Often when I suggest to salespeople that they do some telephone selling, a panicky look comes over their faces and you’d think that I’d suggested they pick up a hot poker and put it to their ear! Telephone selling isn’t telemarketing. It is a tool every salesperson must use at times so we should learn to use…
Probably one of the fastest ways to get rid of a salesperson, apart from telling him you’re happy with your current supplier, is to tell him that whatever it is he’s selling, “Isn’t in the budget.” For some inexplicable reason, salespeople will accept this as the gospel truth and pack up their bag and leave.…
When a prospect isn’t expecting your telephone call or you show up at his office unannounced, the natural tendency for him is to try to get rid of you – to close the door. While a good opening containing a real benefit to the prospect will minimize this tendency and help keep the door open, you still…
You shouldn’t talk price until you’ve established value, but sometimes that’s not always possible. If you feel compelled to provide price information prematurely, as often salespeople do, follow these steps: 1. Don’t apologize for your price (“I know this might sound a bit expensive but…”). Apologizing only reinforces the sense of low value and may…
Discussing facts and features is unfortunately, if you’re like most salespeople, where you’ll say the wrong things! Surprised? You shouldn’t be. If your company is like most companies, your training, if any, will have been almost exclusively product oriented. Fact after fact after fact. If you look at almost any company’s literature, it is composed almost entirely of facts,…
There are always going to be times in a salesperson’s life when we just have to make pure cold calls – those calls where you’re prospect doesn’t know you or is not expecting your call. Many sales people find cold calling hard. Now, while we might not be able to warm up a cold call, we…
Referrals are an excellent source of prospects and can greatly increase sales, but most salespeople don’t deserve to get them because they do very little or nothing to earn them. Some salespeople simply do their job — no more, no less — and then expect the customer to be eager to provide them with the…
The perceived value is the amount of money that a prospect is prepared to pay for what it is you’re selling at a given point in the selling process. Until they are convinced of the value, they’re not prepared to pay your price. As you move through the selling process and the prospect begins to understand…
We all have competition and even when we don’t have competitors, we have competition. How can we have competition when we don’t have competitors? Competitors give your prospects choices and even when you don’t have a competitor, the prospect still has choices —whether to buy what you’re selling or go without. In effect, you are…
The Probe step is probably the single most important step in the selling process and the one that’s done the poorest by many salespeople. If the point of selling is to provide a solution to your prospect’s problems or to help him make an informed buying decision, how can you accomplish that if you don’t…
