How to kick butt in sales without looking and feeling like you are selling.

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Jill Orsatti, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

Trying to navigate the sales process and find your winning formula?

The key is to build trust, find out customer needs and create solutions to issues.
In sales, how do you find a fast and effective way to making your quota, establishing and winning key accounts? The key is to find a pathway to trust, customer needs and creating a solution to those needs that your product or service can solve.
Build rapport, by finding some conversational topic to chat about between you and your client; like the following topics; sports, alumni events, music, family, great travel stories or new restaurants if they are a foodie. If you see a picture of their dog or kids on their screen, ask a question about that, share your photos of your kids or dog to build a bridge of commonality.
Prior to your meeting, see what information that you glean from social media, without letting them know that you did some preparation, to get a sense of who this person is beyond their work life. Sometimes you can learn things that give you an inside edge. This should be something that is pretty easy and can be added naturally into your conversational banter. Preparation is key before going into the client or customer.
Know what your angle will be and know your product or service cold, so that you don’t get nervous about any objections or challenges. The sales process is more about EQ, Emotional quotient (intelligence), reading the cues, reading the room, assessing what your customer is saying but not saying. You can do this by using your intuition and gut reactions. Sometimes the words aren’t really conveying what they are really saying. If you can ask great questions in a way that doesn’t feel like you are in a court room, in a conversational way, to engage them, you can determine what the issue is that your product or service can help solve and get to the heart of the discussion pretty quickly. Make sure to ask open ended questions.
Selling objectively is another tactic, to add more leverage to your story, by sharing feedback from other clients regarding how your company solutions have helped them gain a competitive edge in the industry. Watch their reaction and see what part of your conversation resonates. Once you realize what their area of interest is, explore that a bit more with a well-placed open ended question. Some customers won’t tell you that they are having any issue or need, which is often a harder way to drive into the sales process, but what that leaves you with is knowing that this person is probably guarded, may not yet trust you yet and that needs to be earned.
If they ask for something to move the process forward, consider that a good sign but also it may be a test or challenge, that needs to be handled carefully in order for you to prove your worthiness as a business partner and establish that trust. Do the task well and respond quickly, so you can prove your reliability and knowledge. If they don’t ask for anything, find something to offer to keep the dialogue going and give you another chance to build that trust and have a subsequent conversation at another time, soon after this original meeting. Before the end of the meeting, state that you will reach out in one week for follow up and see what day is best for them, to set the expectation that you will be following up. Timing is critical, people lose interest with too much time between meetings. Try to meet within 1-2 weeks maximum.
Examples of some open ended questions like, how do you see your company’s needs benefit from my solution? What are you currently doing in this process and what are some things you wish were improved?

Detail, listening, educating but just enough until more questions come. Don’t do what most green sales people do, which is the information dump. It’s more about tailoring the conversation to the sophisticated customer, empowering them to make a great decision, which of course is working with you and buying your service or product.
If your customer states that they are happy with their current supplier, and cannot currently earn the spot of first choice, positioning your services/products into the number two spot is great and often leads to becoming number one, when the other company has a backorder, pricing issue or service issue. It leaves you positioned to be #1. Remember being a price disrupter is one way in, but it not the best way into the business because, creating value is much more important than price. Value is perceived by the customer by the superiority or uniqueness of what you can offer and that will help hold pricing higher.
At the end of the day, planning, make the customer feel special, engaged, make the experience fun, conversational, educational and ultimately customized to what their needs are and you will kick butt selling without looking and feeling like you are selling. Remember often it is a marathon not a sprint and relationships take longer to build with some customers than others. Follow up is critical. Good Luck. For more sales tips and career help, reach out to me www.SageOwlTreeCoaching.com for a free consultation.
You’ve got this!