When starting this class, I was not sure if I was going to be able to learn how to sell. I had always thought that you had to be born with the “sales gene” to be a salesman. I am glad to say that I was wrong and learned a lot of useful information that I will be using when I end up starting my own business. I also looked at articles to help myself learn more and use, especially during the final sales pitch. I found this article helpful because it listed seven ways to teach salespeople to sell more efficiently and effectively.
I found an article that is supposed to give sales managers ideas to help teach their salespeople how to sell better and more effectively. The first step of this is telling them how to make discovery calls, which “set the trajectory of the sale”. This includes asking between 11-14 well-thought questions, question velocity, which is just how much “breathing room is left between questions”, and then the manager should create a cheat sheet for their employees to look over to remember this information. The second step is to teach them how to properly do cold calling and prospecting. The way to successfully cold call is to stay on the phone longer, the average successful time is 5 minutes and 50 seconds. Providing employees with different routes the conversation could go will help to keep prospective buyers on the phone which will ultimately lead to more sales. The third step is presenting, the salespeople need to be comfortable selling in front of anybody if they will be a successful salesperson. The fourth step is objection handling. This step teaches the salespeople to stop, pause, and slow down and not to get defensive when they get their first objection in their sales call and to speak more slowly and calmly. The fifth step is selling against competitors and the most important part in this step is to not start with what differentiates you from your competitor but lead into this discussion. Step six is customer storytelling, this will allow for the prospective customer to see how you helped others out, but it is important to show the problem and their solution in this scenario to be successful. Finally, step seven, is to sell to C-Suite executives. This step does not apply to everybody, so it is an optional step in the sales process. It is important to remember that the discovery step will not work on executives, they do not have time for that and will not tolerate it. They want to know what they may be missing in their processes and how to fix it, so you should be telling them what they need.
After teaching all these steps and following this process, the salespeople should go through sales coaching to instill these thoughts into their heads. This will allow for the salespeople to continue to grow and generate more sales.
BoweryJE22