When making cold calls and opening sales calls on the phone, you need guideposts, touch points of some kind to help guide your interaction. Now, some sales trainers would say you need a script when cold calling. However, I think a cold calling script is too rigid. A sales rep must be flexible and address people where they find them mentally and attitudinally, not where the script says your prospect should be.
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In a previous post, we discussed 10 quick sales prospecting ideas to boost your sales. All those ideas dealt with using social media and online properties to make yourself known to potential prospects who are searching online for what you do.
We know that most of your potential customers do their research online. And by the time they begin calling on salespeople, they’ve already decided on what they want to do. Continue reading
Think about the steps you take when you buy something—a pair of sneakers, for instance. Something in your world gets your attention and you come to the conclusion: I need a new pair of sneakers. You start to go out and look, try a couple pairs on, go to the store, go to Amazon, etc. In that process, you remove doubt, because you’re actively looking. Then you start to consider it, lay it out and say, “Jeez, do I really need these? What pair do I need?” Ultimately, you buy a pair.
That’s a simple buying process.
In most sales, especially B2B sales, it’s more complex. In a previous blog, I’ve likened the process to a trip to the doctor’s office. Regardless of the product or service though, there’s a way to be successful: sell how people buy. Do this and you’ll be successful. Sound simple? It is and isn’t at the same time.
The Science and Art of Sales
As a sales professional, you take action to get somebody’s attention. You need to qualify them to see if they would fit business parameters. You have to engage the prospect in some kind of request for their time, ask them a series of questions that are really for their benefit, and get the buyer in a scenario where you can present them with an idea in order to start creating an opportunity where one did not exist before. Then you present something that removes their doubt and gets them saying, “This is a decent fit for me.” Finally, you get into dialogue with them to remove any objection and close.
There’s no shortcut to the process, no way to cheat the sales process—whether solicited or unsolicited. At the end of the day, sales is a science—a series of yeses. “Yes, I’ll talk to you. Yes, you can ask me questions. Yes, you can present to me an idea. Yes, you resolved my objection. Yes, I’ll buy.” It’s an algorithm of questions, each followed by five or six yeses.
But sales is also an art—one that requires a deep understanding of why someone is looking to buy and how to help them understand you’re the right solution. Practiced at a high level, the profession combines creativity with a process for predictable selling.
Success Ultimately Requires a Proven Process
I have been a sales professional, entrepreneur, and have trained other salespeople since the 1980s. Selling vacuums door-to-door in college; leading the largest franchise for Dale Carnegie Training outside Taiwan and Hong Kong; building Tyson Group as the go-to sales trainers of professional sports and entertainment as well as insurance organizations; training over one thousand sales executives and sales managers annually.
In all these years of selling and working with organizations of all sizes, the key to successful sales can be distilled down to a six-step process applicable to any product, service, industry, and solution. This process works. It’s a process that will benefit any high performer—from entrepreneur to sales professional to manager trying to boost team performance—and anyone for whom selling is a matter of life and death.
Learn more about what this proven and repeatable sales process is by visiting www.tysongroup.com, OR by purchasing your copy of, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business And Compete In A Complex World.
I’ve spent the last 20+ years working with sales teams in the pro-sports industry. While each market is unique, each team faces its own challenges, and each league is unlike the others, there are four mistakes that are universal across all pro-sports sales.
Here are some thoughts and advice. Continue reading