Sales

16
oct

How Knowing Your Selling Style Grows Your Sales Numbers

Posted by SalesNo Comments

Sales can be a tricky profession. It requires skill, resilience, determination, and passion. But there is one skill that is more important than the rest: understanding your selling style. Many sales people don’t know their personal style, and they go into a sale blind. But this knowledge can make the difference between closing a sale and a customer walking.

It’s essential to understand how your selling style drives and affects your sales interactions. If you know the strengths and potential trouble spots of each of the four selling styles, you will be able to guide your own sales efforts and anticipate and respond appropriately to your customers’ needs.

Selling style is defined as the way a person performs sales based on their own behavior. Knowing your style is important, but knowing the style of people around you is just as important. For example, if your customer has a style different from your own, the likelihood of making the sale can be dramatically reduced. But when you understand your personal selling style and the individual styles of your customers, you are better able to adjust your behavior and close the deal.

There are four selling styles that people tend to encompass. They are:

  1. Direct. People who take charge, in control, competitive, fast-paced, authoritative, leaders.
  2. Spirited. People who are enthusiastic, friendly, motivators, high-profile, decision makers.
  3. Considerate. People who are warm, counseling, cooperative, reliable, caring.
  4. Systematic. People who are accurate, objective, factual, organized, problem solving.

Once you know which one you are – and which one your current customer is – you can modify your sales technique and be better prepared for the journey through the sales funnel.

Grow your knowledge about your selling style with HRDQ’s webinar “Building Enriched Customer Relationships: What’s My Selling Style?” Join expert John Dieseth as he shares how What’s My Selling Style? empowers salespeople to uncover their own and each customer’s style. It provides powerful techniques on how to alter each sales call to compliment the buyer’s style, enrich the customer relationship, and boost sales. Watch the webinar today!

This webinar is based on the HRDQ product What’s My Selling Style?, a best-selling training tool that helps salespeople analyze how they typically behave in a sales situation, identify their customers’ styles, and learn how to flex their own style to work with their customer. With increased awareness and flexibility, salespeople can use style to maximize sales and rise above the competition. Learn more here.

8
apr
selling_style

What’s Your Selling Style?

Posted by Customer Service Training Games, Personality Style, SalesNo Comments

What makes one salesperson so successful and another unsuccessful? This longstanding question has been tackled by numerous authors as can be seen by the surplus of available books, articles, and journals on sales and selling. Each one tries to put his or her spin on the answer. Business experts have written about ambition, initiative, friendliness, loyalty, self-confidence, tact, adaptability, and the list goes on. We believe that all these areas focus on a similar theme. What is the biggest difference between success and failure in sales? Personality! It is the determining factor in what makes a salesperson great or just mediocre.

Our personalities shine through in everything we do, including the way we typically approach selling. Because sales provide an opportunity to work closely with customers, either face-to-face or by phone, one’s selling style is highly visible. Can people change their selling style and therefore improve their sales? Our answer is, “Yes!” By adapting one’s style to that of the customer there is a greater chance for a positive response and therefore a sale.

How to get people to utilize their selling style

Watch the free webinar Building Enriched Customer Relationships: What’s My Selling Style? In this webinar, you’ll learn about the sales training tool What’s My Selling Style, which helps salespeople learn how to make the most of their selling style. The 20-item assessment identifies personal selling then shows participants how to flex their styles. The participants are also provided with an opportunity to learn about ways that they can identify the style of their customers. With this increased awareness, salespeople will be able to use their selling style to maximize sales and rise ahead of the competition.

 

Learn More
14
nov

How to Create Effective Training Events That Have a Lasting Effect

Posted by Corporate Team Building Games, Corporate Training Materials, Critical Thinking Training, Experiential Learning, Human Resource Training, Learning, Learning Style Assessment, Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Styles, Sales, Team Building ExercisesNo Comments

Yesterday we hosted a free webinar, Guess-Free Selling: Four Building Blocks for Creating Effective Training Programs, with author and sales training expert Scott Messer.  Mr. Messer’s career as a business development professional and entrepreneur has spanned more than 25 years. He has built strategic alliances, co-founded start-ups, overseen mergers and acquisitions, and constructed new business units. He is the founder of Sales Evolution.

Over 200 people registered for the webinar. You may view the archived webinar here.

Here is what some one of the participants had to say about the webinar:

“This webinar was great! As a Learning and Development Professional for almost 8 years, I found Scott Messer’s information both insightful and practical.”

“To get started,” Messer said, “you may be wondering what qualifies a sales coach and trainer to even speak on this topic; that is, say the things that you were dealing with on the HR side of the table. The answer is simple. Getting people to buy into your programming is a sales job. It’s an internal sales job but a sales job nonetheless. Additionally, it’s someone who trains and speaks at dozens of sessions for year. I know the difference in impact that HR can make in turning a program into a good program or having it well, not so good and how to set the stage upfront to make it work.”Picture1

There are four building blocks to effective training.  They are:

  1. Trust
  2. Outcomes
  3. Solution
  4. Value

Without these building blocks, it is very difficult to get buy in from your participants.  Said Messer, “I think most employees want to learn but they hate learning events that they feel are wasting their time. Could it be that your teams really want to improve their skills but they don’t want to learn the way you’re teaching them?”

Messer then described each block and how it impacts training and selling as a whole.  “To oversee a successful training program, keep your discussions with all the stakeholders focused on strengthening each relationship with them within these four building blocks- trust, outcomes, solution and value. These are the drivers for ensuring that each and every one of your programs has the best internal sponsorship, the most enthusiastic participants, and the greatest…and I think this is the most important frankly, the greatest impact post training. Again, it’s not hard to train; that’s easy. Implementation is the key and right now where we see most people falling down is on the post training experience.”

The webinar concluded with, “The best sales calls are good conversation; be it an internal sales conversation, selling up the organization or selling your programs down the organization. It all starts with the conversation centered on trust.”

Want to learn more? You can view the archived webinar here and learn even more. You can watch it as many times as you like and start using the lessons today.

Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss the next free webinar!

8
nov

The Mirror Test

Posted by Coaching Skills, Human Resource Training, Negotiation Skills Training, Negotiation Styles, Sales, Supervisory SkillsNo Comments

By Scott Messermirror test

Recently I’ve been talking to a lot of people about their attitude toward sales and how attitude is one of the primary keys to individual and collective success.  As with the stock market where market psychology drives the herd forward or backwards, so it is with sales psychology.  It either drives you forward or backward if you allow it to control your behavior and attitude.

The italics are intentional.  Because attitude is a matter of choice, ala the famous expression “I choose not to participate in the Recession,” you get to choose yours.  In reality some industries and services are always suffering but that is a Condition; what are the Problems that stem from the condition and what are you doing to resolve them for yourself?  If your industry or service is not suffering but you are, what responsibility do you take for your individual circumstance, and what are you willing to risk emotionally (for that is what holds us back) to change your circumstances?  If your field is thriving are you coasting or working to be the best you can be?

In either case are you doing the high value, high priority things that move you forward or the busy things that allow you to say how hard you’re working?  Are you committed to your own success?  Are you self-motivated?  Do you accept responsibility and accountability for your role in how you got to where you are today and where you’re going tomorrow?

The good news is that yesterday doesn’t matter.  We can have a fresh start beginning right now, this very moment.  Every great artist started scribbling lines on a piece of paper before creating masterpieces, every Pulitzer winning author first wrote gibberish before the best seller; champions are made on the practice field and in the gym, not on the playing field.  What are you doing to raise yourself to a Sales Professional?   For example, how is your verbal business card?  Great?  OK?  Or, “what’s a verbal business card?”  Have you prepared for today and tomorrows sales calls or are you planning on “winging it”?  Do you track your time and activities?  Have you created a habit of giving weekly or daily referrals?  Are you chasing sales or working to collect Decisions through a sales process?  Have you bought into the Guess Free Selling model or are you still fighting it?  When was the last time you called your Sales Evolution sales coach or for that matter responded to the Monday Morning Drill?

At the end of our careers we all have to take The Mirror Test.  What’s that you ask?  It’s when you look in the mirror at the end of your career and to say one of two things to sum it all up.  Either “I did my best and gave it my all” or “Well, it could have been worse”?  Your choice.  What are you going to say?

Scott Messer

Before starting Sales Evolution, LLC, Scott Messer held various sales, sales management, and executive positions at Union Carbide, American Chemsol Corporation, Griff Machine Products Company, Ultimate Software Group, Data Flow Information Systems, Compuware Corporation and Growth Dynamics. This roster included two turn-arounds and two start-ups — Scott helped these firms launch new products and services, establish sales territories and raise capital.

Please join us on Wednesday, November 12th at 2:00 pm EST as Mr. Messer leads a free webinar through HRDQ-U.  Don’t let this opportunity pass you by.  Sign up today!