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Direct Sales Strategies: 9 Sales Tips for Sales Success from High Performing Salespeople

Guest post by: Jon Gilge

Article Overview: Can a collection of the best sales tips make you a great salesperson? I doubt it. But can the best sales tips give you something to think about, point you in new directions, help you rediscover sales techniques and practices you may have forgotten, remind you of why you sell, refresh the reasons that you got to where you are, or show you how to get to where you want to go? Yes, the best sales tips can do that.

Direct Sales Strategies: 9 Sales Tips for Sales Success from High Performing Salespeople

What the Best Sales Tips Can Do For You? Can a collection of the best sales tips make you a great salesperson?

I doubt it.

But can the best sales tips give you something to think about, point you in new directions, help you rediscover sales techniques and practices you may have forgotten, remind you of why you sell, refresh the reasons that you got to where you are, or show you how to get to where you want to go?

Yes, the best sales tips can do that.

The Best Sales Tips From My Career in Sales

• Sales Tip #1: Talent is a myth, effort is what makes salespeople successful. In business, sports, life and the profession of selling talent matters much less than effort applied to the mastery of the skills that lead to success. Those who succeed outwork those who don’t every time. Because effort is a choice, we all can be successful in sales.
• Sales Tip #2: Attitude is the most important element in consistent sales performance. Attitude is the lens through which the mind receives information. It assigns value to the experiences we encounter in selling. When it is positive even negative events are perceived as encouraging, hopeful, and opportunities to learn. When it is negative, even positive events are seen as discouraging, hopeless, and without value. Consistency in selling is about maintaining a positive outlook, and a positive attitude make that possible. The good news- attitude is a choice that you make.
• Sales Tip #3: Start every sales conversation by asking the prospect what they need to know about your company and product. Rather than telling them what you think they should know, ask them what is important to them. Once they tell you, what you say in response is no longer selling them, but rather a much less threatening answering of their questions. Prospects are much more receptive to this, leading to less resistance to the information and the greater likelihood that they will receive it positively.
• Sales Tip #4: Dress and Groom yourself exactly as you want to be perceived. Anyone who tells you that you can’t judge a book by its cover is missing the fact that if the cover doesn’t look good no one will open it. As a salesperson your image creates an impression that influences all aspects of your customer interaction. If you want to sound smarter, seem more trustworthy, be perceived more credibly, then let your dress and grooming represent those things.
• Sales Tip #5: Practice every day. There isn’t always time to practice for hours, nor is there probably the need after you have established your skills, but you should make the commitment and get in the habit of practicing something every day. When you practice, don’t just read or review dialogues in your mind, practice by saying it out loud. Learning is contextual, and what you learn by reading doesn’t do much for your ability to use the information in a conversation.
• Sales Tip #6: Get comfortable with talking to yourself in the mirror. From time to time we all need a good talking to, and who better to do that than the person who knows us best- ourselves. You can’t always rely on someone else to pick you up when your are down, or scold you for not doing the things you know you should be doing. So do it yourself, in a mirror, out loud.
• Sales Tip #7: Be meticulous with your follow up. For every company I ever worked the number one cause of customer dissatisfaction and lost sales was lack of communication. Excel at followup and you will excel at selling. Because people have come to expect poor follow up, when you are different you get noticed and that attention will get you sales. When you need to call someone back, give them an exact time and then call them back at the promised minute. They will be amazed and likely to put complete trust in everything else you say.
• Sales Tip #8: Set goals that you look at every day. Far to often sales people set goals and then forget about them until it is too late. Don’t be that person. Sales goals only work when they serve to convince you of the inevitability of the outcome. It’s not about having an objective, is about subconsciously creating the outcome so that your mind can figure out how to get you there and motivate the behaviors that will. Read them every day- out loud- and into a mirror when possible.
• Sales Tip #9: Sometimes it’s OK to give yourself a reset. We all have bad weeks, and sometimes those weeks turn into a month when we just can’t seem to make the sales happen. Oftentimes the momentum of a bad streak becomes to much to overcome and we suffer from the pressure of being unable to hit our targets. Get out from under this pressure by giving yourself a reset- forget about the first two weeks of the month and set new goals for the last two weeks- starting over at zero for zero. Taking the pressure off of coming back from insurmountable odds is often enough to turn your slump around and get you back to making sales. As a sales manager you can also apply this advice to managing your team.

I hope your sales career will benefit from this collection of my best sales tips and advice. As I wrote this I realized that there was more than 9 sales tips that I wanted to write about, but I’ll save those for the next post.

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Article Tags: best sales tip, best sales tips, sales advice, sales strategies, sales success, sales tip



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