For most of us, what we learn first sticks with us for a long time, often throughout our lives. Nursery rhymes, along with what we consider right and wrong. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.
It happens to salespeople, too. Because our early training is indelible, it stays with us to guide us. But new demands and expectations call for strategic changes to keep up, stay relevant and close more sales. Here are five of them:
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Change your thinking about what you know. Salespeople are known for being sure (sometimes overly sure) of themselves. Although it takes self-confidence to keep going, it also has a risky downside. It can lead to believing we know more than we do. And nothing kills sales faster than arrogance.
Unless salespeople consciously challenge their thinking, they hand sales to the competition. We all benefit by asking ourselves these questions: What am I missing? What don’t I know? Are my assumptions correct?
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Change the way you prepare presentations. Do you think you’re at a place where you can “wing it” or all you need to do to get ready for a presentation is to make a few notes, a quick outline, or go over it in your mind? If so, you’re deluding yourself and shortchanging your employer and your customers.
Like it or not, here’s the truth: If we don’t write it, we only think we know it. This is what happened to the arguably brilliant “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance when he went for job interviews at a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm while at Yale Law School.
“The last interviewer asked me a question I was unprepared to answer: Why did I want to work at a law firm? It was a softball, but I’d gotten so used to talking about my budding interest in antitrust litigation … that I was laughably unprepared. I should have said something about learning from the best or working on high-stakes litigation. I should have said anything other than what came out of my mouth: ‘I don’t really know, but the pay isn’t bad! Ha ha.’ The interviewer looked at me like I had three eyes, and the conversation never recovered.”
It happens when we don’t prepare; when we don’t write it down.
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Change the way you present. For a presentation to be a winner, it must be interactive – participatory. To invite the participants to interrupt you by raising their hand to ask a question, and then to pick up the thread and continue, takes confidence. But it also sends the message that the participants shape the presentation.
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Change your persuasion strategy. There are still salespeople who say, “If I can just get in front of prospects, that’s all I need to close them.” If you want to give it a name, call it “the power of persuasion.” They build their case in a way that leads prospects to the logical conclusion that their only reasonable response is saying yes.
Today, push is out; pull is in. To influence buying behavior today takes a sales environment in which customers can decide if they want to do business with you.
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Change how you relate to customers. Even though companies continue preaching a customer-loyalty message, they may be deceiving themselves.
The trend is toward “tentative” or quid pro quo loyalty. “As long as you give me what I want, I’ll be loyal. If that changes, so will I.” This is the message.
Even if they are an Amazon Prime customer paying $99 a year, customers don’t think twice about buying it for less elsewhere, particularly if there’s free delivery. Clearly, performance-based relationships trump everything, including loyalty.
They say change is inevitable. If it’s true, then there’s no better place to start than with ourselves.
John Graham of GrahamComm is a marketing and sales strategy consultant and business writer. Contact him at jgraham@grahamcomm.com.