Ten Steps To Becoming A Successful Salesman

It’s one thing to be a simple sales agent. Being a successful salesperson is quite another. The corporate sales force is responsible for closing contracts and bringing in revenue. This is why it is crucial to have motivated, charismatic, professional sellers in your team who grind one success after another.

To become an indispensable element for the company, the agent won’t have to send hundreds of emails with his head bowed, participate in all the trade fairs or spin like a top to chase customers. He will have to become that type of seller to close a contract safely. In this article, we reveal ten steps to becoming a successful seller.

Table of Contents

The ten moves of the successful salesman

Identify And Study Your Typical Customer

Acquiring new customers involves multiple company departments, which must work together to identify the best prospects to target. The research must start by identifying the target by the marketing department, which the salespeople will then undertake to convert into customers. For the acquisition mechanism to work at its best, it will be essential to study the ideal consumers for your product/service in depth, creating prototypes of buyers: we are talking about the so-called Typical Customers.

Based on the typical characteristics of the Typical Customer, the seller can decide with a more precise criterion which customer to address and which to exclude. This step significantly reduces the sales agent’s work, allowing him to focus only on genuinely qualified contacts. With this fundamental step in the inbound marketing phase, the seller can save time and effort by taking advantage of many sales opportunities.

Believe In What You Sell

Suppose you are not the first to believe in the validity and efficacy of the product/service you are selling. In that case, the customer will only do so if you believe in the validity and efficacy of the product/service you are selling. Think of those call center salespeople trying to sell you new electricity contracts or water purifiers—they’re all reciting a standard, impersonal chant that you wouldn’t be persuaded to accept even if they gave you the product.

As a seller, you must demonstrate the validity of your proposal through your tone of voice, the words you choose, and the positive attitude you approach. Show yourself determined and competent, explaining the merits and benefits of the product/service to the customer and solving their problems.

Use Tools That Make Your Life Easier

A salesperson in the companies of 2019 will find himself carrying out a wide range of tasks ranging from the most classic meeting with customers to signing contracts, sending reports and documents, to consulting performance statistics. All this, having to distribute the activities in a working day while maintaining high efficiency.

Why complicate your life using obsolete paper diaries and consulting different smartphone, tablet, and PC platforms to find the necessary data? By now, the simple CRMs are outdated, replaced by cutting-edge technological tools that allow you to automate procedures, organize data and create personalized paths for each lead.

These sales tools not only make life easier for the individual salesperson, allowing him to maximize the efficiency of his performance, but also provide a central control and breakdown tool for corporate administration. It’s one thing to be a simple sales agent. Being a successful salesperson is quite another. The corporate sales force is responsible for closing contracts and bringing in revenue.

This is why it is essential to have motivated, charismatic, professional sellers in your team who grind one success after another. To become an indispensable element for the company, the agent won’t have to send hundreds of emails with his head bowed, participate in all the trade fairs or spin like a top to chase customers. He will have to become that type of seller to close a contract safely. In this article, we reveal ten steps to becoming a successful seller.

Establish A Working Procedure

What differentiates a mediocre seller from a successful one is being able to follow a tried and tested procedure that leads to the sure success of the negotiation. A good salesperson builds a precise action strategy that is structured more or less like this:

Research information about the potential customer
Contact by phone or meet the customer for the first time to get to know him
After a short time, she calls or emails him to get to know him better and understand his needs.
He spends at least a week before sending him a summary of what they said; she lets him know that she has the right solution for him in mind. This is the time to make and confirm a second appointment.
During the meeting, the agent will show himself perfectly informed about the customer’s problems and will be able to propose products/services tailored to his needs.
After a few days of giving the customer time to think, the agent comes in in a friendly way to see where they are in the decision-making process.
The quote is sent

In this way, you will always have the progress of the purchasing process under control, being able to prepare the next move and any alternative proposals.

Use Personalized Communications

Remember the call center example? Again, use this as an example of things NOT to do. Using standardized communications for all customers conveys the image of a salesperson who is uninterested and inattentive to his customers. For that customer, you are the point of reference who will solve his problem; you are the face and voice representing the entire company. You must be highly interested in the customer, his story about him, and his ways of communicating and expressing himself.

Use personalized communications, both in form and content. On the other side of the phone, do you find the young entrepreneur who knows the digital world? He uses technicalities, and he will appreciate them. Are you trying to deal with an old-fashioned entrepreneur of a certain age? Show him respect for his position and be highly professional in your explanations.

Don’t be afraid to take that extra step. Often and willingly, giving yourself the first name and communicating “as equals” can be a plus toward the positive conclusion of the negotiation. From a tool point of view, you can adopt digital solutions that allow you to customize and automate emails and messages, finally avoiding oversights and human errors.

Learn To Listen To Your Customers

The defect of many sellers is to talk to a machine, exposing their offer as if it were teleshopping. In a nutshell, the salesperson covers the potential customer with words without asking if he is interested. The customer will find themselves overwhelmed by unsolicited information and likely be annoyed by it.

The question to ask yourself is: why are you addressing that particular customer? Or because that customer thinks they need the products/services your company sells? You have to find out who the customer is and what he needs.

So learn to listen. Be open to confrontation and demonstrate that you are the person who can help. The customer will be led to exposing his problems, and in this way, you, as well as having the opportunity to get to know him, will find out what to propose and how.

You Don’t Suddenly Become A Successful Salesman

You only become a successful salesperson after some time. Behind it is always in-depth study and analysis of strategies, sales techniques, products, and company services. The same thing goes for customers. You cannot think of making the first contact with a customer without knowing anything about him. Once you get the lead from the marketing department, you will need to leverage all the channels you have access to uncover as much information as possible.

If you operate in B2B, start from the company website: here, you can find out the sector in which it operates, the product/service it offers, and the area in which it operates. After that, search for Social Networks: look for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram profiles. From here, you can deduce information such as the composition of the company, the way of communicating with its customers, and a vague idea of the turnover.

When you talk on the phone or meet with the Potential Client, you are no longer dealing with a stranger, but with someone, you are open to getting to know. Please demonstrate that you are already aware of some data concerning him: this will lead the customer to have a reasonable opinion of you as a seller and to gain his trust more quickly.

Think As If You Were A Doctor

How does a doctor prescribe the medicine that cures your disease? Make a diagnosis after doing a physical exam and asking about your symptoms. The seller must proceed in the same way. First of all, he must make sure to carry out an introductory meeting in person with the customer and then be open to acquiring valuable information:

Asking targeted questions
Investigating what the real problem and needs of the customer are
Letting the customer speak and explain
Interrupting as little as possible, only when necessary to go into more detail

After that, you must give the first advice to improve the situation, demonstrating competence. This will show that you are interested in solving their problem, almost like a friend, rather than a salesperson. Once you’ve won his trust, you can explain why your offering can help him.

Only Sell To Those Who Have Reached The Bottom Of The Funnel

What does it mean? The sales funnel is a funnel-shaped marketing scheme: all the target prospects enter the largemouth, which the marketing department will have to screen through its strategic actions. At the bottom of the funnel, managed by the sales department, only users interested in buying will arrive, the so-called qualified contacts.

At this point, these leads will pass on to the commercial agent, who can proceed with the contact and start a possible purchase negotiation. This is why it is said that in a well-structured company, the seller sells only to those who are already interested.

Customer Success Is Salesperson Success

A good salesperson will have customer success as a personal mission. If, instead of seeing it as a commercial objective, he takes the customer’s problem to heart almost as if it were his own, the perspective of the sale changes radically. All the most innovative tools and the most effective strategies can be used. Still, if the seller’s spirit and tenacity are lacking, it will be more challenging to convince the customer to trust them and conclude the sale.

You Are Now Ready To Become A Successful Salesperson

The salesperson is a fundamental figure within medium-large companies, and most of the revenue in the company’s coffers is due to him. For this reason, the companies themselves must encourage their sales force to train and improve constantly.

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