The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Majer

If you want to be a successful sales person and to close the deal, very important part is to be in front of your customers at the exact time when they are on the market for goods or services. You can find companies they are on the market now, or you can put them in the market.

The only thing you can accomplish is to lose a precious time chasing prospects who are not interested for your product, or they are not a fit for your products or services at all.

Many unsuccessful sales people spend their time with customers who are not even close to sales process and to buying, but poorly trained sales person still contact them regularly simply because they are in pipeline and they need to fill their day somehow. Talking to that kind of prospects is just a waste of your and their time.

When you are selling you need to differentiate and trigger events will make this possible. You will have tools to create the opportunity for you, and not just in the visible market where customers are actively looking for provider or supplier, but also in the invisible market - you put them in the market, you are making customers realize that they are on the market now. Without trigger events you can’t force customers to meet with you because you will be just one of many sales guys knocking on their door.

Here are two examples of trigger events:

• Your research shows some trigger events like hiring new 15-20 sales reps or changes in upper management levels: this clearly sends out messages that the company is in need of new office furniture or new computers with software, or maybe a new benefits plan for employees.
• Thousands of corporate turnarounds occur every year. You may have read about a few of them in your local newspaper, but that’s not enough. There are companies in a turnaround phase that affect sales in your area all the time. I suggest keeping abreast of the New York Times or other newspapers like that in your region. Their business page carries a number of turnaround events throughout the company along with web sites by the large accounting firms and graduate business colleges such as Wharton. Turnaround time means change time: new people, new products, new services, and new sales potential for you.

Customers will be positively shocked with your due diligence and fact-finding mission you accomplished with them. When you contact your prospects and on the first conversation you leave them with impression you know their situation very well — you care to help, and you can add value to them, trust me when I say you are much closer to signing a deal than anybody else.

After discovering trigger events, the next steps are to develop the customer’s perception of your unique value. What can you do for them? How your solution can actually create value to them?

Trigger events will give you the clue about the timing too.

More about Trigger Events here:

Selling in 21st Century

Hit or miss doesn’t work in selling

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Recently I visited with Mike, one of my previous customers, who gave me an interesting list of 10 rules for employees. Every new employee who enters his plant has the first step to a partnership in the shape of these ten rules handed them on a printed card:

Read more in my latest book “Crucial Points to Succeed in Sales (and Life)” - link is here.

In my previous article about presenting, I was talking about how we can’t all be at our best every day or every hour.

But if you get your best possible presentation down on paper and then firmly entrench it in the back of your head, you’ll be certain to make a better average presentation than you ever have before. It will also give you confidence during off days.

Now, knowing what you do about your own proposition, if you were in your prospect’s shoes you’d want it, wouldn’t you? Well then your task is simple; you have only to make your prospect feel the same way about it that you do yourself and the order is yours.

And how are you going to do this?

By conveying to your prospect the very things that have made you feel the way you do. You can hardly expect the prospect to view matters the way you do in the first place. If they did, their orders would be coming in through the Internet or the mail.
That’s what you are there for - to make them feel the way you do and arouse their desire.

Fear – Haste - Uncertainty

• Fear is a dangerous four-letter word - an emotional response to impending or imagined danger that is tied to anxiety. They’re all enemies of the successful presentation. Why should you fear? The worst that can happen to you is not to get the order. And you can’t lose anything that you haven’t got.
• Haste, why should you hurry?
  You must make your listener understand in order to get the order. You certainly can’t make them understand by rattling off your presentation as if you were paid by the number of words you got out per minute. Listen and record yourself sometime. Are you interesting to listen to? Are you clear and with a voice of different tones?
• Uncertainty?
  You can’t be uncertain. You know too much of the merit of what you’re selling to waver one second from the absolute knowledge that you are there to benefit the person you’re talking to.

You’re too strong to let fear, haste, or uncertainty wrecks your plans. Leave them to the weaker ones.

I’ve seen lots of salespeople who the minute they encounter opposition put themselves on the defensive, and take the attitude of trying to prove that they are not liars. They’re predestined to failure.
You are the captain of your presentation.

You know what you are going to say. You know how you are going to say it.
You know that what you are going to say and the way you say it are going to direct your prospect’s mind to the final point of desire for what you sell.

So let your facts come as gospel. State them as undeniable, irrefutable truths. Let your deep sincerity and positive statements head off objections and overcome arguments before they are raised.
Assume that your listener believes you; give them facts they can believe, and in the majority of cases they will.
Simply make it easier for them to believe than not to.

Avoid the pitfalls of long words and small superfluous arguments. Remember that the salesperson, to be effective, must get it across in the quickest, most convincing sort of way. Long words and so-called “clever talking” defeat their very object; they are offensive instead of impressive. And those little, good-for-nothing arguments don’t get the orders. Stick to the big points of your proposition: the points that count - the tried and true order-getters.
You know them. Use them.

Whenever you open your mouth to make a presentation forget that you ever made one before, or that you’re ever going to make one again.

There is just one person in the world to be sold, and that is the person you are talking to. You can’t sell that person by thinking of the person you sold yesterday or the one you are going to sell this afternoon. The person is before you; concentrate on that one.
Remember, no matter how old your arguments are to you, they ring fresh in that person’s ears. And the same points that sold your proposition last year and the same ones that will sell it next year will sell it this very minute to the person you’re talking to.
Leave no possible questions unanswered in your prospect’s mind. Some people have a tendency verbally to say, “Yes,” without really being convinced, just to be agreeable or avoid argument. Instead of trying to get a mere verbal assent, bend your endeavors toward making a prospect’s mind completely and absolutely convinced of the truth of what you are saying.
In this way, step-by-step, as you go through your presentation you will gain a general approval on every point you make. Then - when you return to the net result of getting the order - your prospect cannot raise a point, and go back and disagree with you.

To learn more about the Crucial Points to Succeed in Sales and how to use them to improve your sales results, get my e-book here.

My article “Nobody Likes To Be Sold” has been selected as one of the top ten sales articles of the month by Top 10 Sales Articles website.

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