A one-day workshop
Bad news – people don’t buy your product.
Better news – they don’t buy anyone else’s product either.
Best news – they do buy what a product gives them, whether it be removing ‘pain’ or giving ‘pleasure’.
So what a challenge it is that every single person buys your product for a slightly different reason! What’s the secret to selling in that sort of sales environment? This programme provides a great roadmap, giving your entire team the skills to:
Really understand the prospect’s world, their goals and concerns
Position the product offering as the perfect solution to what’s wrong with that prospect’s world
Steer a meeting to a successful conclusion – with authority and finesse
- Build rapport with authenticity
- Use open questions, listening and summary to properly understand the prospect
- Use ‘impact’ questions to ‘stack the pain’ of remaining with the status quo
- Convert features into personalised benefits that reflect stated needs
- Handle objections with calm confidence
- Identify buying signals
- Close effectively
- Convey credible urgency centred on the prospect’s – not the salesperson’s – interests
Expert trainer
Alun is a very experienced and entertaining deliverer of sales training. After sixteen years of sales and sales management – ten of which were in a telesales environment – he became a professional actor, attending Drama School in 2000/2001. Since 2002 he has become a highly skilled corporate role-player and for the last ten years has focused on sales training, using his role-playing experience to make training highly interactive and, above all, fun.
Session outline
1. What makes a customer buy any product?
- Moving towards ‘pleasure’
- Moving away from ‘pain’
- Robert Cialdini’s Psychology of Influence – buying motives
- Understanding what your product does for customers
- Why there is never a ‘one size fits all’ approach
- What are the real ‘unique selling points’ and why the salesperson is the real ‘USP’
- At what point does the customer emotionally buy your product?
2. Getting past gatekeepers
- What gatekeepers’ motivations are
- How to make them your friend rather than your enemy
- How to make your call harder to block than to put through
- How to control the gatekeeper with questions, not answers
- Using Cialdini’s ‘reciprocity’ law to get put through more often
- Practical exercise in which the trainer poses as gatekeeper
3. Questioning and listening skills
- How to use open questions to get the customer talking
- What questions to avoid and why
- How to ‘stack the pain’ of the status quo with ‘impact questions'
- Practical ‘pain stacking’ exercise in pairs
- What listening is and what it isn’t
- Question funnelling – how to earn deeper disclosure through probing
- Practical funnelling exercise in pairs
- The power of summary
4. How to create tailored benefits and not ‘dive into solution’
- What is ‘diving into solution’? Examples and analogies
- Why it is to be avoided
- Practical exercise in pairs – how it feels to have solutions offered up too early
- How to avoid ‘feature-dumping’
- What is ‘value selling’?
- How to create tailored benefits
- How to convert product features into benefits
- How to deal with the prospect’s competitor allegiance
5. Handling objections and testing the water
- How to overcome the price objection by selling value
- Common objections the participants encounter and answers that work
- The objections salespeople carry in their own heads
- The ‘A-C-E’ objection-handling model
- How to uncover objections
- When – and when not – to trial close
6. Closing skills
- Why salespeople often close too early
- How to identify buying signals
- How to use urgency with skill and effectiveness
- Four killer closing techniques that work
- How to avoid buying the product back by careless post-sale talk
- How to ask for referrals for your product
- How to ‘farm’ the account for future opportunities
7. Wrap-up
- Key learnings from each participant
- Individual action planning – steps that can and will be implemented in the workplace
