Impact Words
I love words—which is great being in sales for I get to use them all the time. Words are powerful--they can be emotionally charged and they can help you create a mental picture for your customer. When you are planning how to communicate, you want to choose words that are truthful, believable and passionate.
Using Simple Words
Keep It Simple, Salesperson! That was a well quoted mantra when I started selling. It still rings true today but I wonder how often we remember to follow that advice.
I recently had the opportunity to work with two reps from the same company who had different approaches to the words they used.
Planning Continuum
It always amazes me how little attention, time, and effort people spend on planning. And I’m not talking about life goals—though I feel that is a valuable endeavor. I’m referring to how to define and set goals daily, for every sales interaction.
This thought was triggered by a recent conversation I had with a sales leader who spent time in the field to gain an understanding of how the reps are conducting their sales calls.
Practice, practice, practice!
In his book Outliers The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell makes the assertion that you need about 10,000 hours to become masterful at anything. To be truly expert does requires an enormous amount of time. Gladwell cites studies done by neurologist Daniel Levitin who examined the time required to reach this level of mastery in many disparate fields—chess players, fiction writers, concert pianists, etc. Ten thousand hours seems to be the magic number, the threshold between good and great. Practice is what made them great—they didn’t start out this way.
Wouldn’t you agree?
“Wouldn’t you agree?” This is verbiage that sales people often use when talking to customers and prospects. In my opinion, this represents an overused phrase that does not bring about the desired results—neither more sales nor active engagement of your customer.
I asked a friend who is a physician how many times he has heard those words. His response was literally thousands of times.
5 Rules for Connecting with Customers
It helps to keep things simple. Yes, you should read books and learn all you can about what you can do to excel in your chosen profession. But sometimes I think we go overboard and make things more complicated than they really are. If you are in sales, for example, it won’t hurt to read books on how to build business relationships or connect with customers.
Communicating Better
On a recent flight, I read an article in the in-flight magazine in which the writer (Katherine Dudley Hoehn) talked about a lesson she learned about how to communicate better. Her “insights” matched with what I’ve been advocating for years so I thought it might be worth a second mention.
Hoehn talked about giving advice. Instead of saying, “You should…” she advocated saying, “Have you considered..?” This made sense t...
Your Product Story and Imagery
“There is a big difference between a green sofa and an overstuffed chair with arms that come up to your ears when you sink into it with a child in your lap.” [Dave Lakhani. Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want]. Yes, there is a big difference between forming a mental image in your brain about this comfortable chair and paying no attention at all to the ‘green sofa’. Yet in selling, it seems we often forget the power of w...
The Role of Emotions in Selling
Emotions play a huge role in how we make decisions and this is particularly true when we are evaluating what to buy. Therefore, it behooves us as sales people to be skilled at evoking emotions as part of the selling process. The way we accomplish this is through the words and phrases that we use, for words are the tools that have the power to create feelings, both positive and negative. If we are able to tap into those feelings in a meaningful and effective way, we are more likely to make the sale.
Breaking through the Customer Mindset
Frequently when you read about selling and how to increase your sales results, the focus is on what you (the sales person) can do or say. To improve you do need to keep sharpening the saw and continue your quest to do better. But sometimes in that drive for excellence, we tend to focus so much on the technique or skill that we are developing that we forget to consider the most important part—how what we say or do is interpreted by our customer.