Thursday, September 6, 2012

Sales skills and tools - Use Agenda for Presentations


Learning new sales skills and tools, should be a permanent part of being a professional seller. Adapt those new skills and tools for your unique style, and then use them to increase your efficiency, is another skill alone.

There are many different types of vendors who sell different types of products and ideas, they all use different methods, vendors and allow those really good methods evolve and transform themselves into what works for them.

The sales guy that I do involves inviting accounts established about once a month, and how many new opportunities as I can qualify to fill the holes in my program. Most of my sales calls now begin with a program of what I want to cover during the meeting.

This was not always the procedure that I used, the vendors that I broke into my industry did not use an agenda, many of which just came out with a handful of promotions, asked a few questions, and made their presentations, most were not very professional. Companies that have applied at that time were called by my competitors every 5-6 months, and everyone seemed to use the same approach.

The problem I had was to be the new kid on the block and how can I differentiate from the pack. We are all selling the same products at about the same price, and all similar terms, it seemed as if you just had to spend a lot of time to form some relationships, and after she had been around a long time you could have the 'business, I needed to find a shortcut.

I decided to use a more formal approach to the sales process, before I broke the dress code, which at that time that the industry was in slacks and a polo shirt with the logo of the company, and began to wear a sport coat and tie . Industry lore would have it, you would be kicked out of most stores if you showed up in a tie, well over 25 years, that has not happened once, on the contrary, the almost immediate result was that most of my clients I started to relate to a higher level than before I made the change.

Then I started using a simple page that listed a number of agenda items within the cleaning, customer name, account number, sales figures for the month and year to date, and what they have spent the previous year. Some carefully crafted open-ended questions to gather information and guide them to what I wanted to discuss. A list of promotions or new products, must be aware of. And finally, contact information for the sales counter, credit, corporate headquarters, and I all on a separate page.

There are some subtle clues in this document: The sales numbers for last year are a subliminal reminder that you expect to beat the previous years total, in fact if we get to the last quarter and some accounts are lagging a bit ' , they will say they need to accelerate without any prompting from me.
If you want your customer or prospect to ask in particular about an item, I sometimes include it in the list of promotions, I want to highlight it, but go through the list as we have, almost without fail, the customer must point to that item and ask "what about this", every professional knows that the sale if the customer asks for something first, I have.
In the contact page, I include all the possible ways for the customer to get a hold of me, work phone, cell phone, home phone, home fax, and email addresses. This implies that the customer is very important to me and gives them the confidence that I can get. In over 20 years including my home phone, only two customers have ever called me at home, and they were real emergencies.

Has this worked? It 's been a part of my overall strategy for selling more than 20 years, then I am firmly established itself among the top 5% of sales people in my field.

Finding and implementing ways to differentiate themselves from the competition is a sales capacity is necessary to develop and use .......

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