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Best Practices |
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Best Sales Practices
Selling & Sales Best Practices
Best Sales Practices can be defined as: "Salespeople using a set of agreed upon selling skills in a way that consistently gains agreement with customers to move the sale forward through each milestone of the sale, leading to a customer purchase."
If you want to consistently gain agreement with customers, improve sales practices, and increase sales productivity, consider the following recommendations:
- Focus on Key Selling Skills that drive sales success
- Follow a Sales Process that mirrors how customers make decisions
- Identify each Milestone of your Sales Cycle
- Integrate the Sales Process within each Milestone
- Document the above as your company's Best Sales Practices
- Train your sales force to use Best Sales Practices
Action Selling accomplishes all this within the Sales Skills Certification Program.
Go on to Sales Force Management or continue below for further details on Action Selling's Best Sales Practices.
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Best Sales Practices Explained
- Focus on Key Selling Skills that drive sales success: Among all the skills sales trainers talk about, there are only five that make the greatest impact on moving the sale forward. Focus on mastering these key Selling Skills:
- Managing the Buyer Seller Relationship
- Sales Call Planning
- Sales Questioning Skills
- Sales Presentation Skills
- Gaining Agreement
 Take our free Benchmark Selling Skills Assessment. Discover strengths and areas that need improving. Get detailed reports on what and how to improve.
- Follow a Sales Process that mirrors how customers make decisions: Most salespeople make the same mistakes over and over without realizing it. Without a logical Sales Process to follow, they can't even identify specific problems, let alone correct them. A good sales process mirrors the pattern by which customers make buying decisions. These decisions are sequenced in the following order:
- Salesperson
- Company
- Product
- Price
- Time to Buy
Action Selling breaks a sales call into nine important components, sequenced in the order of the above five key buying decisions. By analyzing each segment of a call and testing against the customer's buying decisions, salespeople can quickly recognize problems and adjust their behavior accordingly.
- Identify each Milestone of your Sales Cycle: What are the necessary key steps to take from initial contact to completed sale? What Commitment must you gain from the customer at each Milestone that will lead to the next step? (Example: Initial meeting with several decision makers followed by a formal proposal meeting. Both meetings are milestones.) (Example: Sales Cycle)
Recommendations:
- Write down 10 strong products/services features that have the greatest appeal to customers. Include a benefit statement ($) for each feature.
- Next, write down expected customer needs associated with those 10 features/benefits. Customers will only buy if a benefit represents a solution to a perceived need. So what needs must you look for?
- Write open-ended questions that help draw out needs for which your 10 strongest features offer solutions.
- Determine sales strategy for each client. Considering the milestone buyer is in, the competition, buyer's time frame, buying influences, etc., what are the best questions that will draw out information?
- Document a powerful, crisp (30-second) company story for all first-call situations.
- Ask peers about these topics, and compare their approaches with yours. Write down and use all other great questions for drawing out needs.
- Create reminder lists and review before every sales call.
- Integrate the Sales Process within each Milestone: The Action Selling Sales Process gives salespeople a road map to follow for every customer encounter. It doesn't matter what Milestone the salesperson is in, Action Selling tells them when to plan, when to establish customer rapport, when to present company and product/service capabilities, when to ask for commitment, how to confirm the sale and how to continually improve.
When the Action Selling Sales Process is used, the focus is on specific, high-priority customer needs. With Action Selling, both the relationship and solution is viewed as a unique value to the customer. That means salespeople win more business, at the right price.
- Document the above as your company's Best Sales Practices: It pays to document your company's sales process and the most successful practices that you and your sales team have found for handling common challenges (i.e. Stalls and Objections). The investment of time in creating this document may be the difference between winning and losing future sales. In the event of Stalls and Objections a few Action Selling sales techniques may be beneficial to include:
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The TFBR: A simple method for presenting solutions to specific needs.
T - Tie Back: Refer back to a need identified with an earlier question:
"You told me earlier that you want to match the products that you stock with the unique needs of each region."
F - Feature: Describe a product feature that meets that need:
"Our regional purchases history reporting will show you exactly what the most popular products are in each region."
B - Benefit: Explain how the feature will serve the customer's need:
"What this means to you is that you will improve service to your customers while minimizing the inventory needed at each location."
R - Reaction: Ask for the customer's own view of how the benefit would serve the need. This confirms that you correctly understand the need and turns the presentation into a dialogue with the customer:
"How will this information help you improve your business?"
Cast each product feature or capability you present in the TFBR format. And present only features that represent solutions to needs you have already uncovered and agreed upon.
The TFBR method will shorten presentations dramatically and make them more powerful as you engage customers in a problem-solving dialogue.
- The USB (Universal Stall Breaker): A capability of your product or company that minimizes risk to the customer.
Do not present the USB to the customer up front. Hold the USB in reserve. If you hear a stall when you ask for commitment follow this procedure:
Say, "I understand."
Restate the product/features the customer liked before the stall arose.
Present the USB.
Ask for commitment again.
- Train your sales force to use Best Sales Practices: Please contact us for help with sales training. We have trained thousands of sales groups in using Action Selling's Best Sales Practices. These principles are covered in more detail and are included in any of the following *Sales Certification Programs.
- Action Selling - Custom (at your location)
- Action Selling - General (open to the public)
- Train the Trainer
- Selling Your Price
- Questions: The Answer to Sales
- Strategic Action Selling Plus
- Coaching for Sales Quality
* All Sales Certification Programs include long-term learning reinforcement and transfer mechanisms helping to insure that newly learned skills tranfer to consistent field success. When sales organizations adopt these principles, we consistently see new heights of sales productivity and long-term ROI.
Talk With A Trainer
To get immediate answers to your questions, please call 1-800-232-3485.
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