"What are the steps to selling?"
Sales is a skill built by preparation with proper research, executed consistently with habit and optimized with refinement in process. When you understand these areas first, you realize success in sales is not only in your control, but inevitable as long as you strive to constantly improve. We share the below information with the intent to help guide you on how to improve your sales technique with proper understanding of each area. We placed these areas in a specific order as they build on each other.
Take a look:
1) Understand your buyer persona - demographics such as business size, annual revenue, what title of the person in the company acts as the champion or person that pitches the offering internally to the decision maker, what does the champion care about. From here, then you can determine where those type of people typically congregate. That's the pool to swim in!
(You can research your existing customers to fill in a lot of these blanks above, then search for patterns and commonalities)
2) Create your value proposition - this is how to represent your offering from the perspective of what they care about as it relates to impacts relevant to them. From here you translate those impacts into the relevance of your solution.
3) Map your buyer's journey - understand the decision making process associated with saying yes to your offering. The primary factors associated with this are consistently:
- Cost: the larger the amount, the more people involved in the decision and the longer the time before the sale happens
- Complexity: the perceived complexity in incorporating your solution which can include: employee buy-in, modifications to existing procedures, intuitiveness in design and integration requirements
If / when you receive objections, you may not have the experience to understand the difference between what they say and what they mean. The smartest approach to this would be to communicate that you respect their decision and appreciate their time. Then ask them for insight as to why they said no with the explanation that you wish to learn how to represent the offering better to others. This is where you get the invaluable insight to permanently improve your approach which increases sales effectiveness. Applying this tactic relentlessly will provide you with inevitable success and expand your skill-set independent of the offering you represent.
Learn how to sustainably sell with the "you win or you learn to get better" concept.