There are many definitions for a sales process and who cares!

Rather than focusing on the ‘sales process’, sales people need to be taught how to notice the customer’s ‘buying process’.

So forget about the sales process and start to notice the customer’s buying process so that you can pitch what they need to hear.

Notice that it’s customer specific! It’s not dependent on how nice it sounds or whether it will be accepted by a dictionary or not.

In ‘not so effective’ sales training’s, you might have come across these steps before:

1. finding your lead

2. qualified prospect

3. need identification

4. proposal

5. the close

6. give the goods or carry out the service

… and you can clearly see that these steps are more about the text book than the customer, so forget about them!

To phrase it differently: if person A has a close rate of 60% but doesn’t follow the rigid ‘sales process’ and person B has a close rate of 5% but does follow the ‘sales process’ then who’s a better salesperson?! I’ve never been contracted to teach a team the ‘sales process’; only to ‘increase their bottom line’. And I do that by teaching them to focus on the buyer and not the text book process.

People that teach the 6 step sales process above think that it’s advantageous to standardize the selling process and customer interaction

But standards don’t help when there are so many variables and no 2 people are the same, so how can it possibly be useful to use the same process on them? So sometimes standards end up capping progress. It’s not really possible for a student to get higher than an A+, for example.

But they can get lower, right?

Do you want to cap your ‘bottom line’? If not, if like me you think that the more money the merrier then be careful with standards.

Sorry for the diversion, let me recap: the sales process should be about noticing and reading a clients verbal and non verbal language so that you can answer the question: ‘how do I know what will make this customer buy?’

If sales training is not done correctly, it not only ends in a loss of money, but also working hours and even loyal customers, so make sure you visit sales training, and sales training uk so that you can make an educated decision.

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Wow! I understand stage fright, but I don’t understand this… Odds are, if you’re much of an internet surfer, you’ve seen this clip already:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII

It’s a clip of Laura Caitlin Upton, the Miss Teen America contestant from South Carolina, giving her answer to a question about education and geography: “Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”

Seeing it written out word for word is almost scarier:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps. And I believe that our education, like, such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere, like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”

Maybe she got left behind, if you know what I mean.

I found this clip with subtitles especially hilarious and immediately saw its relation to persuasion. File this under, ‘Talk too much, lose the sale.’

Our persuasion lives are, for the most part, in front of one person or small groups of people. We’re not persuading in front of thousands, tens of thousands of people, and it must be incredibly stressful. And yet, none of the other forty nine girls blathered nonsense for their answers.

Ms. Upton was trying to persuade a handful of judges. When we persuade, we need to keep in mind that our objective is not to fill the air with lots and lots of words. Our objective is to aim our message at exactly what our clients or prospects desire.

Of course, regardless of how pleasing this contestant’s physical form was, whether or not she was attractive enough to win is not the point. She came in third and that truly indicates this was not an intelligence contest. She’s not hard on the eyes, just hard on the ears.

Ms. Upton’s “answer” to the question can be a lesson for us:

Sometimes less is better. If we don’t have answers, we need to keep our traps shut unless we are blessed with the gift of gab and can fake it until we come up with something passable, at the very, very least.

Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.

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