The Top Five best-Practices Your Sales Pros Need to Know

by Dan Seidman

Here’s a totally contrarian thought: What if you didn’t have to train salespeople in a full selling process?

I believe you can improve performance faster when you focus on specific pieces of the sales puzzle, rather than hope your team memorizes and applies 10 or 12 steps from your sales methodology.

Here are the 5 critical skills that you can focus on which can improve team performance fastest.

1 – The Ultimate Objection Handling Tool to Eliminate Buyer Resistance Between you and me, here’s why this is a problem and why it needs to be built: I’m shocked that teams don’t get together for serious discussions on buyer resistance, in order to find out what everyone else is doing. Price is too high? Rob has a great response. Megan does too. Why aren’t we drawing from the collective brainpower of our team? Build a book of responses to your top objections in three steps…

Identify your top 5 or 6 objections
Create dozens of responses to each one. Why so many? You want to have choices based on the variety of salespeople on the team. Some will adopt responses that others just won’t use
Practice these new responses to resistance

Stop getting stuck when a buyer doubts your offerings, your service, your price. Learn multiple ways to move past resistance and further down the path toward a close. Your company will create a book of techniques to use for anyone on the sales team, especially new hires, in order to speed up the selling process and close more sales.

2 – One Great Opening is Worth 10,000 Closes
If you don’t open well, you’ll never get a close to the close. You must have an opening strategy to put into play, right when you begin your sales call. You can learn how to take charge and create a conversation where the buyer understands the rules of the game – how your meeting will work, and – most critically – how it will end. Buyer and Seller can work together to determine how your products and services can serve the buyer’s company, by benefitting the firm or solving his or her problems. This is perhaps the most potent technique a sales pro can learn and utilized. Are your sales professionals frustrated by conversations that end with “I’ll think it over” or “Give me a call later” or any of a dozen agonizing “goodbyes” that occur in our selling day? Discover how to eradicate stalls that end calls.

3 – Wipe-out The #1 Problem Salespeople Encounter
Get rid of the biggest obstacle to your selling success. It’s a fact that seller spend too much time with bad prospects. You’ll can teach your sales pros to quickly qualify or disqualify buyers. They then focus time and attention on people who are ready, willing and able to spend money with you. Set your buying criteria – do they have money, are you talking to the decision-maker, is there urgency? Next, craft potent qualifying questions that determine whether you pursue this buyer or run away! You can coach your salespeople to become wiser in identifying serious buyers. Here’s the reality of this technique: If we close 20% of our prospects, then the faster we stop engaging with the other 80%, the more quickly we invest our selling time and energy of highly-qualified buyers.

4 – Gain vs. Pain – How to Know Which Approach Motivates each Buyer!
The oldest argument in selling is whether a buyer is better inclined to buy when you sell with PAIN (problems you can solve, bad things) or GAIN (benefits, good things). Recent research from Cognitive Psychology can give us the skills to identify exactly which approach works best with each buyer your face. Your prospects make choices based on either Pain or Gain. You can craft charts of bullets identifying potent language choices to use for each of these buyer types. Get your sales pros in synch with buyers like never before. Learn to speak each buyer’s dialect! Customize your selling conversations and create significant performance improvement.

5 – Debrief Your Sales Call
Wait! You could be thinking, “this isn’t listed in any sales process or book I’ve encountered.” In a traditional environment, sales pros can improve quickly, with the constant observation and input of sales managers. Ride-a-longs, right? Unfortunately, managers aren’t always available to debrief every sales call. Remote selling is only one reason this is difficult. Do this – teach your salesperson to think like a manager, to debrief themselves. By being brutally honest and seeking to improve every day, sales pros can use this simple model, based on the key steps of the sales process, to analyze and improve performance quickly. This is smart selling at it smartest. Based on your own selling system, this can be customized for your company.

These strategies can elevate team performance and get early wins for your sales team.

Most importantly for you? Create a potent legacy to your organization, by enhancing skills in ways that matter most. Good things will happen and you’ll avoid spending a lot of time and money of trying to integrate a sales system, when you don’t have to.