Sell like a Pre-Schooler

Pre-schoolers never stop asking until they get what they need but unfortunately, most people tend to lose that ability to ask for what they need as they grow up and subsequently conform to external pressures from parents, teachers, early employers, social peers, and the general community in which they live.

As a business owner, the loss of this skill, to ask for what you need from those who control what you require, can have a highly detrimental effect on your businesses’ ability to increase its sales revenue.

Your business will therefore reap the benefits if you relearn the ability to ask for what you need in order to grow your business. So how do you start relearning what you once did intuitively as a pre-schooler?

Until you ask someone specifically to take an action, exchange something for something else, or subscribe to a different point of view, you might be selling hard, but you are not gaining any real ground. Therefore, if you have lost the ability to ask for specific outcomes that help you to advance your own agenda, you need to reprogram your brain back to that of a pre-schooler.

In a nutshell, you need to practice, and practice again, the art of asking for the outrageous, until you can do it without cracking up, flinching, sweating, or shaking uncontrollably, and can do it with utter conviction.

Try practicing to ask a prospect to pay $50,000.00 for the privilege of buying a clapped out second hand car, until you can do it in the expectation that you might just be able to pull it off one day.

When you can do this, you are ready to effectively ask for the small things you need your prospects to do in order for you to help them, and at the same time significantly increase the number of sales you make for your business, in any given time frame.

It may surprise you, but most people are happy to give you what you need if you ask in the right way at the right moment. Unfortunately, business owners struggling with making sufficient sales tend to telegraph that they are squeamish about asking for what they need, and as a consequence, their prospects feel the same way about giving and the sales never get booked.

Once you have determined exactly what it is that you and your business need your prospects to do for you, and you have a compelling reason (the future of your business) to ask for what you need, you should then be able to successfully apply what you have relearned, and you should then be rewarded by seeing a significant increase in your sales revenue.

When was the last time you really asked for exactly what you needed from your sales prospects?

A better question perhaps is, when was the last time you asked yourself what you want?

What will you now do differently?

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Learn to Sell with Your Ears

One of the key roles of a business owner is to be the chief salesperson for the business itself, and in many instances this role also includes being the chief salesperson to the largest and most important customers.

Some business owners are very competent in one or both of these sales roles, but for many who do not have sales or marketing backgrounds, and even some who do, the necessity for them to perform these roles can often be quite challenging, and they often find that the efforts that they do put in, deliver less than optimal results.

Regardless of their backgrounds, all business owners can improve their sales performance if they remember the old adage “God gave you two ears and only one mouth, use them in that proportion, if you wish to be successful”.

When you are in front of a prospective customer or client for the first time, how much air time do you give to them? If the ration is not at least 70% of the time you spend with them, you are more than likely talking yourself out of a lot of new business.

How often do you interrupt your prospective customer or client during an average first interaction? Any interruption is a bad mistake. Apart from being seen as rude behaviour, the chances are high that you will not discover a key piece of information, which could help you win the business.

If a prospective customer or client says something you disagree with strongly, are you able to hold off countering with an argument before they have fully expressed their views? If you can't, you will establish the climate for multiple objections to your offering, as well as perhaps missing a hot button or two that you could later push to win the business.

Do you constantly intersperse your presentations with personal stories? Whilst personalising your presentation and building rapport in the initial phase of the first meeting is good form, constant story telling throughout a presentation wastes time, and can easily divert the dialogue away from the business at hand.

Are you a great finisher of other people's sentences? If you are, you will frustrate your prospective customer or client who will see you as a rude, unlikeable person with whom they will not want to do business on a long term basis. You will also be more often wrong than right in your assumptions, as to what they were about to say.

Do you clearly convey to your prospective customer or client your impatience for them to finish speaking so that you can make your point? This is a deadly habit as your prospect knows you are not listening to anything they are saying to you while you are rehearsing in your mind your response to what they said at an earlier point in their dialogue.

Whilst not regularly acknowledged, your eyes are also a tool to enhance communication and you need to be careful that yours don’t bore into your prospective customer or clients eyes like laser beams on full and continuous power. It is easy to overdo eye contact, and this will create tension in the person being subjected to such scrutiny, and this tension will usually block effective communication.

If you improve your listening skills in each of the above areas you will remove a significant barrier between yourself and your potential customers or clients thereby allowing you to more easily establish constructive relationships, which in turn will lead to far more successful business outcomes.

How many of these common listening mistakes are you currently making by force of habit?

When did you last do any training to improve your listening skills?

If you were to remove these listening mistakes completely from your sales presentations, what effect would that have on your closing ratios for new business, and what would this mean in terms of additional revenue for your business?

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Don’t Blow it Next Time

As a business owner, you will most likely have walked away from at least one past business meeting or presentation with a sinking feeling in your stomach, usually providing you with very clear evidence that you had blown the opportunity, to get the business you were pursuing.

It is also likely, that whilst you suspected that you knew where you may have gone wrong, you were never quite sure whether it was a single factor, or a combination of many factors, that led to the less than desirable outcome.

The reality is that there are many key factors that a potential customer or client may take into consideration during their decision making process, and even if you present a compelling case, you do not have to go wrong on very many of these key factors, to effectively blow your hard won opportunity.

Your audience expect, and want a lot, from the person making the presentation to them, and the key factors they will take into account in exercising their judgement include;

• Are you a user of the specific the product or service you are pitching
• Are you displaying any signs of deception or game playing with them
• Are you wasting time their time by straying from the relevant factual information
• Do you share stories of other people using the product / service you offer
• Is your product/service a good deal with clear value at the lowest price possible
• Are you listening to them far more than you talk yourself
• Can you establish the market competitiveness of your pricing policy
• Do you remain positive and upbeat with no hint of negativity of any kind
• Do you convey and maintain sincerity along with showing a strong smiling face
• Do you refrain from inferring that bad decisions may have been made previously
• Are you demonstrating that you really like them as individuals and as a group
• Can you establish confidence that they will definitely get what they pay for
• Will you assist them to actually make and justify the purchase decision
• Are you able to show them exactly how you will support them after they buy
• Are you likely to pressure or harass them to make early decisions
• Did you treat them as adult decision makers
• Did you make them feel as they are special and important to your business
• Were you able to provide clear proof and valid evidence of all claims you made

The real secret to not blowing it in future, is to do whatever you have to do in terms of preparing for, delivering, and closing your pitch, with the utmost care, thereby ensuring that the potential customer or client ticks off on the vast majority, if not all, of these key factors, as your presentation progresses and concludes.

Think back to your last pitch for a piece of significant business where you feel that you really blew it, and you will most likely find that even from your own viewpoint you will be able to highlight one or two of the key factors, where you probably failed in the eyes of the prospect(s).

For your next important pitch for business, use this list of key factors as a checklist to help you prepare for both the presentation itself, and for carefully tailoring the content, to ensure you get as many ticks as possible from the potential customer / client.

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8 Tips to Prevent Negative First Impressions

It is unfortunate, but nothing conveys nervousness or a lack of confidence more than negative body language, and given that we live in a very visual society, you will generally be judged on your body language alone, usually well before you have even had the chance to open your mouth.

As a business owner, you fortunately get to choose whether you are going to be your own best visual aid. The eight tips below can be used as a guide to assist you to demonstrate the body language required to create that critical positive first impression in all of your business interactions.

1) Be properly prepared for the particular activity in which you are to engage.
2) Ensure your posture is erect and conveys alertness.
3) Make a relaxed and confident approach towards those you will be engaging.
4) Make eye contact before you begin to speak.
5) Dress comfortably and appropriately to the environment you are entering.
6) Be conscious of what your hands are doing, or not doing.
7) Smile often.
8) If you wear glasses don't hide behind them, or use them as a crutch.

You also need to understand, that your gestures and mannerisms can help you achieve strong rapport and create a climate of trust, but if your gestures are not aligned to your message or your mannerisms annoy, they can also make people uncomfortable, or even antagonistic, towards you.

It is wise, if you do not already know, to learn quickly what mannerisms and gestures are used by people to convey defensiveness, reflection, suspicion, openness and co-operation, insecurity, and nervousness and ensure that you train yourself to recognise these, and use as appropriate to the situation you find yourself in.

If you can support a strong verbal message with positive and powerful body language, you will appear to your customers/clients as confident, creditable, and caring and in control; the end result of which will undoubtedly be, an increase in business for your enterprise.

Are you conscious of the message your body language conveys to others before you engage with them?

How well do you read the body language of others?

Have you ever filmed yourself doing presentations or conducting business meetings?

Core Skills required for Revenue Generation

As a business owner, and whether you like it or not, you are in the business of selling.

It is therefore important, that you have a clear and complete understanding of the core competencies required of any person responsible for revenue generation in your business, including yourself.

It goes without saying that understanding alone is not enough, you also need to ensure your own and your employee's skills, are developed to the level necessary for sales success, and then you need to diligently apply those skills, and sure others are applying them as diligently as yourself.

The key skills required in any sales role are; presentation skills, influencing skills, negotiation skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, marketing skills, personal management skills and critically in this day and age, information technology skills.

If your sales are not at the level where they need to be, a good solution is to firstly put in place structured plans for yourself and key employees to become more competent in every one of these skills, with a priority being placed on the skill sets that are most lacking, in those engaged in selling for your business.

These skills alone will not necessarily guarantee success in revenue generation, as a clear understanding of the key attributes that the individuals concerned also need to possess, and their ability to persistently apply these attributes, is the second part of the solution.

These key attributes include; the need and the will to succeed, ability to think and act quickly, ability to focus on goals, a strong belief in the products and services offered, high energy levels, high self esteem, the ability to act independently, an optimistic outlook on life, the ability to see the bigger picture, a willingness to accept responsibility for personal outcomes, and an ability to empathise with others.

As you can see, a revenue generating role is not for the untrained or marginally competent; selling is actually a profession, and a professional approach is needed by anyone who has a responsibility for revenue generation.

You must also remember that a poorly trained and far from competent salesperson, can do more damage to your business in a short time, than almost any other role not performed to its optimal level, in your business.

Unless you develop your own and your employees sales skills to an optimum level, revenue generation will always be harder for your business than it needs to be, and in tough times your cash flow may be severely challenged.

How do you and your key employees measure up in terms of sales skills and personal attributes that support effective revenue generation?

Do all relevant personnel have personal development plans specifically tailored to improve the level of revenue generation in your business?

Have you led by example in demonstrating your own commitment to upgrading your selling skills?

Have you allowed adequate funds in your budget to support the development of all of the necessary skills in your employees?

Do you ensure that you select the right people with the necessary attributes to succeeed in sales, to participate in your sales training programs, and eventually in revenue generating activities for your business?

If you answer all of these questions truthfully, and reflect on what the answers mean for your future revenue, it may pave the way for you to make the changes you possibly need to make, to give your business a good shot in the arm.