Sales Training

If you rely on selling products, or online services, you need great sales presentation skills to appeal strongly to your prospects and customers.  There are a great number of books and live resources such as Toastmasters, to help you with making great presentations.

The following fundamental points are what I focus on before, during and after my presentations:

1) Practice, Practice, Practice over and over until your presentation is perfect. Do this by standing in front of a mirror and watching your actions.  Also, tape yourself and then play it back.  This will help with your vocal variety and regulation of delivery in your presentation.  Finally get some live practice in front of friends or colleagues, or if you really want to gain some great tips, attend a Toastmasters club near you.  Toastmasters can offer you friendly feedback in a mutually supportive environment.

2) Know your target market, and tailor your presentation to it.  Consider what your target group may need from your sales presentation, the outcome, their terminology and any relative jargon they use in their business.  Knowing this shows that you understand them and will ultimately help them to trust you.

3) Be open and honest.  Don’t try to wing it if you don’t know how to answer a question or handle an objection.  There is high degree of integrity in admitting that you don’t know but will find out.  This also gives you permission to keep the door of communication open in the future.  Plus it gives you the opportunity to put your strongest foot forward to prove you can serve your clients needs effectively.

4) Have a plan.  A good sales presentation has four areas you need to address, as shown below. You should use your plan outline for the main presentation, however you may diverge from your plan for short periods if required.

The Four Areas of a Great Sales Presentation

1. The Opening.  Let your audience know that you are excited to be presenting to them, by thanking them for attending.  Show your enthusiasm also, by letting them know you look forward to working with them after this presentation.

2.The body. Convey your message in an accurate and convincing way.  Be sure to highlight the benefits of what you can provide, whilst being specific and customer focussed.  Show your expertise by painting word pictures of how you can help your prospects to benefit from choosing your product or service.

3. The conclusion. Summarize your main points and restate the obvious benefits of doing business with you.  Thank everyone for attending.

4. The Q&A. Open the opportunity for your audience to clarify any points from your presentation.  Whilst answering the questions, humbly emphasize your strengths on how you would handle any given situation.  Try to think of all the questions that you may be asked, by brainstorming with colleagues and friends before your presentation.  Remember, a question you don’t know the answer to is your opportunity to find out what their needs are and gives you permission to come back to them.

I love to check out sales presentation resources online, as I always seem to find little gems that gives me further in-depth knowledge to increase my sales skills.

While the world’s main sales training companies are making massive profits training new and existing call centre’s and business development managers, they seem to be lacking producing any substantial results for their students.

Knowing what I know now from my extensive experience of over 15 years in the sales industry and having gone through many live training programs, and read many books and have been through many great self-study courses from the likes of Nightingale Conant my favourite online course shop for personal and business development. The results from using the techniques you learn work quite well, and it’s often dependent on the personality of the individual as to how effective they are.

Many of the sales programs taught over time have been high pressure techniques and the typcial scenario that selling is a “numbers game”, especially to telemarketers and cold callers, however this just doesn’t work in today’s marketplace, due to the aggressive way they come across, surprisingly even if the person calling is very polite and happy on the phone.

This stigma of a telemarketer stereotype, has really stuck with salespeople all over the world and has made it very tough for the modern day salesperson. That’s what got me interested in finding an alternative sales training company back in 2004. I found a company by the name of Unlock The Game, and it teaches a refreshingly new and extremely relatable style to connect with prospects based on getting to the truth, rather than pushing for a sale… Wow, what a relief!

You see, many of the sales training companies that exist today, were initially conceptualized back in the day of the high-pressure salesman, you know the ones that used to go door to door and try and make the first thing that came out of their prospects mouth to be a “Yes” so the sale would move forward in a positive way?

This style has since died a very strangled death, along with the high pressure telesales techniques that still exist to this day. It has caused a whole lot of confusion across the board for salespeople, because they don’t like how to sell the high-pressure way, but at the same time cannot work out an alternative way to sell that takes the pressure out of the process.

This dilemma has caused the old style of selling to remain, and it makes it extremely uncomfortable for both salespeople and the recipient of the calls. The awkward silences, abrupt responses from prospects who are sick and tired of repeated prospecting and quite “obvious” calls to sell them something both over the phone and door to door has caused a sales resistance epidemic.

Cold call reluctance in salespeople is higher than ever, and sales resistance and call shut down is also at it’s extreme in those receiving such calls.

No matter what the sales training companies do for training, and I believe they are moving away from traditional sales ideas and attempting to promote and teach “low-pressure” approaches, which is a grand idea but none the less, their methods still have a “hidden agenda” to make a sale and that causes the prospect receiving the call to be sceptical and shut the call down a lot of the time.

Pain is a word that I hear quite often from sales people, because they just don’t know the answer for going out there and reaching their KPI’s required to successfully make their jobs viable. A lot of the time it’s a mixture of marketing, word of mouth referral and inbound sales calls that the more experienced and successful salespeople utilise. But this still doesn’t make the life of the new salesperson who is just starting out in their sales career.

So what would my suggestion be for a new salesperson starting be?

Find yourself a good coach and self-study program, that is unique and guaranteed to work such as Unlock The Game. Their website also has a free test drive that offers articles, audio and tips to help with a completely new mindset on the sales thinking process before you even make a sales call.

If you can learn this process and new mindset that basically in a nutshell, teaches you how to take any assumption away from pre-empting that you will make a sale, and refocuses the sales person to have a two-way conversation around the truth of their situation.

Now you may be thinking, “oh this sounds like such and such a program”, and that’s a completely natural thing to think. But be warned, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen or heard of before, it may sound similar, but the mindset is completely unique and I highly recommend at least taking the free test drive and if you like what you hear, jump onboard the fully guaranteed program and trial it for 15 days.

I was game to try it back in 2004 and was so surprised to have the founder Ari Galper, who lived in the US at the time, call me from California (I live in Australia) just to welcome and thank me for trying it. Now that instils confidence right from the start, after my very first online purchase and wondering if this program and the money I’m investing on it will be worth it. I very quickly found out that Unlock The Game is one of the most reputable sales training companies for making initial contact with both cold leads and inbound enquiries and has really helped me out.

One of the main points that helped me make my decision was the thousands of testimonials from all around the world, which proves it works for sales from all countries and all industries.

I hope my ideas around sales training companies have helped you and that you’ve gained a whole new perspective and outlook on training yourself and or, your sales staff.

You might think that a question like “How are you going to survive in the sales world?” is an obvious one… But let me assure you, people are so very, very tough these days when it comes to sales people! It’s like they’ve developed a new resiliency towards them and can even smell them a mile away.

I’ve been in sales for over 15 years and back when I first started with my true outbound business development role, my three bosses to be in the interview asked me “How are you going to survive in a competitive market place like this?”…

Now just think about it for a moment, how would you answer such a question?

You might say “well I’ve been through a 18 sales training courses, read 103 sales training books, done sales negotiation training and think so from my experience and track record, believe that I’m truly right up there with the best in this industry!”… And good for you if you can say this, the thing is not everyone can!

I’ve coached hundreds of sales people from inbound lead takers through to the toughest of outbound cold callers and believe me, “MOST” salespeople have done tonnes and tonnes of courses, read hundreds of books and even had their immediate sales managers go out with them to try and coach and mentor them through the sales process so they improve.

The “COLD HARD TRUTH” is however, most salespeople are on their last legs, if they don’t get it right this time, they are OUT, FIRED, SACKED… Never to be seen by that company again and yet another chink in their personal pride is gone…

My question is, “How long can you take this?”…

The common answer is, about 3 to 5 years, some quit much, much sooner, but then there is the “hard noses” (like me) who stick around, trying to improve on “IM-Perfect” models of selling that have been taught for years by the so called experts… We all know what the definition of insanity is don’t we folks?… And with that true, I was insane in the sales industry for some 10 years or so!

To cut a long story short, I survived through sheer determination, and a “LOVE” of meeting new people, networking and over-delivering on value, which of course made them very, very happy.

But how on earth did I get them that way to begin with? And espescially in the early days when I knocked on doors of “STONE COLD” prospects who didn’t care about who I was, or what I had to sell them!

Well, what I used to do was a little bit of a stealth sales operation, my very first business that I created was a low-volume business card and printing business. And what I used to do was go into a small store and take a good look around, strike up a conversation with the people working there, suss out if they were the owners or just employees and so on…

If they appeared friendly and the conversation went well, I would ask them for a business card and most of the time they didn’t have them, or if they did, they were very badly done.

So after getting their card, I would be on my way… Little to their knowledge, I would be off to create a brand new image for their card, and then take it back to them next day as a sample.

This quite simply used to “BLOW people away” because they couldn’t believe they hadn’t even asked me to do that, I would tell them that because I’m so passionate about helping businesses with their image, that I often did this and even if they didn’t go any further they had a model of a great card to use at a later date.

Now, most old-school sales managers would think “giving away your secrets isn’t going to get you sales and make you money” however, they also don’t understand the essence of “giving” and how powerful it is!

9 times out of ten the ecstatic business owners would ask me, “how much to make these?” and becuase they were such a small business, I would say I can do 50 to 150 overnight for $X’s, that way if you want to change them next time round we can do that without it costing you for a minimum run of 500.

They loved it, and so I turned my sales survival strategy into a natural cold calling model, that focussed on “helping solve a problem” of the person I was calling, it also revolved around the law of attraction, becuase if I didn’t like the person running the show, I could walk away and not do them a favour, so my success ratio of closing sales was very, very high!

I did this for years, with computers sales, homeware items and a range of many other products too long to mention here, but the basic factor still remains, natural connection with clients works.

Do something for them and most often they’ll remember you and do something back when the time is right, if nothing else you’ve gained a friend and some very, very positive and willing referrals from them to their colleagues who do buy.

I hope this has been a useful bit of information on how you might survive in a tough sales (or even an easy sales) environment, it works every time, I know this because I’ve done it and coached it.

You can find out more about my natural cold calling methodology at www.naturalcoldcalling.com which is my information marketing site and I’m adding new articles in there for you to learn from all the time.