There, in your field of action, which is the market in which you operate, your potential buyers are waiting for the valuable you offer. But how are you prepared and willing to discover them and turn them into your customers?
What is described here is totally valid for any independent or dependent salesperson, entrepreneurs, as well as for any supervisor, manager, executive or owner who generates his results through his collaborators.
The article aims to describe the main aspects you need to design your way to sales success, after reading it and sincerely reflecting on your management. Only in this way will you be able to visualize and discover which are the topics of your management that you must strengthen so that you find your true path towards the success that you wish to achieve.
Let's start by accepting that generating sales results in quantity and with current and potential customer satisfaction is the result of a series of successes in the activity you carry out.
Likewise, we must accept that the successes in sales are not the product of chance but of causality, that is to say that they are always the "cause and effect" result of the management carried out.
Here we should not look for scapegoats for our mistakes but we should dive into our actions to see what we are doing correctly and correct or improve what is not giving us results.
Let's assume that sales are always measured in terms of results, that is to say that in each case what really counts is whether "we sold or did not sell", and if it did not happen, analyze why it did not happen based on what was done. The recessionary economy, inflation, competition, bad education of our clients, etc., are only variables of the environment in which we operate and where we probably cannot modify it. However, we can sharpen our intelligence to discover new ways to achieve the desired result, despite the drawbacks.
Another aspect to always keep in mind refers to the fact that "all sales are always made between people", regardless of the size of the organizations that these individuals represent. In this way, the link has 85% of the positive emotions that we generate in our interviews and where the key aspect here is in the management strengths that the seller has to lead them to analyze their needs or problems so that they visualize how they are satisfied. or they resolve with the products or services that are commercialized.
For this reason, the seller must be efficiently prepared to:
1. Develop, increase and manage in an orderly and permanent manner a portfolio of qualified opportunities (potential buyers or prospects) that allows you to develop highly productive "face-to-face" sales management. This implies: having the profile of potential clients described, knowing where and how to contact them to qualify their true potential and registering all the information in a file. This activity is called "prospecting" and can be implemented for each company, its products or services, as well as the sales modality that applies.
2. Being an expert in each of their products or services, which means knowing them in such a way that they can adapt and argue them "according to" what each of their interviewees needs or is concerned about. This knowledge must be complemented with all the products or services that compete in its field of action, otherwise it will not be able to respond to objections and, therefore, it will lose many sales opportunities.
3. Master and apply Professional Sales Techniques to achieve high effectiveness in: accessing potential buyers and clients; the analysis of the needs or problems that each of them has related to what they sell; argue efficiently and "tailored" to the needs or problems to achieve understanding and visualization of the benefits you will get from buying; respond effectively to the objections that will be presented to you in each interview, as well as take advantage of the purchase signals that your interviewees will express; and know how to successfully close each trade.
4. Execute an effective management methodology. Every business or activity, according to its products or services and its potential buyers, must have an effective management methodology that describes the most direct way to go with success to achieve its sales results. When it doesn't exist, each vendor needs to experiment with different paths to discovering it, wasting valuable time that will hardly be recovered in terms of results.
5. Planning. Every day a seller is worth a lot of money in terms of the potential results to be obtained. However, the individual management of many vendors tends to let circumstances direct them rather than take charge of their business. If you have your file organized and updated, you should plan your days so that you can "go out and make it happen" instead of "go out and see what happens". Here it will be appreciated how you get more clients for your portfolio by selling them for the first time, you sell again to your satisfied clients and you generate high results every month as a product of your successful planning.
6. Constant updating and improvement. Every professional who wants to stay efficient and effective must be updated and perfected and in sales management is inexorable. In sales, you should keep informed of everything new that exists to be more efficient in your performance as well as be up to date with what happens to your competition. Likewise, you must correct your errors or deviations to make your daily actions more productive.
Conclusions
After describing strengths, the important thing here is to establish what you have as strengths for your management and what you need to complement, incorporate, improve or correct.
Like everything in life, nothing is free. And if what you want is really valuable, you know that you must define what you are willing to invest to achieve it. I mean both in terms of mental and physical effort, in time and also in money.
Indeed, your path to sales success can arise from continuous trials and errors, which will mean investing your time, energy consumption and, for this reason, generating lost opportunities along the way. However, you can choose the path of analysis and objective diagnosis of your management and invest specifically in the accessories that you truly require to begin to transit it, reaping in a short time the recovery of what is invested in such an important aspect of your activity.
© Copyright 2008, by Martín E. Heller
