Selling For Dummies

Tom Hopkins

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118967232
• eBook ISBN: 9781118967249
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Your guide to the most up-to-date selling strategies and techniques

No matter your skill level, this new edition of Selling For Dummies helps you lay the foundation for sales success with the latest information on how to research your prospects, break down the steps of the sales process, follow up with customers, and so much more.

Selling, when done right, is more than a job—it's an art. With the help of Selling For Dummies, you'll discover how to stand head-and-shoulders above the crowd by knowing your clients, and approaching selling with passion and a positive attitude. The book covers making killer sales pitches and presentations, using the latest technologies to your advantage, establishing goals and planning your time efficiently, partnering with others, addressing clients' concerns, and closing more sales.

• Includes expert tips for harnessing the power of the Internet to increase sales
• Covers the latest selling strategies and techniques in the Digital Age
• Explains how mastering selling skills can benefit all areas of your life
• Explores the newest prospecting and qualification strategies

If you're brand new to the sales scene or a seasoned salesperson looking to win more clients and close more sales, Selling For Dummies sets you up for success.

Part I

Laying a Solid Foundation for Selling

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part . . .

• Understand what the role of selling is, what common approaches successful sales people use to convey messages, and how better selling skills can boost your career.
• See how to achieve selling goals and make clients happy in each of seven simple selling steps.
• See how getting out of your comfort zone can help you improve sales, enjoy your career, and sell what people want to buy.

Chapter 1

Selling Makes the World Go Around

In This Chapter

Defining selling

Understanding common methods salespeople use to get their messages across

Improving your life and your career by improving your selling skills

Selling is happening every time two human beings communicate. It’s everywhere around you. In fact, selling affects nearly every waking moment of your day. So in this chapter, I help you understand what exactly this thing called selling is, how it’s done, and how you can use selling skills to make your life and your career better.

Understanding What Selling Is

In the strictest sense of the word, selling is a process of communication in which one party imparts knowledge and information to the other party in order to win the first party over to the other’s ideas, concepts, products, or services. In the traditional sense of the word, selling is the process of moving goods and services from the hands of those who produce them into the hands of those who can benefit from their use.

Selling involves both educational and persuasive skills on the part of the person doing the selling. It’s supported by print, audio, video, and online messages that sell either the particular item or the brand name as being something the buyer would want to have.

In the 1800s Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everyone lives by selling something.” Without selling, products that have been manufactured would sit in warehouses for eternity, people working for those manufacturers would become unemployed, transportation and freight services wouldn’t be needed, and all of us would be living isolated lives, enjoying only the fruits of our own labors.

Look around you right now. You can probably spot hundreds, if not thousands, of items that were sold to get where they are right now. Even if you’re totally naked, sitting in the woods, you had to be involved in some sort of selling process to have this book with you.

If you choose to ignore material possessions, take stock of yourself internally. What do you believe? Why do you believe what you do? Did someone — like your parents or your peers — sell you a set of values as you were growing up? Did your teachers persuade you to believe, through demonstration, that 2 + 2 = 4? Or did you figure that one out on your own? Odds are that whether you’re living in a material world or you’ve forsaken all earthly possessions, you’ve been involved in selling one way or another.

The preceding paragraph should have persuaded you to at least look at selling a bit differently than you have in the past. It was done, too, without pushing facts and figures on you. Good selling isn’t pushing; it’s gently pulling with questions and getting people to think a bit differently than they have before.

The selling triangle

When I give seminars about mastering the fundamentals of selling, I use a triangle with equal sides, like the one here, to illustrate the three main elements of selling:

• On one side is product knowledge, which I cover in Chapter 5.
• On the other side are selling tactics and strategies — the people skills — that I cover in Part III.
• And on the base of the triangle are the words attitude, enthusiasm, and goals, which I cover in Part V.

The three sides of the selling triangle are equally important. If product knowledge was all that mattered, then technical designers, manufacturers, or assemblers of products would be the best salespeople. Of course, these folks often know the products quite literally from the inside out. But until they are trained in selling skills and understand how much of a role attitude plays in sales, their sales approach is often 99 percent description of product and 1 percent relation of the product to the needs of the individual clients — and that rarely results in a sale.

Great selling skills, without product knowledge and enthusiasm, won’t get you far either. Even if you’re comfortable talking with practically anyone, and you’ve invested a tremendous amount of time mastering the best words for creating positive pictures in the minds of your prospects, if you don’t have a clear picture in your own mind of what your product, service, or idea will do for your buyers, how can you paint the right pictures in someone else’s mind?

And if you’re excited about selling, but you have little knowledge or experience with selling tactics and strategies, your enthusiasm will open the doors a crack. But you’ll get your fingers slammed when you start pushing product (because pushing product isn’t how you sell anything).

Remember: A professional who hasn’t developed all three sides of the triangle is failing to reach his full potential and letting down his clients, who expect to work with a competent person. Do your best to develop all three areas of your selling life in order to reap the highest rewards.

Getting a Grip on How Selling Is Done

Although the definition of selling is fairly straightforward, the approaches to selling are virtually endless. In this section, I cover the primary ways that products and services are sold (in order from most direct contact to least amount of contact), and I give you some important tips for using each method.

Face-to-face

On an average day, many sales are concluded in a face-to-face fashion. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are purchased in person at favorite restaurants. People physically register in hotels or check in at airport counters. Retail stores abound with sales opportunities, and millions of salespeople sit across desks, conference tables, or kitchen tables turning prospects into clients. The only retail establishment I can think of where you can make a purchase without speaking with someone is the self-checkout line at the grocery store.

The fun part about person-to-person selling is that you can read prospects’ body language and speak with yours. You can hand them information. Have them handle your product or experience the service firsthand. Involve all their senses. Have them taste, touch, smell, hear, and see just how cool your widget is. (I cover methods for doing this in Chapter 10.)

Phone

With a telephone, salespeople have the potential to reach nearly any other person on the planet. And what you say when your prospective client answers the phone, if he answers at all, is critical. In some industries, you actually try to sell the product on the first call (referred to as a one-time close). In other industries, you’re selling interest — enough interest that the person to whom you speak gets out of his home and down to your store or lets you visit him in his home or place of business. Either way, you’re selling what your business is all about, leaving the person on the other end with a very distinct impression of you and your company — good or bad. And you only have a few seconds to make that connection before he reacts with a brush off or hang up.

Although telemarketing is a thriving method for reaching potential clients, many telemarketers who sell to consumers are finding it more and more challenging to reach a live person when they place their calls. If you plan to use this method of approach, be prepared to leave curiosity-building voice messages in order to make connections with potential clients. More and more people are screening their calls with caller ID features and voice mail than ever before. So unless you have your number listed in the phone book as “Sweepstakes Winner Announcement,” plan on reaching a lot of answering devices. (I cover telephone strategies in more detail in Chapter 7.)

If you hear a live person say “Hello” on the other end of the line, you almost have cause for rejoicing — and you have to be prepared for that happening. Be clear about what you’re selling, whether it’s a product, a meeting, or simply getting permission to send the person information.

Despite the difficulty telemarketers often have in getting through to people who are willing to listen to them, selling by phone is widely accepted and recognized as a true sales profession. It requires tact, training, and the ability to articulate a compelling message in a very brief amount of time, as well as the skill of helping others recognize you as a warm, caring individual who has their needs at heart. Companies across many industries realize that gifted phone sales professionals can help bring a product or service to market in a much more efficient and cost-effective manner than face-to-face selling and reward good ones accordingly.

Email

Many companies rely primarily on email solicitations. In fact, an entire industry revolves around writing copy specific to email marketing and strategies to get your messages through the many spam filters employed by individuals and companies alike.

Even though email allows to you get your message to the person who owns the email address, it doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching him. Many people set up multiple email addresses. People may use one email account for personal communication, another for providing contact information on websites, and one for commercial use. Thousands of email addresses lie aba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Laying a Solid Foundation for Selling
• Part II: Doing Your Homework Before You Sell a Thing
• Part III: The Anatomy of a Sale
• Part IV: Growing Your Business
• Part V: You Can’t Win ‘Em All: Keeping the Faith in Sales
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement