Selling starts the moment humans open their eyes into this life. Babies cry to seek attention, they try to communicate either an empty stomach, soiled diaper or lack of sleep that gives them headaches. Any cries beyond that are to be considered as "sales" where even at their young age, babies start getting what they want.
However, like everything, babies also grow and hopefully they employ better skills in selling. Trust is one of the fundamentals followed by good listening skills, reciprocity, dependability and credibility altogether contour the most basic needs of any sales activity that has high potential to convert the conversation into materialised sales.
Trust is the one with high sensitivity, fragility towards the deal given the subjective ratings earned. Very small matters are prone to breaking the deal if trust is not established well. Or it might generate countless of excuses for the client to give up.
In today's highly impatient environments, listening others carefully became really a rare quality to encounter in daily lives. The simple message it carries is already vital: Talking is sharing anything but listening to others is demonstrating great concern and proves caring.
Reciprocity is a natural and positive outcome of trust and listening once they are established firmly. Based on its genre being mutual exchanges and benefits, it facilitates an important component of any given sales conversation.
Dependability and Credibility are interlocked to Believability and self-confidence. While dependability assures credibility to one, believability transforms into confidence and confidence brings success.
Communication requires a diligent care conveying above mentioned qualities and it is the best practice to adjust speech tone, rate, selection of words, density and depth of the conversation based on the recipient's signals (feedback).
That is one of the toughest parts for the sales person concurrently evaluating certain questions in mind while during his conversation with the prospect. Is the engaged person a suspect or a prospect? When to increase the density and shoot the killer phrase? How to demonstrate a genuine interest in the prospect? Is that the correct person to sell to? Is the product suitable, has ample support behind, strong enough the carry the name of the company, salesperson?
Besides these basic approaches; there are plenty of proven formulas out there being used for more than a century long. One of the most popular ones is four-step analysis.
Need Analysis. It is very important to explore the prospect's need level for a certain product or service. Open-end questions, closed-end questions help until a certain extend to supply auxiliary information. The most challenging stage in this analysis is to overcome the prospect's logic that tends to defer the purchase in a later stage in life just when the emotions are ready to go ahead.
Need Awareness. Once the emotion – logic dynamics are managed or at least believed to be manageable, more in-depth inquiries are required to clearly articulate the prospect's needs and make him realise the need. Questions on product, industry, pricing, application itself and competition gears up the conversation towards a successful conversion.
Need Solutions. Needs are created, make realised and now it is necessary to justify the purchase decision based on "benefits". Product differentiation, features, functions are great tools to impose at this stage.
Need Satisfaction. It is absolutely critical to ask the prospect for his order at all times. If we observe the logical sequence of these four steps, we will realise that the prospect is indeed heading towards a pre-arranged scenario or stage. Decision outcome is now limited to 3 answers only: "Yes", "Maybe" and "No". If anything but "Yes" is heard; it is the sales person's duty to revisit previous three analysis and refill the gaps. "No" is an answer too and deserves ultimate respect as it supplies invaluable feedback what the prospect thought, what has clogged the positive outcome and their views on the product, salesperson and the company. It could be advised to apply Suppose Test (providing scenarios testing immediate purchase, for example, instant 15% discount if the purchase is made at that moment) or Isolation and Validation Tests (for example, gauging if the prospect might be interested in any other product or services and validating the feedback heard) but these to be determined by the sales person at the field as it is the best person to judge given immediate circumstances at the point.
