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Selling successfully requires that you make your prospects comfortable with you. Fear is one of the biggest impediments to any sale, so if you can relax the prospect you’re much more likely to convince him to make the big choice and buy from you. So it follows that choosing the right words during your sales […]

The stereotypical salesperson is someone who talks all the time and never listens to his customers. That kind of salesperson in real life is not a successful one, because listening to prospects is the only way to uncover their needs. And a prospect’s needs are the key to matching them up with the right product. […]

The term ‘consultative selling’ comes from the book Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan, first published in the 1970s. It describes a sales approach in which you act as an expert consultant for your prospects. Consultative sellers ask questions to determine a prospect’s needs and then use that information to select the best product or service […]

Salespeople come from all different walks of life and can have many different personality traits. So naturally they have developed many different ways to sell. Most salespeople don’t adopt a “pure” form of the basic five approaches; you probably have a way of selling that combines attributes from two or more approaches. The best way […]

Having a long-term goal and a plan to get there is extremely important, not to mention exciting. It’s great to know that your desire to be CSO of a major corporation can be reached in ten years or less if you just stick to your plan. But those far-off goals can also be pretty daunting, […]

The sales manager is the person responsible for leading and coaching a team of salespeople. Her duties in a small company often include assigning sales territories, setting quotas, mentoring the members of her sales team, arranging for sales training, building or helping her team to build a sales plan, and sometimes hiring and firing. In […]

So you’ve decided that you want to be a salesperson. Sales can be a pretty intimidating career choice — after all, your job is to convince people, day after day — but it’s also incredibly rewarding. You’ll have the experience of helping your prospects find exactly what they need to improve their businesses and their […]

Selling in a Down Market: Local, national and world economies all tend to go up and down on an irregular cycle. When the economies that affect you are doing well, it usually results in a seller’s market. Demand is high, so you may end up with prospects lining up to buy your product. But when […]

Some sales experts state firmly that a good salesperson doesn’t need to ‘close’ any sale. They believe that if a salesperson does his job, the prospect will be ready to buy by the end of the sales process without any nudging or tricky closing techniques on the part of the salesperson. In fact, some experts […]

Email is probably the best way to reach large numbers of leads quickly. If you have a big lead list, you can send a well-designed email and get responses back much faster than if you simply dialed your way through the list. The catch is that sending an email makes it much easier for leads […]