This blog is filled with practical ideas and tips on personal development for individuals and business professionals. I am a master teacher and global traveler. I share my ideas daily to help others improve their lives.
As you know success with “GOLD PHONE CALLING”, is a numbers game. When you apply the “RULE of FIVE”, where you make another “5 calls” every time you feel like you have made enough calls, you get to push yourself, so that you increase the number of calls you make.
Wednesdays and Thursdays are the two best days of the week to make telephone calls to customers.
Please follow the link below to watch a video
When you include more than one participant, who is there to add some value, in your sales meetings, with future customers. The chance of closing the sale improves by an astonishing 264 %
Encountering customers, who object to the price you charge for your product or service, is as old as time itself. I want to add at the outset that, if you are encountering this objection at the end of every sales meeting, then you have made a one or all of the fundamental errors listed below:
Error no 1: You may not have invested sufficient time to properly qualify your prospect. Are you in front of the perfect future customer, who needs exactly what you have to sell?
Error no 2: you may not have asked sufficient discovery questions. When you have not asked sufficient open ended or open-up questions, your future customers, has not had the opportunity to explain their needs properly.
Error no 3: You may not have understood how to communicate your value to you future customer in terms that they understand. The reason for this may either be that you do not completely understand your own value proposition or you have not listened to your customer explain their real needs and expectations.
In the sales tip today, I am sharing a powerful Sales Tip which will support you to understand how to leverage the most from each sales encounter.
Speak less and Listen more
I have asked thousands of sales professionals this question over the past 12 years.
How much time should you speak during a sales meeting and how much time should your customer speak, as a percentage?
The answers I receive are as high as 80% the customer and 20% the sales person.
I then follow this question up with a second question.
Explore your last ten sales meetings with prospects. How much time did you speak and how much time did your customer speak?
The answers here are very different. In most cases the sales people speak far more than their customers do.
To get a definitive answer to this question, we have conducted research to try to answer this question, with meaningful quantitative numbers.
Our Research
Over the past two years, we have analysed the sales conversations of the top and bottom performers in 22 different organisations, to try to see what the optimal amount of time a sales professional should talk during sales encounters.
When conducting the research, we assumed that the top sales performers were operating optimally and as such we used the amount of time they spoke as the optimum. Conversely, we assumed that the bottom performers were not operating optimally and used the amount of time they spoke as the worst-case scenario.
RESULTS
The results were not at the high end of 80% listening and 20% speaking, as proposed by most sales people during training sessions, but in the case of the top sales performers, they always listened more than they spoke.
THE ACTUAL RESULTS
Sales Person Spoke
Customer Spoke
76%
Bottom Performers
24%
69%
Middle Performers
31%
42%
Top Performers
58%
As you can see from the research above, the top performers spoke about 40 % of the time and the customers spoke about 60 % of the time.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Please follow the link, below to watch the video on YouTube:
I would love to hear your feedback, on how these sales tips arte helping you, after lockdown
There are a number of subtle mistakes that salespeople make, which scuttle their sales efforts. The first of these is the tendency for them, to give up on a prospect (Future Customer) too soon.
Giving up on an account too soon
Extensive research, which was conducted by the National Dry Goods Association of America, found the following:
The chances of closing a sale on the first sales call with purpose, is a measly 2 %
Things only improve marginally, on the second interaction with purpose and increase to 5%
By the third sales interaction with purpose, the chance of closing a sale, is still only a measly 8%
Even by the fourth time you have connected with a prospect, with purpose, your chances of closing the sale, have only increased to 19%
The astounding result, which came from this research was that on the fifth time, a sales professional connects with a prospect, with purpose, the chances of closing a sale, goes from 19% to 81%.
This research shows that “PATIENCE and PERSISTENCE” are the cornerstones of sales success.
If you truly want to be successful, you need to remain focused on showing your future customer that both you and your product and/or service, will indeed offer the positive “TRANSFORMATION” they desire
When you do this methodically and you do not give up too soon, you dramatically increase the chances ofclosing sales.
In other words, you need to have at minimum five (5) powerful reasons or purposes to visit each future customer.