Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Stop trying to Shout Louder than everyone else to ...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Stop trying to Shout Louder than everyone else to ...: The secret to sustainable sales success is not found by trying to shout louder than everyone else out there. The secret is to move away fr...

Stop trying to Shout Louder than everyone else to make the sale

The secret to sustainable sales success is not found by trying to shout louder than everyone else out there. The secret is to move away from the crowd and the noise and to begin the process of building connection with the right people, in the right place at the right time. This is a case of going back to basics and instead of trying to spray your message out into the world and sitting back and praying that someone will hear it and miraculously get to know like and trust what you have to offer. You must clearly define who your target clients are, find out where you can connect with them so that you can begin to build connection and trust with them.

These changing times, where we have so much going on around us all the time, has forced us to take a step back and to change the way we market our businesses. People have not changed, they still choose to buy from businesses they know, like and trust and can offer them the best opportunity to get maximum value. It is time to stop shouting a message that people don’t want to hear, in places where your prospective clients aren’t listening as this is totally ineffectual and just a waste of energy. Commit to begin the process of communicating, connecting and influencing the right people, so that they can easily see that what you have to offer is exactly what they need.

Connect with the right people

Once you have invested the time to identify the right clients, in the right markets and you have found out how to connect with them. You have built connection with them over time and now want to show them the value you offer, use the concept below as an effective way to guide them towards accepting your value proposition as an ideal fit for their needs or challenges.

Learning the art of effective persuasion and influence is best understood by revisiting some ancient wisdom that was given by Aristotle, many centuries ago. He suggested that there are three levels of persuasion, namely Logos, Pathos and Ethos.

Describing your Value Proposition

The first step in the process of influencing others to see the value you offer and that it is perfectly suited to meet their needs, is to appeal to them on a basic, logical level. This is a process in which you communicate a logical message to your prospective client showing them that your market offering is the most obvious choice. This is a process in which you are persuading people that what you have is exactly what they want and need.

This is best illustrated by an example:

Appealing to your prospects logic, is a process in which you ask them a few questions, in which you highlight your unique selling proposition and the incredible benefits your product has to offer. If you are attempting to persuade someone to use your services, as a time management consultant, then you would use the following questions to show them that, what you offer is the only logical solution to their current circumstances.

·         Do you agree that if you focused on improving your team’s effectiveness and discovered the right actions to take every day, so that they would stop spinning their wheels, you would significantly improve your results over the next twelve months?

·         Is it true that you arrive home from work every day exhausted, yet you feel that you have not accomplished much at all?

·         So you want better results, but you feel like you don’t have sufficient time, is that right.

·         So what if making this small investment will allow you to identify the exact actions that you need to take every day and then give you a set of tools and techniques, which would improve your efficiency so dramatically, that it would feel like you gained a couple of hours each day, Would you be interested? Would that give you a huge advantage over your competition? Would it help you to make far more money?

This method of persuading people that what you have to offer is exactly what they need is perfect, for communicating your message to people on a one to one basis or when speaking to small groups of people.

Persuade, but never manipulate

The challenge that we all face when attempting to influence people is that there is a very fine line between persuasion and manipulation. You can never build a successful business by manipulating people; they will eventually see right through you and will no longer trust anything that you have to say.

The way I define the difference between influence and manipulation is:

When someone is trying to manipulate someone, they have a negative intent and are selfishly looking at the interaction from their own selfish perspective only. This is a one sided transaction, where there is only one winner.

On the other hand when you influence someone the intent is always one of offering a mutually beneficial solution to satisfy a need. Persuasion always results in a mutually beneficial outcome, where both parties feel like they have received fair exchange. The best way to persuade someone, that what you have to offer is exactly what they need, is to always ask yourself these few questions

• ·         Why should this person want what I am offering?
• ·         What is in it for them?
• ·         Is it the best option for them, will this transaction be a fair exchange?

When you ensure that what you are attempting to persuade people to buy, is aligned with their needs and that there is always a fair exchange, where everyone wins, you have created the foundation for great success.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Sales Tips to help you Secure Long Lasting Sales R...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Sales Tips to help you Secure Long Lasting Sales R...: The first step towards developing long term relationships with people who you have qualified as perfect prospects for your product or serv...

Sales Tips to help you Secure Long Lasting Sales Relationships

The first step towards developing long term relationships with people who you have qualified as perfect prospects for your product or service, is to think long term. Do not try to make a sale, focusing on a single transaction. Take a long term view of the value proposition you offer and work to show the long term value you and your product and/or service bring to the table. When one of these prospects says they are satisfied, that does not mean that the satisfaction they feel is permanent. Their needs may change and once they fully understand your value proposition, they will see a good reason for switching to you.

Know your Value Proposition

The challenge that most sales people have at this point, is that they give up on their perfect prospect because they do not see how they can proceed. They do not completely understand their own value proposition and so cannot see how they can add real meaningful value to the prospect.

Action Idea: Explore your product and/or service and completely know and believe in the value it offers to your partners and prospects. Once you are clear and you believe in all the benefits you and your product or services offer. It is really simple to show your prospect how they will better satisfy a need or eliminate a challenge if they utilise you as a supplier.

Research and Qualify Prospects

Remember that I am referring to qualified prospects here. These are people within the perfect businesses, who need exactly what you have on offer. You are certain what you have to offer will serve them as well or better than their current supplier.

Action Idea: As you are absolutely clear on the value you and your product and/or service offers, you can carefully research your markets and identify your perfect target business and the individual within that business to approach with your value proposition.  

Develop a Long Term, Mutually Beneficial Relationships

Approach your prospects in a non-threatening way, with a real mind-set of “How Can I Help You” and try to develop rapport with them. Your objective is to build a positive relationship with them, sale or no sale. Your prospect will very quickly see through you if you are inauthentic and are only there with your own self-interest to try to make a sale at all costs. When you show a genuine interest in helping them solve any challenges or better satisfy any need they may have, they will warm to you and want to build a mutually beneficial relationship with you.

Study and Completely Understand needs

Take a long term view when building the relationship and always put the prospects needs ahead of your own need to sell to them. Your objective must always be to find innovative ways to support and help them. Take your time whilst building rapport and a long term relationship with your new prospects. Ask a lot of non-threatening questions so that you can completely understand their needs and how your value proposition can best help them. The key during this phase is to establish a needs gap and then to utilise your extensive knowledge of your own value proposition to offer a solution, which will help them to eliminate a challenge or better satisfy a need.

Sell Yourself

 Remember that people buy from people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. Personal chemistry is important when building the relationship, where you are working to get the prospect to know like and trust you. The prospect will respond to your knowledge, enthusiasm, professionalism and caring, ethical approach and will want to do business with someone who displays all those attributes. You will be an asset to them and their business. Always have your prospects best interests at heart and show them that you are on their team, sale or no sale. Try to come up with new ideas for your prospects, even if they do not relate to your product or service. Show them that you really care. When you help people to get what they want, they will most certainly help you to get what you want.

Add Real Value

It is often difficult to differentiate your product or service if you are selling a commodity. This is when the differentiation must come from you as the sales professional and any other value add, such as service and performance guarantees, better delivery schedules, and superior customer service. Be innovative and find as many ways as possible to be better.

A perfect example of how you can differentiate yourself and utilise this to sell your products or services, is shown by the example I want to offer you. I conducted sales training for an office furniture company in Cape Town a few weeks ago. One of the sales professionals there was one of the most unassuming people you could ever meet.

He had spent eight years building mutually beneficial relationships with his perfect clients. He started with a new company and went to an exhibition to sell his new companies office furniture. He was alone in a 3 square metre booth with only a brochure. He sold four times more office furniture as his large competitor, who had a 66 square metre cubicle containing furniture. They had eight sales people in their stand. He made the sales based purely on who he was and the relationships he had built with his partners. .

Offer a No-Risk trail Order

Many prospective clients are loyal to their current suppliers. This is however not a major challenge if you can show the value you offer. Virtually every prospect will give you the opportunity to run a trial order with them. This must be a no-risk proposition, which can easily be facilitated, by offering a satisfaction guarantee. I offer any new client who works with me a 100 % money back guarantee, if they are not satisfied with my work in any way. This make them feel very comfortable to utilise my services to train their sales staff. It is crucial that you bend over backwards to ensure that the trial order makes a very positive impression.

Persistence wins the Day

There is no better sales skill than persistence. With all things being equal, the persistent sales person, who clearly understands their value proposition and believes completely in what they have to sell will win the account every time. The secret is to stay in contact with prospects, constantly think long term, always be consistent and become a valuable consultant and ally to them. Keep soughing positive seeds and you will eventually reap great rewards.

Author: Andrew Horton motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Basic Selling Techniques to turn you into a Sales ...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Basic Selling Techniques to turn you into a Sales ...: Plan your Day the Night Before To this day I always plan my day the night before. My head does not hit the pillow at night, before I h...

Basic Selling Techniques to turn you into a Sales Super Star

Plan your Day the Night Before

To this day I always plan my day the night before. My head does not hit the pillow at night, before I have arranged all my appointments for the next day. I chart every move I will make the next day, detailing who I plan to meet face to face, who I will call, who I will communicate with electronically.

My plan includes the reason for the contact, any pertinent detail from any previous meetings, which may serve me in the meeting the next day. I also include all the contact details I may need, telephone numbers, email addresses or a map and directions to visit each customer. I do not waste even a second the next day, during my productive selling time searching for any information I may need.

I do not start my engine before I know the exact route I plan to take. This route is carefully charted when I am planning my calls each day. I ensure that I arrange all my calls in one area each day. I never chase across town, unless it is an emergency.

Building Real Meaningful Connection with your new Partners

As you know there are always a number of people, who influence decisions within any sales relationship, but there is always one person whose job is ultimately on the line if they use your product and/or service and there is a royal mess-up. Your role as sales professionals is to ensure that the ultimate decision maker realises that you are in it for the long run and that you are an asset to their team.

I am a great believer in always asking for feedback from my clients. I believe that the quality of any sales relationship is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of meaningful questions that you ask and how you respond to the feedback you receive.

Many years ago I asked a client “From your perspective is my product and service working for you”? Her answer concerned me, when I first heard it as she said “You are not like any salesperson I have dealt with in the past”. I immediately felt I had let her down, until she said “I feel that your office is right next to mine that you are really interested in my business”. Since then I have always used that relationship as a benchmark and tried to build similar connection with all my partners. I try to help all my partners not only get the best solution for their needs, but I also like to help them to be successful in their careers

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Offer your Magnificent 50 clients real white glove treatment

It is impossible to focus all your attention on hundreds of clients at one time. Carefully select what I like to call my “magnificent 50” and focus your energy on only these clients. If you can build a loyal following of 50 regular clients, who regularly buy from you, that is obviously first prize. I realise that this is not always possible and that there are certain sales people, who make sales to clients and then need to be prospecting to new clients all the time as their clients only make purchases periodically. In this case your “magnificent 50” will be the clients you are finalising deals with and a list of qualified prospects you keep adding to the list as you complete each deal.

The secret to make this work for you is to really roll out the red carpet for only these select few clients. Really give them the white glove treatment in every possible way. This is where you need to innovate, be observant and research your “magnificent 50”. The more you can blow their socks off with real meaningful caring and always going the extra mile, the more they will grow to depend on you and see you as their indispensable ally.

Differentiate Yourself

It is often difficult to differentiate your product or service for that of your competitors. The easiest way to really make a difference and to stand out from the crowd is to differentiate yourself, as an asset to their business. Focus on your clients’ needs and build your value proposition around a solution set, which includes you as a valuable asset and consultant to your new partners businesses. Research and understand your partners businesses and provide them with really insightful solutions to their needs and challenges.

Learn to analyse the person responsible for making the final buying decision. Learn to read the person you are talking to and always try to put yourself in their shoes. When you can completely understand their real needs and their agenda, you are far better equipped to integrate into their business and become a true ally. Remember sales decisions are always made emotionally, by people, so the better you become at reading and understanding people the easier it will become to help them.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Designing your Power Plan for Peak Performance

Success always leaves clues. No one around you that has achieved great success has done so in a vacuum. The path they have travelled, to achieve the remarkable success they have achieved, is paved with their own personal recipe or brand for success. One of the easiest ways to invite similar levels of success into your own experience is to explore what they did and to uncover their recipe. This recipe can then form the foundation you use for building your own “success blue print” or strategic plan. If you fail to plan, you are most certainly planning to fail. Not having any plans at all is a plan too; it is just a very poor plan, where you are left to the whims of everyone and everything around you. You are left travelling through your life like a rudderless boat, with no real direction or purpose at all.

Achievers Always have a Plan

The one thing that stands out the most for me, about all the successful people I have admired and whose biographies I have read, is that each one of them had a plan behind their success. So even if you are unable to unlock the individual success recipe of someone you admire, to follow. Know that the path is far easier and requires far less effort, when you have a plan. It is impossible to create a plan until you know what you want to achieve with your life. Start right now by getting a vivid picture in your mind of exactly what you would like your life to look like in the future. Visualise what would be around you, what you would be doing, who would be in your life and what experiences would invite meaning and fulfilment into your experience.

Create your Plan for Success

Once you have a crystal clear picture in your mind of exactly what you want your future to be like. It is a good idea for you to create a plan for your success, one that will work well and will take you to the finish line powerfully and in style. I have written some ideas below to help you create your “Power Plan for Peak Performance”.

Build a Plan that Works for you

All people are different, some people need plenty of detail in their lives and they work best with a very detailed plan, which highlights every intricate detail. Other people are more freewheeling and work better within a plan, which offers only an outline or framework, within which they must work.

The first question to answer is “What is the right plan”? The right plan is one that suites you and your style. A plan that is unique to your circumstances, one that fits you and is right for you. Each of us is unique and driven and inspired by very different things. No one knows you better than you know yourself, create a plan that suites your personality, one that considers your strengths and weaknesses.

Build an Annual Plan

Explore your goals and the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Start the planning process by looking at the big picture. Divide your year into four equal segments of 90 days each. Break your goal or goals back into smaller bite size chunks or smaller projects. During each 90 day segment select a realistic number of projects to tackle and complete. The secret to success is avoiding overwhelm whilst still ensuring that you stretch yourself.

Break each 90 Day Segment back into a monthly plan

Now break these projects back even further into smaller achievable mini goals. These are goals that you will be able to tackle and complete within a month. Finally break these mini goals back into micro goals, which can be achieved within one week. Remember each micro goal must have a completion time during the week and must be measurable. In other words you must know when you will achieve it and be able to monitor your progress daily, until it is done. Whatever gets measured gets done.

Turns your plan into Individual Action Steps

Your plan must then be broken back to include individual daily actions, which you can put into your daily schedule and actually take action on hourly to complete. Review your progress daily and ensure that you are applying sufficient discipline to ensure that you are completing all the actions scheduled each day and more importantly are the actions you are taking delivering the desired results. Planning is important, but with ensuring that you are taking the right actions every day, they remain just words on a piece of paper. Assess your progress as often as possible to ensure that your actions are delivering the desired results. Plan, Do, Review and then if necessary Improve.

Meet your Future Every Day

Create time slots in your daily schedule that are devoted to work on the individual tasks highlighted in your plan. I call these time slots in my daily schedule “Meetings With My Future” Show commitment and perseverance every day and make sure that you meet your commitments to your future. Develop discipline and make completing those daily tasks your top priority. As you repeat this positive cycle over time you will move closer and closer to the future you desire and any dream becomes achievable.

Review your Day

It is always good practice to set time aside at the end of your day to reflect on how you did. Are you meeting your commitments to create the future you desire? This is an opportunity for you to go over everything you have done that day. Are the actions you are taking delivering the desired outcome? If not ask yourself what you can do differently the next day to get a better outcome.

What did you learn?

It is also an opportunity for you to re-examine everything you have learnt that day and lock all the valuable information away for use at a later date. Look back over your day and examine all the people you saw, who you talked to, what was said, what happened and how you felt. Each day is like a mosaic in the big picture of your life, carefully store each one, so that you can use it to create a wonderful picture of your past. This allows you to gain the maximum benefit from your past experiences and makes your past experiences even more valuable, so they can serve you in the future.

Make it Work for you

Ensure that you act on the plan that you have created. Simply commit to do it, work your plan every day. Your daily disciplined actions, over time, will add up to massive equity. Stay committed to take action every day and remain disciplined and focused. You have got so much to gain when you commit to apply these few really simple principles in your life.

Author: Andrew Horton Sales Motivational Speakers South Africa

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za