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Spring up your selling skills to improve your business!

Written by: Stephen Goldberg

Article Overview: Do you sell solutions or products and services? There is a big difference between the two. Most people today only want to deal with sales people if they can provide solutions to their problems or opportunities to improve sales, operations and lower costs.

Spring up your selling skills to improve your business!

Otherwise you will be treated as a commodity and only be able to sell based on price and delivery. The more you can sell on value and return on investment the more profitable your selling will be.

There is a big difference in the skill set required to sell solutions versus commodities. The higher up the person is in their organization to which you are selling, the greater quantity of selling skills you will need.

There are four key skill sets a professional salesperson needs to continuously develop to be at the top in their respective field.

1. Self-knowledge & understanding
2. Product and technical knowledge
3. Planning & organization
4. People skills

Notice that I did not list selling skills, such as listening, closing, negotiation. Of course these skills or techniques are important, but I incorporate them in the four skill sets I listed.

Business owners and sales professionals, who want to excel in their business, must understand the components of these skill sets and know how to develop themselves according to their own strengths and weaknesses.

I used this approach to train and coach Mario Lapointe of SMT-ASSY. After one year Mario more than doubled his sales, amongst other accomplishments.

Please visit my blog to watch a video interview with Mario.

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Article Tags: assy, blog, business owners, coach, commodities, commodity, lapointe, mario, negotiation, planning organization, professional salesperson, return on investment, sales professionals, self knowledge, strengths and weaknesses, technical knowledge, train, video interview



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Help in a Struggling Economy - If anyone on the forum has a question they would like me to ask Mark Tewart on my show Monday Dec 22 - just let me know. I hope to ask him about all kinds of advice that he can share with people who want to improve their sales skills and their life and personal skills. There are many ways to improve our position in business - whether we are the boss or workers -- imagine if you learned to make yourself more valuable to your employer and/or your clients???? Mark can share great information to help you improve your skills and make yourself more valuable. Shri
Re: Cold Calling - In my experience the problem with hiring cold callers is that many of the successful candidates already realize that they have a talent for sales and are already working for themselves. Most of the candidates that would take a job cold calling most likely do not have solid selling or client service skills. I used to work for a brokerage firm in Victoria and we hired co-op students to cold call. In my opinion that was a mistake. Potential clients can sense inexperience very quickly and without a seasoned cold caller on your team prospecting will be very challenging.....the key is to find someone with skills that isn't already doing there own selling....tricky. Good luck Phil
Re: Team Building - Thanks for the resource. I've found team building is a valuable tool to improve how employees get along in the workplace and improve both morale and productivity. When leaders and employees learn team building skills they are able to work together more effectively and do it with less effort. [Link removed by forum admin]
no-cost Admin help - I agree with Wendy. what is the least amount you can start with to hand off to some one else for 1 hour per week. It can be on a pay or unpaid model. Let's say that you want to give away all your routine email correspondence away to someone else. How do you get this done for no out of pocket expense? Well, first ask yourself - what kind of person would take on such a task? What does this task offer in skill development that will be of value to someone? let's call this person who is going to help you an - Intern. The Intern would most probably want to build on the following skills: - Practice written communication - Improve on Email skills - Internet Research skills to answer some email correspondence There are resources out there such as Craigslist and Oodle.com where you can post such a job and you'd be surprised with the responses you will get to help you on such a project. Some of the responses you may get may come from International Students wanting to improve on their written English skills, 60+ individuals wanting to learn more about the Internet and bored stay at home parents...
Re: Essential Leadership skills - Great thread, Yinka. I agree with Robert and GT that at any point in time we possess at least one of those skills, with the ability to call upon any of the other skills when needed. Of course, everyone is born with specific skills and traits, and some skills and traits need to be learned and put into practice first.


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