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Guest post by: Dr. Rick Johnson Become an Author

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Being number one on your sales team just isn't that difficult. 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 successful. 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"

Understanding is the Key

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.

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 we all can't be superstars. Part of becoming a superstar 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.

Anybody can sell to some degree and we all do it without exception. However, to be a professional sales person that reaches star status, accepting these concepts as truths is 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; 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 professional sales person is not easy. It demands creativity and innovative thinking.

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