There are three ways to increase your sales.
- Increase your sales funnel
- Increase your close ratio
- Increase your margins
I don’t know a salesperson that doesn’t want to increase their sales. It means more money and greater job security. The problem is that many companies don’t provide the training necessary to accomplish this goal.
My experience might not be typical, but of all the companies I’ve sold for, only one offered a substantial training program that addressed parts of the above. That company didn’t cover the how-to for all three.
Increase your sales funnel
I wrote about this in How To Calculate Your Monthly Sales Projection, but the takeaway is the more abundant your funnel, the more you sell. Sounds easy and is compared to the others.
Increase your close ratio
Increasing your closing ratio is a great way to increase your sales, and I encourage you to learn how. It requires expanding your skillset in a couple of areas.
- Qualifying
- Asking better questions
The first step is knowing your products better than anyone. What problems do they solve? How do they incorporate into a company’s workflow? I wrote about product knowledge in this article; Product Knowledge is King. Here is what my experience shows.
Scenario One: A salesperson gets the appointment with the right person, and in that meeting, tells them everything they never wanted to know about your company. Your sure to include that your company has the best customer service. They’ve never heard that before.
Getting back to the office, you enter the prospect into the CRM and give it a 90% chance of closing. Then you project the sale to close the next month. Chances are it never happens.
Scenario Two: The same salesperson gets the appointment with the right person. His quick research gives him enough information to know what the company does and some of the challenges they are facing in the coming year. You discover who they compete with and their target market.
Then in the first meeting, you discuss the needs of the prospect. You find out about their criteria, their buying process, their timeline for implementation, and their budget. You also find out who makes the final decision and when they expect to make it.
Getting this information can easily take several appointments, meeting with different people.
From all this information, you decide if this is a prospect for your company. If so, you know how to enter them into the CRM and mark the percentage.
If not, you can enter them and tag them for followup at a later date. The company may be a prospect later.
If they are not a prospect at the current time, DO NOT WASTE time “checking back” and leaving telephone messages that don’t get returned.
Questions
Qualifying requires better information, and to get it, you need to ask better questions. They go hand-in-hand. Ask a lot of bad questions is worse than not asking any.
So how do you ask good questions? Here is my acronym reminder to stay on track.
Q = qualify
U = understand
E = engage
S = state
T = timing
I = image
O = objections
N = notify
S = send
So what does this mean?
Q = qualify
Do your homework. Determine a good set of questions before you arrive. [See above]
U = understand
You are required to understand their problems. What ideas have they tried? Why didn’t they work? Understand where the person you are meeting fits into the overall situation. Are you meeting with the end-user, an influencer, or the decision-maker? More and more, the decisions get made by committees. Is that the case with this current prospect?
E = engage
Engaging the prospect is vital to the process. If they aren’t engaged, they will not share information. They need to know you want to assist in solveing the issues they are experiencing.
Two things to remember. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) and the old saying, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” A multitude of bad questions will result in a multitude of bad answers but if they sense you care, they will engage.
S = state
I am fascinated by the number of misunderstandings I witness in meetings. Recently, four of us met with a gentleman, and afterward, during our discussion, it was apparent we attended four different meetings. As you understand and engage the prospect, it is important to ask good followup questions and to restate what they said for confirmation. (Example: “If I understand you correctly, your thingamabob is causing a loss of three hours labor every time it breaks?”) Gaining confirmation assures the prospect said what you think you heard.
T = timing
The timing always refers to the prospect’s timing, not yours. You need to know when they plan to purchase, when the budget is ready, what is the expected timing for delivery and implementation. All this is critical to your sales projections.
I = image
Building a word picture for the prospect helps clarify the problem and your solution. Lost labor and additional repair expenses can seem like intangibles, but with word pictures, they come alive.
O = objections
Initially, I like to answer the prospect’s questions with a question to gain clarity. Is the question a real issue, or are they just curious? Are they hiding something or misleading with the answer? You need to know.
N = notify
Never skip this step! You must notify your prospect or customer what your next actions are. When will you followup? When can they expect your proposal? This step is critical and can gain a lead over the competition. Your prospect knows precisely what to expect from you.
NOW MAKE SURE AND DO WHAT YOU SAY.
S = send
Always, always, always send a thank-you note after a prospect has spent valuable time with you. It says something about you when you go the extra step.
- You will give a little more than the competition
- You will not skip the details
- You are good at followup
- You care about their time and appreciate them.
Do you want to move from salesman to Professional Salesman? Start using QUESTIONS today, and the journey begins.
Increase your margins
This third step to increase your sales is for professionals only. It is harder to implement and dangerous if done wrong. However, done correctly, it is a great strategy to increase your sales and your paycheck. We’ll dig into this in a later article.