Selling with Impact
Sales is not a dark art. The perception is that some people are natural born sales people and have the “gift of the gab” the truth is some of us are more naturally gifted at putting clients at ease through building rapport, creating empathy and generating impact in their conversations but all these are skills that can be acquired, refined and mastered over time.
Today we look at selling with impact, how to create an impact with your customers and how to create more opportunities for you to increase your sales conversion and reduce your sales cycles.
There are several key components to building up an effective sales process and these start from even before you pick up the phone to what to do after the conversation has ended. A key part of the sales process is building rapport, enough to be able to probe on a solution to the client’s needs, most clients don’t buy on a whim they do so using logic, but also emotion:
Logic
There has to be logical link to align what your product or service you are selling to something that they need and see value in, most clients don’t just buy randomly they have a unfulfilled need by either there current provider or are new to the market either triggered by an experience a life event or an undiscovered need that has recently presented itself.
Emotion
The trigger is what is important here, as mentioned previously clients don’t buy randomly they buy with the head but also they buy with their heart, it’s your job to make that physical connection for the customer and help them find the solution to their problem in your service and importantly YOU, people buy from people so attune yourself to the client’s needs and use this technique to help influence them to buy from you rather than your competitors.
Getting an emotional connection with your client is very powerful in building rapport and ultimately trust, without trust you are not going to make the sale so how is trust generated in the sales process?
Building rapport
As part of the SWIFT Sales principles we train out at Fab Solutions we’ve developed the 3 key principles of rapport buildingknown as the “3 R’s of Rapport” these focus on active listening skills and help you build that emotional connection
- React
It’s easy to just take information but using that information with a physical response either facial gestures, hand movement, leaning in to the conversation or vocal stimulus like changes in inflexion, tone and pace, either way react to information with the most appropriate response and show you are listening and interested.
Remember
There is no point in asking questions of your client if you don’t absorb that information and remember it for future use, this could be as simple as remembering their name later in the call or an event that has triggered a response that you can link back to when replaying options but all information is a gift that can be used to help solidify that emotional connection so make notes on more then what product option they picked.
Re-use
Most sales are two step sales so if you have relevant information reuse it, if you know the customer was going away to speak to their partner ask what the partner thought, if they had been away on holiday, ask about the holiday, if a child had been unwell ask if they are feeling better, as mentioned all information is a gift and you use this to “re-gift” and build that emotional connection with you and the client.
So in summary there are many steps to the sales process but building rapport and trust is critical as this enables you to feel comfortable enough to ask for the business.
For more information on the techniques that we use within our Selling skills programme “SWIFT Selling” – visit our website and drop us a line to see how we can help you and your teams increase sales performance and build leadership capability.
