Corporate E-Learning

Welcome to the Sales Fundamentals workshop. Although the definition of a sale is simple enough, the process of turning someone into a buyer can be very complex. It requires you to convince someone with a potential interest that there is something for them in making their interest concrete – something that merits spending some of their hard-earned money. This workshop will give participants a basic sales process, plus some basic sales tools, that they can use to seal the deal, no matter what the size of the sale.

In this module, we will be looking at the types of sales, common sales approaches, and common sales terminology. Like any profession, sales has its own special vocabulary. There’s nothing particularly difficult about the language of sales. Mastering it just takes a little study and practice. Knowing the language will make you feel more confident and prepared to start selling.

Preparing to make a call begins with learning about your client — specifically, what your client needs, and how you can meet those needs. Before you even pick up the phone you need to have a clear impression of how not only you’re opening, but the following few stages of the conversation are going to go. In preparing this way you will be able to anticipate various reactions from the potential customer – enthusiasm, caution, reluctance etc. – and tailor your responses to their questions or expressions of reluctance. This will ensure that you can mold your selling tactics to get the best results time and again. As a salesperson, you will be required to make many phone calls to potential customers, whether they are “cold calls” or “warm”. The object of the calls will be to try and get a sales agreement in place as soon as possible, so you need to get as many facts nailed down as possible. Having a pen and paper nearby is obviously handy, and you should then decide on a strategy for going forward with the call. The more you know about the person to whom you are speaking, the nature of their business, and what you can do for them, the better for any eventual sales pitch.

Starting off on the right foot is absolutely essential in sales meetings. Simple things go a long way toward making a good first impression: looking and acting professional, treating clients with courtesy and respect, and coming up with a creative way to introduce yourself and your company. Being memorable (for the right reasons) will ensure that your name comes up time and again when possible solutions are being researched.

Once you have made it past the opening, it’s time to make your pitch. In preparing your pitch, work on coming up with a clear, persuasive explanation of what your product can do for the client. Be prepared to answer the all-important question that all clients have: What’s in it for me? This is, after all, the basic question in all financial dealings. If you are trying to persuade people to part with money they have earned, you may well need to work to give them reasons to do so. The central point in any sale is getting the customer to see why what you are offering them is better than any competitor’s offering, and that you will see that their best interests are served. When making a pitch it is important to get the balance right between attractiveness and believability. You can promise the earth to a potential customer in order to get them to sign on the bottom line, but if they do not believe you can deliver on what you are offering then it will be completely pointless. Also, as most deals have a “cooling off” period, the chances are that if you oversell your product they will be dissatisfied and bring the deal to an end before it has had time to become established

Customers who are not ready to decide on a purchase often come up with objections, statements about what is holding them back. You can overcome these objections if you are prepared to respond to them in a calm, rational way. Often all that customers need is more information to make them feel more confident about their purchase. In these situations you need to be careful not to start an argument with a customer or belittle the customer’s concerns. In fact, you might decide to agree with a customer to a certain point but then show the customer a different way of thinking about the purchase. For example: “I know that buying new windows is a big investment, but let’s look at what you can expect to save in energy costs.” There is a saying: “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Although this is something of a cliché and not 100% applicable, it gives a good example of how you can deal with customer objections by turning them to your advantage. Naturally, people will be reluctant to part with money that they have worked hard to earn, and will not want to spend without being absolutely convinced that the spending has been worthwhile. This means that they will be on the look-out for things that will make the purchase less worthwhile. Your task as a salesperson is to hear and understand their objections, but convince them to look at things differently.

You have worked hard to get your foot in the door, tell customers what your product can do for them, and respond to any objections they might have. Now it’s time to seal the deal. Or is it? A good salesperson needs to know when it’s time to close and how to go about doing it. Misidentifying the moment to close can carry numerous problems with it, not least the fact that a customer with extra thinking time can very easily suddenly decide that they are not so interested after all, and a customer who is pressed to complete the deal too early can be left with a negative impression of the salesperson – one which may be impossible to conquer. The point at which it is advisable to close on a deal will be fairly obvious to any experienced salesperson. The moment will become apparent, usually after you have gone through a typical sales pitch, responded to the potential customer’s objections and talked them around, and they have begun to give a positive impression with regards to buying – whether they do this verbally or through their body language and non-verbal comportment. At this point, you should begin to speak as though they are going to buy, while not talking as though they have already bought the product or service.

The closing is not the final stage of a sale. The final stage is following up, which is actually a process that may continue indefinitely. This stage may have two valuable outcomes: referrals and future sales. The nature of a follow-up to a sale will depend on how the sale was carried out. If you sell via mail, then the delivery should be accompanied with a compliments slip thanking the customer for their custom and making clear your hope that you can do more business in the future. If you sell in person, then it can be very beneficial to follow up with a call a few days later asking how they have found the item. When you carry out the follow-up, it is important to leave the customer feeling like they have been well treated. It is likely that you can think of a case where you have been given excellent customer service – you probably told your friends and family about it, and when you have required anything in the same niche you will have thought immediately of the salespeople that covered your sale and gave you such excellent service before. You will want to ensure that you receive that level of service again. As a salesperson, this is how you want people to think of you, too. By providing an excellent level of service every time, you will gain more business from the friends and family of that customer, and from the customers themselves.

If you want to accomplishanything important in life, you need to have goals. Goals give you something to shoot for. They keep you focused and motivated. They let you know when to celebrate and when to start shooting for something higher. Goals are a part of all human endeavor – both in the workplace and in life in general. We measure ourselves by how we do in relation to the goals we have set ourselves and those we have set for us by management. By achieving a goal consistently we can benefit in a number of ways – we will gain recognition, potentially advancement within the company, and frequently will benefit from financial incentives. So, we know the benefits of reaching goals – but there is more to goals than what happens when we attain them. When we are set goals, they are usually set at a reasonable but challenging level and we will be able to achieve them if we do our job well enough. Although we should all be well motivated to do our jobs anyway, the presence of targets keeps us “honest” and encourages us to always make as much effort as we can possibly make. Therefore sales targets have a dual effect – the incentive of what happens if we reach them, and their simple presence both make us work harder than we ordinarily might.

Salespeople collect an enormous amount of information during the course of a day: names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, employers, interests, and more. Managing your data will help you work more efficiently and make it easier to keep track of your clients. The developments in information technology over the past decade or so have made this kind of record keeping so easy that it is now simply not worth not doing it. Most ready-to-go software packages on personal and business computers will come with an easy-to-use spreadsheet and database package, which will allow you to collate all information that you need. By doing this you will be able to search for any information you need. The more information you can keep on customers, the more effective your record-keeping will be and the more synergistic your customer services can be. By having contact information and personal details about customers, you will be able to alert them to deals which may be beneficial to them. As computer software becomes more and more innovative and intuitive, we are able to set up reminders that will alert us to something which may be beneficial from a selling point of view. It is not just a case of record-keeping, but more of information management. Not only do you want to make sure you have the information, you also want to ensure you are using it correctly.

A prospect board is a powerful tool that can help you track prospects and manage your time. It is basically a way of showing where each prospect is in the sales process at any given point in time. It allows the salesperson to see where more work is needed, where a sale is near to completion, and how many sales are currently on the agenda. By using a prospect board it is easy to monitor at a glance where work is needed and how you can best utilize your time in the sales field. Setting up a prospect board is not dissimilar to having a stats board in the office detailing every salesperson’s performance. From a glance at the board it is possible to not only read the current state of play but also to gain some sense of motivation from seeing the work that needs done. If you can see that one deal is near to being closed, then it can be an encouraging document of how much has already been done and a reminder that there is only a small amount remaining to be done – an encouragement to get that work done today. If there is quite a lot of work still to do to get a sale, it can encourage the salesperson to ensure that that work gets done as soon as possible.

Although this workshop is coming to a close, we hope that your journey to improve your sales skills is just beginning. Please take a moment to review and update your action plan. This will be a key tool to guide your progress in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We wish you the best of luck on the rest of your travels!