Selling skills

Being able to sell is an essential skill at every stage and level of business. You need to be able to persuade prospective customers to buy your products or services. You also need to be able to sell yourself to financial investors, and your vision to your shareholders or team. This guide will show you some effective techniques to help you become more successful at selling.

Deals, or sales, rarely fall into your lap. You have to win them. Fortunately, in order to be successful, you do not need to turn yourself into the archetypal over-pushy, foot-in-the-door salesperson. 

The keys to successful selling

Buyers have to make a decision. Your job is to help them do so, and to ensure they opt for your proposition. It is something anyone can learn to do well.

Success in selling depends on several factors:

• Understanding how the process works, and what techniques can be used.
• Using the appropriate techniques.
• Focusing on the customer.
• Listening rather than just talking.
• Communicating clearly
• Directing the interaction.

Selling is not just a case of rattling off a prepared script and asking, 'How many do you want, then?' Good selling is as much about what happens before and after you speak to the prospect. Selling is the climax of the overall marketing process, though it has a cycle of its own.

The timescales involved may be short or may take several years. Activities span such tasks as ‘prospecting’ (ensuring you have appropriate potential customers to talk to), and ‘customer relationship management’ (ensuring customers buy again and again).

Here, we will focus on converting an enquiry to a sale. We will also assume you are having a meeting to discuss a significant purchase, if only to bring out the main points.

You need to recognise that:

• The perspective of buyer and seller are different. Buyers want good quality products or services and value for money. Sellers want immediate revenue and profit. The seller’s job is to make their case clear, attractive and credible.
• You sell in a competitive environment – often the buyer is exploring alternative suppliers, so part of your job is to differentiate yourself from the competition. Buyers may also be deciding how to spend limited cash. For instance, do they buy a holiday or a new dishwasher? So your job is to convince them of the overall benefits of your solution.
• The process involves selling yourself, in that the buyer must trust you and come to value your opinion.
• Selling acts on a buyer to influence their decision. How you do it is as important as what you do.

Confidence is an essential ingredient of the selling process. It stems from two things:

• Knowledge about your business, industry and, of course, your product or service.
• Understanding the process of selling.

This confidence communicates itself to the prospective customer as professionalism. Knowledge is vital; lack of it is fatal. For example, if a seller shows poor product knowledge, it knocks the customers’ confidence in everything they say to them.

The buying process

Consider how people buy. What steps are involved? Imagine you are buying a car.

Defining the requirement

You review the choices of car: new or used, hatchback or estate. At this point you are defining your requirements, although some of these may, in practice, be incompatible.

Information gathering

You then arrive at a short list and enter the information-gathering phase. You want to know more detail about:

• The vehicle’s pros – Sensible petrol consumption, aspects of performance, styling and safety features.
• The vehicle’s cons – High insurance costs or higher than average depreciation.
• The organisation’s pros and cons – In this case, both the manufacturer and the distributor. Are they reliable? What if some fault were to appear?

There may be a profusion of pros and cons.

The decision

Having weighed up the balance of factors and probably made a compromise of some kind, you make your decision. You select the overall package that meets your needs, appeals most and provides value for money. You also select the supplier you believe will deliver their promises.

Often there will be a number of suitable solutions and the decision comes down to less tangible factors such as style, brand, image and confidence in, or empathy with, the supplier.

The seller’s job is to help prospective buyers through each step, listening to the buyer’s views rather than imposing their own. Usually a decision will be made, the question is when, and with whom the business will be placed. You can influence both factors. What you need is a systematic approach.

Preparing to succeed

If there is any sort of magic formula about selling, it is here. Good salespeople do their homework. A plan should not be a straitjacket – you must be flexible because you cannot guarantee everything will go as you might like.

So, think through:

• What you are aiming for – clear objectives are essential. For example, what information do you need? What is your target price? How far will you move from this and in what circumstances?
• What you will do to achieve the objective: what process you will use and how you will present your case.
• Whether anything is necessary to help the process (sales aids: anything the prospective customer should see, from samples to graphs or brochures).
• The likely questions or objections that could be posed.

With these clearly in mind, you can proceed to a meeting with confidence.

Directing a sales meeting

Start well

The initial moments of a meeting are disproportionately important. They set the scene for what is to come. The meeting must be friendly yet professional and businesslike. Indeed, just being organised – in the sense of volunteering an agenda that will suit the prospective customer – can create the right sort of atmosphere. All you need at this stage is for people to think positively about you.

Other factors are important:

• Respect time – Just ascertaining how long someone will give you can make the meeting easier. Arriving punctually and sticking to the time limit always impresses.
• Create roles and rapport – The buying/selling relationship needs setting up. Think about how you want to position yourself – as an expert or an adviser, for example.
• Listen and watch – Good salespeople listen far more than they talk, and they watch carefully for reactions and body language. There are three reasons for this:
  
  1. They discover the prospective customer’s agenda and motivators.
  
  2. They endear the prospective customer to them.
  
  3. They avoid wasting everybody’s time on issues that are irrelevant.
• Discover customers’ real needs – Do not always settle for superficial information. Ask for more. Ask open questions (beginning with who, what, where, when, why, and how) to get your prospective customer talking more freely. Make it clear that understanding their needs is in their interest. Basic information includes their needs, preferences, constraints, timescales, budget, and who has authority to sign the deal. Other useful information includes who will use it, how, why, where, when, how often, and, if appropriate, what was wrong with their last supplier. Remember, too, that the stated requirement may not be the whole truth – there is often a sub-agenda which people may not wish to bring into the open, but which may carry more weight in practice. The skill is to use questions to find the real drivers.
• Relate to their needs – Note the emerging picture and ensure that, as you proceed, you relate back to it, matching your comments to their requirements. For example, 'Since reliability was so important, what we offer is…' Personalising your case is vital to being persuasive – it differentiates you from your competitors (particularly those who have failed to discover as much).
• Link to make your case – Keep telling the prospective customer what you propose to do in terms that are customer-oriented. For example, you might say, 'I have a clear idea of what you need. In light of the urgency, perhaps it would help if I went through the timescale in more detail. I think you’ll find we can hit that deadline.'

Present a persuasive case

This is the core of the meeting. You must achieve several objectives as you proceed:

• Make it clear – This sounds obvious, but many salespeople fail because prospective customers are left unsure of what they have been told.
  Think through how you will explain things. Make it logical and easy to follow. Avoid jargon. You can score points here because people love it when something they expect to be complicated turns out to be simple to follow.
• Make it attractive – The prime technique here is to talk about benefits rather than features. Features are factual statements about the product or service but, in themselves, are pointless. Benefits show how features can do something for, or mean something to, the prospective customer. To return to the example of buying a car, features abound. However, it is not persuasive just to say, 'This model has a five-speed gearbox.' It is far better to link your discovery of the customer’s concern for economic motoring with the excellent fuel consumption and the financial saving that this implies (benefit), to the five-speed gearbox (feature). In other words: benefits lead to and create a reason to buy. Features only deliver the benefit. Each benefit must be tailored to a particular buyer.
• Build a positive case – Spell out the advantages point by point. Describe benefits, link matters logically, explain precisely and succinctly and give as much detail as necessary. Being comprehensive is never an objective; giving a full picture is, especially one that matches the customer’s needs. Leaving out a key element of the positive evidence can be dangerous. So too can padding your case with benefits in which your prospective customer has not expressed an interest. This can dilute your argument and, at worst, can do so to a level where a competitor seems a better option.
• Make it descriptive – Paint a picture of what your solution would mean to the prospective customer. Your product, or any part of it, must never just be ‘quite nice’ or ‘very practical’. Use adjectives. Create a turn of phrase that gets to the core of what they actually want to achieve. For example, a courier service might say, 'With our service, you will never have to worry about the hassles of delivering to the US again. You can have more time on the golf course instead of waiting late at the office for confirmation of safe arrival.'
• Add proof – Remember the prospective customer may understandably feel you have a vested interest in saying how good something is. So provide external evidence, such as a magazine’s test results on a car or customer testimonials, to reinforce your case.

Overall the technique at this stage is to remain positive throughout and ensure you present a case that holds together neatly. It must not sound as if you are haphazardly making it up for the first time. It must sound considered, as if you are taking the trouble to do it in a way that is right for the individual buyer.

The customer should feel you are working with them. You want to avoid them feeling you are doing something to them or putting your own interests first.

Keep control

Throughout the sales process you will need to manage objections. Remember that the customer is continually weighing things up. Plan how you will deal with potential snags or objections.

Some objections will be raised by the customer – 'Surely that’s not enough service calls!' Some should be raised by you (where you know the customer is likely to think of an issue and it will automatically become a negative if neither party raises it).

Answers do not necessarily have to demolish objections. They may, after all, be valid. You have to work to adjust the balance. There are only four possible courses of action. You can:

• Remove the issue – Sometimes a prospective customer is simply wrong; they have made an incorrect assumption or you have not made something clear. Put them right, but do so diplomatically.
• Turn it into something positive – Literally reverse their thinking – 'Actually this can be an advantage…'
• Reduce its significance – Here you agree – to an extent – but make it clear that no great harm is done.
• Agree with it, but put it in perspective – Never fight inevitable logic; you will just seem stupid (or desperate). If there is a downside, say so. You can minimise it, and discuss the point in context of the whole balance and the advantages.

Deal with one objection at a time and aim to keep the overall case positive. Try not to appear panicked.

Gain commitment

Finally, you need to ‘close’, to ask for a commitment of some sort. Closing does not cause people to buy. Everything else you have done does that. However, it can prompt action, turning the interest into action. This action may be to buy, or it may be some other positive step along the way – agreeing to a presentation or a written quotation, perhaps.

Getting from one stage to the next usually needs a positive prompt. Not closing negates your earlier good work. Checking your facts is no substitute for a close. If you ask, for instance, 'Is that all the information you need at present?' you risk them ending matters (at least for the moment): 'Yes, that’s been most helpful, let me think on it. I’ll call you next week. Goodbye.'

Closing is not complicated, though there are several techniques. You can:

• Just ask – 'Can we go ahead then?'
• Assume agreement and run the conversation on – 'Fine, we seem agreed about it all. If you can confirm in writing…' or, 'Where would you like it delivered?'
• Offer alternatives – 'Do you want A or B?' Ideally the first will be more specifically stated than the second, and you will have two more alternatives to offer if neither of the former finds favour.

There are other ways to close but beware of being too clever; they are not usually necessary and can appear pushy. The golden rule is to shut up when you’ve asked your closing question. If you break the silence, you let them off the hook to make a decision.

Handle delay

Sometimes further action may be necessary. For instance, they may delay their decision saying, 'I’ll think about it.' Always agree: 'It’s an important decision. Of course you must be sure.' But find out why: '…but why particularly do you need to do this? Is anything still unclear?' This may unearth extra information. For example, that something is unclear (in which case, clarify and close again), or that the decision needs ratifying elsewhere.

Always keep the initiative. Find out when a decision will be reached and volunteer to make contact again.

Wrap up

You may have done all that is necessary and have the signed order in your hand. Once you get agreement, thank the customer; see to any administrative matters and end matters promptly. It is all too easy, once your guard is down, to ramble on and suddenly find you have talked the customer out of it.

Be persistent

Be persistent and keep in touch. Take delays at face value. If someone says the buyer is out of the office when you telephone, call again – and again if necessary. You can get orders by persevering after less persistent competitors have given up.

What matters is the success rate. No one wins them all. Some sales demand additional skills – negotiation, formal presentations or persuasively written proposals and quotations. You have to do what is necessary. It may not always be as easy or quick as you would like but, if you understand the techniques and use them appropriately, you have every chance of being effective.

Selling is a necessary part of business. It will not just happen and few people have the qualities of the mythical ‘born seller’. However, it is neither something distasteful nor something to be terrified of. Not only does it bring in business, it can be very satisfying in its own right. And the more you practise the better you’ll become.