AS sales leaders, we need to consciously nurture and cultivate our team’s sales-maker mindset. And there are five essential sales-maker tools that we must ensure that our team carries with them in their toolkit—product competence, effective selling skills, practical market intelligence, strategic planning, and a healthy outlook in life.
Product competence
I always remind sales professionals that the primary requirement to effective selling is to know your product or services inside and out. If you truly know your product, you can craft the most appropriate features and benefits, and can likewise effectively up-sell and cross-sell.
Remember, no amount of selling skills can compensate for the utter lack of product competence. Besides, it is best to note that one’s confidence in selling is a function of that person’s level of product competence.
Effective selling skills
Aside from product competence, sales professionals must also learn the fundamentals of effective selling. This will involve skills in the art of asking questions, managing rejections, objections and other questions, and closing deals.
These skills are important because customer buying decisions are not just based on logic and linear thinking, but mostly influenced by six main buying motivations—gain, fear, pleasure, convenience, pride and peer pressure.
Practical market intelligence
Sales professionals must also possess a good sense of practical market intelligence. Sales-makers grow businesses by not only increasing the volume of sales per customer, but more importantly, to increase the number of sales accounts and sub-markets within a given territory.
Doing this will not only increase business size, but will allow for business sustainability over the long haul. To accomplish this, one must be well acquainted with various market-scapes, including market and product potentials, product use and consumption cycles, market shares, competitive positions, and other emerging market trends.
Strategic planning
Setting priorities is as important as the actual selling process. These priorities are determined based on solid strategic plans. And sales-makers must be experts in strategic planning. One may possess outstanding sales acumen, but without proper planning and time management, a sales professional can only cover a limited number of clients, hence closing a limited number of transactions. It helps to apply the rudiments of route and time management.
Moreover, one must also practice the 80/20 Rule or The Pareto Principle in segmenting customers vis-a-vis setting of targets and scheduling of sales call frequencies, and selecting the most appropriate sales approach.
Healthy outlook in life
Alongside the skills, sales-makers must also possess a healthy outlook in life.
Selling is a numbers game, and depending on your batting average for closing, you can always expect a fair share of rejections.
Hence, being in sales means that you must develop an appetite for rejections and objections for these are part of the territory. It’s part of the game! One must learn to get back up after every rejection, and move forward by getting into another closing situation, while learning from previous setbacks.
Knowing your deepest why will definitely help develop grit that will allow you to keep moving forward. More importantly, your faith in God will also enable you to always rise from every fall, knowing fully well that He will never leave you nor forsake you.
Besides, what’s the worst thing that can happen after getting a no? So as the poem suggests, “rest if you must, but don’t you quit.”
Nurture and cultivate these five sales-maker tools and you will definitely move towards the height of your dreams. God bless!
Alexey Rola Cajilig is the President of ARCWAY Consultancy Inc., Executive Director of ARC DOCENDI, and the Executive Managing Director of EM-CORE Success Academy and EM-CORE Foundation Inc. He is a Sales Leadership Coach, Strategic Sales Operations Consultant, Christian Motivational Speaker, Human Ecologist and Author of The effective Seller. He is also the creator of ARCH Styles, a behavioral and personality assessment tool. If you have questions and suggestions, you may send an email to salesleadershipcoachlex@gmail.com.