A two-day workshop
‘Selling’ doesn’t work. You’ve got to help customers buy. And that means engaging with the customer in a positive way, showing that you understand their requirement and giving them confidence that your product or service is the best possible way of meeting that requirement.
This may sound painless but there’s more to it than meets the eye and it’s all too easy to get it wrong. You need to follow a process. This in-depth two-day programme will show you how, including:
Structuring calls effectively
Understanding the reasons behind customers’ buying decisions
Defining a customer’s level of interest
Following an effective method of developing sales
Well-developed questioning techniques
How best to present features and benefits to customers
Differentiating between logical and emotional purchasing
Overcoming objections
Gaining commitment to the next stage of the buying process
- Understand ‘how buyers buy’ and align their selling activities accordingly
- Recognise the difference between ‘latent pain’ and ‘active vision’ opportunities
- Conduct effective pre-call planning and research
- Stimulate interest and establish credibility with your prospects
- Get prospects to share / admit high priority pain
- Engage in consultative dialogue that promotes the differentiating strengths of your offerings
- Gain access to ‘power’ people within an opportunity
- Effectively qualify and disqualify opportunities based on objective decision criteria
- Better control and manage sell cycles
- Improve their chances of winning competitive opportunities
- Shorten sales cycles and avoid ‘no decision’
- Negotiate the steps leading to a successful sale
Expert trainer
Tim is passionate about helping people achieve greater results in business, specifically in business-to-business sales. His sales and sales management career has now spanned over three decades.
Session outline
1. An introduction to selling
- Understanding the key points that encourage a customer to purchase from us
- The difference between consultative selling and a transactional sale
- Understanding the roles that trust and empathy play in a sale
- Understanding how tricks and manipulation can sink a sale
- Vital pre-meeting research that must take place before a conversation
- Understanding how the customer sees us and why positioning is important
2. Structuring the sales conversation process
- Defining a set process for structuring a sales call with a chance to demonstrate understanding
- How the first minute of a conversation can destroy a sale
- Understanding BPO objectives for a sale
- How a step-by-step sales conversation process helps win more sales
- Understanding the mis-match between the customers buying process
- How our sales processes can lead to mistakes
3. How and why people buy
- An insight into the emotional factors behind how people arrive at purchasing decisions
- Using research from neuroscience that shows how sales people can really make mistakes
- Understanding how people make decisions about larger purchases
- Understanding the stakeholders in companies and their buying motives
- How to analyse the stakeholders and determine a win-plan
4. Understanding the funnel
- Studying the sales and buying process to understand the ratios of sales to prospects and better forecasting
- Understanding the role of forecasting in sales analysis
- Why many forecasts are nearly always wrong
- Understanding the stages of a sales process
- How ‘verifiable outcomes’ can really change forecasting
5. Questioning techniques
- Understanding the different questioning techniques and when they should be used
- Using the ‘knowledge tree’ as a framework for questioning
- Understanding the use of real empathy to help customers uncover their needs
- How effective research can really empower your questions
- How to ask ‘high gain’ questions
- How to ask difficult questions without feeling intrusive
6. Features and benefits
- How to practically apply them in a sales scenario
- How to align the benefits to customers’ business goals
- Really understanding the difference and how to demonstrate true economic benefits to a customer
- How to discover business goals, and align value propositions to these
- How to craft an effective value proposition for a customer
- Using the SAR storytelling method to really engage customers to align their thinking patterns
- Using the latest neuroscience research that explains what customers are really thinking
7. Overcoming objections
- How ‘confirmation bias’ can hinder any sales conversation
- How the CLARA method of responding to customer concerns can dramatically improve the chances of customers responding to us in a positive way
- Practising the method to become comfortable and congruent with it
8. Closing the sale
- A deep dive into what closing is
- How different sales have different closes
- How too many closing methods can destroy a sale
- How to lead up to a close with a logical sequence of questions
- Using the ACSAT trust method of closing
- A clear methodology with a chance to practise the skills in a fun way
