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| Marketing |
 How
to Improve Your Sales - Developing Professional Competencies - Part 2By Noelle Daudelin of Transcend Training & Communications Inc. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how crucial your attitude and your behaviour is in your sales and business efforts. Now with a fantastic attitude and appropriate goal driven behaviours, you need to have the suitable competencies of your profession. Where can you develop your competencies? A salesperson could gain these skills from reading books, in-class training, on-the-job training, having a coach, or through trial and error. The specific competencies that business professionals need are numerous but boil down to human interaction, communication and relationship building. You need to know how to quickly establish rapport and build trust to communicate effectively and understand what your client’s predominant sense is and how to use that sense to your benefit. Once rapport has been established, your next step is to learn more about your prospect through questioning. You must first establish what problems, or pleasures, you can provide the solutions to. How can your company or service be a benefit to the client? List the points on a piece of paper. Develop a series of open-ended questions to uncover the problems and get the prospect talking. As they speak, listen for clues. Question their answers. Seek clarification. Ask them direct and leading questions to where you want to take them. Start gathering facts, then use close-ended questions. You will need to know how to stay in control of the situation through questioning techniques and to summarize the answers so you can prescribe valuable solutions. Remember, you cannot sell somebody just anything in today’s marketplace, however you can take your prospect through a self-discovery process, allowing them to buy for their own reasons. One key point to remember is you must listen effectively. There are several active listening techniques that you should apply, but the main question you should ask yourself is: do you really want to service the prospect, or are you simply there for your own reasons? My favourite quote relating to sales is Cavett Robert’s, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Practice your listening skills. Learn what the characteristics of a good listener are. Learn how to use appropriate body language and listening techniques to show your prospect you hear them. Now we have to take the above techniques and use them to qualify opportunities by setting parameters. This means setting the ground rules, eliminating surprises and having a clear future that both parties can work toward. To name a few, it means being 100% honest and up front from the initial meeting with your prospect - find out the client’s time frame, objectives, agenda, etc., and deal with your biggest objections up front. It is not about you; it’s about them! Once a number of motivators have been identified, you need to uncover financial considerations. If they don’t have a budget, how will they proceed? If they do have a budget, you need to know what it is. How else can you provide them with a solution if you don’t know how much money they have set aside for their problem or desire? If you have a level of trust with your prospect, they will share this necessary information because they know you are working to help them. Now that you have identified the motivators and the financial ability, you must confirm the decision making process. When will the decision be made? Who, besides the person you are speaking with, is involved in the decision making process? Once all the necessary information has been gathered, you can begin to understand exactly what solutions you can prescribe that are specific to the customer’s needs, keep competitors out, and develop the account to its maximum potential. Review the parameters of the presentation, your findings and present solutions to the client’s problem, in their dominant sense. When you feel you have the prospect agreeing with your solutions, ask them what they would like to do next. Do not push them! Learn to keep quiet and let the customer do all the talking. Let the prospect buy from you. Maintain the relationship by following up consistently in writing, by phone, face-to-face and by email. Do your job well; gain trust and respect, and referrals will come to you. We have discussed attitude, behaviour and competencies, however you must also have commitment. Commit to yourself personally and professionally. Discipline is a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do even when you don’t want to do it. It is through self-discipline that you will realize the greatest results. However, discipline is hard to master. You will need to discipline yourself for at least 21 consecutive days to make it a habit. To do this, identify the appropriate behaviours to reach your goals and monitor yourself daily. Monitoring, or recognizing yourself, gives you the satisfaction of daily accomplishments and successes, and leads you toward increased motivation. This increased motivation is then rewarded in terms of results. Behaviour that gets recognized and rewarded, gets repeated. Remember, you are in charge of your attitude. Make the best of it, for you! Know what behaviours you must follow in order to reach your goals. Never stop learning about yourself, your business, your co-workers and your competitors. Become an industry expert. Be disciplined! Commit to yourself and respect that commitment. These four tips can help you take your business to the next level. Noelle Daudelin, of Transcend Training & Communications Inc., provides results driven, custom designed, dynamic & interactive training & speaking. If you would like to learn more about how to grow your revenues. 403.286.9606 ndaudelin@transcendtraining.ca |