sales training
Professional Selling
Technical or creative professionals can demonstrate value: that’s what they do.
That doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales.
It’s great impressing people but failure to convert those impressions into real commitment can be the difference between winning and losing a business opportunity.
This course will equip you with a sales methodology to structure the demonstration of value to engage your buyers in terms of the factors that will determine their decision making.
Thus enabling you to seize the moment, because you’ll never have a better chance to decisively influence their decision making process than the moment when you’re actuallly in front of them.
Telephone Selling/Cold Calling
How to generate opportunities on the phone:
Learn how to structure a call to get in front of decisions makers: selling the meeting not the ‘product’.
Cold calling concentrates all elements of the sales process. But the emphasis in this sales training session will be on how to structure what you say on the phone to business decision makers who have never heard of you before, to qualify them as a business opportunity.
- Opening and gaining rapport
- Qualifying: person/need/timescale
- Framing your value proposition to impel a response
- Closing: diary close for the meeting. Diarise a further contact. Elicit a reason not to contact.
Ju-Jitsu Closing Techniques
In sales we can easily become overly invested in the business case, the demonstration of value: proving the value proposition.
But this can be at the expense of advancing the buyer’s decision making process in the moment: closing.
Closing means being alive to the the interaction in terms of how it advances a buying decision, which may bear little if any relation to the business case considered on its own merits.
The ju-jitsu principle of countering your opponent with his own force rather than reacting against it with your own illustrates this nicely.
But there is no one size fits all closing technique. Otherwise one could just use a script.
There are phrases and verbal formulae that can help you over the line. But tone and timing generally count for more than semantic content.
After all in some situations the most effective close is to hold the silence, allowing your ‘opponent’ to ‘close’ himself
Structured Selling
This course is designed to give you a sales methodology, from opening to close, to structure the demonstration of value to win commitment from buyers.
What you’ll learn:
Framing the value proposition:
Your value proposition is the reasons why people buy from you: framing the proposition in terms of its target audience is necessary because people buy for their reasons not yours.
Lead generation:
How to structure a call to get in front of decision makers: selling the meeting not the ‘product’.
What not to do:
Three; self-sabotaging habits of mind and corresponding speech patterns that must be avoided (doing this alone will put you ahead of your competitors.)
Pivotal moments:
Selling is: Opening. Demonstrating value. Closing. Understanding this structure so you are in control of the process. Because if you’re not the customer is.
Always be closing:
The sales process is incremental: closing means advancing that sales. What this means at the various stages of the sale and practical techniques to accomplish it.
Closing on price and/or ‘objections’:
How to use questions about price or other buying signals to your advantage. Again, using this effectively will put you ahead of 90% of sales professionals.
The reality of the marketplace is that if you’re not qualifying and closing, you may demonstrate value to no business purpose.
Learn proven structured selling methods and how to harness them to your business proposition.
Avoid the pitfalls that beset start-ups in sales-led markets through making the business sales-led.
Pro-Active Selling For B2B Sales
Whatever the reason, if your market isn’t coming to you, you have to approach your market.
Being pro-active means taking the initiative to contact people directly by whatever medium best suits your purpose.
Some businesses opt to outsource the lead generation and even the entire sales function. But whether you employ sales people inhouse or rely on others to generate new business, it’s important to systematically understand the sales process from initial contact to close.
Interview Mastery
Interviewing sales people over many years has taught me that even highly qualified sales people from specialist recruiters don’t actually sell themselves, i.e. structure what they say to direct the dialogue towards winning some form of commitment from the interviewer in the moment.
By default people allow the interviewer to control the dialogue.
A structured approach would almost certainly win them the job, because in sales the interview is such a decisive factor in the selection process, given that they wouldn’t be at the interview in the first place if they weren’t already qualified for the role on paper.
For recruiters this course provides an interview template for recruiters to drill their candidates prior to the interview, to structure what they say and gain a decisive advantage over their rivals.