Sales skills for selling products (In-House)

1 What makes a customer buy any product?

• Moving towards 'pleasure'
• Moving away from 'pain'
• Robert Cialdini's Psychology of Influence - buying motives
• Understanding what your product does for customers
• Why there is never a 'one size fits all' approach
• What are the real 'unique selling points' and why the salesperson is the real 'USP'
• At what point does the customer emotionally buy your product?

2 Getting past gatekeepers

• What gatekeepers' motivations are
• How to make them your friend rather than your enemy
• How to make your call harder to block than to put through
• How to control the gatekeeper with questions, not answers
• Using Cialdini's 'reciprocity' law to get put through more often
• Practical exercise in which the trainer poses as gatekeeper

3 Questioning and listening skills

• How to use open questions to get the customer talking
• What questions to avoid and why
• How to 'stack the pain' of the status quo with 'impact questions'
• Practical 'pain stacking' exercise in pairs
• What listening is and what it isn't
• Question funnelling - how to earn deeper disclosure through probing
• Practical funnelling exercise in pairs
• The power of summary

4 How to create tailored benefits and not 'dive into solution'

• What is 'diving into solution'? Examples and analogies
• Why it is to be avoided
• Practical exercise in pairs - how it feels to have solutions offered up too early
• How to avoid 'feature-dumping'
• What is 'value selling'?
• How to create tailored benefits
• How to convert product features into benefits
• How to deal with the prospect's competitor allegiance

5 Handling objections and testing the water

• How to overcome the price objection by selling value
• Common objections the participants encounter and answers that work
• The objections salespeople carry in their own heads
• The 'A-C-E' objection-handling model
• How to uncover objections
• When - and when not - to trial close

6 Closing skills

• Why salespeople often close too early
• How to identify buying signals
• How to use urgency with skill and effectiveness
• Four killer closing techniques that work
• How to avoid buying the product back by careless post-sale talk
• How to ask for referrals for your product
• How to 'farm' the account for future opportunities

7 Wrap-up

• Key learnings from each participant
• Individual action planning - steps that can and will be implemented in the workplace