How2Sell© Sales Training - Proven Strategies to Close More Deals

A sales territory includes a few big customers who account for a large percentage of your revenue, and a lot of smaller accounts – a mix that’s the basis of the so-called “80-20 rule.” That is, 80% of your business is generated by 20% of your customers.

That 80% demands a significant investment of coverage because you need to know what’s going on all the time. Coverage, coverage, coverage is the key - opportunities are missed because the salesperson isn’t on top of them and didn’t know they existed.

Key accounts not only represent large sales potential, but often have:

• An interest in centralized purchasing (they don’t want to deal with many suppliers).
• Involved buying processes.
• Specialized needs.
• A willingness to enter into long-term relationships.
  

The investment in creating compelling value around these needs is worth the effort because this 20% of the customer base represents such a large revenue source.

But what about the other 80% of the account base? Doesn’t it also represent sales potential? Doesn’t it exhibit the same characteristics as the 20% group? If that portion isn’t closely managed, over-investment in it may translate into paltry returns.

Optimizing account coverage and contact management is a discipline that hinges on answering several questions:

• Who am I going to see and why?
• How often?
• At what cost?
• For what potential return?
• How do I provide value-focused communication™ to all of my accounts?
  

The answers - and the focus of this chapter - lie in developing a repeatable and measurable process to manage the balance between sales revenue generated and selling costs across all account grades.

The Process We’ll Explore in Chapter 1

1. Grade all your accounts in the territory as A, B, or C.
   
2. Determine your contact capacity by contact medium and frequency. This is the number of face-to-face, telephone, and mail/e-mail customer contacts possible in one year, based on your required travel percentage, and will give you a realistic idea of how many contacts you can make.
   
3. Determine the cost structure for each type of contact (face-to-face, phone, and mail).
   
4. Determine the cost-per-contact for each type of contact (face-to-face, phone, and mail).
   
5. Develop a Contact Grid® for your account coverage by account grade, contact medium, and contact frequency. This will show you who you’re going to contact, by what medium, at what cost, and how often - so that customer investment can be balanced with customer revenue.
   
6. Review the Contact Grid® paying close attention to account coverage, contact economics, and overall effectiveness.
   

Even if your sales work doesn’t involve a large amount of repeat business from established accounts, it’s valuable to know your contact capacity (the number of mail, phone calls, and visits per customer), your cost-per-contact, and your available call frequency.

Read on ! ...

Here's the bottom line:
Customer investment must be proportionate with customer revenue.

In Chapter 1 (“How to Optimize Account Coverage and Contact Management”), you learned how to grade accounts and assign a contact frequency using a Contact Grid® to help determine who to see and how often. The Contact Grid® created an optimized mix of face-to-face sales calls, telephone work, and mail/e-mail contacts to help manage your most valuable resource: the time you have to sell your product or service.

Now, we’ll focus on three key elements that will help you turn up your territory travel planning several notches:

• Maximizing customer contact
• Minimizing travel time
• Optimizing account coverage

The majority of your sales revenue, from 65% to 80%, usually comes from your top accounts. That’s why it makes so much sense to primarily focus on your large accounts and evaluate all other travel and coverage based on what you’re doing with those customers. Since there is a fixed number of face-to-face calls you can reasonably make in a year’s time, you must maximize the effectiveness of your contacts with these accounts, minimize your travel time, and optimize your coverage of the rest of your accounts.

To get going, this chapter covers:

1. Laying out the top accounts in your territory
2. Creating logical geographical account groupings
3. Planning your travel around your top accounts
4. Incorporating road-wise territory management and routing tips

Read on !.....

Here's the bottom line:
Efficient territory travel will help you cover your accounts much more profitably and effectively.

Picture this: You’re in the middle of a drawn-out product presentation, and you refer to the literature to discover that it doesn’t match what you’re presenting. In your briefcase, you do find a tattered black-and-white copy, so you tell your prospect you’ll make him a copy before you leave. Then, you’re asked about delivery and volume-pricing discounts, and you reply with a confident, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out!”

Your sales manager asks later if you provisionally closed the next quarter’s purchase. Your reply: “I forgot to ask.”

Sound extreme? It shouldn’t, because it happens more often than you think. The sad part is that all of it could have been avoided through proper sales call planning, which helps you prepare, boost confidence, and polish your professional skills. It ensures that your calls are productive for you and your prospect.

This chapter can help you in several ways. You may already have a pre-call planning routine and want to improve it. You may be searching for a regimen that you’re more comfortable with so you can turn up your results meter. Or you may want to rejuvenate what has become a tired game.

That said, it’s worthwhile to look at two elements in pre-call planning:

A. Fundamentals that are a key part of any kind of sales call.

B. Seven kinds of calls (there are others, but these are common):

1. The introductory call to qualify an opportunity
2. The call for a line card or catalog review
3. The static product demonstration
4. The active product demonstration
   
5. The call on which a factory or technical rep accompanies you
6. The proposal presentation
7. The sales call to close a sale
   

They may be separate sales calls, or they may overlap in one call or any combination. No matter. It just pays to be prepared.

As Bobby Unser, winner of three Indianapolis 500’s, once said “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.”

Read on ! ....

Here's the bottom line:
Prepare well by learning as much as possible about the account before going in.

Picture this: You’ve discovered an excellent opportunity for your company. You know you have compelling value and sense that the odds of winning the business are high—if you can just get in to tell your story.

Your competitors are also hot on the trail, which is why the vice president responsible for the project has suddenly become quite popular and very busy. But because this kind of business doesn’t get done over the phone or through email, you must secure an appointment to get the sales ball rolling. Your sales manager will not accept "But they won't call me back!".

Sound familiar? The story may differ depending on the industry, market, and size of the opportunity, but the desired outcome is always the same. That’s where our repeatable 3-2-1 process comes in. It’s a time-tested method that consistently nails down the appointments you need to seize opportunity whenever it arises.

Our approach is repeatable and measurable, with each step building on the last while reinforcing the value proposition tied to your appointment request. We call this Contact Escalation®, and its purpose is to equip you with the tools to close the appointment at any stage of the process.

The key elements of the 3-2-1 process:

1. Step 1: Phone three times
2. Step 2: Send two emails, followed by a phone call
3. Step 3: Send one second-day letter via UPS, FedEx, or another trackable method, followed by a phone call
4. Step 4 (optional): If the opportunity justifies it, coordinate and plan an on-site visit

At first glance, the process may seem overly simple, but much happens between the lines of each step. When it all comes together, the process proves its effectiveness, measurability, and repeatability.

Read on !...

Here's the bottom line:
If you have not spelled out enough compelling value for your prospect to justify spending time with you, you will not get the appointments you need to increase your sales and income!

Let’s say you’re at an appointment with a key contact on a project that presents an excellent opportunity for your company. After some introductory chit-chat, you get down to business. At this stage of the sales process, your job is to qualify a few fundamental issues and details about the opportunity so you can eventually present a compelling offer. Your questioning starts out fine, but soon becomes sidetracked and random due to some of your prospect’s replies. At best, you’re gathering only sketchy information. To make matters worse, your contact begins to appear annoyed, elusive, and less responsive.

Been there? The situation may vary by marketplace and industry, but the issue remains the same: a prospective customer won’t buy until you secure vital information about their company’s requirements and purchasing processes. Sharpening your skills using our 'BATON'© qualifying method to develop a focused, repeatable method for collecting that information will help you qualify more efficiently and effectively—saving you from wasted time, money, and income.

Read on! ...

Here's the bottom line:
The key to getting more information is ask about ALL the categories (BATON©) then listen, reply and ask again.

This chapter has one focus, and one focus only: To help you sharpen your sales presentation skills.

There’s a lot of information about sales presentations. Topics such as voice projection, body language, personality mirroring, PowerPoint tips and the like have their place in prospect and customer presentations. They’re covered in great detail in innumerable books, DVDs, websites, and various training courses.

That’s not our focus in this chapter, nor do we present a comprehensive treatise on those topics. We want to sharpen your presentation skills through making a few small changes so that you can position and portray the compelling value of your product or service more effectively and more convincingly. Your goal, in turn, is to deliver a presentation where your prospect arrives at their own natural conclusion of:

“Yes, we like it. We’re buying.”

At this point, we’ll look at four key elements, presented in a checklist manner, for sharpening these specific presentation skills:

1. Effective preparation
2. Effective introductions
3. Effective presentation tips
4. Effective summary, close and follow-up

We simply want to help you sharpen what you are already doing.

The basis for any sales presentation, of course, must be a detailed and thorough understanding of your prospect’s current situation, needs, and requirements, and how you intend to meet them. That’s why we’ll begin with the assumption that you have properly qualified your prospect (see Chapter 5: “How to Qualify More Effectively”) and are now ready to present your offering.

Your presentation may be an extension of a one-on-one sales call or a separately scheduled event with several people. In either case, you should be able to close more sales after developing and sharpening a repeatable presentation process that leaves nothing to chance.

Read on ! ....

Here's the bottom line: Work hard at becoming an expert in your product or service to communicate your compelling value proposition with passion and effectiveness.

In sales, it’s not unusual to have 500 or so face-to-face presentations a year. But as you ask each prospect to make buy from you, you don’t have 500 different ways to ask for the business, do you?

Nobody does. Instead, common sense and practice have told you that you need three, four or five effective closes that can be used in most, if not all, of those 500 meetings. In other words, a few select closes should cover 90% of the let’s-do-business situations you’ll encounter.

Read on ! ...

Here's the bottom line:
You need to be exceptionally good at only three to five kind of closes.

In sales, it’s not unusual to deliver as many as 500 face-to-face presentations a year. But in asking each prospect to buy something from you, it’s doubtful you’d hear 500 different and unique objections to your product or service. There just aren’t that many excuses for not purchasing something. Chances are far better that you’d hear three, four, or five objections repeated 100 or so times.

While there are many variations of those common objections, we focus on a repeatable and measurable process to get to the real objection, and in doing so sharpen your skillset. If you don’t satisfy the real objection, it will stick and you won’t get the sale.

Your key to handling those objections that can stall, and even kill, the sales process, is the well-honed and repeatable practice we’ve dubbed QUIC©. Its components:

• Qualify the objection –
• Isolate the objection
• Clarify to close

Ideally, sharpening your selling skills with the QUIC© process will give you the tools to successfully handle common objections and push the opportunity toward closure. The three most powerful words you can master in overcoming objections is "Help me understand..."

In line with that, we’ have craft a market-hardened, repeatable process that, in most cases, can successfully handle those objections.

Read on ! ...

Here's the bottom line: Use short precisely worded and open ended questions to fully draw out the objection.

Effective sales call follow-up stems from two major efforts: organizing data that’s accurate and within a second’s reach, and developing a winning and repeatable process you’re comfortable with. Data and processes are strong allies, and a common denominator ties them together:

People will tell you when to follow-up. Just ask.

Developing a strong, repeatable follow-up process includes:

A Contact Management System. Managing timely and critical data such as:

• Meeting and telephone call notes
• Call back follow-ups
• Action item follow-ups
  

Other types of follow-ups that cover 90% of your situations:

• After submitting a quotation
• A meeting follow-up with action items
• Opportunity tracking and follow-up

How to stay in touch with prospects through value-based communications....

Read On !

Here's the bottom line: The key to winning business is organized and accessible data combined with a proven repeatable follow up effort.