Have you ever been shopping in a place and the salesperson there awed you with there selling techniques? And you dream of employing such people in your business, but you can’t find one. So let me tell you, no one is a born salesperson.
Few people make it look easy with the amount of preparation and time they have given to this skill.
So let us dive into the mechanics of how to sell. You can use this resource to learn about sales techniques or teach your sales team how to do bring in the maximum sell.
What’s here for me?
- Begin by setting a goal
- Barriers
- Straight-line persuasion
- Buyer vs non-buyer
- Building rapport with the customer
- Understand the customer
- Closing the sell
- FAQs
Begin by setting a goal
Before learning the selling techniques begin by setting a goal for your organization. Based on your Business Strategy planning, How much revenue do you aim for at the end of the year? How many customers do you need to acquire to reach your goal? The number of leads approximately needed to close that many customers? How many people do you need to reach out to generate that many leads? And so on. Ones you and your sales team are oriented towards this goal. Sit and sketch out small achievable plans to reach your goal, and set realistic time frames for each step.
Barriers
Selling is not about simply pushing your product to anyone you get hold of. By doing this your brand value will take a hit. You will do your own loss in the long run. But you should look at it as identifying the people who need your product(they may be currently aware or unaware of this) and making the product available to them. This should be your company’s basics for selling.
But many times even if someone needs a product, there may be a certain barrier because of which the person is not buying it from you. Then the role of a salesperson comes in existence. They help in removing the barrier using their selling techniques for that person so that he/she may buy the product.
Some of the usual barriers are:
- Unaware: There may be people who need your kind of product but are totally unaware of your existence.
- Lack of enough knowledge: There maybe someone who knows your product exists in the market but they do not have in-depth knowledge of the product.
- Trust issues: There may be someone who doesn’t trust your brand yet. They are still not sure if you are a genuine brand in the market.
- Financial barrier: There may be some who want to buy your products but they don’t have enough funds in their account.
There can be many different barriers, different in each niche. You must do some market research to find barriers in your supposed customers.
Straight-line persuasion
This was a system developed by Jordan Belfort. And as the name suggests, using this selling technique you try to get a customer from 1-10 to buy your product as quickly as possible without wasting any time in between. He also discards relationship marketing by giving the logic that even though it has more conversion rate but the life cycle of a product sale becomes unnecessarily long. Whereas in that much time one can reach out to more people and use his method, thus getting more sales in the same time.
Straight-line persuasion is an art of influencing, persuading and selling. The basic three pillars of Straight Line Persuasion system are:
- Developing rapport with the customer.
- Gather information about your customer’s needs by asking specific questions.
- Keeping the selling process on the straight line(During any point in the sales conversation, if the customer tries to talk something irrelevant from sales, you bring it back.)
Buyer vs non-buyer
If you have ever been in a position of selling something before you must have experienced that certain customers who come never actually intended to buy.
Maybe your product or service does not fit them, maybe they can not afford it, or maybe simply someone does not want to buy it at all. And those are exactly the type of people whom you should not entertain or waste your selling techniques upon. That’s simply a waste of time.
Your focus should be on finding the right people to speak to and prune out the rest. Don’t try to convert the non-buyers into buyers. But if you notice that someone is not buying from you, but did buy a similar product somewhere else, then you should look carefully to find where is your sales process lagging, and fix it.
Normally stats say that out of every 100 people you encounter during reaching out to prospective buyers. Only 30 are ready to buy then and there. 30 others are still looking around for other alternatives also but are ready to buy one such product, another 30 are just curious onlookers. They are in no hurry so may or may not buy soon, the rest 10 people never intend to buy the product, now or in the future.
Building rapport with the customer
In relationship marketing, people usually tend to first build a relationship with the customer by talking about personal stuff like their hobbies and interest. Which place they visited in their last holiday and other such things, but as discussed earlier this leads to a lesser number of conversion then the straight line persuasion method at the end of the month. So you must not go this way.
The best way to build rapport with your customer is by showcasing your expertise, you must be perceived by them as someone who can help them achieve their goal.
Remember always, you are here to sell and currently, you are conversing with a customer. You can do all the relationship-building you want to, but only after you are done selling the product.
Understand the customer
Every customer you meet is unique in their own ways. Some are motivated logically, some emotionally, some are rather afraid of making a wrong decision, and some have limited beliefs to buy.
Each one of them has a different belief system mostly formed by the types of surrounding they come from and before trying to sell them, you must try to understand those belief systems. That will make you work much faster and easier.
Some basic things that you can try to do with every customer for maximum conversion:
- Create a strong emotional reason
- Create a strong logical reason
- Break their limited buying beliefs
- Remove all the reasons for not buying the product
- Surround your product with positive air and strong reasons to buy
- Make them admit that they need the product
Closing the sell
This is the part of selling where only the one with great techniques are supposed to talk, and these expert sellers mostly focus on three things:
- Customer genuinely loves the product: That can only happen when your product is actually the best in the market. Moreover, strictly don’t try to sell anything that you yourself don’t trustfully.
- The customer has trust in your company: If customers do not trust your company, you can not convince them to buy your product.
- The customer trusts you: The person selling the product should be trustworthy in the eyes of the customer only then he would buy from them.
To sum up, when these three conditions are fulfilled, only then your product is sold.
Further, we have a blog on earning money by Selling Books, ebooks, online courses, Stock Photos. If you want you can start executing your selling skills using these.
FAQs
Cross selling is the technique of selling an additional product or service to an old customer. Simply put it is the technique of selling related product/service of the product that is being sold.
Personal selling technique involves face-to-face interpersonal selling skills. Here you convince the customer to buy your product or service.
To evaluate your selling techniques:
1. Talk to your colleagues especially in the sales team. They have expertise in the field so it is easy for them to judge your techniques and give recommendations.
2. Take a sales skills assessment test.
3. Customer feedback.
Keep applying & practicing the above steps in the blog and with time you will surely keep getting better.
