THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL SALESPERSON
Ever been in that situation when you did all the talking, had a great meeting, and didn’t get the business, even though you thought you had a superior product or service?
Read on to find ways to increase your sales, to scale and then accelerate your business revenues and growth. Why have 1X when you can have 5X?
Let’s get started!
My Experience
I’m at an age when I want to give something back. The world is changing at a faster rate and experience counts. People say I’m good at sales but in truth, I’ve done more sales courses than most, including XEROX Sales, Tele sales, Relationship Management, Key Account Management, Negotiation, Skills of Persuasion, NLP, Advanced selling, Time Management (it’s important) etc.
Most courses I attended were obligatory because I worked with fantastic companies and high achievers. Later I did the CIM diploma in Marketing and an MBA (Imperial) where I wrote a 20,000-word dissertation on User experience.
I was fortunate to have great teachers. I did one CIM Diploma course at 2 institutions just for kicks and ended up teaching most of one class what I learned at the other.
Like Managers, bosses, and golf coaches, find good teachers. In golf, a poor golf tutor is never going to get your handicap down and will probably worsen it, it’s the same in business and we want you to be the best of the best.
Did it work? … Yes Definitely!
Chemicals: In my first sales role after Xerox sales training, we took the largest 100 clients in the Chemicals sector in 3 months. Then they gave me another 100 and put the price up 6%. I did 300 miles per day; my mantra was one more call in the morning and one more in the afternoon. Every 3 months the price went up again. After 2 years I had 197 from 200 clients and the price was 60% higher.
Electronics/Solvents: I changed roles and secured all the business at one of the largest industrial groups at a premium of nearly 50% than we’d previously achieved.
Financial Services: Using the same skills I convinced the Board to let me loose on pensions and working with 400 investment managers and 4 regional directors I increased revenues in pensions by 2.2X and 2.7X over successive years, having had zero growth for many years previously.
Trading: Using this method, we, signed 4 of the top 5 oil traders in 3 months for a new oil trading platform.
Jewellery: More recently we took a jewellery business in an intensely competitive and fragmented market and grew its revenues over 10X over a 2-year period, and this year we want a 7X increase.
What did I learn? Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!
Pre-PItch
1. Do your desktop research first, identify the most attractive sectors using some qualifying screening criteria (fit with our proposition, size, growth, accessibility etc).
2. Understand how the competition will compete and how you will differentiate your products and services. You sell based on your strengths.
3. Understand the features and benefits of your products. People generally buy the benefits not the features.
4. Understand which benefits should be tailored to different individuals in a business. The CEO, COO, Head of Quality, FD and Head of Production may all want to hear slightly different tailored messages.
5. Work out your elevator pitch, ideally less than 30 seconds, make it believable, memorable, succinct, powerful, and relevant to the person you are talking to.
6. Understand resistance and why people may not buy (indifference or scepticism), learn to handle both. Contact me to find out more.
7. Put yourself in the customers’ position, you want a win-win outcome.
8. You should be in that eclectic position of representing the customer in front of your business and the business in front of the customer. Make sure the customer understands that you represent him, and will get him him the best deal possible.
9. Understand the sector in which you operate including key developments, technology, regulation, channels to markets, distributors and wholesalers.
10. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Never ever criticise them. A better approach is Company x are good, I like them and know James well, but we’re better at PQ and R (the things that are most important to the client) and here’s the evidence to prove it.
11. Motivate yourself, generally, the better salespeople are like F1 drivers, they end up in the best cars. It’s the same skills to sell hardware, brushes, dry-cleaning solvent, Government bonds / debt financing, multi million investment portfolios, and software, and I should know I’ve done them all successfully.
12. Be clear about your career progression. Work your career aspiration backwards over 3 years to include 3 roles. Blue - sky your thinking setting a target of your perfect role in 3 years’ time and then figure out the skills and competencies required to exceed expectations in every role to get there.
13. Build you knowledge on your customers prior to the meeting and during the meeting, e.g.married or single, where they live, what they do at weekends (I always meet the best prospects on Fridays or Mondays to ask what they did or will do over the weekend. Write everything down as soon as you leave their office.
14. Go to the customers if possible, don’t make them come to you.
15. You’re in the contact business. Meeting them is better than zoom and zoom is better than a phone call. You need to press the flesh!
Who to target?
1. You want to start as high up the food chain as possible. If targeting start-ups, don’t start searching for individual businesses, start with investors and incubators, or tech fund managers who can introduce you to 50 of them.
2. Sell to growth sectors, there is less competition and more money for investment.
3. Sell to growing businesses in growth sectors first, i.e. those not those not in financial trouble.
4. Sell to larger businesses in growth sectors, we want larger sales per customer.
5. Go for the low hanging fruit first: the easiest sales are ones where one person and organisation can sell to many on your behalf. I had 200 laundries in a group, so I went to head office which pleased my boss when I closed it. I went to a consultancy to get access to 30,000 of their clients for a customer.
6. Repeat sales are easier than new sales: Those that have bought before, with whom you have a great relationship because you’ve asked for feedback and exceeded their expectations will give you repeat business. Every year I would hit my budget in Private banking having dinner with my best clients in the week before XMAS knowing there was a higher probability of getting business because I had a great relationship.
Getting the meeting
1. Use LinkedIn and the internet to target the right people in the business.
2. Work out who are the decision makers (DMU) and understand their needs from others in the business.
3. Try to get a warm introduction from someone in the business, an advocate for you, your products or knowledge is more powerful in overcoming scepticism.
4. Target as high up the business as possible, generally CEOs get what CEOs want.
5. The most senior people arrive earliest, so make early calls to get through secretaries/PAs and assistants, who screen out calls.
CONTROLLING THE CONVERSATION DuRING THE MEETING – AND USING SELLING SKILLS TO CLOSE THE DEAL
1. Sales skills are invaluable but can be learned. Some guys are self-taught, but all the good ones follow the same basic programme as most of the courses.
2. Prior to the meeting find out what’s most important to the prospective customer.
3. People buy people so get good at building relationships because in the words of Drucker “build good relationships and great deals follow.”
4. Smile, be proactive and control the conversation and hit them with a benefit statement: If you’ve ever volunteered to raise money outside a shop for NSPCC, help for heroes or the salvation army the same principles apply. There’s an old Chinese proverb that states a person who cannot smile should not open a shop!
5. Learn to negotiate and make it an enjoyable experience Negotiation is a process of resolving conflict so one or both modify their original proposals to reach a mutually acceptable conclusion.
6. Experience is important, you will make mistakes and learn a lot about yourself, but you have to make mistakes. Winners get up quicker, never ever give up on yourself.
7. Control the conversation: A sales process is a journey of discovery. You have to have a plan and take your potential customer on that journey with you. You must learn to control conversations through:
a. open benefit statements (e.g., pleased to meet you James, I can’t wait to solve the issues you mentioned and start making you some money etc),
b. open probing questions: The most important question which should be asked before you meet them (what’s important to you when choosing X)?
c. closed probing questions: Usually have a yes/no answer (e.g. Is charging time important when selecting your new electric car)?
8. Once you identify all their needs, you need to get confirmation that your product or services meet or exceed their needs. Work through each need individually. Pause regularly and summarise e.g 'Can I confirm where we've got to.’ Do not move onto the next need until you have agreement.
9. Confirm where you are up to in your discussions e.g. James we’ve spoken a lot about product X, Y, Z and have identified your needs of P, Q and R and how we can meet all your requirements on P and Q, is there anything else you need me to cover on those before I move on to R.
10. Never say I need to check with someone (about price) in your negotiations, it ruins your credibility; you never have a 2nd chance to make a first impression. An old saying is “Why should the customer talk to a monkey when he can talk to the organ grinder”. If the boss pays peanuts, he will get monkeys.
11. Always ask for feedback (even of you don’t get the business) and if you get great feedback then you must ask for something in return, because you have exceeded their expectations, they should be in the mood to help you.
12. Customers would rather talk about themselves and their social life than you and your product or service. Your aim is to befriend them and that means learning all about them and adding value to their lives.
13. Learn the value of repeat business not transactional business. Most younger managers forget this. Calculate and include lifetime value into your decisions.
14. In services, People, Process and Physical evidence are important. Physical evidence is necessary to handle scepticism about whether you can do, what you claim to be able to do.
15. Understand body language (stay open and positive), and use mirroring to build empathy (you mirror them unless they are closed in which case you lead). Understand buying signals to determine when to close.
16. Learn to summarise and close once you have agreement that your product meets all the needs of the buyer.
17. If it’s a complex sale, have a clear set of priorities and suggested attendees for each meeting. Clarify beforehand your objectives, and your understanding of the needs of the buyer. Always set up the next meeting during the face 2 face meeting with an agreed list of objectives.
18. Feedback everything you learn so that you can continually improve your product or service offering.
19. Use CRM and conscientiously update your records. Keep everything digital, so that someone else in your business has access to the latest information.
The sales process is a journey involving identifying, anticipating, and satisfying needs. It’s no surprise that is exactly the definition of Marketing used by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and why sales and marketing are inseparable. The sales function is important for feeding back information on competitor activity, what works and doesn’t so the proposition and competitiveness can be improved.
Finally, the skills for selling and then relationship management are slightly different, and I’ve met characters who were good at one, but not both.
There’s a lot here, so If you want help putting this all together, improving your sales and conversions to accelerate your business growth, then get in touch.
5XR and Sales
We encourage potential customers to contact you, then improve conversion rates with detailed analytics and UX /CX specialists to analyse the customer journey and optimise your website and communications. We aim to get more new bussiness, and then to get more repeat business.
AUTHOR: John Macleod
tel +44 7501 79 3679
BIO
John Macleod is a founding Director of 5XR, London’s Strategic Marketing Consultancy.
He’s also Director of Strategy at CSJ where sales increased over 3X for each of the last 2 years. He was winner of the Dassault 7-week FinTech challenge (Nov’16) and helped Kalypton win the Fed Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force Top Technology Award (Dec’17) against 200 other competitors. He was Head of Pensions and Head of Broker sales at Barclays where he increased sales by triple digits for 2 consecutive years.
