You may have a great product, but that means nothing if you can’t sell it. So how do you avoid going the way of the Betamax? These eight lessons will take your sales skills from good to great:
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Be natural
We all know what it’s like to be stuck on the phone with someone who sounds like a robot or seems insincere. It was because of this that Matt Drought named his company Natural Training – he says that being yourself is essential for building a relationship with customers.
“When you think about it,” he says, “the world’s most successful sales guy ever is a nerd. Bill Gates built a piece of software in the 1980s and he sold so much of it that he’s now giving money away because he doesn’t know what to do with it. He might not be a natural communicator or presenter but he established a style and stuck with it. He wasn’t compromising who he was so he was authentic, and he let his content and ideas win people over.”
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Create your own pitch
This philosophy is core to the success of Testbirds, a crowdsourced software testing firm formed in 2011 and that now has 60 staff. Around 15 to 20 of these employees are working on sales tasks such as making phone calls, delivering internet presentations, and representing the company at faceto-face meetings.
CEO and co-founder Philipp Benkler emphasises that all his sales staff are given the freedom to choose their own storyline to practice and pitch. “In training, I show them the pitch that I do, but I tell them that it’s not necessarily the best way, it’s just the way that works for me. I then give them a few days to prepare their own, because they have to feel comfortable with how they sell and what words they use.”
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Listen to the customer
Drought says one of the biggest misconceptions about sales is that you must be the type of person who loves talking. “I prefer someone to have a love of listening. If you’re listening hard enough, customers will tell you exactly how to win the business. There are all these little signals – little bits of gold in every conversation – that great salespeople pick up. A lot of people nod and make a sound with their mouths to show that they’re listening, but really they’re waiting to speak,” he says.
Benkler at Testbirds agrees that there is often a need to ease off and say less. “Once you have someone on the phone, you have 10 to 12 seconds to convince them to agree to a meeting or a follow up discussion. Yet a lot of people do what I call ‘bulldozering’, where they think ‘finally someone has picked up the phone, now I will tell them all the good things about my service and my company’, without even asking if the customer has time to speak or if they’re the right person.”
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Focus on value creation
Drought advises using the information you glean from potential customers to establish the value you can offer them. “Selling is a simple value proposition: ‘If I pay x then I receive y’. You’ve got to increase the value so that when people pay you, they’re getting a higher perceived value – they virtually can’t say no because it seems like a great deal.”
Focusing on value creation is the solution to the biggest problem facing the sales industry today, according to MTD Training’s head of learning and development, Mark Williams.
The problem is how to sell when customers are constantly telling you you’ve got to be cheaper. How do you retain your margins and the quality of service that you give?
“You need to increase the value that you offer in every other aspect,” he says. “Upfront price may be one of the things that the customer is looking for, but it might be that the costs over the long run are a lot more. So you need to recognise how the customer sees value before you start talking about price.”
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Learn from thought leaders
Away from the actual customer interactions, Williams emphasises the importance of following thought leaders to understand your industry and others more deeply. This, he says, allows you to diagnose your customers’ needs more effectively, sound more impressive when speaking to them and make yourself interesting to talk to.
“LinkedIn Pulse is one website we send our salespeople to; it has many leaders and captains of industry offering excellent advice freely and openly,” he says.
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Analyse your performance
This should extend to learning from your own performance, Williams adds. “Even if you don’t make a sale, ask what you learned from that, so that you don’t repeat the mistakes you made before. One of the things we advocate is to have a quick meeting with your manager to review what you’ve just done and what you could have done differently. Learning from the failures is as good as learning from the successes.”
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Focus on results
Drought says you should frequently ask yourself: “What am I doing right now to make my target?”, because there are always plenty of non-sales related activities that can get in the way. Making sales is your number one priority and you mustn’t be distracted from that.
In a similar vein, this also means not “pretending to sell”, he says. “There are a lot of people who think ‘right, I’ve made my 40 calls, I’ve gone to my three meetings, and I’ve looked good in the eyes of my manager, so I’ve justified my position. That’s not selling, selling is actually selling, finding unmet need.”
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Be bold
Too many people are cautious when it comes to selling, according to Drought. “There’s no such thing as the sales police. The people making the really serious money in sales are quite strategically adventurous; they go for it, they try new stuff. They find out where the edge is and then work back from there, they don’t tiptoe around their comfort zone.”
This advertisement feature is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Simply Business, the UK’s biggest business and landlord insurance provider, and sponsor of the supporting business growth hub.
