As a sales trainer for over 30 years, I have worked with thousands of professional sales people promoting hundreds of products and services, in dozens of countries around the world.
While coaching these sales people, I have observed that success can be boiled down to three areas that I call the triangle of performance: knowledge, skills and attitude.
Picture a triangle with the word ‘Knowledge’ under the base line. To succeed in sales, a professional must have a solid depth of knowledge about the product or service they offer. In today’s selling, product knowledge is the foundation of our performance. It is the price of admission and without it we can’t even get into the game, let alone play. Due to the ease of access to information, our customer can be more knowledgeable than we are. Thorough product knowledge can give us the confidence to lead the buying conversation.
On one side of the triangle is ‘skills.’ Communication skills, as well as human relations skills, are how the knowledge shows up. What a tragedy it is when someone with great knowledge can’t express it clearly and concisely to a customer, and even worse when they don’t listen to what the customer is telling them. If you want to sell, don’t tell, listen.
The remaining side of the triangle is ‘attitude.’ My years in working with those thousands of sales professionals have taught me that our attitude plays an even bigger role than skills and knowledge. Selling is a lonely profession of peaks and valleys; and while the peaks are high and thrilling, the valleys are lower than low. A sales person needs to be able to pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps with pep talks and faith talks. Make a list of new prospects, insert some names of your best customers, and get busy and hit the phones. Talking to your best customers between the cold calls will lift your spirits and your attitude will soar.
Dale Carnegie ranks #4 on Inc. Magazine’s 10 greatest sales people list. The son of a Missouri farmer, Carnegie began his career selling products and correspondence courses to ranchers. He eventually landed in New York City, where he began to offer a series of public speaking classes that were frequented by many budding salespeople. His book How to Win Friends and Influence People instructs readers to become more effective communicators and to focus on fostering relationships. In the forward to his timeless classic, Carnegie reports that even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge, and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering – to personality and the ability to lead people.
For me, he sums up the key to success in selling by stating: “You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
Regards,
Dave
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