Effective Selling – It’s Not About You
Consulting | Fred Mills | December 10, 2009 at 7:50 pm
From Mediocre to great, what differentiates great sales people?
It is surely one of the great ironies of the selling profession that sales people are often described as being ‘great talkers’. Great sales people have to be effective communicators of course but the ‘gift of the gab’ can actually often be a hallmark of the poor sales person, not the great one.
The most effective sales people are those that LISTEN. The old adage of “two ears, one mouth, use them in that ratio” has never been more true. In our experience great salespeople differ from their more pedestrian counterparts in a number of important and significant ways.
- They listen more than they talk. (I know, we just said that, but it’s important so we repeat it again).
- They have time. It is interesting but great salespeople always seem unhurried and under no pressure – even when the customer tells them they ‘only have a minute’.
- They are not pre-occupied with ‘closing the sale’. Closing scares poor salespeople, great salespeople take the time and trouble to ask great, High-Gain questions and, because they are focused on what the customer wants and how they can solve the customer’s problems, they do not build the close up into something huge and scary in their heads. Moreover, the fear of rejection experienced by poor sales people doe snot exist for this group, they take time to determine how they can solve the customer’s problem and therefore the outcome of the call is always favourable.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this latter phenomenon is demonstrated by McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s largest and most successful Management Consultancies. McKinsey & Co has a lot of processes and practices which are admirable but, of all their great strengths, their approach to Consultative selling skills is perhaps the greatest.
McKinsey sends Senior, hugely qualified and intelligent people into prospective clients and they ask lots of questions. They focus entirely on the customer’s issues and needs, they do not waste a second working on the answers to problems the customer does not think he has – they fix what you want to have fixed! At the end of this exhaustive process the result, the outcome, the close if you will, is always the same ‘you need to hire McKinsey & Co’.
This hugely successful Business is built on the basis of a selling approach that is highly consultative (forgive the pun), they are treated as partners, advisers even (before they have been officially hired) and this all comes about as a result of great questioning and great active listening.
The great news is that, admirable though McKinsey & Co are, there is nothing terribly magical about their approach. It is the simple but determined application of sound consultative selling skills that yields the results. These skills can be learned and implemented by anyone – we just need to stop talking and thinking about ourselves for a while!
Author: Fred Mills
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera News
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