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Sahrpen Your Sales Skills - Selling in a Recession
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| Guest post by: Colly Graham |
Article Overview: Once people believe there is going to be a recession they start to feel negative about their selling prospects. Do you have a clearly defined Sales Strategy?
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Sahrpen Your Sales Skills - Selling in a Recession
Once people believe there is going to be a recession they start to feel negative about their selling prospects.
Do you have a clearly defined Sales Strategy?
A Sales Strategy is basically a calculated and tactical plan for acquiring new business, growing existing business and making and exceeding the company sales quota. As in all good plans you need to begin with the end in mind. What is it you want to achieve - be specific? Knowing what you want to achieve will allow you to formulate the necessary steps to achieve the results you are seeking.
• How Much?
• By When?
There are four basic parts of a sales strategy:
1. New business acquisition
2. New business acquisition tactics
3. Existing business growth strategies
4. Existing business growth tactics
Four Parts of the Plan
Sales Quota: This critical element of plan sets the tempo of efforts throughout the year and provides quarterly, monthly, weekly and even daily sub-goals for you to achieve.
Sales Territory: Refers to the geographic area, list of named accounts or specific market niche you have been assigned to in which you are to sell products, services and solutions.
Strategy: The plan necessary to accomplish the company's sales' goal
Tactics: The steps necessary to carry out the plan.
Analyse your existing customers - who has not bought in the last three to six months - go after them and bring them back into the fold.
Stop being a hunter and become a farmer - look at the activities of the farmer and apply it to your accounts.
With the farmer concept, you look upon your accounts the way a farmer would look at his land. The farmer cultivates, prepares, plants, seeds, waters, fertilises, weeds, protects, grows, develops crops, harvests and then starts the cycle all over again.
1. Cultivating - learning as much about your customer as possible to discover opportunities to see what you need to plant so that you can harvest the results.
2. Preparation - putting yourself in a better position to service the customer, building your relationship to understand his business at depth, asking questions to uncover and discover further opportunities.
3. Planting - using your skills as a problem solver to offer solutions for the further problems you have uncovered within the account. Helping the customer realise that he has further problems that you can solve.
4. Seeding - demonstrating how you can solve this problem.
5. Watering and Fertilising- showing how other customers have benefited by placing further business with you
6. Weeding - keeping your competitors out of your accounts.
7. Harvesting - requires that you get further business from the existing customer - you get more sales!
8. Continuous Harvesting - requires that you maintain excellent customer relations
And finally build and strength your relationships with your customers.
Build a relationship of mutual trust and respect with clients through rapport. Protect your accounts from competitors by adding value to the relationship by identifying opportunities that have a positive impact on their business. Today's customers have become more sophisticated and demanding of higher levels of customer service than ever before. They want someone they can trust who understands their needs and wants.
Customer loyalty should be what we seek to give rather than what we seek to get.
As Zig Ziglar is famous for saying, "You can get anything you want in life if you will just help enough other people get what they want."
Article Tags: business acquisition, business growth strategies, critical element, crops, existing customers, harvests, market niche, necessary steps, new business, plants, prospects, recession, s sales, sales goal, sales quota, sales strategy, sales territory, seeds, six months, weeds
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About the Author: Colly Graham RSS for Colly's articles - Visit Colly's website Colly Graham CEO of salesxcellence After graduating from college, Colly entered the field of accountancy however after five years decided to change his career direction in sales. First working for a Fortune 500 company in fast moving consumer goods, his career progressed from selling capital equipment, financial services to internet services, with a wide management experience in both telephone and field sales, concentrating on the recruitment, training and development of sales people, in this role he gained experience in designing and building a number of successful sales teams. Colly brings thirty years of practical experience of selling and his ability to empathize with sales people and establish immediate rapport and credibility as a trainer, (the accolade Colly receives from most sales people is “that he has carried the bag”). A licensed practitioner of NLP Colly trained with Richard Bandler in 1998. When I entered the field of sales, back in 1969, with local franchise holder for Pepsi Cola because of my lack of knowledge of any selling skills I set a goal, to one day, start my own training company. As my career in sales progressed becoming a sales manager, group Click here to visit Colly's website The Sales Pipeline Value Added Selling Sales Strategy Three Types of Telephoners The Art of Communication |
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