Focus on your best opportunities
It stands to reason that you are going to be more successful working on your best opportunities. However, lots of sales people still chase opportunities that are never or highly unlikely to close. To know which are your best deals, you need to employ a sales opportunity management process. You need to determine the criteria by which you will judge each opportunity, such as:
1. How big is the order?
2. Do we have a specific advantage over our competitors?
3. Is the budget known and understood?
4. Are we the most likely winners?
You may also have product and company specific criteria that allow you to judge an opportunity. Be rigorous in your assessment of each opportunity and then focus on the best.
Build trust with your customer
As a sales person, we should keep in mind at all times that our role is to help our customer. We are solving a business problem for them, so we want them to trust us in the way that we trust a doctor to cure us. Without trust, we are going to struggle to persuade them to engage with us and the chances are, they are not going to buy from us. So, when we first meet with them, we need to build trust rather than to try to sell our product. If we put our product first, we will look like a pushy sales person and that’s not the image that we want to portray.
The four traits of trustworthiness are:
1. Reliability – can your customer rely on you to do what you say you will do?
2. Competence – do you know what you are talking about?
3. Empathy – do you care about the customer as a person?
4. Integrity – are you doing the right things for the right reason?
If you are doing all of those things, then you are increasing your chances of success.
Different buyers
There are likely to be a number of people involved in the buying process and you need to engage with all of them. They will include:
1. The Economic Buyer - the person who owns the budget and signs the cheque
2. The Technical Buyer - usually the most senior technical person reviewing the proposed solution.
3. The users – the people who will actually use the product.
Each of these people will have different objectives, both professional and personal, and will view your product in different ways. It is important that you engage with each of them, understand their needs and their personality so that you can persuade them of the merits of what you are selling.
Know Everything!
This doesn’t mean that you need to swallow an encyclopaedia but you do need to know certain things before you can close a deal:
1. What does the customer need?
2. What are you going to sell them?
3. What is the competition and why are you unique?
4. How much will you sell them and when do they need it?
5. How much will you charge and who is going to pay?
If any of this information is unknown, then you will struggle to close the deal.
Handle Objections
The closer that you get to closing a deal, the more the customer will think about how they are going to implement the product internally. They will start to ask questions and may raise objections. At this stage, it is natural to take the objections personally as you can almost smell the deal! However, an objection is really just a request for more information.
There are four steps to handling an objection. Firstly, pause, take a breath, don’t jump in, allow the customer to finish. They might want to get something important off their chest and butting in will just make them more irritated. Then, ask questions to ensure that you understand their objections thoroughly. Respond thoughtfully. They have raised an issue that is important to them so it needs to be important to you. Finally, ensure that you have dealt with it properly and the customer is satisfied.
You may find that you are facing common objections from customers before you can close a deal. If this is the case, make sure that you give them this information earlier in the sales process so that they have a chance to understand and assimilate that before it becomes an objection.
So, if you can do all of those things, you are in pole position to close more deals. To find out more, register for my webinar on Thursday 24th February at 15.00 UK time. For more details and to register, please visit www.hoolock-consulting.com/webinar.