SOHO Start-Up -- Focus On Relationships

Focus On Relationships
by Bill Brooks, CEO, The Brooks Group

The bottom line to successful selling is to understand that success depends upon building and maintaining the right kinds of relationships with prospective customers.

This includes being trusted, but it is by no means limited to that. There’s no place in the sales winner’s circle for salespeople who can’t develop trust with others, yet we’ve all met many salespeople who were thoroughly trustworthy but still couldn’t sell ice water in a desert.

The ancient Greeks gave us a word that gets at the nature of what I’m talking about. The word is symbiosis and it means “living together in a mutually beneficial relationship” – a relationship that provides enough benefits for all of the partners to view it as valuable. It’s what someone labeled a “win-win situation,” and for salespeople it means always making sure that customers get enough value to more than justify what they invest in my product or service.

Bottom line, if you want to increase your customer impact, you’ll have to focus on three essential areas:

What kind of person you are. Impact grows out of the way you feel about yourself, about others, and how you feel about what you are doing.

To get a feeling about the level of your customer impact, you’ll need to look at a very essential question, “What is there about me that would make people want to buy from me?” Is it expertise? Positioning? Enthusiasm? Knowledge? Follow through? Whatever it is, learn to concentrate on it and maximize its impact on others. First identify it and then value it!

What you know. Your most valuable selling tool is not your mouth – as most salespeople seem to believe – but your mind.

Significant customer impact grows out of what you know about people, about selling, and about what you are selling. It also has to do with how you apply what you know to get people to do what is in your mutual best interests.

What you know, however, needs to be tempered with a deep knowledge about how to apply what you know. Complex, confusing explanations about your product or service can be both boring and perplexing to prospects or customers. So…be careful about how you explain what you know.

What you do. Of course, nothing works unless you do. But there’s more to it than that. Some of the hardest working salespeople in the world are also some of the least successful. Effective, professional selling involves doing the right things, at the right time, and in the right way to obtain the desired response.

Don’t say or do anything in the sales presentation that doesn’t add value to the presentation. Don’t talk just to talk. Actually listen…consistently prospect…do the right things!

To Sum It All Up…
The key to success in selling is to have significant customer impact – to be able to influence enough of the right people to do the right thing, at the right time, to get whatever you want out of life.

That can only happen when you put yourself in the prospective customer’s shoes and understand that:

People only pay attention to those they believe have something important to say to them.
People buy for their reasons, not for yours or mine.
People don’t want to be sold – they want to buy.
Buying is basically an emotional response.

The best way to boost your customer impact is to cultivate an empathy for the customer and to understand his or her needs, interests, and desires. The problem? This is, unfortunately, easier said than done. So – to help you do this, let’s take a look at 5 tips that can help you sell easier, faster and resistance free starting now.

Practice in-depth, deliberate pre-call planning.
Understand the power of effective questioning to better identify and pinpoint precisely how to present your solution.
Look at your product or service as a way to solve a problem, fill a need or alleviate a circumstance. Stop looking at it as a feature laden commodity!
Understand the power of presenting the correct solution instead of a bells and whistles loaded sales presentation.
Capture the enthusiasm, pain, despair or unfulfilled emotional void that you detect your customer or prospect has and allow them to ride your solution to fulfill, eliminate or expand that emotion.

There is little doubt that sales is a science. There is also little doubt that it also requires an in-depth ability to emotionally engage yourself, your product or service and your prospect. But, like lots of things, this is far easier said than done. Capture this secret and your sales career will soar.

For almost two decades Bill Brooks has been one of America’s most in-demand sales speakers. The reason behind Bill’s tremendous popularity is that he has successfully accomplished what other sales speakers merely talk about. He enjoys real-world, legitimate sales success, executive experience, in-depth topic expertise, academic preparation, as well as the highest speaking and consulting accreditations. Bill has been a sales executive and marketing manager, an international sales award winner, CEO of a 300 million dollar corporation and successful college football coach with a 70% winning record. Bill is author of over 100 video and 200 audio programs, and 9 books. For more information about Bill Brooks’ speaking, training and consulting services; or learning tools, call 800-633-7762 or e-mail sales@thebrooksgroup.com or visit his website at www.brooksgroup.com.

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