Closing the sale is the most misunderstood of all the selling skills. It’s also probably the most over-rated. But there’s no mystery involved. Just make the goal of every sales call to leave a happy customer behind. If you concentrate on sound communication and long-term relationships, you’ll find it easy to ask for the order.
Approach closing opportunities with the idea that every sales call should give the customer yet another reason to do business with you—again. It’s a pro-active, pro-customer way to look at your job. When it comes time to ask for the order, it’s easy!
“Fear Of Closing” takes the mystery out of the process and puts closing the sale into the context of improving your customer relationships.
“Buying Signals” explains how to recognize buyer behavior that says they’re ready to make a commitment. That’s the time to ask for the order.
“Closing Techniques” explores some of the standard approaches to making the sale happen—as well as some you might not expect.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Time Management
From a practical standpoint, you don’t have 24 selling hours in a day. You don’t even have eight. I estimate that most salespeople can count on no more than five hours and 30 minutes daily when they can expect to make face-to-face presentations. This is due mainly to the availability of your prospects and customers. Even if you work an 8 AM to 6 PM ten-hour day, you’ll probably not be able to get more than five and a half hours in front of prospects.
Occasionally, of course, you’ll have breakfast and lunch meetings with customers, squeeze in one last call at 4:45 PM, etc. But for the most part, you’ll find it difficult to consistently make appointments with anyone before 9:30 AM because your prospects are busy organizing their own day (which does not revolve around you). Much the same holds true for lunch, which seldom starts at noon or lasts exactly an hour for most decision makers and influencers.
Here’s what a typical sales day looks like:
8 – 9:30 AM Arrive at office, attend meetings, organize day, leave for first call
9:30 AM – 12 PM Prime Sales time
12 – 1:30 PM Lunch, return phone calls, paperwork, leave for calls
1:30 – 4:30 PM Prime Sales time
4:30 – 6 PM Return to office, return phone calls, attend meetings, paperwork
As you can see, you have five hours and 30 minutes of prime selling time in the day. How do you maximize it? Using the priority system you’ve set up, you have to plan your activities.
“Plan your work and work your plan” is yet another “golden oldie” sales adage. And it’s a good one because it describes the essence of sound time management. It’s not enough to lay out a plan, you have to execute it to get any benefit from it. In fact, if you don’t “work your plan,” you’ve wasted the time it took to draw it up.
You can spend a lot of time planning. You can also invest hundreds of dollars in account management software and cross-indexed leather-bound time management systems. Or you can make up a “to do” list on a napkin at the coffee shop where you start your day. These are all planning systems that can work. I suggest trying something in between.
You need both long-term and short-term plans. Or call them strategic and tactical plans, if you have a military frame of mind. Which one is more important? Neither. They serve two distinct but equally important purposes.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
Occasionally, of course, you’ll have breakfast and lunch meetings with customers, squeeze in one last call at 4:45 PM, etc. But for the most part, you’ll find it difficult to consistently make appointments with anyone before 9:30 AM because your prospects are busy organizing their own day (which does not revolve around you). Much the same holds true for lunch, which seldom starts at noon or lasts exactly an hour for most decision makers and influencers.
Here’s what a typical sales day looks like:
8 – 9:30 AM Arrive at office, attend meetings, organize day, leave for first call
9:30 AM – 12 PM Prime Sales time
12 – 1:30 PM Lunch, return phone calls, paperwork, leave for calls
1:30 – 4:30 PM Prime Sales time
4:30 – 6 PM Return to office, return phone calls, attend meetings, paperwork
As you can see, you have five hours and 30 minutes of prime selling time in the day. How do you maximize it? Using the priority system you’ve set up, you have to plan your activities.
“Plan your work and work your plan” is yet another “golden oldie” sales adage. And it’s a good one because it describes the essence of sound time management. It’s not enough to lay out a plan, you have to execute it to get any benefit from it. In fact, if you don’t “work your plan,” you’ve wasted the time it took to draw it up.
You can spend a lot of time planning. You can also invest hundreds of dollars in account management software and cross-indexed leather-bound time management systems. Or you can make up a “to do” list on a napkin at the coffee shop where you start your day. These are all planning systems that can work. I suggest trying something in between.
You need both long-term and short-term plans. Or call them strategic and tactical plans, if you have a military frame of mind. Which one is more important? Neither. They serve two distinct but equally important purposes.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Why Sales?
What attracted me to sales in the first place was the freedom the job offered. I could come and go pretty much as I pleased, work on the things I wanted to work on, and even sort of set my own goals and use the methods I wanted to achieve them. Of course I had to make sure these things didn’t contradict the company’s policies and practices, but that has never been hard since every company I’ve ever sold for wanted the same things I did: more sales from more customers to produce more income. I soon found that if I produced those things, all of us would be happy.
But the personal freedom of sales turned out to be just a side benefit to the job. The real source of gratification turned out to be the senior partner of freedom, which is personal responsibility. Selling makes you free to set and pursue your own goals, but holds you responsible to yourself for doing so. When salespeople accept that responsibility, they have taken the first step on the path to satisfaction and success.
Another constant in selling is the need for salespeople to communicate with prospects on a human level. Advancing technology may make some transactional sales functions obsolete, but as long as people make the decisions about what to buy or not to buy, there will be an important place for salespeople in our economy.
And selling will always be a fun thing to do. It combines many of the positive stimulating forces in life: learning new things, facing different challenges, and meeting a wide variety of people. You get to make a pretty good (or even a very good) living and you can take most of the credit for your own success. Above all, you get to take some interesting risks, which adds plenty of spice to your life.
Creativity is a risk-taking enterprise. To endeavor to make something new is to take risks on several levels. Risk might be defined as the ability to fail. You may spend hours, days, even weeks on the project but fail to conceive an idea that’s workable. Even if you do create one, you may fail to complete it satisfactorily and have to abandon it. Even if your idea comes to fruition, you may fail to find a market for it. Even if you sell it, your idea may not produce the results your customer expected. Every one of these potential failures wounds your ego and your pocketbook. With all these ways to fail, why try?
Because not every idea fails and the ones that succeed reward you tremendously. The risk/reward ratio is actually stacked in your favor. What’s even better, you will improve the odds of success as your professional capabilities grow.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
But the personal freedom of sales turned out to be just a side benefit to the job. The real source of gratification turned out to be the senior partner of freedom, which is personal responsibility. Selling makes you free to set and pursue your own goals, but holds you responsible to yourself for doing so. When salespeople accept that responsibility, they have taken the first step on the path to satisfaction and success.
Another constant in selling is the need for salespeople to communicate with prospects on a human level. Advancing technology may make some transactional sales functions obsolete, but as long as people make the decisions about what to buy or not to buy, there will be an important place for salespeople in our economy.
And selling will always be a fun thing to do. It combines many of the positive stimulating forces in life: learning new things, facing different challenges, and meeting a wide variety of people. You get to make a pretty good (or even a very good) living and you can take most of the credit for your own success. Above all, you get to take some interesting risks, which adds plenty of spice to your life.
Creativity is a risk-taking enterprise. To endeavor to make something new is to take risks on several levels. Risk might be defined as the ability to fail. You may spend hours, days, even weeks on the project but fail to conceive an idea that’s workable. Even if you do create one, you may fail to complete it satisfactorily and have to abandon it. Even if your idea comes to fruition, you may fail to find a market for it. Even if you sell it, your idea may not produce the results your customer expected. Every one of these potential failures wounds your ego and your pocketbook. With all these ways to fail, why try?
Because not every idea fails and the ones that succeed reward you tremendously. The risk/reward ratio is actually stacked in your favor. What’s even better, you will improve the odds of success as your professional capabilities grow.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Face Calls
There’s a simple principle involved in time management for salespeople. More calls means more sales. Simple. As Woody Allen said, “80 percent of success is being there.” You’re “there” more often when you make more calls.
Let’s define a term. A “call” is a face-to-face meeting where you ask a prospect to buy something. It’s not a telephone call to get an appointment or a service call on a current customer, although those activities are certainly important. But when I talk about making more calls in the context of business-to-business sales, I’m talking about asking for orders in person more frequently.
The technological advances of our society are wonderful. You have email, smart phones, instant messaging, video conferencing, and all kinds of other ways to communicate with your prospects. These high-tech wonders can make you more efficient. But they can’t take the place of the face-to-face call. The salesperson who tries to substitute electronic “virtual selling” for personal contact is going to be about as successful as the quarterback who tries to run a play from the bench. The rest of the team may run the play, but it won’t be the same without him there to handle the ball.
There is no substitute for meeting with the client in person. When you’re there face-to-face, you build trust. It’s really hard to believe in what someone’s saying if you can’t look into their eyes while they’re saying it. If you’ve done any telephone sales, you know how hard it is to create a trusting relationship with a prospect who can’t see you.
You also demonstrate your professionalism and transmit your enthusiasm much better in person. “Seeing is believing” is more than just a truism when it’s applied to a sales call. When the prospect can see your animation, can see how prepared you are, can see the masterful way you control your presentation, you gain tremendous credibility. When you’re there face-to-face, you find yourself much more focused on the client, too, which in turn will make your presentation just that much more persuasive.
Personal calls also show the prospect you care. They say you’re so concerned about the success of his or her business that you are willing to invest some of your valuable time in working on it with them. Use all the modern technology you want, but use it to get more face time with more prospects and current customers. That’s where its real value lies.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
Let’s define a term. A “call” is a face-to-face meeting where you ask a prospect to buy something. It’s not a telephone call to get an appointment or a service call on a current customer, although those activities are certainly important. But when I talk about making more calls in the context of business-to-business sales, I’m talking about asking for orders in person more frequently.
The technological advances of our society are wonderful. You have email, smart phones, instant messaging, video conferencing, and all kinds of other ways to communicate with your prospects. These high-tech wonders can make you more efficient. But they can’t take the place of the face-to-face call. The salesperson who tries to substitute electronic “virtual selling” for personal contact is going to be about as successful as the quarterback who tries to run a play from the bench. The rest of the team may run the play, but it won’t be the same without him there to handle the ball.
There is no substitute for meeting with the client in person. When you’re there face-to-face, you build trust. It’s really hard to believe in what someone’s saying if you can’t look into their eyes while they’re saying it. If you’ve done any telephone sales, you know how hard it is to create a trusting relationship with a prospect who can’t see you.
You also demonstrate your professionalism and transmit your enthusiasm much better in person. “Seeing is believing” is more than just a truism when it’s applied to a sales call. When the prospect can see your animation, can see how prepared you are, can see the masterful way you control your presentation, you gain tremendous credibility. When you’re there face-to-face, you find yourself much more focused on the client, too, which in turn will make your presentation just that much more persuasive.
Personal calls also show the prospect you care. They say you’re so concerned about the success of his or her business that you are willing to invest some of your valuable time in working on it with them. Use all the modern technology you want, but use it to get more face time with more prospects and current customers. That’s where its real value lies.
Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, hiring, firing, and motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.
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