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Be a Sales Professional
| Guest post by: Dr. Rick Johnson |
Article Overview: Being number one on your sales team just isn't that difficult. Being a "Professional" Sales person should be your primary goal. Salesmanship is a learned skill. You can perfect that skill. Yes, it does help to have an outgoing personality, high self-esteem and an ego. But, these attributes alone won't make you a Sales Professional. Confidence in yourself, confidence in your products and confidence in your company is a key ingredient. The only way to gain this kind of ultimate confidence is by attaining knowledge. Study your products, understand your value propositions and understand what your competitive advantage is.
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Free Download - Sales Management --Unmask the Confusion of Territory Account Assignment By Dr. Rick Johnson |
Be a Sales Professional
Being number one on your sales team just isn't that difficult. Being a "Professional" Sales person should be your primary goal. Salesmanship is a learned skill. You can perfect that skill. Yes, it does help to have an outgoing personality, high self-esteem and an ego. But, these attributes alone won't make you a Sales Professional. Confidence in yourself, confidence in your products and confidence in your company is a key ingredient. The only way to gain this kind of ultimate confidence is by attaining knowledge. Study your products, understand your value propositions and understand what your competitive advantage is.
Value Propositions
Don't blow this concept off as some sales training jargon. Value propositions are extremely important. You have one, your company has one and your products have them. What is it about you that creates value for your customer? What is it about your company that creates value for your customer? What is it about your product that creates value for your customer? It's not features and benefits.
"Perceived Value drives customer expectations"
"Performance value drives customer satisfaction"
The higher you raise a customer's perceived value of you, of your company, of your product, the closer you come to creating competitive advantage.
Understanding is the Key to Being a Professional.
Understand yourself first. Determine your strengths. Recognize your weaknesses. Make a vow to work on improving those areas where you are weak. To excel at anything you must have confidence and confidence comes from experience and knowledge. Recognizing your weakness puts you in a position of strength because you become familiar with your limitations and what you need to do to overcome them. Personal understanding is critical to understanding your customers. And, if you don't understand your customers it is extremely difficult to discover their pain and provide solutions.
Be Honest with Yourself
The road to success in sales requires a kind of personal honesty that not everyone is capable of exercising. That specifically is why all sales people are not professional... Part of becoming a professional in sales is understanding people so well that building relationship equity is almost automatic. A skill that becomes inherent to your personification. This can't happen unless you understand yourself first. People grow and change, you grow and change so this concept of knowing yourself and really knowing your customers is a living changing thing that you must always be conscious of. The more your customers change, the more you must change and adjust. This requires a certain amount of intuitive judgment and a perspective on helping the customer solve their problems to such an extent that you can see the forest in spite of the trees.
You Can Change Yourself but You Can't Change Your Customer
Selling is all about understanding your customers. Accepting your customers as they are while understanding their specific wants, needs and desires for what they are and not what you would like them to be. This puts you in a position of strength in building a personal relationship with the customer. Don't succumb to the common trait called impatience if your customer has trouble identifying his real pain. Often times it is up to you to help him discover that pain and in turn recognize the value you and your company provide by eliminating that pain.
Sales is a Profession to be Proud Of
Learning your product, making a clear presentation to qualified prospects, and closing more sales will take a lot less time once you know your own capabilities and failings, and understand and care about the prospects you are calling upon. You must become a total solution provider regardless of the circumstance or situation. Sometimes solving a customer's problem will have nothing to do with your product or your company. That doesn't matter. Solving the problem builds relationship equity and relationships are still extremely important even in this century when a relationship is required to even get into the game. Selling occurs all around us all day long. Our mere existence is predicated upon selling something all the time. That something can be anything from a product to an idea, a concept or even a philosophy.
Everyone can sell to some degree and we all do it without exception. However, to be a professional sales person, accepting these concepts as truths are the starting point. Accepting the concepts described in this article will enable you to understand that salesmanship is not a born trait. Agreed, there are some personality traits that may help you create success quicker but true professional sales skills are learned.
An old sales buddy of mine once said;
"You can send a gorilla out on the road and if he calls on enough people, if he doesn't give up, sooner or later someone will pin an order to his chest and send him home." --------Brian Williamson
Maybe you know some sales people like that. If you do rest assured they aren't the professionals we are talking about. Sales is a profession that requires professionals. It's a profession to be proud of. It requires persistence, tenacity, confidence and understanding. Study yourself, study people, do your homework and never forget the basics. Targeting, goal setting, action planning and follow-up never go out of fashion no matter how much of a star you become. Never forget where you came from and how you created the success you create.
Getting up out of bed in the morning; doing what has to be done to excel in sales; keeping records, updating your materials, managing your pipeline, planning the direction of further sales efforts, and all the while increasing your own knowledge - all this definitely requires personal motivation, discipline, and energy. Being a sales person']);"> professional sales person is not easy. It demands creativity and innovative thinking. Go---- be a PRO!!!
Why Follow a Sales Process?
Differentiation is the Key
Handling Objections in Today’s Sales Environment
How to Select Professional Sales Training
The Diary of a Mad Sales Person
Winning Business the Right Way
Establishing Your Sales Objectives
Nothing Happens Until Somebody Sells Something
“A Business Coach’s Top Ten Tactics for Marketing Professional Services”
Sales Prospecting for Sales Results
Top 10 Characteristics of Successful Sales Professionals
The 3-Most Powerful Words in Sales
Sales Interview Questions from a Sales Coach
Be A Proud Sales Professional
Sales Training for the B2B Sales Team
The Value 2 (Squared) Equation
Advanced Sales Tip
Top 20 Interview Questions for Salespeople
Why Sales and Customer Service Should Be the Same Person if You Want To Increase Sales
Even Engineers Sell
Article Tags: competitive advantage, professional sales person, salesmanship, value propositions
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About the Author: Dr. Rick Johnson RSS for Dr. Rick's articles - Visit Dr. Rick's website www.ceostrategist.com - Sign up to receive "The Howl" a free monthly newsletter that addresses real world industry issues. - Straight talk about today's issues. Rick Johnson, expert speaker, wholesale distribution's "Leadership Strategist", founder of CEO Strategist, LLC a firm that helps clients create and maintain competitive advantage. Need a speaker for your next event, E-mail rick@ceostrategist.com. Dr. Rick Johnson has over 35 years of experience in distribution sales and operations. Rick�s career can be broken down by decades. The first ten years of his distribution career were spent with the largest steel-processing distributor in the world (Joseph T. Ryerson). The second ten years began with Rick starting his own processing distribution center from scratch. In the first year, sales reached $1 million dollars and had grown to $25 million in its tenth year when Rick sold the business to one of the major national chains. The third ten years of Rick�s career dealing with financially troubled Turn-A-Round companies. After completing ten years of TAR work, Rick decided a decade of acting like Darth Vader was enough and became a consultant to the Wholesale Distribution Industry in 1999. Rick received an MBA from Keller Graduate School in Chicago and a Bachelor's degree from Capital University, Columbus Ohio. He also served six years in the United States Air Force as a survival instructor. Rick completed his dissertation on Strategic Leadership and received his Ph.D. in 2005. Rick is frequently published in numerous magazines including a column in Supply House Times, with over 250 different articles published to date. He�s also a published author with eight books to his credit. Click here to visit Dr. Rick's website   Can Your Son or Daughter Really Run the Business Cash for Clunkers Was It Worth It Developing a Proactive Sales Strategy What if Your Boss is a Jerk Gutless Management |
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