What are we signing up for when we take on a sales role?
The Harvard Business Review in its leading article in August 2006 was able to show unequivocally that selling is now harder than in previous years. Customers are more informed (often via the internet), there is more competition and price cutting, many companies go to great lengths to keep sales people at a distance (with purchasing arms for example), and in short, sales people need to find and win more customers than they did 7 years ago.
As sales people we are often made responsible for a (tough) budget we haven’t set. We are always dealing with customers we can’t control. Unless we find the behaviours and thinking that are highly correlated with success, our sales role will be a potential source of significant negative stress.
In the Winning Sales Conversations Program, we focus on the mindset and behaviours that are highly correlated with sales success. In short, we help sales people engage in a series of value building conversations that aim for the best possible outcome in every interaction. By measuring and reinforcing the behaviours and thinking that lead to success, we help support sales people create a “positive tension” about the challenges they face. Consequently, this programme creates and supports a genuine optimissum within the participants.
What’s different about the Winning Sales Conversations Program?
“Winning Sales Conversations” teaches 2 important skills, rarely acknowledged in other sales programs:
- The skill of Active Listening ie
- the ability to listen to clients non verbal and verbal communication and
- to know how to skillfully handle discrepancies and mixed messages.
- The skill of demonstrating “Personal Authority” ie
- “Serving” customers, without being “subservient” to them
- Remaining assertive, even with difficult customers.
Apart from these differentiating skills, Winning Sales Conversations, also teaches sales people how to use questions to ‘drill down’ and to deliver:
- a deeper awareness of their customer’s issues,
- a stronger awareness of the customer’s priorities and values
- reliable feedback from customer’s as to their readiness for next steps
- tough, value adding “critical” questions in a way that enriches customer relationships, rather than causing customer suspicion
Winning Sales Conversations is based on sound psychological principles about what motivates people to make decisions. It gives sales people the mindset and behaviours (both emotional and rational), that are required to successfully facilitate customer’s buying decisions in a respectful, rewarding manner.
