Today on the Sales Insight blog, I want to share with you my personal top five sales tips focused on the strategies, techniques and tactics that will get you the results you want for your business.
#1 Prioritise your selling time
Many sales people and sales managers allow too many other tasks to get in the way of focused selling time.
Be ruthless and disciplined with your time. Drowning in admin and only allowing 30 to 40% of your time to focus on sales activity will be damaging in the long run.
It’s no secret that if you can double the amount of time selling, you will probably sell more.
#2 Supercharge your sales pipeline by having a systematic, relentless and varied approach to prospecting.
It’s no surprise that sales people with empty pipelines have either lost focus on prospecting or have relied too much on others to generate their leads.
Use all channels to engage with prospects and do enough research to be able to focus on providing potentially valuable insights that demonstrate you’re a credible and valuable person to meet.
And always remember my three golden rules: don’t waste your time cold calling, maximise asking for referrals, and don’t become a pain in the neck!
#3 Have a structured approach to asking questions to ensure you fully understand the customer’s needs and can explore potential opportunities.
Salestrong have developed the GRID questioning model to act as a simple yet effective way of doing just this. Making sure the customer has a significantly great share of voice in the sales conversation has a significant positive impact on your chances of them buying.
It will also make you stand out from the majority of sales people who spend too much time telling.
You can find out more about the GRID model here.
#4 Collaborate with a customer to understand the impact your product or service will potentially have on their business and work hard to quantify the benefits that your solution brings.
Most sales people are excellent at telling the customer the cost of their product or service, but terrible at demonstrating the financial or other return they can expect.
This makes it harder for a customer to make a positive decision because all they see is that cost.
It is your job to understand the typical drivers of value in their business and how to work with them to calculate this value.
#5 Make a strong sales presentation that is compelling and captures the attention of your customers.
The key to a strong sales presentation is to spend 80% of your time talking about the customer’s business, the challenges they face, and how your solution creates value by overcoming these challenges.
Always ensure you’ve done your research and invested time with the customer beforehand in order to gain as much insight as possible into their business.
Aim to only talk about your business towards the end. My own rule for presentations is never inflict on other people a presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through yourself.
Discover more about how to present a strong sales presentation here.
As always, if you have any questions please feel free to email me at steve@salestrong.co.uk.
