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necessary to make the sales you want to make, you will inevitably achieve
your sales goals.
It is important to emphasis that success in sales is a numbers game. It is a
matter of probabilities. The more clearly that you plan out your sales
strategies and tactics on paper, the more likely it is that you will do the
things necessary to achieve the amount of money that you want. The sales
will take care of themselves.
Plan Out Your Sales Work in Detail
Start by determining the average size of a sale, and the average commission
that you earn per sale. Divide these amounts into your desired sales and
income goals. For example, if you earn $500.00 per sale, and your annual
income goal is $60,000.00, you will have to make one hundred and twenty
sales per year, or an average of ten sales per month.
You then determine how many sales presentations you will have to make,
based on your current experience and skill level, to achieve that number of
sales. From there, you work back to determine how many calls you will have
to make to find that number of qualified prospects. You then determine how
many prospecting calls you will have to make each day in order to get a
certain number of presentations and follow-ups, which will lead to the
number of sales you desire and the achievement of your income goal.
If you determine that you have to make twenty phone calls in order to get
five appointments, and you need five appointments in order to get one sale,
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you now have a specific target to aim at. You have a specific activity goal
that you can work on each day. Every morning, you begin work and focus o
making a specific number of calls. You discipline yourself to do the things
you need to do, to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
Get Better At What You Do
Once you have determined your sales goals, and worked out an activity
schedule for each day, you immediately go to work on yourself to upgrade
your skills in your key result areas.
One of the best uses of your time is to get better in the most important things
you do. Your goal is to upgrade your skills so that you achieve more and
better results in a shorter period of time.
For example, if the number of appointments you make is determined by how
effective you are on the telephone, you should decide, right now, to become
an expert at telephone prospecting. If your success is determined by how
effectively you present your product, then practice and become an expert at
presentation skills. If your success is determined by how well you handle
objections, or close the sale then you should make yourself an expert in each
of these areas.
Improve Your Ratios
When you begin, you may make only one sale for every twenty people you
speak to. As you improve your sales skills, your ratio will get better and
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better. Soon, you will be making one sale for every fifteen people that you
speak to, and then one sale for every ten people, and so on.
Some professional sales people, by continually practicing and upgrading
their skills, have reduced their call-to-sale ratio to as low as 5 to 1, and even
3 to 1. Just think what a difference it would make in your income if you
could sell to every third person you spoke to!
Analyze Your Current Skill Level
There are seven key result areas in selling. On a scale from one to ten, you
must be at a seven or better in each of these areas if you want to realize your
full potential as a sales professional. They are the following:
#1: Prospecting: getting appointments with people what can and will buy in
a reasonable period of time;
#2: Establishing trust and rapport; asking questions, listening, and
establishing a bond of trust and friendliness that is essential to making any
sale;
#3: Identifying needs: asking questions to determine exactly what it is that
the customer wants and needs from you, and how you can serve him best;
#4: Presenting solutions: showing the prospect that your product or service,
all things considered, is the ideal choice for him or her at this time;
#5: Answering objections: resolving any questions or concerns that the
customer may have about your product or service;
#6: Closing the sale: asking the prospect to take action on your offer;
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#7: Getting resales and referrals: creating “customers for life,” who buy
from you again and recommend you to their friends and colleagues.
Give yourself a grade on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10
being the highest, in each of these seven key result areas.
Start With Your Weakest Key Skill
Here is a discovery; your weakest key result area sets the height of your
sales and your earnings. You may be excellent at six out of the seven of
these key result areas, but your weakness in the seventh area will determine
how much you sell and earn overall.
The good news is that all sales skills are learnable. You can learn any skill
you need to achieve any goal you have set for yourself. The most rapid
improvement in your sales results will come from your identifying your
weakest skill and working exclusively in that area until you have mastered it.
Ask yourself this question, “What one skill, if I developed and did it in an
excellent fashion, would have the greatest impact on my sales and my
income?”
Whatever your answer is to that question, write down the development of
that skill as a goal, make a plan, organize your plan by priority, and work on
getting better in that area every single day. Read every morning on the
subject. Listen to audio programs in your car. Attend seminars and
workshops to learn how to master that key skill. This decision can have
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more of an affect on your income, and faster, than anything else you could
do.
Plan Your Work in Advance
Once you have determined your sales, income and activity goals clearly, you
can then plan your year, your month, your week, and especially every day in
advance. Plan your upcoming week on the weekend before. Plan your
upcoming day the evening before. Always work from a written plan of
action.
Many top sales people will take one or two hours on either a Saturday or a
Sunday to plan the coming week. Some of them will plan their coming week
on the previous Friday. The very act of planning gives you a tremendous
sense of control over yourself and your work. It gives you a feeling of
personal power. Prior planning increases your self-confidence and raises
your self-esteem. And every minute in planning saves you ten minutes in
execution, so you’ll get much more done than someone that does not plan at
all.
The Acid Test of Prospecting
A good measure of how well you are doing in prospecting is to determine
how far in advance you are booked for sales appointments and presentations.
A good salesperson usually has their appointments for the following week
all planned out by Friday of the previous week. If you ask where he or she is
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going to be the next week, he can tell you within one hour where he will be
each day, from Monday to Friday.
Poor sales people have no idea where they will be in the coming week. They
have few appointments and no plans. Everyday is a new adventure for them.
They don’t know how it is going to turn out. As a result, they work less than
90 minutes a day, and spend most of their time around the office or having
lunch or coffee with their co-workers.
From now on, resolve to plan every day the day before, preferably at the end
of the day, or in the evening. Make out a list of everything that you have to
do the following day, and organize the list by time and priority before you
turn out the lights.
Set a goal to structure your day with appointments 30 to 60 minutes apart.
The law of forced efficiency says that, if you put tight time constraints on
yourself for each appointment, you will cover everything of importance in
the sales call within the time allotted.
Plan Your Calls Geographically
One of the most important time management techniques for sales people is
to group your calls in a specific geographic area. This enables you to reduce
travel time, and to increase the number of calls that you can make during the
day. Keep reminding yourself that you have nothing to sell but your time,
face to face with prospects and customers, and how you use your time
determines your income.
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Don’t make the mistake of making your first appointment in the north end of
town, and your second appointment at the south end, and then spending half
your day driving in between. Many poor sales people organize their time this
way. They are somehow able to convince themselves that they are actually
working when they are traveling great distances between appointments.
Close the Sale
One of the best time management techniques is to close the sale after the
presentation so that you do not have to go back over and over. Give the
prospect an opportunity to buy at the end of every sales conversation. Ask
for the order, one way or another. Fully 50% of all sales calls end without
the salesperson asking for the order once.
One of the very worst uses of time is for you to go through the laborious
process of prospecting, getting appointments, making presentations,
answering objections, and then not closing the sale. For you to lose the sale
because you cannot or will not ask a closing question wipes out all of the
time you have invested up to now.
Study and become proficient with a variety of closing techniques, or
decision-making questions. A closing technique can be defined as a question
that gets the prospect to commit to an action of some kind, or to comment
one way or another on your product. For example you can ask simple
questions that tell you how well you’re doing, which give you feedback from
the prospect.
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Ask questions such as the following:
#1. “Does this make sense to you so far?”
#2 “Do you have any questions or concerns that I haven’t covered?”
#3 “Do you like what I am showing you so far?”
#4 “Is this the sort of thing you are looking for?”
Invite Him to Buy
If it appears that the prospect likes what you have shown him, and is
interested in what you are selling, you can use the invitational close and ask,
“Well, if you like it, why don’t you give it a try?”
You can use the directive close, which says, “Well then, if you have no
further questions, the next step is….” and you go on and explain the plan of
action, and wrap up the sale.
It is amazing how much time you can save in your sales career if you just
muster up the courage to invite people to make a decision on your offering.
In follow-up interviews with prospects, it is amazing how many of them
have said that they would have bought if the salesperson had just asked
them, or invited them to buy.
It is sad that so many sales are lost every single day because the salesperson
did not ask for the order. Developing a habit of asking for the order in a
polite, courteous and carefully pre-planned way is a tremendous technique
for improving your efficiency and productivity.
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Eliminating the Time Wasters in Selling
There are several time wasters in selling. Based on interviews with
thousands of sales people and sales managers, here are the ten major reasons
why people waste their time and fail to realize their full potential for sales
and income.
1. Procrastination
Procrastination is the thief of time. It is usually accompanied by delaying
tactics, or finding all kinds of excuses for not getting out and getting going.
Usually, procrastination is caused by a deep fear of rejection, or fear of
failure. This is often called “call reluctance.”
This kind of fear, of rejection and disapproval, which leads to
procrastination and delay, can only be overcome by confronting it everyday
until it goes away. The most remarkable thing about your fears is that, if you
face them squarely, they diminish. But if you back away from them, or avoid
the situation that you fear, your fears grow until they paralyze all productive
action.
When I started selling, I was terrified of cold calling and prospecting. But
then I learned something that changed my career. I learned that, “rejection is
not personal.” If a person says that they are not interested in what you are
selling, it is not aimed at you personally. It is merely an automatic response
to a commercial offer in a competitive society. The person does not know
you well enough to reject you personally. Rejection is not personal.
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Once I learned that, I began calling on people, both door-to-door and officeto-
office, and by telephone. All my fears of rejection disappeared.
Eventually, I reached a point where the negative reaction to my sales
activities had no affect on me at all. This must be your goal as well.
2. Incompletion of the Sale
Incomplete sales that require callbacks are a major time waster. These
usually occur when the salesperson does not have everything he needs to
make the sale. Sometimes, because of poor preparation, sales people do not
have the proper price lists, the proper brochures, the correct inventory
figures or the necessary information to conclude the sale.
Sometimes the salesperson lacks the ability to answer objections, or to ask
for the order. Making a sales call on a qualified prospect and then not being
ready to conclude the sale is a tremendous waste of time. Often when you
call back on the prospect again, he or she has lost all interest.
3. Poor Preparation
Poor preparation is usually visible when there are obvious inaccuracies and
deficiencies in the presentation. Proper preparation prior to a sales call
requires that you learn as much about the prospect as possible before you
meet with him or her. There is nothing quite so insulting to a prospect when
a salesperson tries to sell them something without knowing anything about
