Effective Sales Training Program

This last week I have been working hard on developing a training program on selling. This program is something I would like to be able to use to train people in the companies that I start. Last summer I started my own sales/marketing firm and wanted to develop this but never got around to it. Now I would like to include it as part of my capstone as a motivational speaker.

Selling is an essential life skill in business. It is the money maker; it is how deals are made, and it is how business is done. I have worked in sales, started and run my own sales company, studied the literature, and have spent time working and talking with some really good sales people that have taught me almost everything I know.

I am going to put a video together to train people on essential sales principles. I have asked my mentor Nick Romano (an expert sales professional) and other sales professionals to participate in the video. They have agreed, and with their help, I am going to teach how to effectively sale anything.

I have based my training program on 3 fundamental skills:

1. Establish the appropriate relationship
2. Educate/Build Value
3. Identify the Closing behavior (close the sale)
   

Each skill is based on principles of human behavior, psychology, relationships, and economics. In my video presentation I will show examples of how to use these skills in real life situations in multiple arenas of selling. I will also include hand out worksheets to allow people following the presentation to practice these skills.

My presentation will not only draw from my own successful sales experiences, and those of my mentors, but also from the academic and popular literature in sales to provide credibility and power to these principles.

I will begin the presentation by building the value of effective sales training. I will show how simple steps and skills can lead to big sales results. Then I will show an overview of the program and the three steps.

In each step I will use one or two experts from the sales profession to help teach that principle. I will also show acted examples of those principles to show how to use it in real life. At the end of each principle. I will create a spot on the video for people to take time to practice that skill with a partner.

Below I have included some of the basic material I will cover that I have drawn from my experiences, Interviews with sales professionals, and the popular and and academic literature.

Closing the Sale

This step is by far the most important and most difficult part of any sale. It is the part where you get them to buy. Where you get them to do what it is you want them to do.
To Effectively close the sales:

1. Identify the CLOSING Behavior

An effective sale and close will influence to a specific behavior. In the classic book on leadership and change, Influencer by Vital Smarts, the authors research how master influencers make effective change come about using multiple sources of influence. They highlight effective leaders such as Muhamed Yunus with the Grameen Foundation and Mimi Silbert with Delancey Street enterprises and how they influenced large groups of people to do incredible things. The book shows how the strategies of these master influencers to create such change by focusing on a specific behavior to influence. These behaviors, which they call Vital Behaviors, are the key and specific behaviors they are trying to influence to create maximum influence.
Examples of vital behaviors include
In sales the vital behavior happens when you close the sale. One of the biggest problems people have with closing sales is not selling people to do that specific behavior. What I mean by this is if you are selling something, what specifically you want them to do to buy. What specific behavior do you want from them? Do you want them to sign a contract? Do you want them to take an item and purchase it at the register? Do you need a credit card number? Do you want them to only say yes? Do you want them to jump up and down and do a little dance for you?
I started a sales firm once selling curbside recycling services. I learned quickly the importance of Identifying Closing Behaviors quickly. I would emphasize the importance of closing sales in my trainings but my sales people kept trying to get people to ‘sign up for recycling’. I identified this problem one time training a sales person when a frustrated customer said, “What do you want me to do? Do I sign up with you? Do I call my city utility office? Do you have a website? What?” All we needed from people to ‘sign up for recycling’ was to fill out and sign a simple form. My sales people had the forms but kept trying to get people to sign up for recycling and not sign the forms. They would do an excellent job and educating the value of recycling to people and do everything perfect but could not clarify to each customer what it is they wanted from them specifically.
I then focused my sales scripts to simply and quickly get to the closing: “All we need is for you to fill out this simple form, and we can get you started recycling.” My sales reps were to hand the clipboard and pen anticipating acceptance from the customer. Sales performance improved dramatically.
How does this apply to other sales?
Identify the specific Closing Behavior first; it is the main objective of the sale, and everything else in your sales strategy should build up to that objective. This is primarily why I have chosen ‘Close the sale’ as the first step in an effective sale.

2. Make it easy for them to say yes/ Make it hard for them to say no:

a. Physically
b. Psychologically
My mother works as a cashier at ShopKo. She recently came to me for advice on how to sell extended warranties on electronic devices sold in the store. She told me how corporate was pushing these warranties and how nobody wanted them and she didn’t feel like it was her place to try and push these onto people.
I asked her to go through her sales presentation with me. As a cashier you have only a moment to make the sale. She said she would quickly explain the benefits and price and then ask if they wanted her to add on the extended warranty. She hadn’t had much success with this approach.
I went through with her the principle of closing sales and found out that the closing behavior for selling these extended warranties is consent. All the customer has to do is consent that they buy the extended warranty. They don’t have to sign anything extra, fill out any new form, just say yes.
This is where principle 2 of close the sale comes in. Make it easy for them to say yes and make it hard for them to say no. You are going to do this verbally, physically, and psychologically. Let’s talk about how to do this verbally and psychologically. I thought about how to make it easy for someone to say yes and hard to say no to the extended warranty. Originally my mom would ask, “Would you like me to add on the extended warranty to your product?” Now taking the time to add one something sounds hard regardless of price. You have to wait longer, you have to make the cashier more work, you have to pay more money for something you might never need or use, it is just too hard to say yes and easy to say no. An effective sales person will switch this.
I told my mom to try it out this way. Instead of asking the customer to add on the extended warranty, she was to say, “If it’s alright I’m going to go ahead and add the extended warranty.” This way instead of making it easy to say no, it was hard to say no. The customer would then have to stop the cashier from doing something they had already started and awkwardly communicate the desire to a confused cashier to not get the extended warranty. In this situation it is socially much easier to say yes, and hard to say no. Physically I told my mother to also, after she said, “If it’s alright, I’m going to go ahead and add the extended warranty,” she was to turn away from the customer and begin the transaction.
Selling in person has this advantage. You can use strong body language and gestures to aid you in closing sales and making it easy to say yes and hard to say no. This definitely is a high pressure sells technique but you must learn that all good salespeople are high pressure sales people. It isn’t about manipulation of strong-arming someone; it is about doing business and being concise. There is no shame in a good business person trying to do business.
When I ran my sales firm selling recycling services I used body language to make it easy to say yes and hard to say no on the doorsteps of peoples’ houses. After my sales reps gave the closing line, “All we need you to do is fill out this quick form and we can get you started recycling,” the reps were to hand the clipboard and pen to the homeowner in anticipation of them taking it and signing the form. It worked miracles when it was done.
Not everyone has the courage to close hard and show anticipation of the sale toward customers. They have a fear that waits, not allowing any expectations to go up in case they don’t get the sale. There is something powerful about communicating an expected sale. When you can successfully communicate, “it is obvious that you are going to choose to buy this so let me take care of the details for you quickly and easily,” you are almost guaranteed to close the sale every time.

3. Show immediate value

After you communicate the closing behavior, you should then communicate the immediate value associated with that behavior. "All we need you to do is sign this form and we can get you started saving the environment."

"If it's alright, let's go ahead and move forward so we can start working hard for your company."

4. Do it early, do if often

This principle is self-explanatory. When you are closing the sale, do it early in the sales presentation to communicate to your customer clearly what you want from them, and do it more than once. (Statistics?) What's great about this skill is that it can first save you a lot of time if they say yes the first time, but it will also help any objections or concerns about your product come out early in the presentation. You will better be able get a feel about your customer's feelings about your product.


PRACTICE

With a partner, go through each of the situations below. For each situation (1) Identify a closing behavior (2) Discuss how to make it easy to yes and (3) Identify the immediate value and (4) Take turns practicing closing the sale in a role play.

1. You are a clerk in a retail store trying to sell the new big screen television set that is on sale to someone 'just looking'. The workers in the back have to bring one to the front when someone buys one.

2. You are negotiating a large marketing contract with a big company. The executive you are negotiating with seems interested but you cannot yet tell if he is in or not.

Establish the Appropriate Relationship

Based on two main factors:
1. Your customer

References
McFarland, R., Challagalla, G., & Shervani, T. (2006). Influence Tactics for Effective Adaptive Selling. Journal of Marketing, 70(4), 103-117. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

“Buyers are more complex than orginally presumed. You cannot neatly put buyers into categories. An effective salesperson will adapt their influencing techniques to match the buyer’s specific needs and personality.”

• Be on their side
• Talk about anything about the sale at first to build rapport
• Fill their needs: Find out their specific needs. “Whats important to you (in a tv)?”
• AMPP: Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase, Prime

Do not ever start a conversation with, “Can I help you?” You will almost always get a no. Find other questions to ask to get started. “Have you shopped here before.”

2. Your product

Educate/Build Value

The market place exists to create and exchange value. Nothing should be sold or will be sold for very long that isn’t really valuable to someone. In the market place you are not just selling things to people. The word selling has gotten a bad reputation somehow connoting manipulation and ripping people off. But you should never sell something where you have to do that. It isn’t good business and it isn’t ethical. In the real business world you are exchanging value.
However, there is so much value out there and we don’t all see value in the same way. So the only way that we can learn to recognize new value is to discover it on our own, or have someone else teach us the value of something. This is what a sale is. It is educating value to customers. If you don’t see value in what you are trying to sell then how can you teach its value to someone else without lying to them? You either need to find something else to do or have someone teach you more about value. Entrepreneurs are trying to create new value, and they do create new value, this is how we have made so much advance in the world over the past few centuries is because of entrepreneurs creating value.
Sell only things that are valuable. Learn how to recognize value where it exists. You cannot communicate and build value if you do not see it yourself. It is much easier to get someone to see something you are seeing than to get someone to see something you do not see. You need to clearly understand why it should be obvious why someone should purchase a specific product. You must be totally convinced yourself. To do this you need to be educated about the product as much as you can. People buy things for different reasons, and you need to see how this product is valuable to many different types of people with many different types of needs and wants.

When it is possible, I try to sell to specific types of people who I know will obviously need or want the product. When I am convinced that someone will clearly want it, then all I have to do is teach them what I know so that they will buy. If I am selling to someone who at first does not convince me that they do obviously need the product, I try to take time to learn more about the product and the situation so that I can see why something is so obviously valuable. This is why I prefer to sell to businesses instead of resident households, besides there is more money, I can do more research on the specific company because of their own marketing/PR efforts, rather than a person at their home whom I will know little about before speaking to them besides the color and type of front door they have.
You also need to trust that people can make good decisions about value if they are only taught to see what you see.

People buy things that they perceive to be valuable. This is why they purchase; they are purchasing the value. They are not purchasing the product, they are purchasing the value of the product. When you buy a microwave, you aren’t buying a weird looking box with buttons, you are buying the convenience of heating your food quickly, this is why you are buying a microwave. When you buy life insurance, you are not buying paperwork and another monthly bill, you are buying the security that comes for loved ones in the event of your death. In Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber emphasized that you are selling more than just the product, you are selling the feeling. When you go to McDonald’s you are not buying a very high quality hamburger or any high quality food for that matter, you are purchasing the McDonald’s experience which is Ronald McDonald, the play place, the quick, friendly, and consistent service with a , “Welcome to McDonald’s!” in ___ locations around the world.

Other
Sell the feelings, not the product; sell the value, not the item
Make them feel special
Overcoming objections
High pressure sales
Do business, not manipulation
Get them saying yes

Your best customers are you best customers