Before you choose to answer your prospect’s “how much” question, consider if you are unintentionally helping your prospect lower your prices. Read the rest of this entry »
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Stop Helping Your Prospects Lower Your Prices
May 15th, 2012Hope, Fear, and Selling
May 1st, 2012
The bottom line of selling is going to the bank; however, prospects are more likely to offer hope instead of an order when meeting a salesperson.
“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear,”—President Snow, the Hunger Games. “A little hope is effective; a lot of hope is dangerous.” Read the rest of this entry »
Better is in the Eye of the Beholder
April 9th, 2012
The two words that are guaranteed to trip up most sales people are “better” and “value.” The latter we’ll talk about in another post.
Typically the “better” trap is set by a prospect at the beginning of a meeting. After introductions and polite conversation your prospect says, “so tell me how you are better than my current supplier.”
If your instinct is to jump to a features-and-benefits presentation, STOP! There is no way for you to answer that question and have any chance of closing the sale.
There are three reasons why your prospects set the “better” trap:
- They have been trained by amateur salespeople who sell by claiming that their thing is better than what the prospect is currently using.
- They believed a “better” claim by an amateur salesperson and had the painful experience of finding out that what they switched to wasn’t better.
- They want to be entertained by another salesperson exhausting themselves through an elaborate dog-and-pony presentation.
Fortunately for you, the better trap is one of your prospect’s weaker moves for controlling your sales interview.
To keep your sales interview moving, and put you back in control, you can remove the better trap with one of the following:
- Kick the trap out of the way (gently) – you can’t tell them why you’re better, because better is in the eye of the beholder.
- Find out what “better” means – what has to be “better” for your prospect to do business with you?
- Uncover the underlying reason for asking – your prospect may have been burned in the past. Uncover that now or it will come back to bite you later.
Once the better trap is removed, you will be back in control of the sales interview. Your prospect does; however, have many more traps at their disposal and will employ them all to force you into their system.
Talk to your Sandler Trainer about the traps your prospects set for you and your options for removing those traps safely.
Hamish Knox is a Sandler Trainer in Calgary, Alberta.
Posturing Language
March 6th, 2012
Over time, every successful salesperson comes to the conclusion that having the proper selling posture during the sales interview is critical. Many sales people are still struggling to understand this concept.
When we talk about posture, we are talking about the attitude reflected in the communication of the salesperson. We know that the message we send in our communication is made up of our body language, our tonality, and our words. However, how we mix those three elements creates a particular attitude that is palpable to our receiver. Read the rest of this entry »
Death Trap by Happy Ears
March 5th, 2012
A common death trap salespeople fall into is having “happy ears,” meaning, they tend to hear what they want to hear. In actuality, what they (salespeople) heard does not reflect the real intent of what the prospect said. Read the rest of this entry »
Refine Your Sales Process With a Sales Template
February 10th, 2012By Veronica Truong
A sales template is defined as the step by step set of interactions you want your prospect to go through because it will give you a clear competitive advantage or otherwise increase the chances of you winning the business. An efficient sale system enables you to consistently achieve a desired outcome or set of outcomes without wasting time, energy, money etc. The most effective sales templates are basic enough to accommodate for change (focused on each stage of the sales meeting). Having critical reviews of each step is important because it takes out the guess work and decreases the time of reinventing the process. Read the rest of this entry »
Goals Without Plans: Just Well-Intentioned Daydreams
December 13th, 2011By Bill Bartlett
I am a “serial goal setter”! I have used goals all my life to chart my path and measure my progress. Perhaps it’s my need to be in control that has driven me to do this or my desire to anticipate what may be looming over the next horizon. Be that as it may, I do know that far too many sales people allow others to chart their course. They blindly accept yearly quotas as their goals for the New Year, never imagining they could enhance their results by layering personal “quality of life goals” on top of them.
The Sales Success Code: Turning Desire Into Ability
September 20th, 2011
By Bill Bartlett
I am fascinated by the way clients, prospects and salespeople, in general, define success. It is usually very personal and intimate, and reflects their perspective on their own life. Some define it in terms of income as in “he who dies with the most money” is deemed successful. Others use the importance of their job to determine whetheror not they are successful. A third group speaks of balance, though it is rarely achieved.
We all learn to define success, and to a certain degree failure, at a very early age. It happens when we receive our first report card in grade school. Whether we were educated in a pass-fail system or an A – F system, the marks all of us dreaded were the words “fail” or the letters “D” and “F”.
Networking Works!
September 1st, 2011By Abby Donnelly
Attending a networking event? WHY??
That may seem like a strange question, but time is one of our most limited resources! Taking a few minutes to evaluate why you should attend THIS particular networking event may save you hours of unproductive time and energy. Read the rest of this entry »
Sales is a Game
August 9th, 2011By Bill Bartlett
Do you “sell to live” or “live to sell”? I have been training sales people for over 16 years and have found a common trait in the highest performers: they “live to sell”. They love prospecting for new business opportunities. They love being in the role of “closer”. Their sales quota is a benchmark that they regularly exceed because just hitting quota makes them “average”. They don’t hide from the fact that they sell by putting words like “account manager” or “territory manager” on their business cards. They have turned the buyer-seller relationship into a game-A game with rules that they create!
All games have rules. Here are the rules to which the upper echelon of sales people are committed:
1. You have to be a hunter to survive. Hunting means spending 60% of your month finding new prospects. By the way, most sales people fail because they approach selling like farming; they plant seeds they hope and pray will grow into their existing customer base.
2. You cannot manage time. You can and must identify and execute behaviors that enable you to master it. Winning sales people know that the phrase “time is money” is a misnomer. They know they can always make more money, but they cannot recover time that has been squandered. They identify income-producing activities and focus on them in a laser-like fashion during their “pay-time” hours. Read the rest of this entry »
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