Selling

Nick Constable

• Editore: HarperCollins Business
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780007358939
• Argomento: Commerce
• Categoria: Commerce Général

The selling secrets that experts and top professionals use.

Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Selling.
Includes how to:
• Pitch your product to meet the needs of your customer
• Use body language to build rapport
• Negotiate and close the deal
• Make your customers keep coming back for more
• Develop new business relationships

Generating new business

You need a range of techniques and skills to find new opportunities in your chosen markets. If you work for a large organization, it can be easy to rely on the Marketing department to generate leads or just to stay in your comfort zone and try to win all your business from existing customers. But I have found that it is best to become self-sufficient in the art of creating opportunities for yourself.

3.1
Pick the right prospects

The first thing you need to do is decide exactly what sort of customer you are targeting. Here are the five key questions to ask yourself when defining who your target customers will be.

1 Where are they? Make it easy for your customers to find you, in the real world or online, and target customers that you can reach with minimum time and effort.

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2 How many of them are there? It’s important to give yourself as many opportunities as possible, so consider how big the total addressable market for your product or service will be.

case study A remark is attributed to Thomas J. Watson, the first CEO of IBM in the early 1950s: “There may be a world market for about five computers.” Despite this lowly prediction, IBM continuously targeted its selling efforts at people whom it identified could use its products. Its total addressable market has turned out to be a lot bigger than five computers!

one minute wonder Analyse past successes. Why did that customer buy? Are there other similar customers out there? Is there a common need in that market which you can address? What is unique about what you’re offering to them?

3 Can they buy? It’s no good going after customers who cannot afford your product or service, or targeting individuals who have no say in the decision. For example, kidney dialysis machines won’t be of much interest to a rural doctor, but perhaps his superiors at the main hospital will be in a better position to buy.

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4 Have they heard of you? If you can identify customers and markets that are familiar with your company or you as an individual, the chances are you’ll find contacting them much easier. Also consider if they might know any of your existing customers – if you’ve already sold to one of their competitors, they could be an obvious target.

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5 Will they change? No one will buy what you’re selling if they don’t see a reason to change, do something differently or try something new.

Decide where to focus your research.

3.2
Make a prospect list

Now you have a clear idea of whom you are targeting, the next task is to start building a list of likely suspects and prospects, and getting yourself organized with a simple system to record your progress. You probably have a few existing customers whom you would like to revisit. But you need to add to this list with lots of new names and contacts.

• Get organized. It might sound obvious, but it is vital that you use a system of some kind to record and organize all your activities. You could use a simple spreadsheet structure in Microsoft Excel, or perhaps you have access to a contact management or CRM system. Even just pen and paper works. Record all the company and individual contact details, and crucially, the next actions for each prospect.
• Sources for research. In the old days, we relied on business directories, and even visits to the local library! Nowadays, the Internet holds a wealth of information about companies and people. Marketing and publishing companies sell this information, and failing that, a bit of desk research using the web and telephone should produce plenty of suspects.

“It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring who reaps a harvest in the Autumn”

BC Forbes, founder of Forbes Magazine

• Getting the names. If all you have initially is a company name, getting the names of individual buyers is the next step. Try simply phoning their switchboard and asking for the right person – it often works! Alternatively, find the name of anyone who works there, for example, on the Customer Service desk, and call them, asking for their assistance in contacting the right people. The good news is that most company websites contain the names of senior directors somewhere – try reading through their press releases, for example.
• Referrals. It’s amazing how many salespeople overlook the smartest way of gathering new names. Ask your existing customers: “If you were doing my job tomorrow, who would be the first person you’d call?” Explain you are on a drive to generate some new contacts and ask for their help. Remember, though, that you need to have earned the right to seek their help in this way.
• Segment your list. As you build up your list and move through the selling cycle, keep the list segmented into the six stages of the selling cycle (see 1.3).

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Gather all your sales leads and research into one place. This is called your ‘sales pipeline’.

3.3
Plan your sales campaign

It is good policy to create a plan for your sales campaign. This will help you to think about how you will go about using your limited time and resources to achieve the best results.

• Set a goal. What will success look like? Identify a measurable objective for your campaign, perhaps expressed as the numbers of opportunities in your pipeline, or as a total potential sales value of your pipeline.
• Pick a single proposition. You might have many different products or services you can sell, but don’t try to plan a campaign for all of them at once. A better strategy is to pick a single ‘value proposition’ and focus your energies around this. It’s less confusing for the customer too.

“The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it”

Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-born American industrialist

Every customer or market is different, so you should think about customizing your approach, using a suitable combination of the following methods of making initial contact.

1 Email. A personalized email to a named individual can be a great way of creating initial interest. Don’t expect the prospect to respond, though. Emails are easy to ignore, so follow them up with a phone call.

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2 Telephone. Ultimately, you need to speak directly to your prospect, and if they haven’t phoned you, you will need to pick up that phone and make those calls! We’ll look at this activity in the pages that follow.

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3 Letters and mailers. As part of a campaign using other methods, consider the impact of a personalized letter sent in the post. Perhaps you have some relevant company literature that you can use as a reason for writing to the prospect. Try sending letters like this to a number of people at once, including the senior decision makers. This could give you the excuse you need to call them!

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4 Events. In your market, are there industry events and exhibitions where your prospects gather? Get along there and meet them face to face!

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5 In person. In some markets, it is acceptable and necessary to call in person at the prospects’ business premises. This is a great way of establishing contact.

Work out your methods of approach.

3.4
Play the numbers game

It makes no difference if you are selling ocean liners at $100 million each or selling packets of washing powder, the law of raw numbers is fundamental to sales success. In simple terms, you need to give yourself every chance of winning by getting yourself on the starting grid for as many races as possible.

• Activity and effectiveness. Essentially, playing the ‘numbers game’ means paying attention to these two pillars of sales success. Activity is the amount of work you put in; effectiveness is the skill with which you execute your plans.

If you work hard and call up a thousand people every month, but have no idea who you are calling or how to speak to them, you’re likely to fail. Equally, you might be the best telephone seller in the world, but

“The harder I work, the luckier I get”

Samuel Goldwyn, film producer

one minute wonder Calculate the level of new prospecting activity you need to reach your revenue targets by taking the average value of your typical sale and multiplying by your conversion rate for each stage of the selling cycle. You might find you need to fill that funnel with a lot more new leads than you had first anticipated!

if you only speak to two people every week, you will also fail. So selling, particularly generating new business, is not just a ‘war of attrition’, it is also a war to be fought using intelligence and skill.

• The funnel. Think about your sales pipeline as a huge funnel. The top of the funnel is very wide, and you can fill it with a great many new suspects. As you move each opportunity through the selling cycle, the numbers of opportunities normally become fewer. At each stage, opportunities will fall away, for all sorts of reasons, some of which will be beyond your control. You can do the maths and work out what your conversion rate is for each stage of the selling cycle. Your conversion rate is affected by your abilities at each stage – your effectiveness.

For example, you might find you are an absolute genius at making new appointments with prospects over the telephone. But for some reason, a lot of these meetings never seem to turn into real opportunities. Your conversion rate at the meeting stage needs some attention! In this way, analysing your raw numbers and your conversion rates will help you to spot bottlenecks in your sales pipeline.

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Create a deep pipeline with lots of new opportunities at the top of the funnel.

3.5
Try telephone prospecting

Despite the emergence of Internet advertising, networking events and email marketing, the combined experience of successful salespeople tells us that picking up the telephone and making what are traditionally called ‘cold calls’ remains the best way of quickly creating new opportunities.

One of the reasons telephone prospecting is so effective is that it will put you in first place every time you open up a new opportunity. Leads that come from adverts or other marketing campaigns are nice to have, but consider the fact that if the prospect has responded to your company, he has also probably signalled his interest to your competitors! That’s not good.

case study Recently, I met a salesperson booked onto one of my training workshops, who told me he was already pretty successful, and delighted in informing me he had no need to learn how to cold call. “I get my leads from Marketing and follow every one of them up,” he told me. So I asked him if he was happy with the money he was making. Of course, he said, “No, I‘d love to earn more.” Taking control of his own success, by learning to use the telephone effectively, was a better solution.

Getting there first is a golden rule of sales success. It allows you to control the process of uncovering ‘pain’, creating the vision of va...