Perhaps you've just started up in business, or got a new salesperson on your team who needs to learn the ropes.  Whatever it is, this article is a great reminder to keep things simple if you want to make the sale.

I am not a good golfer, but I definitely play better when I try not to think about the many, many interdependent parts of a golf swing, and the hundreds of tips and techniques I have learned and read over the years.

Top sales people ask top questions

1. keeping my head down, and
2. not swinging so hard

– then many other good things occur naturally in my swing, such as proper rotation, weight shift, follow through, and so on.

Similarly, there is a long list of techniques and devices said to contribute to the most successful sales meetings, especially when it is a first meeting.  We’ve all been hearing about them for years.  And like in golf, far too many to keep top of mind in the heat of the moment.

So, as you head into a first meeting with a new prospect, rather than stuff your head with a hundred goals, and tensing up, remember just these three things.  Doing so will unleash other sales best practices naturally, and produce a much better, naturally flowing meeting.

Three Things to Remind Yourself as You Walk into a Sales Meeting

1. This is about them, and what they wish to accomplish; not your product or service. Resist urges and requests to “pitch.”
2. Build relationships by listening for individual goals of the people and generously offering your help any way possible, whether related to this project or not (referrals, content, etc.)
3. Interview your customer for information critical to the sale, rather than the other way around:
   - What are the desired results of the project, or how they would define success?
   - What is the decision-making process and who are the key people?
   - What is being talked about around the board room table?

[Lee says: the first point is the key - this is all about the customer.  You must really spend time to figure out what they want before you start telling them how wonderful your services/products are. ]

You may come up with one of your own reminders to add/edit to this list, which is perfectly fine if it works. Keep them on an index card in your briefcase, and glance over them a few times as you wait in the lobby, or as you ride up the elevator.

Meetings that are oriented to these principles are far more successful because:

• The customer has ample time to share relevant information in detail.
• Obstacles to the sale are revealed to you.
• You instill in your customer that your company is a trustworthy partner rather than simply a vendor.
• You can understand the business context and can focus your solution and messaging on business benefits and the client’s desired results.

You can see more of Steve's writing at his Boston business coach blog.

People don't buy the features of your product – they buy the advantage or benefit for themself.

I have always had a soft spot for James Dyson and his vacuum cleaner products, because he came from nowhere to own over 50% of the vacuum cleaner market.  He took on the big brands and won.  That's a small business hero!

Demonstration of Features and Benefits from Dyson…

Check out this advert from Dyson to see how he shows off just one important feature and ties it immediately to a benefit…

Notice what gets said in the voiceover as they explain why this is a better handheld vacuum…

Feature – the Dyson handheld uses a special digital motor with Neodymium magnets

Advantage – the motor spins up to 5 times faster than a Formula 1 engine (I presume they chose this to make it sound sporty and fast).

Benefit – "It's why Dyson handhelds can deliver up to twice the suction of others in use".  Along with the footage of picking up crumbs from a car seat, it's a great advert because it explains why the product is better.

When you sell your products and services, do you take the time to explain the features, advantages and benefits?

If you don't, this is a great way to improve your sales performance and it's so very simple to put into practice.

The unspoken message is that it's better than the competition, or the one you already have.

To use this in your own business, start with the feature or fact about your service, then explain how that's better than the competition and finally tell the customer how it delivers something that they need.

The Benefit Is Crucial – Focus on Your Customer…

So many sales people talk endlessly about how wonderful their service is without taking the time to explain why it's great to their customer.

It makes the customer feel left out because you're talking about yourself.

Switch to benefits and immediately you are relating to the customer's situation – they'll love you for it.

When you use features and benefits, it will make your presentation a thousand times stronger than your competition and help you clinch the sale.

I don't know about you, but with things being tighter at the moment, I have increased my marketing rather than cut it.  I've also paid a lot of attention to doing more of what works, and ruthlessly eliminated things that don't.

So what gives?  I think when people get scared by the press they start to suffer recession depression and just give up.  If you don't measure your results from marketing it's impossible to know how well it performs.

I'll bet the companies cutting back on telemarketers haven't figured out how to select, train and manage their telemarketers to get consistent, quality results for them.

I was amazed by this conversation – people actually cutting back their opportunities to make sales and new connections.  How much opportunity does that leave for their competitors?

Meanwhile a client told me he'd stopped his BNI* membership because it was so expensive.  A few months later he went through his customer base and realised that most of them came from BNI.

Please don't stop the marketing that's working for you – put in place simple measurements so you can see what works.  But don't stop marketing, whatever you do.

That would be like deciding that you won't water your vegetables during a drought – it's a decision that will starve your company to death.
 

*BNI stands for Business Networking International – a weekly meeting for the member businesses to share referrals and do business with each other.  A very effective marketing method for small businesses, in my experience.  Look them up – you'll find there's a chapter near you somewhere.

• £2,000/month basic salary (including employer's NI and other costs)
• £1,000/month overhead costs (fair share of office, admin etc)
• £1,000/month for lead generation.  That's the telemarketing, advertising & other associated costs for getting enquiries that the salesperson takes on.

Writing a business letter the old fashioned way, we might start something like…

Dear Mr Bracket,

Herewith please find enclosed the items as requested in your call of 15th September 2008.  Notwithstanding the twaddle in this letter, I would be delighted to introduce ourselves to your company at your earliest convenience.  To take advantage of blah blah blah…

Yours Sincerely,

Mr D.Dull

It's not easy to read and it's certainly not going to win you any favours for being friendly to customers.  So when you're writing to customers, take the time to use their language so that you don't build a barrier of strange words between you.

In the last week I've been working with a couple of clients on their sales copy.  One of these is a letter that sells a service to lawyers, another is selling a software product to IT people and the third is for a restaurant's advert in a local paper. 

The language in each of these is very different to appeal to three very different groups of potential customers.   No school teacher is going to mark it, so don't worry about using abbreviations or phrases your teacher told you to avoid.  Just make sure it's a language that your audience will understand. 

One of the most successful direct mail letters I've written got a phenomenal response – so good that most people shake their heads and say it's not possible (10% response to a cold list).  It was to a very specific audience and took around two days in total to write, over about 6 weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with my client. 

It looks horrible because it uses technical manufacturing and engineering language that most of us have never seen before.  Yet it generated £15,000 per month of orders because it speaks in the language of the customer.

Right, it's time for your business coach to take his next lesson in "How To Speak Geek" – handy for talking to my teenage son…

How To Speak Geek

They talk and talk about what their product does without spending enough time to ask you what you want.

And so you drift off and start thinking about other things.

At the end, you decide if you want to buy based on your feelings about the product, not because of what you've learnt from them.

On behalf of poor customers everywhere that face this kind of awful selling every day, I'd like to say…

SHUT UP!

That's better, just be quiet.  I even tell salesmen this directly – then tell them what I really want, if they'll listen.  If they don't, I walk away and buy elsewhere.

Please join me in this – I want people to respect and love salespeople for doing a great job.  Let's get rid of the pushy Arthur Daleys and Delboy Trotters by not buying off them anymore.

Now as you sit there smiling about this, have you started wondering what YOU are like in front of customers?

If you want to improve, make sure you start every meaningful sales conversation by finding out precisely what your customer wants, before you utter any opinions, advice or thoughts.  They really don't care what you know until they know that you're interested in helping them. 

Spend the time to really listen, carefully.  Make notes and highlight to yourself the top 3 things your client wants, so that you can make sure your solution matches these needs when you offer them.  Don't jump in too soon and start talking – make sure you really understand first.

Now, I'm a naturally chatty guy and I know that over the years I've talked myself out of some sales.  It makes me cringe to think of those lost sales now.

So please work hard to shut up instead of talking.  Because when you listen, you find out what they really want.  And when you know what they really want, it's so much easier to give it to them and make you and them happy.

While teaching people to sell on the phone, it's probably even more important.  One client put stickers all around his monitor with the letters STFU written on them, to remind him to listen carefully.

You could do worse than take a leaf out of his book 

Here's a free sales training programme in 4 easy steps.  Read it and then figure out how apply this in your business.

First, let's start with the idea that what you have to offer, your product or service, is something that people would genuinely want.  If you don't believe it is, pack up and go home!  Successful selling, with integrity, starts with believing in your own products.

How To Sell Step 1 – Build Rapport…

Before somebody will buy from you, they need to feel like you care.  Spend a little time chatting with them and showing you're human before you get into the sales talk proper. 

There's a saying that people buy from people like them.  So to build rapport, make sure your body language mirrors theirs, don't sit with your arms folded if they are open. 

If they're quiet and softly spoken, don't keep talking at volume 10 – turn it down a little, so that you "tune yourself" to their wavelength a bit.

How To Sell Step 2 – Learn What They Want…

Selling is all about filling a need or solving a problem.  If you don't know what they need, how can you possibly help them find it? 

Spend time to ask them questions and dig into their reasons for wanting it.  Put yourself in their shoes by spending enough time to figure out what they want. 

You should talk for 50% of the time or less – maximum!  If you are talking, you have no idea what they want, because, and I know this to be true, you can't read their minds, even if you think you can! 

You need to shut up, because if they're talking, you can listen and find out what they really want. 

The key is patience – don't rush to close the deal – investing time to understand their needs will reap bigger and better sales, stronger clients relationships and more referrals.

How To Sell Step 3 -  Present Your Solution…

Now you've taken the time to listen carefully to what they need, present your services or products in a way that demonstrates how they solve your client's problem or needs.

Just be careful that, since I'm sure you love your services and products, that you don't become over-enthusiastic and get caught up in the technical details of your product.  Make sure you talk in terms of meeting your customer's needs, not just waffling on about how great your service is.

How To Sell Step 4 – Ask For The Sale!

This is really obvious.  It's also the stage that many people in sales avoid doing!  But the payoff comes here so you must master it.

So rather than having to say, "do you want it?", find some alternatives that suit you and your products/services.

You could ask, "how would you prefer to pay?" or  "which colour would you like, the black or the red?", etc. 

When you give your clients a choice, they feel in control and not sold to.  You also don't get to feel so uncomfortable with asking for the sale.

Further Learning

One of my personal favourites on selling is Brian Tracy's Advanced Selling Strategies.  Although he's American, he offers well-written and tested approaches to sales and is highly regarded as a business author.  I got his 6 CD set, "The Psychology of Selling", from Ebay a few years ago and it really made a difference to my sales.

On the other hand, if you prefer a short read, several of my clients rave about The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino.  It's told in the form of a story and  teaches the practice of positive affirmations as a way to maintain a positive attitude and focus on your sales.

Sales Coaching

And that's all there is to it.  Of course there is a lot more depth to this than I can cover in a blog posting, but this basic outline is the crux of successful selling.  If you do these 4 steps consistently in every sales meeting, with confidence, you will make more sales.

You will also make more long-term customers who know that you take the time to care about them.

If you'd like to learn more about selling, get in touch via my contact form and ask about my personalised sales training, covering each of these 4 steps in much more depth and giving you the chance to practice and learn how to boost your sales.

The result?  A broken nose for me and you would survive the ordeal comfortably enough.

So when you hear people talking of "economic slowdown" or "recession", how hard will you fight to keep your head above water? 

Leave the recession talk to the experts in the city, with their fat bonuses and completely surreal view of business.  They are looking at the great unwashed, not the street-smart entrepreneur that reads this blog.  Wish I could stick their heads in a bucket of water… 

I Am Feeling Terribly Vexed…

It really irritates me to hear people whining about the economy.  It's complete bunkum that there is no business "out there".  The difference now is that you might have to look a bit more carefully for it, then work a bit smarter to make sure you get it, rather than your customers going to the business next door.

A friend told me a story recently about a truck salesman in America.  You know the big pick-up trucks? 

Despite the "economic slowdown" in the USA in the wake of the sub-prime crisis, this guy was selling at record levels and got noticed by the manufacturer's big boys in Detroit.  Impressed with his sales, they headed out to see how he was doing it…

Once they arrived and spoke to him about how brilliant his achievement was in a recession, his head fell and so did his sales.  From around 40 trucks a month to just a trickle.  The only difference?  This poor guy didn't watch the news and had no idea that the experts had been talking the US economy into a recession.  Once he believed there there was a recession, he found it far harder to sell.

So what can you learn from this tale of pickup trucks and buckets of water?

Business Growth & Sales Are 80% Head Game, 20% Knowledge…

Your bucket is either half-full or half-empty.  Keep your head up. 

Do what your competitors don't, smile at customers and treat them well, get smarter with your marketing and your sales can stay at their picked-up levels throughout any "market downturn" and you can keep growing.  (Sorry for the pickup pun if you're groaning)

Take this to heart or your friendly local business coach might just come round with a bucket full of water to wake you up again!

Look at the money side of this – would you prefer to have £50K profit from £1M turnover or £200K profit from £250K turnover?

Obviously it feeds the ego more to say "I run a £1m business", but it feeds the family more if you take £200K profits!

I hope that now you don't just want to increase turnover!

Here are 5 great methods to dramatically increase your turnover AND profits…

1. Make more with every sale you make – there are lots of ways to do this, but offering some value-add services or extras will encourage people to buy more.

2. Increase your price to reflect the quality of your service.  If you charge less than your competitors but give a better service, you're too cheap.

3. Create a referral system to generate more new business from your existing customers.

4. Make a list of your services to give your customers – that way they'll know about all of your services – they can't buy it if they don't know you do it.

5. Improve your sales process and/or get some sales training.  More sales from the same enquiries = more profits.

You will be amazed just how much you can increase your turnover and grow your profits with these ideas – but only if you take action on them.

Companies I've worked with use these methods among others to grow by between 30%-300% every year

Turn over a new leaf and try something new.  It's exciting to do something different in your business – let the excitement grip you, try it out.

If you've found this post useful, you may also want to read How To Increase Profit.

So what caused the change?  Who knows, perhaps a bit of peer pressure or maybe just curiosity.  Whatever it was, he now gets to enjoy something that he has missed out on for years.

You're probably wondering exactly what this has to do with business.  Well, I realised that a friend of mine has exactly the same sort of thinking about Google Adwords advertising.  Adwords are the "Sponsored Listings" you see at the top and right of the search results pages.  He says that "nobody ever clicks on the sponsored listings, so they can't be any good".  This guy runs a business with profitable sales of £2-£3M per annum and has a talent for business.  I was amazed that he could think like this!

Just in case you think the same, Google made $1.3 BILLION in the first quarter of this year from paid advertising, the majority of which comes from Adwords.  When I saw that figure, I was not surprised – it is one of the fastest and most effective ways to target customers who are searching for a specific service or product.  And, whereas you pay for the space for newspaper advertising, you only pay Google when somebody clicks on your advert, so you're only paying for people with some level of interest in your product.

So, my friend's comment that "nobody ever clicks on them" is clearly hogwash.  I have several clients who use them extensively to generate a large proportion of their leads and it's something I'd be happy to talk to you about if you want to generate more leads.

So do you have a hunch about something that is holding you back from making more sales…

Oh, my final question for you – how can I get my son (and daughter) to try berries – strawberries, raspberries, the lot!  Neither of them will go anywhere near even though we have them regularly.