The sales presentation is the ultimate purpose of every sales process, of every sales call, and of every sales system. The job of the sales person revolves around the point in time when he offers the customer something to buy. The sales presentation can take a variety of forms. If you demonstrate a product, for […]

Emotions help in selling If you’ve been in sales for awhile you’re probably very familiar with the saying, “Features tell, benefits sell.” Features are the things that your product does, while benefits are the ways that those features will help your customers. In other words, features are logical and benefits are emotional. And sales is […]

How To Successfully Sell Over the Telephone? The cost of selling is escalating and time is ever in short supply to make face-to-face sales calls. But stiff competition requires that sales professionals keep notching up their sales goals every quarter and every year. The secret is not something very unfathomable. It lies with the proper […]

You’ve Got to ‘Open’ Before You Can Close How To Close The Sale: Every salesperson talks about “Closing the sale.” The best salespeople understand that before you can close the sale, you must open it. “Opening” means using well designed and delivered questions to thoroughly uncover as many aspects of the buying decision as possible. […]

On Preparation and Presentations: In my first professional, full-time sales position, the company brought all the new sales people to a six-week training class in Mill Valley, California. There, we memorized three, four page, single-spaced sales presentations. Most days consisted of practicing those presentations in role-playing scenarios, having them video recorded, playing them back, and […]

Every sale goes through the same basic cycle, from prospecting for leads all the way through to asking for referrals from your new customer. But the length of this cycle can vary greatly depending on the product or service you’re selling, along with a few other factors. In most cases, the more expensive a product […]

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. […]

Whenever I ask sales people to rate themselves on their competence at all the different parts of the sales process, they invariably rate themselves low at closing the sale. Unfortunately, sales people who don’t close consistently waste a lot of their time, waste their customer’s time, and are not nearly as effective as they could […]

Sales is, at its most basic level, a relatively simple process. I recall one of my clients showing me the flow-chart of his sales process. Twenty six steps. That level of detail may be appropriate for that specific situation, but it is an overkill when we are talking about the application for a typical professional […]