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Direct Sales Strategies- Overcoming Resistance to the Sales Presentation- A 30 Minute Lesson

Guest post by: Jon Gilge

Article Overview: Can you really learn to close more sales in only 30 minutes? Yes you can. While we know that you can't become a Sales Giant in 30 minutes, if you spend that time learning just 2 skills you will start to close more sales right away, and close them easier than you may have imagined.

Direct Sales Strategies- Overcoming Resistance to the Sales Presentation- A 30 Minute Lesson

Can you really learn to close more sales in only 30 minutes?

Yes you can.

While we know that you can’t become a Sales Giant in 30 minutes, if you spend that time learning just 2 skills you will start closing more sales right away, and close them easier than you may have imagined.

There is rule to self improvement that tells us that the quickest way to get better is to focus your improvement efforts on the answer to this questions:

What one thing skill, if significantly improved, would have the greatest impact on my ability to sell?

This article will answer that question for you, actually it will answer it twice, based on my evaluation of hundreds of sales people over that last decade.

To stay true to my promise of this lesson helping you close more sales with a skill that you can learn in only 30 minutes, I will only include a full explanation of one of the two techniques and save the other for my next article.

When sales are missed, the reason is often the same time and time again. This is because the weak links in a sales person’s technique are the open doors through which an otherwise interested prospect runs in the anxiety of the buying decision. While not completely universal, those open doors are very similar from salesperson to salesperson, and from industry to industry. And while there are more than I will discuss here, I will focus on the ones that are most quickly remedied. 30 minutes was the promise, right.

So here they are– the common and quickly fixed weak links in the process of selling:

1. The inability to move past a prospects resistance to being sold.

2. A failure to effectively respond to mild buying hesitations expressed after the buying question, the most common of which is “I need to think about it.”

Moving past a prospect resistance to being sold

There a several ways to do this, but the most effective I know of is to start the sales conversation with this statement:

" Mr Prospect, I want to let you know that my focus today is not to tell you what I think is important about my company and product and why you should own it. Rather, I want to focus on your needs, and what you want to know about my company and product before you can decide if it is right for you. If you decide that it isn’t for you, that’s fine, and I promise to point you in the direction of something that it. If you do decide that it’s right for you, I’ll show you how I can help you own it."

Prospect are always defensive against being sold something, and predisposed to believe that you are there to sell them what you have to offer whether it is right for them or not. Where there is defensiveness all of the information that you try to provide passes through the filter of that resistance which reduces its ability to convince. Where there is doubt in your intentions, skepticism biases the judgments that the prospect makes as to the true ability of your product or service to meet his needs.

So how do you eliminate defensiveness and the perception of bias?

You use the statement above to change their entire perception of the intention of the sales conversation. It is no longer about you telling them, it is about you answering their questions regarding the suitability of the product and your company’s ability to deliver it. What was about you selling them has become about buyer and selling figuring out if there is a match between the prospect’s need and the sellers product. With this shift made, the buyer can relax their resistance and become able to consider the product on its true merits.

After you have determined the solutions the prospect is looking for, continue building on this new paradigm by getting into your presentation with this statement:

"Mrs. Prospect, now that I know what problems you are having, and what the solution might look like, I want to take the opportunity to share with you how my company and my product can provide a solution. I’ll start that process by asking you this– what do you need to know about my company and my product before you would know that it is right for you."

Let them tell you, write down their topics, and lead them gently to ask about the strengths of your company and product. Then answer each of those questions, one by one, confirming that the answer is what they need it to be. If you ever have a customer resist your presentation, this is also the solution, because how can a client resist answers to their questions.

Later, conclude your presentation with a review of your how your company and product was the answer to all of their questions about what a company and product would need to be for them to know that it was right for them. Then ask them:

"Since my product and company provide everything you are looking for, there is only one thing left to consider, the price. If we can make the price fair and affordable would you like to go ahead with an order today?"

How can they say no to that?

They might, and if they do, that leads us to the second common and quickly fixed weak link in the process of selling

A failure to effectively respond to mild buying hesitations expressed after they buying question, the most common of which is “I need to think about it.”

Since that will take another thirty minutes to discuss and learn, I’ll have to save it for the next article.

To Your Ultimate Success!

The Sales Giant

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Article Tags: onecall close, overcoming objections, overcoming sales resistance, sales presentation, sales strategies



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