Ten Key Factors That Maximize Sales

10 Key Factors That Maximize Sales

Some sales people are successful today because they gain the majority of their targeted customers business. They manage the relationship and continuously build relationship equity. That doesn’t mean they operate with the "lone wolf"mentality doing almost everything for the customer.

These sales people are successful because they take full advantage of all the resources their company has to offer. Transactions and promos flow through a managed relationship. They also dedicate a specific amount of their time to new account development and penetration of those accounts with high potential rather than over providing service functions to existing accounts. Ten Key identifying factors that will help maximize sales success include:

1. Not being afraid to prospect for new accounts and new business. Have enough confidence to view rejection as simply a step closer to success.

2. Understanding the value of planning and actually documenting the key actions necessary to meet specific objectives at specific accounts.

3. Become professional with your planned presentations whether it is to an individual buyer or a group of customer decision makers. Perfect your elevator speech that clearly outlines your value proposition. Get it down pat for those opportunistic moments that may occur.

4. Goals are a matter of course and they include more than just revenue and margin growth. Milestones are established for target accounts to highlight progress toward their major goals.

5. No one likes record keeping and paperwork but the really successful sales professional understands the necessity and the value received in return for being methodical with their record keeping.

6. Time management should be forever on your mind and you need to continuously practice efficient time control.

7. You’ve got to be very, very, very hungy! Hungry for knowledge to improve your skills and demonstrate enough curiosity that you don’t wait for company sponsored seminars for education and training. Read, listen to tapes and finance your own self improvement in addition to company programs.

8. Don’t chase orders, chase customers. Be willing to lose an order but fight aggressively to never lose a customer unless you need to prune your territory garden due to unacceptable profitability.

9. Your objective on every sales call is to identify the customer’s real needs, not to just take an order. Take pride in being a solution provider and demand creator instead of a demand fulfiller.

10. Understand that often a key to your success lies in your ability to educate the customer. This may range in the form of business acumen to helping the customer understand real value. Become an expert at demonstrating the difference between price and cost.

The formula for success is simple:

FINDING THE CUSTOMER PAIN - TAKING THE PAIN AWAY = SETTING YOUR PRICE

Customers will pay plenty, if you can reduce their “ain” Find out what the customer’s problems are and where they are in pain. Look at it from their point of view, not yours.

Customers no longer spout off about quality products and reliable deliveries. That’s a given. Although all customers are trained to say “Your Price is to High”, if you find the pain, price is not an issue. Remember the emerging role of the sales professional today is not to increase sales. Let me repeat that— your role today is not to increase sales. Your role as a sales professional today is to systematically and consistently increase the number of customers who choose you to be their #1 supplier……..

And it’s not about Features and Benefits

Today it’s not about the features and benefits of your product or service. It’s about value and how your customers are going to make a profit. You no longer just sell yourself and everything falls into place. Today, relationships are still very important but they are the ante to play. Customers are smarter and more educated. You must bring every resource your company has into play and leverage those resources to create competitive advantage. Learn to really listen to your customers. Let them talk and when there seems to be a pause in the conversation resist the temptation to start talking again. Chances are good that the customer has more to say. The quieter you are the more they will tell you. Listen long enough with a few strategically placed questions and the customer might just tell you exactly how to gain his business. (And it won’t just be about price)

Drs. Christiaan Janssens MBA

Executive Coach CJ Coaching

CRO Akwa Wellness

Value Added Selling

Christiaan Janssens
Executive Coach
CRO @ Spa Akwa Belgium

Consultative Selling

Consultative selling

A big part of training salespeople these days is helping them to differentiate themselves from everyone else. This is accomplished by effectively applying a consultative sales process: the salesperson has a conversation with a decision maker that is unlike any conversation the competition has had. It uncovers the convincing reasons for spending money, changing vendors, buying a product or service and, as important, buying it from you. That creates urgency, an encouragement for a prospect to self-qualify, so that you don’t have to pull teeth getting a prospect qualified. The end result should be a prospect that is willing to spend more to do business with you, and a sales cycle that is not based on winning on price.

Example:

A salesman met a customer that had moved their business to a competitor because of price issues. It sounded like they were getting what they were paying for:

- Paying more for freight,

- Finding variations in the product,

- Stocking more inventory than necessary because of availability problems

So far so good. The salesman had done enough to at least uncover some issues and, while these aren’t persuasive reasons, additional questions would lead us to these. What he should have done:

He should have asked, “How important is it to have continued availability of quality, local inventory?” The customer would have said, “Extremely important”, the salesman would have said, “Tell me how that would affect your business”, and we would have gotten closer to the persuasive reasons.

What the salesman did instead:

He asked, “If you had access to local delivery, through a distributor, and the price was competitive, would you consider looking into this?”

The horror of the question was that the salesman introduced an unnecessary criterion: competitive pricing for doing business with him. What’s wrong with that? Two things:

- Even if you wanted to be the low priced seller, and they don’t, if you don’t have a competitive price, you don’t get the business!

- He didn’t need to offer competitive pricing, because he sold value! He identified the problem and offered a solution to a problem. That is the value someone will pay for and he undermined it by bringing the customer’s attention back to price!

The lesson:

The reality is that there are only four reasons why price becomes an issue:

- The salesman made it an issue (experience)

- The salesman accepted that it was an issue (non supportive beliefs)

- The salesman didn’t know how to prevent it from being an issue (tactics)

- The salesman was foolishly calling on purchasing instead of an actual decision maker who owned a problem or an opportunity (strategy).

Value-added selling

In a marketplace too often focused on price, Value-Added Selling provides sales professionals with a market-proven approach for selling customers on the inherent value of a product. Based on a value-selling model proven to work across industries and product lines, we will explain how to define value in the client’s terms, orient a pitch to fit the client’s needs, and close the deal. This gives sales professionals the tools and confidence they need to deemphasize price in the selling equation.

Value-added selling is a proactive philosophy of seeking ways to enhance, augment, or enlarge your bundled package solution for the customer. It’s promising a lot and delivering more, always looking for ways to exceed the customer’s expectations. Value-added selling is a proactive philosophy. Value-added salespeople take the initiative to add value. Value-added sales-people do not wait for the customer to complain about the price. Value-added salespeople build in more value on the front end so that price becomes less of an issue on the backend. Being proactive with customers means you never have to say you’re sorry. Value-added selling is a business philosophy that emanates from rock solid core beliefs. The first belief is that trust is the currency of great relationships. If two people trust each other, like each other, and want to do business with each other, they will work out the details. Despite technology and the complexity of many industrial sales, selling is still relationship management. Buyers may prefer brands, but they reserve loyalty for people.

A second core belief is that people want to get as good as they give. This commitment to equity shows itself in the desire to achieve win-win outcomes. If it’s not a good deal for the buyer or the seller, it’s a bad deal for both of them. When customers feel that they gave better than they got, they defect when the first opportunity presents itself. Thus, the seller loses. When sellers perceive that they gave better than they got, they resent the business and fail to serve enthusiastically. Thus, the customer loses. Win-win outcomes are the only acceptable results for long-term relationships.

A third core belief stems from a customer value focus—that the sale is more about the customer than the seller. It’s their problem. It’s their money. It’s a solution with which they must live. The sale should be about the customer. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Value-added salespeople define value in customer terms, not seller terms. If you define value in customer terms, they pay for it with a higher selling price. Conversely, if you define value in your terms, you pay for it with a bigger discount. Because of this customer value focus, value-added salespeople are in business to make a difference, not just to make a deal. They approach the sale by asking them-selves this question: “Where can we have the greatest impact on the customer’s business?” The natural outcome of this belief is that you will generate all the deals you can handle. This follows a parallel belief that you achieve success by helping other people achieve higher levels of success.

A fourth core belief is that you sell a bundled package solution, a three-dimensional solution: your product or service, your company, and yourself. Two major studies found that salespeople contribute at least one-third of the value that customers receive. The company and product contribute the balance. The same product from the same company from two different salespeople results in two different solutions altogether. The salesperson’s competence and attitude are primary drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. This three-dimensional view of the solution offers great hope for companies and their salespeople. If you sell the product only, you open the field to too many competitors. Companies bring value to the table with their facilities, depth of re-sources, commitment to the industry, management philosophy, support, and people. People represent the single unique dimension of value, because there’s no commodity in creativity and no traffic jam on the extra mile. Salespeople add value with their problem-solving skills, follow-up, accessibility, knowledge, ability to get things done, logistics support, and initiative.