Sales Training: Practical Sales Techniques

Chris Croft

The first definition of sales is helping the customer realise it’s worth spending the extra. On the
other hand, it’s finding out what they need, helping them to think about what they need, and
then showing that you can do it, showing that you can help them.

Making new friends and helping them.

Walking along a Tightrope

You go from the start along this Tightrope to the money, the sale, and the profit at the far end.
Note that it is not fall off the Tightrope. As you see, it is difficult in the way, because if you put
one step wrong, you are off the Tightrope and cannot get back on.
1. The first thing is to make sure that you prepare. If you turn up to a customer and you
haven’t prepared, suppose you get their name wrong, or you accidentally reveal that
you have no idea what their company does, you are off the Tightrope.
2. The next step is if you are late. If you turn up late, now some customers aren’t too
bothered, but some customers are and it is a percentage game. You don’t want to lose
half your customers. Make sure you are not late.
3. If they don’t like you. If a customer doesn’t like you, you are off the Tightrope.
4. What their needs are. What they’re looking for? Why you are there? Once you found
out what their needs are, you can then finally show them what the benefits are of
whatever it is you’re offering them. You do have to show them the benefits.
5. If you don’t discover the objections, then you are off the Tightrope, and sometimes,
they won’t want to tell you what their objections are.
6. If didn’t close. Ask for the order. Some fear probably because they say No, so, quite
often, salespeople don’t close. They just say, well, there you are, let me know. If you
decide you want to buy it in the future, let me know.
 7. The final step is following up. If the customer says I need to check with my boss, we
cannot decide until April, why would you not phone them next week and say, what did
the boss think?

Process of selling
The old process of selling is a sales funnel that includes contact > qualify > present > close. The
main problem is time-consuming, time is important, present them and…very unpleasant,

New process of selling:

RELATIONSHIPS SALES METHOD

Start with building up a relationship with the customer. The old process doesn’t involve any
relationships. In this step, the customer has to trust you, you’ve got to understand the
customer, and they need to like you.
The second step is to identify the needs that the customer has and to diagnose what their
problem is.
The third step is then to prescribe a solution.
The last step is to confirm and take an order.

Not to be liked: have you ever not bought something because you didn’t like the guy? I think we
all have. If it’s a product that we want, or a service that we want, why it matters whether we
like the guy or not? We don’t want to give our money to someone we don’t like. That
salesperson is probably only representing the company. We probably don’t have to deal with
him again. He/She represents the company, which is also important that he or she should be,
the best person that company can put in front of you. If you don’t like the best person they can
put in front of you, then, are you going like that company? Are you going to like their attitude,
the way they work, and the other people you are going to deal with in that company?

We have three possibilities:

1. The person keen to buy from you.
2. They are neutral, they are not bothered.
3. They are not very keen to buy from you.

First impression and body language

For years, IBM had a rule that you couldn’t have a beard. They believe that some customers
wouldn’t trust men with beards.
I’d recommend not having anything that might upset the customer or might worry them. Don’t
have a really unusual hairstyle or a crazy shirt, or weird shoes, or anything. Why takes a risk?
Be clean, and smart, don’t have dirty fingernails, or something like that.
The first thing that probably happens when you walk into a room is to smile or not. If you don’t
smile maybe because you had a bad journey, or you couldn’t find anywhere to park, or your
dog is ill, or maybe you are worried about a sales meeting. If you don’t smile, though, the
customer will think it is because you don’t like them, or you don’t like their look of them.
The next thing that probably will happen is you will probably shake hands. We all know what
the worst handshake is. The dead fish handshake. So a nice firm handshake, obviously, but not
too firm and not on top. Just a nice, horizontal, normal handshake.
The next is eye contact, not crazy intense eye contact but most of the time you should be
looking at them. Do not do that disrespectfully. They feel that they are not important.
The final thing is to use their name. If you don’t use somebody’s name, it is as if you don’t know
what their name is. Don’t chicken out of using their name at all.

Book: How to win friends and influence people: Imagine that everyone you meet has got MMFI
written across their forehead. Not MFI, obviously that would be a furniture shop that, I think,
may have gone out of business now, but MMFI, which stands for “Make Me Feel Important”.
Everybody wants to be made to feel important.
How give everybody feel important?
Ask questions and Listen: tell me all about what you are doing, what are your needs, what your
business does, and what are the issues, etc. sales is all about listening and you should be a good
listener, not a good talker.
If you’re going to be a good listener, you have to ask them questions and get them talking and
then listen.
Benefits of being a good listener:
1. You can find common ground with the other person. What do you like doing in your
spare time?
2. MMFI
3. Makes you likeable
4. Learning
5. You’re in control
6. Avoids mines

Questioning funnel:

Book: The Inner Games of Tennis: it is not really about tennis at all. It is about the kind of
success in your life. They were various spin-offs following on from the book. There is one called
The Inner Game of Work. They said forget selling. Your job is to find out as much as you can
about the customer, and when you get back to base, you are going to be judged, and your
bonus will depend on how much you found out about the customer. That is all we want to
know. What happened was, they sold more. The reason for that is because they went to see the
customers, they asked loads of questions, they discovered lots of needs that the customers
had.

Finally, the questioning funnel starts off with opening questions like who, where, when, why
etc. or even tell me about. With open questions, you could get any answer. At the other end of
the funnel, you’ve got closed questions. These are Yes or No questions. For instance, If I could
help you with that, would you like to look at a possible solution? Or would you like to buy this,
or which will solve your problems?
The key part of the funnel is the middle question. Which is a probing question. You will get back
the useful information. So, if you open with me, tell me about your work, and the person says
Well, it is not too bad, although my boss is a bit funny. A good probing question would be,
really? So, tell me more about your boss. He or She said my boss is very moody and something
like that, and then you could say, well, what sort of things does he do? Oh well, sometimes he
comes in and he just shouts at everybody. Another probing question is: so, how do you handle
that? Or what do you think you should have done? The difficult thing about probing questions is
that you are improvising. Because you don’t know where the conversation is going to go. So,
you are improvising. The good news about probing questions is that they have a pretty much
standard format, which tells me more about that. Tell me through it.
Once you have found out enough, you can then summarise and start a new funnel. For
example, you start a new funnel and you say tell me about your spare time? and if the person
says, well, I am really into golf, you can go into a golf funnel and say oh, right? so whereabouts
do you play? And off you go. If you hate golf, you could just say, oh that’s good, and anything
else apart from golf?

Question – Answer – Comment

What we are doing then? If we ask them a question, they answer it, and then we put a little
comment in at the end just to show that we have listened. Actually putting the comment forces
you to listen.

Ideally is 90%-10% - 90 them, and 10 you

You have two 5%: the first is for comment and the other 5% is just to ask another question.

People Vary: 4 types of People

Carl Jung
The logical People: Analytical – Controller
The Emotional People: Amiable – Enthusiast
Introvert: Analytical – Amiable
Extrovert: Controller – Enthusiast

Analytical person: Quiet – Logical – Accuracy – Detail

With this person, I’d want to tell them all about what I’m going to do, why I’m doing it, and the
background behind it, also the conversation needs to be very, kind, calm and diagnostic, and
need to ask them lots of things as well. I could probably have a little chart of the pros and cons
of which thing we could do. I could probably show them options, that sort of thing. So, they
want lots of detail, the meeting would probably be in their office with lots of paperwork.

Controller Person: Loud – Fast – Efficient - Dynamic

they want a much quicker meeting, they want 10 minutes, maximum, if you want to get an
appointment with them, you’ve got to say to them, All I need is ten minutes. They love to hear
that. At the ten-minute point, I say to them, we’re supposed to stop now, and they go No No I
want to know more about this. They don’t want to have to travel to you. It’s in their office. They
want bullet points.
Imagine a person answers you: Hello, my name is Fred from the accounts department, how can
I help you? You know it is an analytical person. If you ring up and they go, yes, what do you
want? You know it is a controller.

Enthusiast Person: Energic – Creative – Fun – Excited – Stories

I’ve got to show them that it’s fun, and I’ve got to be a fun person as well. They like examples
and they like stories. The controller doesn’t really care about other people, the analytical is
going to think, but the enthusiastic person says well, that sounds great, we should do this. They
want a meeting to be fun. A good place to meet them is probably a pub. Or, coffee, or
whatever.

Amiable Person: Friendly – Thoughtful – Calm – Relationship

They want a longer, calmer type of meeting. For them, it is all about relationships. So, you have
to be their friend. You got to remember the name of their cat.

Overall, the controller just sends them some bullet points. For the analytical, send them loads
of information, for the enthusiast, just send them, links to whatever it is that excites them, and
for the amiable, you got to send them birthday cards and things like that. So, adopt to the other
person, it’s really important.

The diagnosing part of the process: identify what their needs are, and trying to find out what
their problem is.
 Don’t be tempted to stop questioning too early.
 Bring a standard list.
 Narrow down your pitch by asking their problems.
 Narrow down with a menu.
 Don’t worry, they want to be cured.
 Keep passing it back.
 Be assertive.
 Find their needs then solve them.

Visualise the problem

Make them really feel a bit of pain. Insurance people do this, actually. Because they say to you,
do you have life insurance? And you go, well, no. and they go, well, what would happen if you
died? And you say, I don’t know.
Question until they say it, for example, oh my god!
What is the cost of the fact their car keeps breaking down is.
What’s the cost of having a useless computer?
What’s the cost of their staff not being trained?
What they say is true. You shouldn’t say “you need this”, they should say “I need this”.
Use questions to do it.

Difference between features and benefits

Salespeople love features. Features are easy, the problem is, that the customer doesn’t care
that much about features. Do I want a 100-hertz TV? I don’t know. We should show both.

I don't want to know about all the features and the benefits I get from them, because some of
those benefits are things I don't care about.

Tailor the list.

Objections are actually just a sign of interest. So, objections aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
Sometimes objections are not real, because people have this fear of commitment. They are just
worry, if we do buy it, afterwards we might think, oh no, what have I done? So sometimes
objections are just because the person’s too frightened to take the plunge and spend the
money.

Most car adverts are not actually to try to sell you the car. They are actually to convince you
after you’ve bought the car. That if you’ve bought the right one. There’s a thing called buyer’s
remorse. Where after you’ve bought something, you think, oh, what have I done? The other
reason is that they’ve still got the real one if they need it. They might try and fob you off with a
fake objection in the hope they don’t have to play their real card. Once they play their real card,
if you can answer that, then they are in real trouble, so they have to buy it. There might be
reasons where they may not want to tell you the real objection. If we can’t find out what the
real objection is, we can’t handle it. Price isn’t normally the problem.

Peeling the onion: you say “apart from that, is there any other reason?”
Example: if I could sort the price in some way, if price wasn’t a problem, then, would you buy
it?
You don’t have to say “apart from that” you could say “as well as that”
Example: As well as the price, because I know it’s a bit expensive, is there any other reason why
you wouldn’t buy it? And if they say “well, No, you know, it’s really just the price” then you
know that you do have to handle the price objection. But 9 times of ten, they’ll say “well, yeah,
the other problem is, you know, I’m still not convinced of the reliability or I’m just thinking it’s
going to be a bit hard to learn how to use it.
They know that if they say, well, its only price, that if you then handle price, they’ve got to buy
it. So, you’re forcing them, really, to come out with the real objection.

Feel Felt Found

I know how you feel, I felt the same way, but what I found was.
“I said I love to go to India. The other person said Oh no, I wouldn’t want to go to India. Oh no!
There would be too many people, I would just feel claustrophobic and crowed in by all the
people.”
How would I handle that? I could say No, don’t be stupid. It’s not like that. It’s not like on the
telly. But I wouldn’t do that, because saying don’t be stupid, you’re wrong, is never going to
work. What I would say is:
I know your feel, because I felt the same way, and I had this image of all these people crowding
in. But what I found, actually, when I got there is that there are great big open spaces, there
are deserts, there are castles, Look here are some photos. And when you do get into the towns,
the people are so friendly. Actually, it’s not a problem that it’s really populated.
So back it up with evidence.

Finally collect for common objections. Prepare solutions.

Price Objection
Probably you haven’t built the needs. Salespeople always worry about the price. Price isn’t the
deciding factor. If somebody says, oh, I’m not sure about the price. Your first thought should be,
it never is. So, the first thing to do is to peel the onion and say, “If we could sort the price,
would there be any other reason?” But suppose they say, no it really is price. Some answers are
is it the fact that they don’t have the cash right now, they can’t actually afford it right now, or is
it the actual amount that they can’t justify? And those are two quite different things. so, is it the
total amount, justifying the expenditure? Or is it just they haven’t got the cash? And clearly, if
they haven’t got the cash, you might be able to do some sort of a payment scheme.

The price VS Your price

Cash flow VS Total

CLOSE
Prepare your close
Tea or Coffee close

Keeping the ball in your court

If they said I need to think about it, or we haven’t got the budget until April. What do you do?
So, keep the next step. Never say Okay, well, you know, call me when you’re ready. Call me if
you change your mind. They’re never going to call you. And you can’t call them either. Because
if you do, you’re just hassling them. And they said, well, look, I said I wasn’t ready yet, don’t
keep phoning me. So, what you must do is get the next action with you.
You could say: Okay, well, that’s fine, Shall I phone you in a week? Or how long will it take to
check with your boss? After that, phoning as promised. So, you’ve got an excuse to phone
them, and it makes you look efficient. You should always phone them when they said you
should phone them. Follow their lead.

Seven Efficiency Points:

1. Always be contactable: always have you, always answer it if you possibly can, or have a
message saying, I’ll text you back straight away.
2. Reply quickly to enquiries. I always email back the same day. You will receive “thank you
for your prompt reply”
3. Keep Promises: If you say you’ll send them a sample by the end of the week, you must.
4. Attention to detail: Make sure that you always spell the person’s name right. You get
their company name right. Make sure that if you promised you’ll send them a certain
thing, you send them exactly that thing. If you got an unusual name, by the way, check
the spelling, and also check the pronunciation.
5. Create an email footer: you should setup a little signature or footer on your emails.
6. Customised Voicemail: I’ll get back to you the same day. Please leave a message. I
always return my calls. You should absolutely put your name on there.
7. Strict diary control: write your diary for future follow-up. To do.
Negotiating

Deciding to Do it: why do we avoid negotiating? So:

False Excuses: I haven’t got time, or they probably wouldn’t negotiate with me, or what if they
don’t like me? What if they laugh at me? We have all these fears and all these excuses. They are
pretty much all false.
Don’t let the excuses win

Overcoming Embarrassment and Pride.

You don’t want to look cheap,
How do we overcome embarrassment and pride? The answer is to think of it as a game.
Negotiating is just a game.

Fear of losing the Deal:

Blame it on yourself.
I can’t afford it.