Sales & Marketing Consultant, Bestselling Author & Business Motivational Speaker

This blog is about marketing, and today we’re going to talk about the most fundamental aspect of marketing – how to sell. As a business owner, you undoubtedly know quite a lot about how to sell, and have likely been selling something, in one form or another, for much of your working life. However, it never hurts to revisit the basic, and maybe you’ll pick up something extra that you missed along the way.

In short, the keys to effective selling are knowledge and effort. If that sounds overly simplistic, allow me to explain a bit further.

Know Yourself, Know Your Customer, and Know your Competitor

The first step to successful sales is having a full range of knowledge, about your own company and product, as well as about your customer’s needs, and your competitor’s company and his products.

Every single time that you talk to a customer, you should start the day by researching their company. Strive to never give the same sales pitch to two different customers. Research each customer individually, and look for ways that a relationship with your company can bring them a unique benefit.

When customers are confronted by a salesperson who truly knows what they’re talking about, and who truly understand both their own company and the wider industry, they are automatically less defensive, and much more likely to walk away from the conversation one step closer to making a purchase.

Put in the Effort

Even more important than sales knowledge and techniques is putting in the full effort required to close a deal or make a sale. Never treat a customer like someone who you can do without; every time you make a sales pitch, you should tell yourself that there is no failure – that the company is on the line and you absolutely have to make this sale.

This is doubly important if you’re no longer directly involved in the sales aspect of your business, and you rely on others to do it for you. In your hiring and training processes, ensure that motivation is your primary goal. Never hire someone for sales based on their knowledge of the industry, however encyclopedic it may be. The determining factor in the success of a salesperson is their motivation level, and ensuring that they’re going out every day, meeting with clients, and taking the risks required to make sales.

These may seem like fundamental issues, but it is the fundamentals that make sales, and making sales makes companies.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

In today’s marketing world of high-powered ad campaigns and high-tech internet marketing, its easy to overlook to lowly telephone. However, this simple device is still the lifeline of most business, and its often the best way to communicate with current and future clients.

People respond much better to a phone call than they do to a lot of other sales devices. Not only is a phone call much more personalised than, say, an email or a Facebook wall post, but it gives you an opportunity to tailor your speech to what the customer wants to hear, and gives you an opportunity to overcome their objections.

However, as powerful a technique as the phone call is, it also provides you with considerably more opportunity to alienate your clients that you get with most other sales techniques. Follow these three techniques to optimise your results when calling clients over the phone.

Bypass the Guards

As they say in sales, timing is everything. This is true in the most literal sense when you’re dealing with telephone marketing. The time of the day that you call can make or break you chances of success.

If you are calling a new client while they’re at work, you run the risk of getting stopped by gatekeepers, particularly if they’re a busy professional or manager. Gatekeepers are the secretaries and administrative personnel who surround your potential client or partner, and insist on taking a message. Bypass them by calling after before 9 am or after 5 pm. They’ll have gone home, leaving your client to take calls for themself.

Avoid Calling Your Clients at Home

Lastly, you run a risky gambit by calling people at home after work. People’s schedules vary widely, and you can never be sure that you’re calling at an appropriate time when you reach someone at home during the week. Calling a client during dinner or while they’re unwinding later is one sure fire to ruin the relationship. Unless it’s an emergency, save it for the daytime or the weekend.

Always Smile

Its sounds silly, but make sure that you’re happy while you’re talking to your clients. You can project confidence and enthusiasm through the telephone, and a lot of this is controlled by whether you’re smiling and thinking enthusiastically about building the relationship or selling your product.

On this same note, make sure to sound professional. Even more so than in face-to-face conversation, you can’t rely on pauses like “um” and “uh” to break up your sentences in a telephone call, and you must remember to be polite, and fill your speech with “thank you” and other words of consideration.

By following these few simple tips, you can improve your existing client relationships, and build new ones, over the telephone.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

Last week I talked about face-to-face sales techniques. The elevator pitch is a perfect example of how you can benefit from powerful face-to-face sales techniques no matter what industry you’re in.

While the elevator pitch isn’t actually used in elevators (although it could be), the name alludes to the fact that it should ideally take about the same amount of time as a typical elevator ride.

The basic idea of the elevator pitch is to give potential customers an idea of what your business does, why it does it better than your competitors, and how you can translate your past successes into future benefits for them.

Keep it Updated

It’s essential to keep your elevator pitch updated as your business changes, and as your role within your business changes. You wouldn’t air the same commercials year in and year out, would you? Neither should you use the same sales pitch to clients from year to year.

Related to this is the importance of tailoring your speech to different groups of customers. While one subset of customers may care more about the potential cost savings afforded by your product or service, another group may be much more concerned with effectiveness, quick delivery, or any other aspect of your business. Stress the parts of your business that are most likely to appeal to the customer you are currently pitching to.

Nail the Delivery

Like with any kind of face-to-face sales, the key to your elevator pitch is in the delivery. You only really have one chance to delivery your pitch perfectly, which means that you have to understand your customer and understand what they are looking for.

Even more importantly, you have to make your pitch relevant and exciting. Open with an appeal to emotion, with a surprising statistic, or with anything that will catch your potential client’s attention and get him engaged. Once you’ve done this, you  can move into statistics, or the nuts and bolts of what benefits they stand to gain by using your product or service.

Above all, be confident. If you aren’t 110% sure of your product, then nobody else will be either.

Keep your elevator pitch relevant and updated, and when you get a chance to use, make sure that your delivery is perfect. In this way, you can make sure that when you get a chance to speak with a potential customer, you can bring them in every time.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

In this age of internet marketing, SEO, and social media, it’s important to remember just how important face-to-face communications are. Marketing or selling your product in person may seem like a quaint, antiquated, notion, but in fact it is still one of the most effective ways to motivate people to buy your product. Top salespeople will always jump at the chance to make a pitch in person, as they know it’s the most effective way to move the product off the shelves. By following a few simple rules, you can make yourself orders of magnitude more effective at in-person sales.

Make or Break

Never forget that, more than any other type of sales, face to face selling is a make or break opportunity. People are busy, they have short attention spans, and typically they aren’t very interested in what you’re selling, at least initially. Which is all the more reason that it is absolutely essential to open strong and close quickly.

Capture Their Attention

Once you get the first few seconds of someone’s attention, you can easily build from there. But getting the first few seconds is the tough part – how do you get someone to take a break from their busy life and listen to what you have to say? By making a creating appeal to their emotions, or by offering them a deal! Even the busiest among us are always looking for a way to save a couple of quid, so give them a chance to do just that.

Create Urgency

Along with being make-or-break, face to face selling needs to move along quickly. As opposed to internet-based sales, where you bring in your customer slowly with free information before offering them an opportunity to buy, face-to-face sales need to close quickly.

If your customer walks away without making a purchase, you will likely never hear from them again. So build urgency in whatever manner you can. Stress that there is only a limited amount of your product left, or that the offer you’re giving them will not be good forever.

However, here you must be careful to steer away from hackneyed phrases like “limited time offer,” and “only available for a short time.” People are so accustomed to these phrases being thrown around that they won’t believe you even if you’re telling the truth, and you’ll damage your credibility by looking like a pushy, amateur, salesman.

In today’s age of faceless promotion and internet marketing, face-to-face sales are more effective than ever. However, the key to effective in-person selling is understanding that your customers are busy, making a powerful appeal, giving them an offer, creating urgency, and closing deal without coming off as pushy or annoying. Sounds like a tall order, but the only way to get better at it is by practising.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker