Can you increase your income AND decrease your sales calls? And at the same time work only with the clients you really liked?
Sound impossible? We don't think so.
Many sales courses today aim to load sales-staff with an armoury of techniques to entice, corner and close clients into signing on the dotted line. The underlying assumption being, “You as client will never understand why you should buy a product. I know what you need – and I have the science to prove it.” This approach, in play since the late 1930s, is all about:
- Approaches and openings
- Features
- Benefits and evidence
- Tie downs, Nail downs, Hold downs or pin downs
- Responding to objections and rebuttals
- 119 classic closes
Then customers demonstrated a need to be understood. Sales trainers responded with presentations punctuated by questions, questions designed to help the presenter know where to navigate next to reel in the sale. Sales people were taught techniques to build rapport with clients. They were taught to recognise and speak in the clients’ terms to create a sense of trust. They worked to understand the situation from the client’s point of view, so that they could tailor their close in a way that would make it difficult for a client to refuse.
But there is a more fulfilling way.
Each one of us has the capacity to understand our circumstances and make creative, unique decisions appropriate to the situation and to ourselves. This is a core principle at StrategyWorks, which we believe this principle applies to sales. And really, aren’t we all a bit sick of slick tongued cowboys manipulating us into sales that will benefit them more than us?
As clients, we prefer to buy products based on our reasons, not on those of a sales person. When we do understand the product we are buying we are more likely to maintain it. In fact sales are lost because the person selling does not take the time to build a relationship with us as client to understand our real needs.
A good sales process will build business through rich, enduring relationships with clients. At the heart of the business relationship is trust. Real, robust trust.
We need to learn to trust:
- Our clients to understand and make the most effective decisions for themselves
- Ourselves enough to listen and appreciate the client without launching into presentation
- Our ability to create an environment in which our prospects feel comfortable
- A process without tight systems, covering every little detail, giving us freedom to be ourselves
- Our capacity for grace under fire. Though we are experts in our field it is not necessary to prove ourselves at our clients expense
Building a relationship on trust requires sales people to make clients feel relaxed and comfortable. Stiff, formal or reserved people can make others feel uncomfortable. But if you are open, comfortable and fully yourself, you create an environment in which your clients can do the same. This does not require a long list of do’s and don’ts. Quite the opposite. Creating a comfortable environment requires you as sales-person simply to be yourself, which requires you to be comfortable with yourself. And to do that you need to get to know yourself and what is important to you.
At StrategyWorks the sales coaching in highly interactive:
- Participants in coaching begin with work to reach clarity on what is important to them, what they want to achieve and how they would like to go about doing it.
- Each person in the group defines the type of client who, to them, would be ideal.
- We cover a simple, but profound, high-impact sales conversation.
- We talk about how to build and maintain trusting relationships
- And we discuss an approach to growing each person’s portfolio of ideal clients.
So how would you like to build your business by working only with your favourite clients? Please send us a note if you would like to hear more.