Finding your sales potential is critically important to a successful sales career and is your opportunity to develop increased positive relationships with your clients and prospects. The key to sales success is the ability to develop rapport, ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. It is here that the sales professional will use his or her potential to develop credibility and earn the right to begin discovering the Wants and Needs step of fact-finding and discovery in the sales process.
Sales professionals can use the FORMULA FOR SUCCESS to maximize their sales opportunities with prospects and clients, much earlier in the sales cycle, when they have a better understanding of how to get RESULTS.
Top salespeople offer to share a little information about themselves and their organization, while remembering that this process is about the prospect and their issues -- not you and your issues!
Utilizing a "capabilities statement," the sales professional works to clearly identify for the prospect the areas in which your organization can work. Utilizing our FORMULA FOR SALES SUCCESS, the salesperson can indicate an understanding of how people and organizations improve, and how that ties to the product or service you are selling:
Let's word backwards to explain the formula and how it builds on your credibility with your prospects or clients:
IR
We start out by asking what actual
Improved Results are desired in the organization and how that will be tracked or measured. Everything else we do is geared around achieving those business goals and results (the o and p in parentheses represent both the organizational goals, as well as personal goals). By analyzing your own situation and performance, both personally and professionally, you can set goals in areas that are most meaningful and, as an outcome, organizational and personal results improve.
Improved Results provide more revenue to achieve even more opportunities and resources, and typically that increases salespeople's motivation to become even more effective. Continuous improvement becomes self-sustaining; a way of life at your organization.
PBC
PBC represents
Positive Behavioral Change. Wouldn't you agree that in order to achieve improved results you will have to behave differently?
Goals
Doesn't it make sense that if professional sales people had goals to focus their energy on, it would make it easier to change their behavior in a way that can be sustained?
S + K
Skills is knowing
how to do something and knowledge is
where and when to do something.
A
The A stands for Attitude (the want to). This approach,
Sales by Commitment, is a results-oriented philosophy that involves first developing a goal-oriented attitude among the sales professionals. Attitude is more a multiplier of skills and knowledge that will directly influence the goals that you set and achieve. This will help to determine whether you expand the client base and services provided or allow atrophy to set in. Whether you diligently look for additional opportunities, or remain satisfied with the status quo.
v&b
v&b represents an individual's values and beliefs. Research tells us the great majority of attitudes we carry with us today were developed when we were between 0 and 5 years old. During that period of life, we were not judging what input we would accept and which we would not. We were more like giant sponges that accepted what was being washed over us. The reason this is so significant is because it is estimated that approximately 77% of the input we received as infants and young children was negative vs. 23% that was positive. Think about those times when as a salesperson you were trying to role out a new product or assimilate a new sales reporting process. How often did you make the statement, "Oh that will never work?" or maybe you have been known to say, "we tried that before and it didn't work then, and it won't work now!"
88% B (f) C
This represents the fact that during approximately 88% of our selling day our
behaviors are below the conscious level. We are on automatic pilot as a
function of prior conditioning. We don't typically have to think about tying our shoes, driving a car or figuring out how we are going to get to work. We perform these tasks automatically. Why is this so critical to understand? If you agree that we need to change our behaviors in order to achieve different results, and if you accept that 88% of the time we are operating below the conscious level, then we need to think differently at the subconscious level in order to have sustainable behavior change that leads to Improved Results.
Clearly, the extra potential exists within you and can be unlocked by understanding and applying the
Formula For Sales Success.
For additional information on the Formula for Success and our other secrets to increased sales success, contact us at info@houstonpartnersinternational.com.
Have a Great Week!
Jerry
