When Selling – Stop “Winging It”

Research shows that salespeople will never reach their performance potential without a well-defined sales-call procedure that they can follow and learn from. “Winging it” on sales calls has grim consequences – lost sales, extended sell cycles, margin erosion and no clear path to improvement. Bottom line: Your entire sales career can be mediocre if you “wing it.” Performance improves by as much as 50% when salespeople have a consistent game plan for their sales calls.

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What Is Your Customer Thinking?

Ever wonder what’s going on your customer’s head? Turns out that customers — the ones who are actually going to buy — always go through five “decision-making” states. If the customer balks at any one of them, or the sales pro pushes for a decision before the previous decisions have been made, the result is almost always a lost sale. Here are the five decisions:

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Document Your Best Sales Practices

What Works Best For Your Company?

Experience is a wonderful teacher, but only if you pay attention and draw the right lessons from your experience. It pays to document certain portions of your company’s sales process – and the most successful practices that you and your fellow salespeople have found for handling common challenges. Salespeople who do this maximize the use of their time, shorten sell cycles, make more sales, and cash bigger paychecks.

To learn from what works, document what works.

What parts of your sales process should you document?

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Dealing With Sales Stalls and Objections

Most salespeople think of “stalls” and “objections” as synonyms. Wrong. Action Selling Sales Training says – Stalls and objections are both things you may hear after you have asked for commitment, but an objection is a specific reason not to buy. In a stall-“I need to think about it”-the customer offers no particular reason for hesitating.

Almost all salespeople buy in to the stall. Very few ever get the deal once they do.

What the stalling customer is really saying is this: “I’m not quite sold yet. Sell me some more.” Well then, by all means, do some more selling. But do it right. Here’s how:

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The principle mission of salespeople is to Gain Commitment.

Our recent research shows that nearly 80% of salespeople do not understand what their primary purpose is. Your principle mission is to Gain Commitment. The confusion stems from the variety of tasks we as salespeople are asked to perform. The end result is that 62% of salespeople make sales calls where there is no attempt at Gaining Commitment.

One of the most important reasons why this occurs is most salespeople do not establish what we call a Commitment Objective for every sales call. This is the number one mistake that all salespeople make. Well, it’s time to change that!

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