An accomplished medical researcher told me about a presentation she had recently made. “I gave too much background and had to rush when explaining the clinical implications.” “Who was the audience?” I asked. The answer: “A group of clinicians.” If this doctor was trying to “sell” her conclusions to her audience, she failed.
How could anything be any simpler! A nice card thanking someone.
Why don’t we all do it? Mostly because we don’t have a system or because it works so well we don’t do it anymore. I send them and it has generated more good will and annuity sales than ever imagined. Plus it is easy and cheap to do. Here are some tips for you”
• Always make it handwritten and in card form
• Never use a postage machine, always a stamp
• Put the stamp on slightly crooked, just a little
Would you find it easier to get a sale if you could read your customer’s mind?
Assuming you said yes, here’s how to do it. Ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers, your customer will tell you everything you want to know. Easy, eh?
Well it sounds easy, but it takes self-discipline to do it right. Let’s start with the questions to ask.
The first type is what are known as ‘open’ questions, meaning that they usually produce informative answers of some length - as opposed to ‘closed’ questions which do the opposite.
Selling has been around as long as the human race. Selling has evolved and changed rapidly over the years and has reached a unique point, forcing sales professionals to adapt and change their approach to selling in order to stay ahead of the competition and meet the expectations of their customers.
Across all industries, one of the major issues professional salespeople struggle with is proper time management. All too often, at the end of the day the professional salesperson can look back and feel as if they accomplished nothing of value. We evaluate three key tips to improving time efficiency and your mastery of time management.
Tip #1 Have your day planned out before you start.
It’s very easy to start generating a lot of leads because it’s a very scientific process. Most marketing guru’s say run this ad or make this type of offer and you’ll have an explosion of people responding and those leads will show up in your inbox.
Nothing that you’ve done has made them come there, it’s all been very scientific, you’ve run a very specific direct response ad and people are responding to an offer that you’ve made, and that is where the lead conversion process starts. Now you have to do something, and your mindset is really going to make a big difference at this point.
Sales presentations become so much more compelling at the point when you have identified and agreed all your prospects requirements, and have tailored your presentation so that it illustrates how you can completely satisfy their agreed requirements. If you can then add your unique strengths to what the prospect is looking for, your proposal becomes stronger and much more persuasive.
Here are ten suggestions that help improve the effectiveness of any presentation:
1. Find out in advance how much time you’ll have and plan that your presentation will take approximately 75% of the allocated time. This leaves sufficient time for questions and through handling of any objections that you may encounter.
You want to get your brand name out there and take control of the great product or service that you have to offer. A good way of doing this is to use marketing to create a personal relationship between what you have to offer and what the customer is looking for.
According to Rick Roth of Advertising Age, “Chief marketing officers (CMO) who understand the interplay between their key retailers and their brand also fair better. How retailers advertise a shelved product also adds to or detracts from a brand’s value.”
Most insurance agents know the basics of selling mortgage protection plans. Generally the choice is term insurance that will pay a future benefit in the event of the death or disability of a mortgage payer. It is simple and an easy need to be understood by the prospect.
How do you convert a possible $600 to $1,000 commission to a larger payday and one where the result is not a transaction but a client relationship is developed? How do you make jump to big time sales from this basic insurance need sale? Here is a tried and true system which never fails.
Explain to the client that there are three ways to protect against the mortgage in the event of death. Each has different expenses and each has different benefits. Start with plan one.
People love to use acronyms. I’d like to think it’s because we think so fast we need to condense our speech to compensate, so we use acronyms to speed things up; but I could be wrong. Acronyms are especially rampant in Chat Rooms. If you’ve been to one, you know how hard it is to understand what people are saying if you don’t know acronyms like LOL or BRB.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, as the case maybe—the technical professions are full of them. Maybe it’s because they’re easier to use or they’re just plain faster to say. Or, maybe it’s because they help the person using them establish his or her mental superiority. Whatever the reason, our jobs are replete with them and they serve their purposes.