Eps 1514: How Priory Made Me A Better Salesperson Than You
— The too lazy to register an account podcast
| Host image: | StyleGAN neural net |
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| Content creation: | GPT-3.5, |
Host
Perry Bowman
Podcast Content
If you want to learn how to be a better salesperson, you must make it your goal to study the prospect decision-making process at an early stage, each time. Not understanding a prospects decision-making process is one of the most common pitfalls that salespeople fall into.
By identifying a prospects decision-making process prior to presenting, you keep the control over your sales process. That way, a good salesperson anticipates challenges or questions and has an effective answer ready, lest they miss out on a sale. They also know how to deal with a refusal, learning from both their most successful deals as well as those they have lost. High-performing salespeople understand their prospects unique pain points, and they are good at explaining why their product is the right fit.
Great salespeople view selling not as something they do with people, but rather as a collaborative process between them and their customer. Customers want to do business with salespeople who are trustworthy, knowledgeable, and are willing to ask questions and provide answers that are what they are looking for. A great salesperson has a lot more to offer customers than a compelling sales pitch: They are passionate individuals who are resilient, who spend the time necessary to understand what customers want, demonstrate empathy, and confidently negotiate for a product. Good salespeople need to be upfront from the beginning, and should want to sell you something you need to succeed personally and professionally.
In fact, if you have the best interests of others in mind, you have the makings of a great salesman. One key to becoming a great salesman is just realizing that prospects do not really care about you. When you appear to be successful and confident, prospects believe that you do not want their business. What matters is that you are comfortable enough in your own skin to seem confident, and this may lead to prospects feeling more comfortable closing a deal.
No matter what response you receive from a prospect, celebrate that you have indeed made contact, and are a step closer to reaching out to your ideal client. That way, if a prospect says something that does not actually make sense, or something that you really need to dive into, you are prepared to capitalize on that. Simple questions like these generate a lot of value as you are selling, as well as engaging prospects and encouraging them to open up to you. If you begin each sales conversation with a soliloquy, prospects are turned off, and will close.
In fairness, sometimes there might be times you actually do need the sale to cover expenses, but prospects should never be in the position of telling. Customers will respect and trust you more when they notice that you are not trying to push products that they do not want. It is easy to get carried away and promise people the world now, but that only makes customers upset if your team cannot deliver.
Once you understand that you cannot get shit done by sales managers, you will be freed to drastically improve and be a much better salesperson. The good news is you do not need to be a born salesman to be successful in the world of sales.
There is no one way to be a great salesperson, but the habits mentioned above are crucial for providing your customers with a positive sales experience. The following eight simple keys will help you establish your credibility as an expert on anything you are selling, so that you can gain trust from prospects and begin achieving your sales goals. Following these best rep practices will help you be among the best selling reps on your team - or indeed, company.
The second of the core qualities absolutely required in a good salesperson is a specific type of ego-driven motivation that makes them want to make the sale personally, or in an ego-driven manner, rather than just to get the money. The authors defined the second of these two qualities, ego drive, as a personal want and need to make a sale--not for money to be gained, but because a salesman feels that he has to.
A good salesmans sense should be that he has to make a sale; that a customer is there to help him meet a personal need. His need to achieve conquest will likely prevent him from siding with the customer; rather, it will motivate him to make full use of his customer knowledge in order to get the sale. The Salesman has a motivation, a need, to make a sale, and Salesmans empathic nature gives him a connecting tool to do so.
One of the older men has a great deal of empathy, but no great drive for the self, so he is an "B" Salesman, not an "A". These qualities, along with the excellent empathy of one of the older men, gave him great potential as a manager, but not a sales manager, because his only moderate drive would hurt him at the latter job.
Go means that good salespeople research their prospects and collect as much information as necessary prior to the big client meeting. For the most part, the candidates had a bit of empathetic qualities, and without exception had a nice verbal delivery, but none had that deep-seated sales drive that we are looking for in a productive salesperson.