Even if you have what could be called a natural affinity with people and find the art of selling to someone is something that you enjoy and tend to excel at, there is always likely to be room for improvement when it comes to sharpening your skills and boosting your conversion rate.
With the help of some professional sales coaching, and armed with some valuable tips and techniques, who knows how successful you might become?
Here are some great suggestions for improving your sales skills.
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Focus on delivering a solution
A solid sales strategy would be to consider what the key challenges are that your customers are trying to overcome. By putting yourself in their position and identifying their needs you can then adapt your sales approach to meet those requirements.
Offer a value proposition that is unique
Whatever market you operate in it is bound to be highly competitive. That means you have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
Even if you are offering a product or service that they can get elsewhere, if you can add value in some way this will help win their business and retain their loyalty.
There are numerous ways to add value. You can review previous sales success to see which types of offers and incentives have been well received in the past.
Deliver a consistent message
Consistency is often important when it comes to developing a successful sales strategy.
Pull together a range of consistent marketing strategies that have stood the test of time and allow customers to recognize what you stand for and what you are offering.
Look at boosting sales revenues using existing customers
It is well known that it is a lot easier to sell to someone who has already done business with you compared to winning a new customer from scratch.
A fantastic way to boost sales would be to see how you can increase cart value and the frequency of your customer’s purchases.
Look at ways of offering deals and extra incentives so that they spend more on each visit and return with greater frequency.
Understand what makes your customer buy
Getting into the mindset of your typical customer can provide valuable insights that you can use to increase your sales.
Take some time to focus on what makes your customer buy your products or services. Ask for feedback and analyze sales data to see if you can uncover the relevant triggers, so you can replicate the tactics with new prospects.
Make use of data
One of the great things about selling online is that it has become a lot easier to use analytical tools to get all sorts of valuable information about your website and what your competitors are doing.
Running a regular website audit can reveal a lot of useful data insights. Using tools like Google Analytics can also help you to conduct a competitor analysis. This can often provide some useful pointers such as keyword data that you can use to boost sales.
Work on creating a sense of urgency
It is believed that more than a third of potential deals that are in your sales pipeline at any one time don’t manage to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
The reason for this is widely considered to be what is referred to as “Status Quo Bias”. What this describes is an in-built aversion for a customer to do something different than they are already doing. In other words, they are not inclined to take a leap of faith and commit to buying from you, or anyone else for that matter.
The way to break this so-called status quo is to create a sense of urgency that you have the solution and taking decisive action would help them meet their business goals.
Offer the customer something they didn’t know they needed
Introducing unconsidered needs into the sales conversation is an effective sales technique that could help improve your sales figures.
Although it definitely works to identify their specific needs and meet those requirements with your initial pitch. It can be highly effective when you highlight problems or opportunities that they hadn’t considered up to that point.
Introducing an unconsidered need into the sales conversation can have a positive impact and prove to be highly persuasive when it comes to making your pitch memorable.
Highlight the difference between you and a competitor
Another classic sales conundrum is when you fall into what is often referred to as the parity trap when conducting your sales conversations.
What this describes is what can often be an unavoidable overlap between what you are offering in terms of price, product, and service, compared to your rivals.
If a customer is struggling to identify any real difference it is likely to be a scenario that boils down to who is offering the best price. The way to avoid that scenario is to focus your pitch on telling a customer what is uniquely different about what you are offering. This helps to steer the conversation away from a potential parity trap, which is where you don’t really want to end up.
Work on creating the perfect sales pitch
You will often find that you have a buyer’s complete attention at the beginning of your conversation but it has a tendency to wane somewhere in the middle, which then makes it hard to close the deal at the end if you have lost their focus.
This is a sales presentation dilemma that is often called “the hammock effect”. It is described this way because of the fact that their attention and focus dips in the middle of your sales pitch.
Look at ways of introducing interesting facts or numbers in the middle part of your pitch. This will help you to keep their attention and should improve your chances of keeping them engaged right to the end.
These simple but effective sales techniques are also useful tools to have at your disposal when trying to improve your sales performance.
Can you use some of these techniques to boost your sales?
