Day 7: Improve Your Sales Skill

Today’s lesson is focused on real sales, on closing the order, on persuading the prospect to take direct action and to execute a transaction.

There are many small businesses that succeed or fail based upon their sales ability. Recruiting, training and maintaining effective sales people can be the difference between success and collapse. And it has always been true that at the end of the day, we are all in sales.

Although creating a list of effective sales skills is easy, honing each of them down to an effective level can be challenging. And even though some of us feel like we don’t have a “sales personality”, it is true that with focus and training you can improve your ability in this very important area.

For today’s Basic Sales Skills focus, we’re going to assume you have already captured a prospect. Granted, this is no small assumption. Winning the opportunity to meet with and talk to a qualified prospect for your offering is huge and generally requires talent, persuasion, persistence and luck. But today’s focus is on the basics of how to convert a prospect in to a customer.

Since my early days as a Sales Rep with IBM, I homed in on six basic sales skills that have served me well. Each one of them can make or break a sale. Once you have won the right to present to a prospect and are ready to take the next steps, you should:

• Be overly prepared.
• Make sure you’re talking to the decision-maker.
• Invite discussion and listen, with emphasis on ‘listen’.
• Sell benefits, not features.
• Make the decision maker like you, be empathetic.
• Ask for the business.

These are the basics, and all of these are paramount in being successful in sales. There are entire courses and curriculum centered on each of these, and I highly recommend getting good at all of them.

Jeffrey Gitomer, also known as the Chief Executive Salesman has written multiple volumes on effective selling. To further understand the basics of selling, I recommend checking out this version of his interview on The BusinessMakers Show: http://www.thebusinessmakers.com/episodes/shows/2007/march/episode-093/flashback-093.html

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