How to sell a product or service? Although it seems like a simple question, the answer is not and it is more complicated than it seems. The right answer can mean the difference between the success or failure of any company, business, or trade.
The major objective in organizations is to get customers!
The phrase: to create and keep satisfied customers, contains a whole sales strategy that we will talk about on another occasion. For now, we are concerned with the answer to the challenge: how to sell more and better?
The creation of a customer represents a sale, an income, and a source of employment, the raison of any business is to make a profit. Therefore, the most important activity in business is to sell, the main function of managers is to sell! And believe it or not, I find managers who do everything but sell; organizations that are disorganized so as not to sell, work groups, not teams, that do not understand the sales function, entire structures that boycott their sales!
Who succeeds in today's global and fiercely competitive markets? Only smart organizations and companies are transforming the way they sell. So the first step is the desire to change your selling model or adopt one, and it is not changing for change's sake, but a real transformation in the way you think about selling.
I assure you that if you are not selling more, it is either because, you don't want to or you can't, and if it is the latter, you must change your approach to how you approach the potential market. The way to sell now is to remove the weight sign from your forehead. Selling now is not selling! Selling now is advising, guiding, helping, and presenting options and alternative solutions, which is why, in my training, I emphasize the training of advisors, not salespeople.
The expert advisor is the one who keeps the relationship as the cornerstone of his success, the one who personalizes his contacts and makes their needs and wishes his own and his priority. The friendship factor is the best weapon to make them feel comfortable; what is given to the friend; is time, attention, and interest. This is how we define the friendship factor in sales. The consultative, psychological, and human forms a new model of how to sell.
What in leadership represents the value of credibility, the equivalent in sales is trust.
To sell better, the first obstacle is the resistance of potential customers.
In any new relationship, the first thing that arises is tension and fear of the unknown. Despite this, we must face their resistance and rejection, understanding that their change, that is, their openness to listen to us, comes when you change, not before! Confidence is therefore 40% of success in sales. We must infect potential customers with courage, encouragement, and vigour to act, to know about them, their company, their tastes, their fears, their whims, their family, their preferences, and in short, everything about their world, giving at all times an emotional and consultative approach.
Selling is thinking like a chess game, going two or three moves ahead to win, looking for the customer's benefit, taking care to make a tailor made suit, and not talking too much or manipulating the situation. Excite them with what your product or service can do for them and once you provoke their desire to buy and make it theirs, known as mental ownership, ask for their opinion.
In the experience I have had training consultants, I have been able to remove the weight and manipulative burden that comes with the traditional sales close. I regret that some books and charlatans promote the closing as the most important action in the sales process.
In the book Relate and Sell It describes the new selling model, based on the psychology of the selling approach, where we do not ask for decisions, but for opinions. We are convinced that we do not sell, but that we are not bought, and to achieve this approach in our sales team we have to train advisors to enlighten with their expert opinion the favorable decision of our customers to purchase our products and services.
Make sure that your sales teams develop and practice the critical skills that we will be sharing from this blog, applying the techniques of professional communicators and creating habits that guarantee their success.
Upnify´s Editorial Team; formed by professionals and experts in Marketing, Sales, Communication, Design and other areas. They share their experience through articles enriching the commercial culture.