My Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Newbies – Great Salesperson
Sales is the exchange of a product or service between a buyer and a seller at the right time and in the most appropriate place. This appropriate time and place positively affect the sales process. – Great Salesperson
The seller, i.e. the person who is in the act of selling the product and/or service to the buyer for a certain price, must be reliable, have a positive attitude and have strong human relations.
A good salesperson is someone who can act in accordance with the different customer profiles he/she encounters every day and who can be in the same state of mind with people in different moods.
What is difficult is not to sell the product or service, but to convince and sell to people who are in different emotions every day with appropriate sales techniques. One of the most effective methods here is to use the same body language, and tone of voice and model the same energy state as the other person.
For this reason, a good salesperson is someone who can renew themselves every day and can be shaped according to every changing mental state.
The best salespeople in the world are self-confident, well-rounded people who are experts in sales techniques, are positive, are interested in at least one art form, know how to deal with objections, have high energy, and do not see rejection as a source of sadness, but as part of their development.
The way to become self-confident is to be aware of your knowledge and skills, give importance to your personal development, master sales techniques and achieve success.
As you succeed, your self-confidence grows, and completing a planned day according to our plan is also a success. Knowing yourself well will increase your self-confidence.
Sales techniques bring success when they are designed to increase the positive impact on people’s buying behaviour.
Many sales techniques have a set of rules, but in the new generation of sales techniques, this issue examines a little more sociological and psychological aspects. Because people’s buying behaviour is not what it used to be.
There is a lot of information and what needs to be done to find, filter and use the most accurate among this information is to see this issue as a science, not just as sales techniques or sales tactics.
For this reason, although you have knowledge about sales techniques, having a lively, energetic, outgoing personality is the basic rule of being a good salesperson.
Be a good salesperson and trust yourself because confidence brings sales.
Why Do People Buy?
Although most of us are not knowledgeable about sales techniques, we sell at every stage of our lives. When we enter a job interview, we sell ourselves, we want them to prefer us by emphasizing our experience, knowledge and differences.
In fact, we apply sales techniques knowingly or unknowingly. Sale is a continuous concept.
People buy many products or services throughout their lives, but no one wants to be sold a product or service. This is because people don’t like to be sold to.
Think about yourself… How do you behave when you are asked to sell a product and/or service? You usually raise a number of objections and resist not buying it.
This is a psychological phenomenon because people don’t buy to buy, they buy because they need to buy. This or that sales technique will not help you here. You need to understand the customer first.
That’s why people buy from people who listen to them carefully, who understand exactly what their problem is and who they think can solve it.
Non-need orientations are special situations created by expert salespeople with their sales techniques.
Needs are infinite and resources are limited, so we may always need everything. In this case, it is necessary to think about “why do people buy?”.
People buy because they need something.
People buy because they think they might need them.
People buy when they are convinced that they should buy.
These items I have mentioned show us why people buy in general.
So instead of thinking about how to sell more, or instead of approaching your customer directly with sales techniques, we can determine a more accurate strategy to think about why people buy first and close the sales process with more positive results.
Remember! No sale without a contract is a closed sale. Our goal should be to analyze people’s needs correctly or to close this process with the right sales techniques that will benefit them by making them think that they need the product or service we are trying to sell.
Apart from classical sales techniques, new generation sales techniques are no longer enough to identify needs. It is necessary to create a need. The most important point here is the point of storytelling. It is a good sales strategy to tell people what benefits they will have when they buy this product or service, as well as what they can lose if they don’t buy it, because people don’t like to lose…
How Do We Easily Persuade A Person?
A human being is a being that gains meaning through the ability of language, that can socialize through this ability, and that can make sense of the environment and the world by using language.
From a human perspective, language is the most important element that preserves the place and value of human beings in the world. In other words, language is a means of understanding and expressing the world in which humans exist (Sever, 1997; Aksan, 2007).
While communicating with each other, people expect their thoughts to be accepted by other people. This is exactly where we can talk about persuasion. A persuasion is a form of social influence.
It is the process of guiding people towards the adoption of an idea, attitude or action through rational and symbolic (which is not always logical) means. The method used to achieve the goal of persuasion is to make the goal interesting instead of forcing it towards the goal.
Aristotle’s classic work rhetoric is recognized as the first important work on persuasion. Aristotle wrote many years ago about the effects of “the personality of the speaker”, “the characteristics of the target” and “the characteristics of the speech” on the persuasiveness of the message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981).
According to Brembeck and Howell (1952: 24), persuasion is “a conscious attempt to change thoughts and actions through the manipulation of human motives in order to achieve predetermined results”.
In 1976, the same scholars defined persuasion in a much simpler way and defined persuasion as “communication intended to influence the choices of individuals”. Reardon (1991: 2) defines persuasion as “guiding another individual to adopt a particular behaviour, belief or attitude through various emotional and cognitive techniques”.
Raven and Haley (1982: 427), on the other hand, define persuasion as “creating a change in the cognition, attitude or behaviour of an individual or individuals through the influence of an individual”.
These explanations show us that persuasion is an extremely important and powerful concept in interpersonal communication.
Persuasion exists in every aspect of our lives and is used at every moment. In political communication, mass media (advertisements, movies, etc.), in the triangle of mother-father-child, in emotional relationships, in our business life, etc. It is observed that we use persuasion in many places.
However, persuasion, which includes a number of basic techniques, is valid not only in verbal communication but also in powerful non-verbal communication such as body language.
The science of sales is intertwined with the science of persuasion. Sales, which is about people, is a sociological and psychological science, so there are a number of psychological factors in being able to persuade a person.
These factors provide us with important clues to make the other person say “YES” or “NO” with appropriate sales techniques. Research shows that it is possible to talk about the psychology of persuasion for the last 60 years.
If you give someone something for nothing, they feel indebted to you and do what you say. In other words, if you do someone a favour, they will return it.
If you make a promise or ask for something, that person will do what you say in order to keep their word. Individuals use this principle because they want to stick to their previous promises and be consistent with their promises.
Here people are encouraged to take a small step in the direction they want to be persuaded. If you convince someone that others are doing something, that person is willing to do it. By nature, when people are indecisive at any moment, they act by looking at the decisions made by the majority before them.
If the person you want to get something done likes you, they will do what you say; if they don’t like you, they will do what the person they like says. People more easily say “YES” to the suggestions of the person they like.
A sincere compliment before you start marketing increases the success rate much more. Communicating with people with a sincere conversation before entering the bargaining or sales process, using icebreakers will help you break the resistance mechanism against you and create a more trusting environment and prepare the ground for you to persuade more easily.
How To Do A Strategic Sales Management?
Sales management starts with good planning. Planning is at the heart of Sales Strategy. This planning includes the visits you will make, the weekly list of your potential customers, and the existing and new customers you will call. Sales does not consist of a single phase, especially in B2B, business-to-business sales, that is, corporate sales;
Meeting with the customer phase
Sharing and pre-confirming the meeting outputs obtained after the meeting,
Bidding phase,
Follow-up phase
It consists of a series of steps such as order confirmation phases.
After all these stages are realized, the relationship management stage with your customer is passed, which is one of the most important stages of sales techniques. When you do a good relationship management, you will have developed your existing customer and ensured their loyalty to you.
Your customer who works with you should prefer to work with you again in the next contract period, not with your competitor. Successful Sales management is realized by planning all these stages. When you build your sales processes with the right planning and customer development main headings, you will create longer-lasting, more profitable and more loyal customers.
This is relatively easier in individual sales management. Your customer has come to you and already has in mind the product or service they have decided to buy. The most important thing you need to do while managing this process is to listen to your customer and make the right needs analysis.
When analyzing needs, it is necessary to ask the right questions. You have listened to your customer and understood their needs, the most effective method you will do after this point will be to close the sale quickly. Time is as important for your customer as it is for you.
Customer Greeting
The most important and most effective method of welcoming a customer is to greet them as if they were the first customer of the day. Think about yourself, how do you want to be greeted when you go to a store or a sports centre?
The stress of the day and many negative situations discourage people and reduce their energy, but it is out of the question for professional salespeople, especially in the service sector, to be demotivated, demotivated and indifferent to the customer.
For this reason, even if you meet 50 customers a day, you need to greet your fiftieth customer with the same energy and sympathy with which you greet your first customer.
Below you will find the sales strategy and the concept of sales techniques that should be followed in a custom greeting.
When a customer arrives, greet them like a guest who has come to your home, if your meeting with them is going to take a long time, ask your teammate at the front desk if they want to drink something while waiting, so that when someone comes to our house, we first ask if you want to drink something, water, tea, etc. We ask. Our store is our home too…
When you first make contact with the customer (we make first eye contact), smile and act energetic.
In the first 3 seconds, people decide whether to negotiate with you or not, and research shows that the first impression is 80% effective on people. So you are perceived as 80% good or 80% bad. So don’t forget the psychology of first impressions.
Remember! People buy from people/organizations they like or they buy from people/organizations they think they might like. If they don’t like you, they won’t buy from you, which means you’ve lost the customer to a competitor, and the outgoing customer won’t come back.
When you start to show your customer around your store, do not tell them about the product/service immediately. In the research conducted, people buy 90% of the products or services of people who have a sincere conversation with them.
This is a very big rate, how come we are standing in this 10% unaffordable area and we cannot sell? Because we do not personalize our business, our product, our customer…
Know that time is important when explaining the product/service, time is the hourglass where your performance and the other party will decide whether to buy or not, and the clock is running non-stop, so it is not the right approach to spend a long time for a customer for long hours, even if the customer wants it, the long time you spend here may be a time when you can miss the closing of a second sale, so find the ideal time for each of your customers and explain what you want to tell in all this time with your keywords, then proceed to the sales closing process and close it.
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