Selling Skills Training | How to Have Effective Sales Conversations?
When it comes to sales, there are many ways to start up a sales conversation, and most salespeople always make major mistakes every time when they start to talk with a prospect. In fact, most salespeople can do better if they are train to do it.
Sales conversation. What is it? It is more than you talking. Sales conversation takes two. It is not a monologue. It is a dialogue. It is a customer centred exchange of information that begins and ends with the customer whose needs must drive the conversation.
You have a sales approach you use consciously or unconsciously every day. How open are you to looking at your sales conversation up close? If you are open, these lessons can help you assess yourself, spot your strengths and weaknesses, and change your sales conversation. You will tap into your natural skills, leverage your knowledge, and sell more by creating compelling dialogues with your customers.
You are probably thinking, “But I already do all that.” And it is likely that you do. But how are you keeping up with the changes that are occurring everywhere around you—with your customers, your competitors, your markets, and your own organization?
Relying solely on product knowledge or technical expertise doesn’t work in today’s environment. The Internet is a free and convenient source of knowledge, giving customers more information than ever before. Salespeople face a tough business climate in which they need to win all the good deals that are out there. In this environment, products—once the key differentiator—are the equal- izer. Instead of talking about products, your role is to communicate a message in which you add value, provide perspective, and show how your features and benefits apply to and satisfy customer needs. Most salespeople use a model for selling that has been the pre- dominant model for decades. It primarily relies on the old, tried-but no longer true features and benefits focus. Too many salespeople tell their product stories too soon, without necessarily meaning to do so, and invariably conversation from a generic product vs. customer point of view. When they ask about needs, they don’t go far enough. When they identify a need, they jump to product, rather than create a rich dialogue to understand why, how, or when.
Selling today is more demanding. As business becomes more challenging, salespeople need a higher level of skill. My experience, in more than two decades of working with tens of thousands of sales- people in some of the finest organizations in the world, shows that at best only 30% of salespeople truly practice need-based consultative selling and no more than one third of those achieve trusted-advisor level with their customers.
The bottom line is that too many salespeople are still too quick to tell a product story. While most think solution, they present product. Because they tend to talk more than they listen, they create an imbalanced give/get ratio instead of a 50/50 dialogue. Overall, the level of preparation and questioning does not measure up. Most sales organizations have good salespeople, but they lack enough superb salespeople to drive the growth they need to succeed.
As much as everything else is changing, the old formulas of selling features and benefits are still around, blocking dialogues and holding good salespeople back from becoming superb.
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