Quick Tips on How to Maximise Return from Sales Staffs

The Value of Field Selling

It can be argued that today brand, social media and marketing sell products and services. This can be the case, but only where the market is educated and prospects know how best to satisfy their needs..

Sales are the lifeblood of organisations. The route to market is either direct through employed sales people or via channels.

In either case, sales people are brand ambassadors who educate and build the need for products and services.

There are two fundamental types of need – recognised and unrecognised. Responding to recognised needs is relatively straightforward and driven by specified criteria such as performance and price. With unrecognised needs, you are dealing with an issue – problem or opportunity – and the selling skills required are very different. It is more of a consultative sale, still best handled face to face, either in the flesh, via one of the online conferencing services or a combination of both.

The Opportunity

There are over 750,000 people involved in sales in the UK alone. Worldwide, millions are being trained by thousands of sales trainers, consultants and sales methodology companies.

Professional and academic development is important to many sales people. This presents universities with a great opportunity.

The 70:20:10 Model

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Become a Preferred Supplier

The Purchasing Department is the first point of contact for suppliers and is responsible for identifying and contracting with companies that provide consistently high quality products and services.

It’s important to be in tune with the prospect’s buying cycles. We need to keep in appropriate touch until they are ready to move. Then our name will come first when they think of selecting a supplier.

Preferred supplier status comes in various shades – Qualified Supplier, Approved Supplier, Preferred Supplier or even Sole Supplier.  We can work our way up this ladder.

We need to lay out how to move away from a mere product/service sale towards the more inclusive policy sale. We need a track record of good service and need to sell this policy at a higher level.

When prospecting, we need to keep in touch with all of the key players – not just the initial contact – until they are ready to buy. We create a Relationship Matrix. When a buyer has had any system, product or service for some time, they begin to itch.  It’s time for a change, and we need to make sure we have the best chance of winning the business.

• Differentiate between deal selling and account management and how this relates to gaining preferred supplier status.

• Understand when and why prospecting within the account is important to gaining preferred supplied status.

• Determine the commitments that you need to get from your prospect to achieve preferred supplier status.

• Determine the areas that an Account Manager needs to work on to develop an account.

• Review your own accounts to ensure that you are delivering customer value.

• Recognise the best ways of determining buying windows and positioning your offering on top of the prospect's shopping list.

• Understand the concept of contact to contract.

• Recognise the best ways of determining buying windows and positioning your offering on top of the prospect's shopping list.

• Define ways to manage long term relationships with future prospects.

• Recall the role of networks as a means of connecting with prospects in long term buying cycles.

• Define ways to manage long term relationships with future prospects.

• Differentiate between the factors that can open markets during "Itch Cycles".

• Understand the importance of keeping good customer relationship records.

For More Detailed Information, Please Visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Gain+Preferred+Supplier+Status_105

Advance's Cold Calling Sales Module

Advance's cold calling sales module describes how some simple techniques and knowledge of the process can turn a cold call into a cool one.

Cold calling is the sales process of approaching prospective customers or clients—typically via telephone, by email or through making a connection on a social network—who were not expecting such an interaction. The word "cold" is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting a call or has not specifically asked to be contacted by a sales person. A cold call is usually the start of a sales process generally known as telemarketing.

Cold Calling is a tough business.  It is time consuming, can be stressful and gets a low hit rate. This course describes how some simple techniques and knowledge of the process can turn a cold call into a cool one – it will never be warm!

It is extremely challenging to connect with busy decision makers. And that many companies don’t even accept cold calls from sales people. However, that doesn’t mean cold calling is dead.

It takes hard work, effort, and discipline.

Advance’s path breaking course on ‘Cold Calling Techniques’ definitely makes the journey smoother and better. It’s very systematic and process oriented. You will be able to feel the difference within 30 days!

Learning Outcomes

• Recognise the importance of territory research to screen and select interested prospects.
• Determine the role of the marketing function and other mechanisms for assisting prospecting activity.
• Compose an effective slogan to introduce yourself to a prospect.
• Understand the techniques that are used to secure meetings with senior executives over the telephone.
• Ask and answer questions confidently.
• Understand the techniques that are used to secure meetings with senior executives over the telephone.
• Understand the behaviour of senior executives and how to deal with them when cold calling.
• Understand what to say when leaving a voice mail.
• Sequence the process involved in leaving effective voice messages.
• Follow up voice mail with other calls to action.

Advance Unveils The True Art of Consultative Selling

The straight forward verbal skills of need creation apply to just one person. Unfortunately, major sales are not that simple.  Typically, there will be technicians evaluating your product, financial people looking at the cost/benefit analysis, end users checking that it can do the job they want and possibly, senior directors who will make the final decision.

They all have different requirements from what you are selling. Your task is to create different needs in all their minds so that they can buy from you.

The problem is to get them all marching in the same direction, namely towards you. In other words, in addition to the basic verbal skills, there is a political overlay. In this section, we will examine how we might marry the verbal skills to the political coordination and the needs to develop unrecognised needs.

One of the biggest problems that inexperienced salespeople have is how to keep the door open after the initial contact.

We can create needs for products or services in two ways. We can shock the prospect by showing what others are achieving, or work collaboratively to resolve a problem or exploit an opportunity.

In this course, we examine how you can pro-actively set up activities with an account, by selling to many people to identify new opportunities.  In short we can define a detailed sales process that starts by gaining a formalised and replicable hunting licence and ends with the prospect appointing a responsible implementation manager with a clear follow up project.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Define consultative selling and understand the difference between recognised and unrecognised needs.
• Understand the main different ways of implementing hunting licences.
• Detail the steps for setting up typical consultative selling sessions.
• Understand the common patterns that underlie the processes for setting up hunting licences.

For More Detailed Information, Please Visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Develop+Hunting+Licences+-+the+True+Art+of+Consultative+Selling_45

Advance’s ‘Strategic Selling’ Course Demystifies How to Win a Complex Sale?

Any product or service may become a complex sale. In some instances a complex sale occurs when the market is mature and the stakes high enough to warrant attention from a variety of stakeholders in the buying organization. In other instances a complex sales process is needed when the buyer has never had experience with the vendor, technology being sold, or if the solution is business critical or impacts the buying organization on a strategic level. The series of filters, purchasing steps, and stakeholders involved are designed to reduce the risks associated with making the wrong buying decision. Big sales have many stakeholders.  To move the sale forward, we must unravel the politics and know who to meet and/or to lobby, together with their profiles, power and influence.

How to win a complex sale?

In a major sale there can be many people in the decision group – decision makers, recommenders, gatekeepers, budget holders, technical specialists, financial evaluators, users, consultants, contract negotiators, purchasing. In this course, we present a graphical tool that helps to unravel the politics and produce a comprehensive contact plan that identifies who we should meet, when and why.

Different levels of management have different interests.  It is important that a salesperson should learn to talk at the various levels, using appropriate language and terminology.

While senior management focus is competitive edge and increased effectiveness, more junior people attend to increased efficiency and cost savings. This course examines several ways where we should modify our areas of discussion depending on the level in the hierarchy at which we are talking. The sales process is identical but salespeople must adjust their focus and language.

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Understand the advantages of capturing organisation charts for key accounts.
• Create profiles of key people in a prospect's organisation.
• Map the politics of an organisation and identify decision makers.
• Analyse key people and be able to influence their decisions.
• Understand the difference between decision makers and decision takers.
• Understand how to have relevant business conversations with senior people.
• Appreciate the different benefits being sought by different levels of management.
• Phrase questions appropriately for communication at different levels.
• Understand how to sell a product or service effectively at different levels.
• Define the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.

Advance is a sales consultancy that specialises in revitalising every aspect of sales operations. We combine our experience based consultancy, sales methodology and intellectual property with modern training and technology to help our customers maximise profitable growth. Most organisations know what needs to be done. We know how, and support our customers in the achievement of their sales goals. We enable them to articulate and sell their vision, see the world through their customers‟ eyes and gain customers‟ commitment to their way forward.

Advance have served Global corporate like IBM, GE, Accenture, Vodafone, Xerox , Lufthansa & many more..

Please Visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Prepare+and+Use+a+Political+Map_40 For More Detailed Information.

The ‘Art of Listening’ from Advance is Simply Brilliant

Advance Art of Listening course explores, how we can get the prospect to open up and tell us that their personal issues. The key is to learn to listen for and react to ‘emotion buttons’. These are signals and words that the prospect uses during the business discussion that expose their underlying emotions.

As per Advance’s definition (which is very much appropriate in Sales scenario), ‘Listening is the active process of letting other person know that you’ve heard them’.

Listening is giving positive signals to the other person that say, “Hi, I’m still here. Please keep going!”

 

When the other person is talking, good listeners show   great enthusiasm. They talk at the same time as the other person! But they are not interrupting.

No! Really! That’s terrible!

Phrases like these encourage the other person to keep going. Sometimes, it is just enough to raise the eyebrow. But show the other person that you have understood. Most people can afford to be much more demonstrative in their listening. It may feel a little corny to you but to them they love it.  Many salespeople are so busy asking questions and thinking of the next question to ask that they forget to listen to the answers.

Few of the techniques which brilliantly works are:

a) maintaining the wave length with the speaker

b) Be responsive to his words

c) showing Empathy

d) offer an emotion

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Understand the skill and techniques of listening.
• Emphasise and acknowledge emotion buttons effectively.
• Understand the difference between personal and business personal benefits.
• Use listening to uncover needs and benefit.
• Introduce subjects by asking the right questions to keep the prospect talking.

Advance is a sales consultancy that specialises in revitalising every aspect of sales operations. We combine our experience based consultancy, sales methodology and intellectual property with modern training and technology to help our customers maximise profitable growth. Most organisations know what needs to be done. We know how, and support our customers in the achievement of their sales goals. We enable them to articulate and sell their vision, see the world through their customers‟ eyes and gain customers‟ commitment to their way forward.

Advance have served Global corporate like IBM, GE, Accenture, Vodafone, Xerox , Lufthansa & many more..

For More Detailed Information. Please Visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Listen+your+Way+to+Sales+Success_33

Need Creation Techniques by Advance, Impress the Sales Veterans

Plenty have been written on Need creation and addressing needs. But, after interviewing several Sales professionals, we’ve found that around 45-60% cases, they need to address to ‘unrecognised’ needs rather than responding to ‘recognised’ needs!

Unrecognised Needs define the situations where your customer is aware of the problems but couldn’t figure out a solution, while recognised needs are those , where you customer knows the solution and he is in the process of selecting the best solution available in the market.

Conventional wisdom says ‘Sell Benefits’. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you how to identify benefits. First then, a definition: The advantages of your offering do not become benefits until your prospect has told you why they are important. As the prospect tells you all about their problems and ambitions, they are, at the same time, telling you the benefits that they are looking for. They are telling you the benefits even before they know what is that you are selling.

Prospects buy because they have a need. We can create, influence, and develop needs in the prospect both for our products and our uniqueness.

In this course, we explore how to create or amplify the need for our offering. The discussion starts with the prospect’s vision of problems and opportunities. Needs are then created/ developed by allowing them to ‘wallow’ in their issues in our area of expertise. The more they talk, the more they convince themselves.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course you will be able to :

• Identify areas of need for your customer.

• Hold thought-provoking conversations that stimulate needs for your products.

• Describe and sell a vision.

• Use effect questions to create need.

• Differentiate between benefits and criteria to create a need for your product.

To Know More About Need Creation Techniques by Advance please visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Create+Needs_32

Commitment based Sales Meeting Objectives

There is a world of difference between the agenda of a meeting and the commitment from the meeting.

Most Sales people remain engrossed with the Agenda and oftenly ignore the Commitment part.

We can only measure our likelihood of success in a sale by the level of commitment we get from the prospect.  In this course we learn about how to plan sales meetings. Most sales professionals when asked to describe their objective for an upcoming meeting give the agenda.  In this course, we make a big distinction between the agenda of a meeting and the commitment sought from the prospect by the end of it.

The Agenda is what you do during the meeting, while the Commitment is what you want the prospect to do at the end of the meeting.

The commitment is always a physical action. For example, you want your prospect to put a date on his diary, to introduce you with his finance team etc.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• Create an effective commitment driven agenda
• Understand what questions different levels of management expect you to ask
• Give senior people appropriate decisions to make
• Define the pattern of a sale as a set of commitments
• Understand the five key commitments

Advance Selling Skills Academy is a Sales Operation Consultant with world class expertise on Sales Process Management, Sales Training Development serving to leading corporate across industries. For 20+ years we have been helping sales people change their behaviours to drive performance and bottom line results.

To Know More About Commitment based Sales Meeting Objectives please visit: http://www.as-sa.co.uk/course/How+to+Gain+Commitments_36