3 WAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SELLING TECHNIQUE
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Craft Practice- Make a commitment to improving performance through practicing his or her technique. Role-playing is a great activity to simulate interactions with customers and practice difficult or challenging scenarios based on employee needs.
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Needs Based Selling Expertise- Sales professionals must have the ability to uncover customer needs and pains associated with the particular products or services being sold. It is essential that all sales professionals have an expansive knowledge of open-ended questions versus closed-ended questions.
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An open-ended question is one that starts with the words what, how, or why, and elicits a non yes or no response. Needs based selling is derived from the ability to produce open dialogue with the customer to discover his or her needs. For example, when we go out with a friend or our spouse, we simply don’t ask, “What are your thoughts on going to a movie?” We ask a closed-ended question, “Do you want to go to a movie?”
Sales professionals must have the ability to be consistent with asking open-ended questions to develop a deep understanding of the customers’ needs, pains, and desires, associated with the products or services being sold. Customers do not want to be sold, rather, they want to buy products or services that meet their specific needs.
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Product Knowledge- A professional inside sales person must have the vast knowledge of the organization’s product or services they sell. This includes the ability to coach, and/or train or teach other employees about the product, its technical specifications, its features, as well as its benefits. In addition, the inside sales person must have the ability to ask questions to bring those benefits and features forward in direct correlation to the customer’s needs. This can only happen with good needs based selling, along with the ability to bring in depth product knowledge forward.
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