If you want to be a better salesperson personally, or you’re a manager who wants their staff to sell more effectively, then follow the following guide to the top ten sales training techniques to maximise your profits and reap the rewards.

• Keep it Simple

Too many people in sales overcook it big time when discussing the features of their products and services. The client only cares how they will benefit from what you are offering, so streamline your pitch and keep it simple.

• Ask Questions

A client may need some prodding to reveal exactly what they are looking for. Ask plenty of questions so when the time comes you can deliver a specific, tailor-made, and killer pitch. 

• Work Around the Clock 

Quite often the most important people in the world of business work outside the nine to five grind. An early morning or late evening call will often catch the exact person you need to sell to – the person with the power to make decisions.

• Network

Build an extensive portfolio of contacts who you can sell too. If one prospect dries up you should always have another one to hand. 

• Something for Nothing 

If you give a prospective client a little taster of the product and services your company offers for free, it might well pay dividends in the long run.

• Be Persistent

Do not take no for an answer. Don’t be pushy but be persistent. There is a difference. 

• Tone and Delivery

Study your voice, the words you use and the way you say them. Could they by improved? Do you sound friendly and warm enough? And do you sound, knowledgeable, confident, genuine and reassuring? 

• Set a Schedule

Selling can be an exhausting business, set yourself a timetable and a set of goals to help you organise your efficiency. 

• Put them at Ease

Cracking a joke is a great way to put the client at ease and get them to drop their guard. If you make a customer laugh they’re more likely to look upon you and your product in a more favourable light. 

• Customer Care

From the start of the selling process to the end, make sure you put the customer first. A happy client is a returning client. 

About the author:

Chris Goodwinis the Managing Director and founding member of Results Driven Training (RDT) 

Chris has a background in industry and 25 years’ experience in the skills arena in public and private sectors. One of his core skill sets is designing coaching, sales training and development packages that are bespoke to business need and linked directly to business growth (ROI).

Guest Post: Top 10 Sales Techniques is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Choosing to do your work well is a conscious decision – one that only you can make. Selling can be an incredibly rewarding career but if you show no passion for what you’re doing (no matter what it is that you’re doing) you can never succeed. So, begin by making the conscious choice to excel at your sales career and to be passionate about your success. Your enthusiasm will be easily transferred to your clients and they will be more inclined to hear you out.

By being enthusiastic about your career you will naturally want to be better; learn more; and sell more. Invest in some additional training that will take your career to the next level and you’ll find that your confidence increases ten-fold. With greater confidence, you WILL sell more! Thus begins the cycle of success in selling. Greater enthusiasm; extra training; bigger sales. And it all began with your conscious decision to do your job well. At the end of the day, it IS your choice.

Sales Tip #50: do your sales job well is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

A woman walked up to a girl and asked: 

- “Do you handle ladies’ sunglasses?”

– “Yes,” she replied.

- “I would like to see some.”

- “All right. This pair costs $99; this one $249.”

She responded mechanically, pointing to sunglasses of various prices.  I stood and watched the transaction. The customer received absolutely no information regarding those sunglasses. I said to myself, “You can have a vending machine here – you can set up a box and put a credit card in and get the thing you came for, without any information. This is all wrong.”

As an experiment, I took that same young lady to the store manager and I said to him,

- “You are never going to sell much of those sunglasses so long as you put people out there who do not know how to sell. Until you employ salespeople who can talk intelligently, there will not be any increase in your revenue.”

- “How would you do it?”

- “This way: Go into the office and tell the girl everything you know about sunglasses, but don’t talk in technical terms. Don’t tell her how the manufacturing process works in producing a pair of shades. Tell her what it will do for the customer. “

I wanted to make an experiment and kept track of that girl’s sales. She sold 37 per cent more than the others. Pretty soon customers began to ask her questions because they found that she knew something about the merchandise.

Ask yourself – are you selling based on features of your product, or based on benefits your product will provide for your customer?

Remember – features tell but benefits sell.

Benefits Based Selling is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

IntroMojo provides you with all publicly available information about a sales target in a targeted and interactive format — in categories salespeople specifically need, like ‘what they talking about’, ‘stuff they like’, ‘how they can be reached’, and more.

IntroMojo helps to solve this problem by placing all available prospect information at the salesperson’s fingertips. There is nothing quite like it on the web. It’s clean, not intrusive and easy to understand. It could revolutionize the sales process.

Take a look at IntroMojo today and I will have an exclusive interview with IntroMojo guys later this week!

Introducing IntroMojo is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Business can be fun and should be fun. Love what you do and do what you love. It’s about passion…it’s about creating the pathway for your own success and doing it with enthusiasm and zeal.

In this post I will give you 10 reasons why I believe selling is even better than sex:

1. You are never too young or too old to sell. And just because you may be over 65, you don’t have to rely on those little blue pills to help you make a sale.
2. A new sales job comes with an instruction manual – complete with graphs and pictures and everything that you might need to come to grips with the basics.
3. When it comes to selling on an airplane or just chatting to a prospective client in the seat next to you, you’ll realize that it’s so much easier than trying to sneak into the bathroom for a quickie in order to join the “mile-high club”.
4. You don’t have to fear retribution for showing the proof to back up your claims of success and achievement. On the contrary, your prospective clients will want to see that. And the more sales history you have, the better! Your prospects may be very keen to see who you have listed as your previously satisfied clients.
5. If your customers decide to take photos or film you while you’re making your pitch, you don’t have to worry about those pictures or videos showing up on the internet when you become famous.
6. You don’t have to check for a wedding band or make sure that the person you’re chatting with is, in fact, a real woman or man.
7. It’s possible to close with a customer in two minutes or less and it’s actually something to be proud of.
8. You can be absolutely certain that nine months after a sales meeting, the customer’s lawyers won’t contact you asking for half of your pre-tax income for the next eighteen years.
9. You can invite your previous, current and potential customers to come together in a same room – it is called a “Customer Appreciation Day”.
10. If you’re practicing your presentation at night in the comfort of your own home, you don’t have to be concerned about keeping your neighbors awake.

If you want to learn how to transfer the sex energy into sales enthusiasm to improve your career and life, and learn about other 200 reasons why selling is even better than sex, get my book “Selling Is Better Than Sex” today!

Buy the book from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble or Chapters-Indigo, or you can order a signed copy directly from me – www.SellingIsBetter.com

10 Reasons Why Selling IS Better Than Sex is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

So you are probably asking yourself – how is it that they can make six or seven figures and you are struggling month by month to make ends meet and reach your quotas?

The first and probably the most accurate answer is that they see themselves as professionals.

How can you grow if you don’t adopt new ideas or learn about new things in business and in sales? How can you expect to advance to better, higher paid positions if you stop investing in your knowledge?

In my 20+ years in different roles in sales, I have met many sales people who never bought a book about the sales in their life. They never attended a seminar about sales, which was not part of their company at the time. However, they were always complaining about how companies are not investing enough in their sales force, yet expect them to be perfect and up to date. That is the reason why they don’t want to invest in seminars on their own.

They believe that if their company does not see the value in it, why would they pay for it by themselves? Also they feel they know everything about the sales, so there is no need for spending money on books and seminars, or finding time for reading magazines or specialized websites. Many of those people who don’t learn continuously wonder why they don’t advance in their career or are skipped over again for a promotion.

I am giving you perfect examples of how the amateurs are thinking while blaming everyone around them for being unsuccessful in sales. You are the one who is making the decision. Every morning, when you look in the mirror, are you seeing the reflection of an amateur or professional?

Sales professional is someone who invests in his knowledge, who reads magazines and web portals dedicated to sales people and attends seminars and conferences. A sales person who follows the trends understands how essential it is to improve him personally.Professionals are ones they know how necessary this is to start selling more. And of course – they are the ones who are earning more.

Be different from the 95% of salespeople out there who are not investing in their knowledge, and you will start seeing the change. It will start first inside of you where you will be hungrier for the new knowledge. You will have a better conversation and better approach to your prospects and people around you will see that difference.

Your self-respect that you’ve gained with that new knowledge will make the world your oyster. Don’t wait for your employer to send you to a seminar. Be proactive, for yourself and your career. It will benefit you in the long term – with your career and most importantly you will see the difference in your wallet!

You are asking your clients to make a change, but if you are unwilling to change yourself, how can you ask your prospects to?

Your sales process will also depend on your efforts invested in research and understanding your customer base, your energy and enthusiasm about your product. If you cannot transfer enthusiasm to your prospects, you are in deep problems. When you talking about something people can feel if you are insincere, or you really know what you are talking about.

It is not what are you saying but how are you saying it.

What does it mean to be sales professional? I am not saying that you have to live, eat and breathe sales 24/7 every day for the rest of your life, but to start seeing your sales position as something more, something bigger than 9-5 job.

Whether you love your sales job or not, you have a choice to do it well or not, to be fully involved or back away, and if you have this attitude of choosing to do your work well, you will enjoy your job itself!

You can be very productive once you consciously choose to be in sales, and if you change your approach from “get things done” to actually enjoy what you do, you can get the job well done and be rewarded for your efforts.

Fulfillment in your life comes with doing a great job, whatever you do. And your occupation, in this case sales profession, is just as important to your personal health as the right food for your body.

Invest in your knowledge; put the seeds in the small steps and watering your skills and constant caring about your sales knowledge. And when the time of harvesting comes, you will have the fruits of your efforts in front of you.

To differentiate from majority of people who don’t like what they do, you have to actually enjoy what you do.

Start your day by doing your job the best you can, and try to do it for a week. Then come back next week and do it all over again. The best you can, not waiting for rewards, not asking for rewards. Don’t wait for results to come, just do the job the best you could. When first results came back, when you get positive feedback from your customers, when you close a new deal – ask yourself: What has changed?

You will start loving your job because success will come, first in small steps, but more and more day by day it will grow. Your customers will start seeing you as a knowledgeable person, your colleagues will see you with different eyes, and you will realize that all of that is important, but most important are feelings inside of you that start building – good feelings about yourself.

You will feel worthy, valuable to your customers, colleagues, and you will build that feeling inside of you that you are valuable part of your environment.

And you will start feeling that you are helping others – your colleagues to be better, your customers to find the best solution, and by helping them you are actually helping yourself to become a more valuable member of the community.

Does it make sense?

Natural order of things is in doing your best at what you do best, and the rewards will follow inevitable.

Remember this – you can’t fail how hard you try it.

Sales Amateur vs. Sales Professional is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

In your search for a Target Market, try to identify those that have a major problem and who are willing to spend money in order to fix it. Straight away, this gives you the advantage of knowing that your customer has the funds to pay for the excellent product or service that you can offer. It’s no use walking in with guns blazing, shooting off fantastic selling techniques when your client hasn’t got the resources to make the purchase.

Investigate, research, explore.

You need to select a market that you can identify with. This will be the place where you spend your days fulfilling your dreams – you need to be comfortable and able to enjoy yourself, and able to identify with your customers. This will benefit you as much as it will benefit them.

For example, it would be fruitless to try and market a Rap CD at an old-age home. For starters, your audience will never identify with your appearance (most likely resembling your most favored Rap artist). And secondly, a group of octogenarians is less likely to scramble over one another in order to purchase a CD that doesn’t qualify as “music” to them and certainly doesn’t have any lyrics that they can actually understand.

Focus. This seems basic, but in the frenzied rush to accumulate sales, this detail may be overlooked.

By finding your Target Market before you get ready to sell, you can save yourself a lot of time and money that would otherwise be wasted on inappropriate targets.

Another important factor in selecting the correct market segment for your product is finding out if you have a competitive advantage over your rivals who are in the same selling industry as you.

As part of your research, there are other factors that you may want to take into account before selecting your Target Market. Firstly, you might want to identify geographic factors. You’re not going to be terribly successful if you try to sell air-conditioning units to folks in Alaska. Secondly, take into account the demographics of your clients. You’re not going to want to sell hair-loss prevention products to young women, or shampoo to bald men. Age, gender, race, income-earning potential – these are all things to take into account when selecting the right target for your product.

And, thirdly, some companies see themselves as being high-tech or innovative, or it may be important to them to maintain a reputation of social responsibility. These are psycho-graphic characteristics that you can use as a marketing tactic. This is all good information.

Finally, investigate the behavioral characteristics of a potential market. Understand what their buying habits and buying patterns are. For example, Fortune 500 companies don’t take purchasing decisions lightly and they certainly don’t rush into them. If you understand your target market and if you can identify with them and what they stand for, you’ve taken the first tentative steps to success. You’ve found a select group of customers that may actually want to buy your product.

—————

So you think you can sell? is a series of sales seminars and workshops dedicated to three groups of salespeople that exist in the world today. The first group is a group of novice sales reps that are entering the field of sales. Second is a group of experienced sales professionals. Finally, the third group is a group of non-sales people who need help selling their newly created product or ideas themselves.

Please keep visiting this blog in the month of November when we will share more info about this unique sales training program: So you think you can sell?

So you think you can sell? is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

You’ve probably heard of my book, “Trigger Events – How to Find Your NEXT Customer.” It’s the book that helps sales people easily differentiate prospects from suspects, gives them a new set of tools to find new customers who are on the market today, and makes them successful by using 21st century resources to close more sales.

You don’t have time to read the book. You want the important information in that book, and you want it now.

Now there’s a new, better way to absorb the secrets of sales success  from the book:

“Trigger Events – How to Find Your NEXT Customer” Audio Book!

You need this audio book if:

• You’ve never heard of the book.
• You’ve got the book but haven’t read it.
• You’ve read it, but didn’t master the material, and haven’t received the wealth and success you want.

Just released on October 10th! If you order now, you will save $10 on the full price of the audio book plus the shipping cost ($6.50) is on us on every order received before October 31st!

Regular Price: $29.95

Special Price: $19.95

The problem:

Consider these questions…

• What is the Holy Grail of Sales and how can YOU use it to sell more?
• How can you KNOW where to focus your selling activities right now?
• Where and how can you find customers who are in the market TODAY?
• How can you be in front of your customers at the exact time when they are in the market?
• What is the curse of the sales job and how can you overcome it?
• How can you use online and offline resources of trigger events to close more sales today?
• Why it is not enough to simply know how to sell; why do you have to deeply understand how your customers buy?
• How can you easily differentiate prospects from suspects, save your time and sell more today?
• How can you find the perfect timing to contact your prospects and sell?
• What is the importance of uncovering customers’ needs and wants before you speak with them?
• How can you win the deal and not even touch the topic of discounting of your product or service?
• How can you make customers realize that they are on the market with trigger events happening?

Grab the most out of each minute! Listen to this audio book during your commute, morning walk/run or while you’re driving to your sales appointments.

If you are in sales, you need this audio book – period. When you start using techniques mentioned in this book and learn where to find trigger events and how to use them, you will be able to get to the proposal itself much faster because you will know that your prospects are already qualified for your product or service, and you will have information about their needs gathered before the meeting or presentation.

Listen to this audio book carefully and it will boost you a step ahead of your competition, who is most definitely not spending enough time learning about the customers before any sales call is made.

When you show your prospects that you actually care and you have done your homework and you know about trigger events happening inside their company, you also show them that you are interested about their issues, and most importantly concerned about their wants and needs. You will create interest in their eyes because you are different from anyone else who contacts them and who is simply trying to sell something without really understanding their needs.

Just released on October 10th! If you order now, you will save $10 on the full price of the audio book plus the shipping cost ($6.50) is on us on every order received before October 31st!

Regular Price: $29.95

Special Price: $19.95

Please spread the word!

We tried our best to make this audio book affordable and useful to every sales person worldwide. Please spread the word about the upcoming Trigger Events Audio Book in your blog posts and tweets. We really appreciate your support.

Tweets (copy and paste):

The Trigger Events Audio Book is available now! – http://bit.ly/3RTefB – Pre-order now! (via @SalesScienceArt)

Get the new set of tools to find new customers who are in the market today! http://bit.ly/3RTefB – Pre-order CD now! (via @SalesScienceArt)

How to be in front of your customers when they are in the market?  http://bit.ly/3RTefB – Pre-order audio book now! (via @SalesScienceArt)

Audio Book: Trigger Events is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer