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Sharpen your sales skills - Selling in a recession

Written by: Colly Graham

Article Overview: Once people believe there is going to be a recession they start to feel negative about their selling prospects.

Sharpen 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 strategies
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 a 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."

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  Advertising during recession

Article Tags: business acquisition, business growth strategies, business strategies, critical element, crops, existing customers, harvests, market niche, necessary steps, new business, prospects, recession, s sales, sales goal, sales quota, sales strategy, sales territory, seeds, six months, weeds



Related Forum Posts
Business magazines - Fast Company is pretty good if you're into technology although it can be very on the edge. Entrepreneur has become one giant advertisement and I cancelled my subscription. Selling Power also has some useful content if you're looking at improving your sales skills / presentations.
Re: Has the poor economy hurt or improved your holiday shopping? - Yea surprisingly the confirmed recession in Canada, hasn't really taken any affect on me as a student. I don't see much changes at all, but I'm sure adults who own stocks are not too happy. I agree with you about the shopping, the sales are better than ever this year.=)
Franchise Choice - I would: .Spend time evaluating what my passions in life were and how i could take more time to be doing those things - work or social or family .spend time evaluating what would help me get to where i wanted to be - not concentrating on moving away from something i.e a job . Look at what skills I have and where i needed training i.e sales.business management/retail management e.t.c - what ever is needed. I would then invest in myself and acquire those skills on the open market from reputable training providers . Set up my own business doing something i loved . Invest the money saved into me, sales and marketing and mentoring from succesful people who had done what i was trying to do.
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: Obama Wants Social Security for Illegals - [quote="Lucy Wu":2dlphfqu]I think America's biggest problem right now is clearly the recession, and that should be the main focus as of now.[/quote:2dlphfqu] I agree. Do you think President Elect Obama is doing or will do what is best in terms of beating this recession?


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