company whose clients are companies and individuals that sell to consumers (in-home selling, retail, financial/real estate, etc.) to maximize sales performance. Get the free Selling to Consumers sales tips newsletter.
One sales representative invested ten months working with the prospect closely on their project. And yet, when the time came to consummate the order, she froze. Another sales consultant spent two hours in his retail store finding the perfect solution for her shopper. Yet when the time came to close the sale, he got verbal diarrhea as a byproduct of his anxiety. Scenarios like these are repeated daily by salespeople all over the world.
Sales people know they're supposed to ask for the prospect's business. They've been taught to close the sale in sales training seminars, they've read about it in sales books, and they've heard sales trainers preach the concept repeatedly. Yet, many still fail to ask the prospect to buy. How can this be?
Many salespeople fear rejection, even though rejection is an everyday fact of their profession. A day rarely goes by where I, as a salesperson and business owner, do not experience rejection in some way. Yet, I intellectually understand that I must continue to keep setting myself up for rejection. I need to keep going to bat, in a sense, so I can have another opportunity for sales success.
In most sales positions, failure is experienced more often than rejection, even by the top salespeople in the organization. Yet, live with some degree of fear of rejection on a daily basis.
I say, "Go ahead and reject me!" I want as many "at bats" as I can fit into my day. I can certainly work on my batting average (closing average), but I've got to get to the plate to be able to take a swing (I hate sports analogies in business, but this one just seems to fit).
As sales managers, we need to coach our teams about this concept continually. We need to find new ways to explore it with our team. We need to design training excercises and coaching and ride-alongs and observations that will shed light on the importance of asking for businesss. Be repetitive. Be creative. Keep at it. Our people must improve their abilities at closing the deal.
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Skip Anderson is the founder of Selling to Consumers, a sales training and consulting company whose clients are companies and individuals that sell to consumers (in-home selling, retail, services) to maximize sales performance. Get the free Selling to Consumers Sales Tips newsletter.
