Let’s say it’s your first day on a new job, in a new industry, selling a new product, that you’re completely uneducated on. You not only have to lean how to sell the product, you gotta learn what the product is and does as well.
Most salespeople rely solely on their sales skills to hopefully work their way into closing some sales. While if you’re a killer closer this may work, for most people they are gonna need some help.
The normal sales manager or boss, tells the salesperson just to go smile and dial. They say “keep hitting the phones until you knock a sale out” but for a lot of salesmen that KO never comes.
Here’s a much faster way to learn how to sell anything. It’s a better process to educate yourself and it makes the company’s currently clients feel good about doing business too.
First ask your manager or boss for a list of 100-200 current clients. They don’t have to all be the best clients. Hell, some of them need to be bad clients. You definitely wanna hear from all types.
Also make a survey of questions you can ask each current customer. Questions like:
What made you decide to become a client?
How has our product benefited you.
Do you recommend our product to your friends and family?
Make a list of about 6-10 each questions you can ask the clients. You don’t want to wing this. You want to have the same questions ready for each customer to answer.
Once you make the list of questions, start calling and surveying the list of clients you got from the manager. This is how you quickly educate yourself on why people buy and what the benefits are.
Take notes on each client and update them in the CRM. This lets the company know how the customers feel too. It’s good feedback for everyone. This also puts you in good standing with HR and the other sales staff.
The average sales guy smiles and dials. Sells and fails over and over again. This can be a really tough way to start a new sales job. It’s tough on your mentally. All those “no’s” and not idea how to answer questions is frustrating for even the most elite sales guy.
With this process you’re getting good feedback from people who already paid and are shooting you straight. It’s the best way to learn what to sell I know of.
Every time we start a new sales person off in my companies this is the exact process we put them through. We let them get surveys and feedback for training on week one. We don’t turn them loose on new prospects until they have done 200 surveys.
It works. Our sales staff feels secure about our products, they even get referrals from some of the clients they survey. This is always a nice bonus for the new guy.
If you’re wanting to learn how to train your sales staff better or you simply want to get better at sales yourself, check out our inbound lead selling system at www.inboundleadcloser.com
