The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Majer

The average salesperson is overly eager to begin actual selling, and in this ambition he or she is encouraged by the average sales manager.  In selling, as in many other activities of life, it often is true that less haste makes more speed. It does not pay to rush the preparation steps, for the result is bound to be a lot of stumbling afterward.

The importance of the preliminary preparation of the salesperson in knowledge of his products or services has already been emphasized in the preceding posts on this blog. Now we are to realize that knowledge of his territory and of his prospective customers is equally necessary.

Many salespeople consider prospecting in a very narrow way. They are on the lookout for the names of people who might buy, but do not realize the broader aspect of prospecting. They do not seek comprehensive knowledge of conditions in general throughout their industries or territories, but only “hot tips” that are likely to lead to orders.

I frequently meet salespeople who regard systematic prospecting as the sales manager’s job. These people think the company should comb the field with marketing messages and keep the salesperson supplied with prospects to follow up and sell.

Let us realize the wider salesperson meaning of prospecting, and appreciate that prospecting is the salesperson’s job -  practically all of the responsibility rests on him for doing it well. We get the right idea if we understand that the salesperson should comprehend for whom he is working primarily — himself.

Don’t start your selling cross-eyed. The business in which you are engaging is your business. Attend to it yourself if you would have it taken care of in the way that will be best for you. The company risks very little on you, compared with what you have to lose. Therefore make your investment of yourself wisely, with forethought and care to insure the highest degree of effectiveness in your sales efforts.

Do not think of what you do as temporary or a makeshift. Search for the materials with which to build your business permanently. Act from the start of your connection with a company as if you expected to spend all your life in that relation, developing from year to year. You may have other plans in view, but conduct yourself as you would do if the company was really your own.

Aimless, hit-or-miss prospecting is never very systematic effective. The salesperson must determine exactly what he or she wants to know. If you are just looking for the names of buyers, you will find your prospecting like bacon, with a streak of fat and a streak of lean. But if you systematically seek fundamental knowledge of your industry or territory, and are motivated by a definite purpose all the time, you will accumulate a fund of facts that will enable you to do most of your prospecting inside your own mind.

You won’t need tips. You will know the conditions in your field which influence buying, and at the right time will be guided by your knowledge to the very places where business is to be had.

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Today I am sharing with you my Daily Sales Tip #21 titled: “Find companies that have immediate wants and needs.”

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Three main keys of every sale are:

1. Researching and qualifying your customers
2. Being in front of them
3. Being there when they are ready to buy

To start the sales process you need to find out who could be in the market today, and then recognize your selected customer’s wants and needs. Even if your company does not have automated system to generate new leads for you, when you learn more about prospecting, you will be able to find your next customer by your own.

Your mission as a sales person should be to find companies that have immediate wants and needs. This means that something happened or is happening to them - a move, a merger, new investors, etc. You have to look for any event that might create the opportunity for you, or better said you are looking for event that can trigger the sales for you.

Selling itself is changing. Customers are more educated, they are searching for information by themselves, and they are looking from providers to understand buyer’s situation, needs and business. Salespeople need new knowledge about prospecting and new set of tools to be better prepared for challenges that customers are putting in front of us each day.

That is why we created “The Secrets of Prospecting” one-day workshop that goes above and beyond usual sales trainings about prospecting and cold calling – you will learn and practice where to find events that trigger the purchase to happen, directly from the author of the book “Trigger Events”!

After the workshop you will know who to target, why to target and how to target them; how to open the conversation and warm up cold calls; how to create interest in the first few minutes of the conversation and how to successfully follow up.  More about the workshop…

Registration options:

1. Click HERE to fill the form.

2. Visit http://prospectingsecrets.eventbrite.com to register and pay online

3. To register by phone call us at 416-840-4982 OR 1-866-876-4761

Consider the following letter by an active head of one of the largest software company in America:

“Results are the only things that count. We are perfectly willing to pay a salesperson $100,000 a year if they deliver the goods; we are willing to pay $750,000 a year if that person delivers, and a person’s earnings from $7500 a month up to almost anything is in their own hands.”

The heads of ninety-nine out of every hundred companies employing salespeople reflects that sentiment. Often the main limit to the salesperson’s earning power is a self-imposed one.

I am sure you know the question in the mind of the person starting out with a cell phone in one hand and an expense check in the other is: “How can I sell?”

The question in the mind of the salesperson producing now is: “How can I increase my sales?”

Understand in advance, please, that we offer no theories. The source of the methods offered herein derives from the operation of thousands of successful salespeople in varied lines the country over.

These people are working more than the average salesperson because they are better than the average. And here is what they have found produce real results.

Are You an Order Taker or an Order Maker?

Let’s take a look at the order-taker, not as a negative example, and not as an object of pity, but only to make a point.
Chris the “order-taker” visits on Smith, Brown, Jones, James, and Robinson. They are not in the market. Then she opens her portfolio in Harrison’s store and Harrison buys.

Mind you, she didn’t sell anything. Harrison was ready; the order taker had the goods, showed them and took the order. Why? Simply because the prospect was in the market, ready to buy.

She encountered a favorable situation; she was standing directly under the apple with a bushel basket when it dropped from the tree. That is what makes it possible for the order-taker to exist. If the order-taker calls on enough people they are bound to find a certain percentage needing what is sold and ready to order.

Let’s leave the subject of order taking. Let’s deal with the problem of the person who really sells.

What is it? What’s the difference?
Simply this - the salesperson must create a specialized situation, and place people in the market who didn’t feel that way when they walked in the store. It has been said that sometimes a good salesperson sells to buyers who don’t think they want what they buy.

The reason why is this: the good salesperson makes the buyers realize they want what is being offered.

Let this sink in deeply. The order-taker canvasses looking for people who want to buy. However, the professional salesperson tries to make every person he or she calls on wants to buy.

The order-taker accepts the advantage of the situation he finds. But the order maker, a professional salesperson creates specialized situations to suit his purpose.

Now, the question you should ask yourself is:

Are You an Order Taker or an Order Maker?

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.

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

Get the book “Trigger Events”

During my workshops and seminars I am regularly being asked for my opinion on what is needed to be successful in sales. Here it is - a short list of things that every salesperson needs to do regularly, day-by-day, week-by-week, to ensure the continuous success in sales.

1. Never ever stop learning
2. Stay positive
3. Take time off
4. Stay in control of your emotions
5. Work with decision makers exclusively
6. Set your selling quota
7. Stay committed
8. Put the rubber on the road, not on the carpet
9. Stick to the system
10. Watch your language, appearance, and behavior
11. Get organized
12. Set small goals
13. Prepare a “to do” list each day
14. Cultivate contacts
15. Contact three past buyers a day
16. Contact three prospects a day
17. Become the number one communicator in your office
18. Increase your personal association with top performers
19. Know the nuts and bolts of the business
20. Improve your attitude to yourself, your company, and its products
21. Ask yourself, “Is this what you want?”

Success in this world is fundamentally a matter of selling, of using its principles whether in business, society, or politics, and applying them properly and effectively.

Are you suited up, trained and ready to get out there and win?

Practically every sale made to a new buyer may be properly classified as easy, difficult, or impossible. You’ll readily agree to that. But will you agree to this? Sales are not easy, difficult, or impossible according to the character or mood of the person you’re talking to.

What you say or do during the first few minutes of your conversation is the one thing which largely controls the later course of the sale. It doesn’t take brains to make a sale difficult or impossible. Your task is to pave the path and make it easy. And it’s just as easy to make a sale easy, as it is to spoil it altogether.

The whole object of your approach is to arouse fully your prospect’s interest, and bring them to the point where they want to see your product and hear your proposition.

That is the first specialized situation - to make the person you’re talking to really want particulars - arouse their interest and put them in a buying frame of mind.

How are you going to go about creating this situation?

In the first place, there is a factor in selling which few men seem to have recognized; yet it is a block over which we stumble time and time again, when by knowing that it was there we could just as easily walk around it.

This stumbling block is this:
The average person’s instinctive antagonism to being sold.

It exists and is a force with which we have to contend just as surely as the wind blows, the rain falls, and the sun shines. The minute a person realizes that you have something to sell, they instinctively - without realizing it - throw up the mental barrier.

Though they will hardly put it in words or even admit it. More likely they will respond this way in their mind:

“This person has something to sell. He thinks he is going to make me take it. I’ll show him he is wrong. I will not buy.”

You see the idea? The mere fact that you are a salesperson influences your prospect partly to make up their mind that they are not going to buy. This feeling is based on the fact that every person instinctively hates to admit that another person can make or control him or her to do anything. And remember, all this happens before either of you say one word. So your first task is to get past this barrier of instinctive antagonism to being sold.

How are you going to do it?
Here’s the way to overcome that instinctive antagonism to being sold - the quick way - the sure way.

Forget forever that there is such a thing as forcing your business on the other: put yourself in their place and start right - working with the potential buyer to find out how their business will be benefited by your proposition.

In this way you can overcome this instinctive antagonism to being sold in much less time than it takes to tell about it. The earliest you manage this antagonism the better.

There is a right and a wrong way of meeting the objection of antagonism. Here is an example.

The salesperson says to the prospect:

“Your vacuum cleaner is a loser; mine has twice the power and suction. I can’t even give you a trade in on that piece of junk.”

The right way:

“I know you are interested in a clean environment and my company is too. This is the reason they designed this vacuum cleaner; it does not recycle the dust - it picks it up and securely holds it. It’s the best help you can get toward maintaining a clean home environment. Here, let’s compare in a operation test your old one with this new model.”

The question has been turned from salesperson’s proposition to discussing customer’s problem. The instinctive antagonism to being sold has been passed. And if he’s the right salesperson, the eventual solution of your problem will be his proposition.

Overcoming instinctive antagonism to being sold is a good deal like starting your plane by doing a pre-flight walk around first; it has nothing to do with your initial purpose but it is a necessary preliminary.

The real purpose of your approach is to arouse the interest of your prospective purchaser - to put him in the mental attitude of:

“If this is what he says it is - I’ll buy.”

Get the idea?

And once you have created the specialized situation, all you have to do is to prove that your statements are true; then the order is yours.

By definition, a sale is the act of meeting prospective buyers and providing them with a product or service in return for money or other agreed upon compensation. A sale is an act of completion of a commercial activity. The “deal is closed”, means the customer has consented to the proposed product or service by making full or partial payment (as in the case of installments) to the seller.

Selling is therefore a process in which you need to follow certain steps, one at a time, to reach your final goal – the sale itself.
The same fundamentals that govern the direct sale of tangible goods govern the indirect sales of intangible goods.
Your sales process will also depend on your efforts invested in research and understanding your customer base, together with your energy and enthusiasm about your product.

Sometimes you can skip some steps if the customer is giving you signals to move further, faster. Otherwise, it solely depends on you and your readiness to be prepared before contacting the prospect.

If we simplify the whole sales process we can agree that there are four major steps in sales:

1. opening/qualifying
2. information gathering
3. presentation of your proposal, and
4. closing.

Opening phase is usually a result of a cold call to someone who has not yet heard of you or thought about working with you.

Information gathering is a second step when sales person is asking customers what they do, how they do it, and why they do it that way. Then he/she ask how his company can help them do it better. Usually second step means getting the meeting or presentation opportunity.

Proposal is next step when sales person is giving the presentation based on the gathered information, and giving the recommendation or meaningful solution to solve their pains, issues, or needs.

When customer decides to buy that is a fourth step in sales process and the only step that actually counts - closing the deal. This means they see the value in your solution and you assisted to buyer to make a decision based on information you provided.

When you don’t close the deal you did not completed your process. It is very similar to playing baseball when you get to the third base but never reach home and score; in sales this means you have gone through three steps but on the end you didn’t engaged buyer enough to see the value in your solution.

You didn’t address their needs that will trigger a buy to happen. You have wasted your time and your customer’s time, and there is hardly any chance of getting back to that customer to try to sell again.

More about the lead generation, cold calling, presenting, objection handling and closing techniques you can learn on my regularly scheduling webinars. Feel free to subscribe to my daily sales tips newsletter.

You have arranged the meeting with your customer, and you got his attention. Next step is to secure his interest in your products or services.

Interest is usually lacking for one of two reasons — either you have not secured your customer’s attention, or your argument or selling pitch or presentation is not the best.

If you believe your argument or selling talk is failing to arouse interest, you must investigate the cause.

This could be one of the following:

1. Your proposition actually has no interest for the customer and for good reasons can have none. If this is the case, the sooner you find it out, the better for you both. A salesperson, however, should be very careful about giving up on this supposition. There is a constant temptation to believe it is impossible to interest a customer, when as a matter of fact, the whole fault lies with the salesperson.
2. You do not understand your customer and are not grasping the things that will be sure to interest him.
3. You are not describing your products or services in an attractive, intelligent way.
4. There is something objectionable about you as a salesperson.

In short, you will see that unless the fault is of the first point mentioned, it lies in your failure to understand and make the most of either one of the three factors of the sale: the product, the customer, or the salesperson.

It is very natural when the salesperson is putting up the best talk he knows how, and knows that his products are right, that he should believe that the fault lies with the buyer.

The fault is rarely with the buyer.

While it may be true that certain ignorant buyers will hurt their own interests rather than purchase from a certain salesperson, the reason for this is always to be found in some matter connected either with the salesperson or his products in a direct or indirect way. If the customer will not buy a certain new style of products, it may seem that it is the prejudice of the customer that makes the sale impossible; but the thing that really makes the sale impossible is that the salesperson does not know how to overcome this prejudice.

In short, it is wrong for the salesperson to blame his failure upon the buyer. He can’t properly excuse himself for the failure to make a sale by merely saying, “I could have sold it to him, if he had had any sense.” The salesperson must take the customer as he finds him.

More about how to awake interest on buyer’s side in my next article on this blog.

My new webinar is scheduled for April 2nd: Find Buyers Who Are Ready to Buy…Now!

Learn to Identify the Trigger Events
That Motivate Prospects to Buy

“I have lot of business in my pipeline, but very few deals are closing.” Adding prospects to a sales pipeline is easy … but if they aren’t ready to buy, you’ll waste precious time that could be better spent pursuing accounts that are ready to sign. Although the economy is in strife, people are still buying. The key is to identify which prospects are ready to buy now.

In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Use trigger events to select the right prospects to pursue
• Identify prospect needs before you ever contact them
• Recognize the difference between internal and external trigger events
• Leverage trigger events to increase your sales effectiveness

As an added bonus, you’ll receive my e-Book, “Trigger Events,” a $13.95 value.

Suggested Attendees: All sales people, sales managers, and small business owners

Read more here.