Sales: Converting leads into business

We tend to buy things (especially big ticket items and intangibles) from people we trust and like, yet the majority of sales people don’t invest time and effort, before the sales meeting, in creating credibility and rapport.

Instead they rely on over promising about what their product or service will do, oh and discounting!

To be a great sales person we need to become problem solvers, we need to understand the pain the prospect is suffering from and what we can do to remove it. The only way we can understand the person’s pain is to ask questions, lots of them.  This will make sure the prospect knows we understand his pain and establish ourselves as the experts when it comes to providing a solution.

If we invest a load of time and effort establishing ourselves as the experts, our product or service as the right solution and we have built up rapport with the prospect then just imagine how easy it will be to make the sale!

So we have to develop a systemised sales process that will do just that. So we drip feed the prospect information about us, our business, our product and service, some case studies and we have asked loads of questions about their pain – all this before we ask them to part with their hard-earned cash.

Making the sale suddenly becomes easy!

Then afterwards, after we’ve made the sale, instead of disappearing off into the distance to blow some of our commission we spend time and effort following up, making sure they are happy and we also use this as an opportunity to educate them on all of the other products and services we have to offer.

Once someone has bought from you they are much more likely to buy again – providing they know you can sell it.

Our sales effort then, needs to look something like this:

Author: Simon Streeton, Pro-actions Business Coach, West Midlands