Skip to main content

11 Things to Start doing for Yourself in Sales

11 Things to Start doing for Yourself in Sales

  1. Spending time with the Right People – Those who know things about Sales, that typically only the College of HardKnocks, can teach you. The right people appreciate you, encourage you to improve in a healthy and challenging way. These people will make you more alive (if that is possible). Make them your role models.
  2. Face your Challenges Head On – The challenges you face, do not define you. It is how you react to them, respond to them, that defines you. Challenges dissolve only when you take focused action. Do what you can, when you can, and acknowledge what you’ve done. It is about taking baby steps in the right direction, inch by inch. It is asking yourself, at all times, is there anything more that I could have done.
  3. Be honest with Yourself (about everything) – Make an honest list of what is right and what is not. If it is not right, can be changed with the current skills you have ? The only person you can count upon is yourself.
  4. Operate from Strengths – The gains you will make by working on polishing your strengths (given a fixed effort) will be far more than what you will achieve by working on bettering yourself in the areas of weakness.
  5. Learning from your Mistakes – Mistakes are okay. However, mistakes teach us only when we consciously sit down and analyze them to learn the lessons. Many a sales person is tempted to forget the sale that he could not close and chase the new potential client. If he does that, he is never going to become better. Never.
  6. Add new Techniques – work on building rapport with the client. Clients do not buy because your product or service is superior. They but because they have a good rapport with you and trust you. Of course, before they can trust you, they need to like you. Work on how to make them like you and trust you. I will share some thoughts on this, post Deepawali.
  7. Create a few key Metrics – learn to measure the performance of the sales team. Many in the Sales Team, are merely running like crazy rabbits from one client meeting to another, without looking for performance lessons, from what is happening around them. I will share a few Sales Metrics in my next blog.
  8. Build new Relationships – Look for opportunities to build new relationships. Focus not on the commercial value of this relationship. Look for dependable, honest people who add to what you are, who reciprocate your commitment.
  9. Help your team Grow – Care about the people in your team. Guide them if you know a better way. More you help others, the more they will want to help you. It will set forth a positive upward spiral.
  10. Focus on the details – notice the details, work on them, try to make them flawless. Most people look at the big picture. However, it is the fine details, that can make or break your attempts to convert a potential customer into a live customer. Make it a matter of personal prestige to see that you work towards perfection.
  11. Think 80/20 – a principle that we learnt in Management Colleges but hardly applied to real life work situations. Find out the customers (the 20%) who are giving you nearly 80% of the business. Give them additional attention. Try to do more of the 20% work, which will fetch you a higher return on your effort.
Look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Comments

  1. Unknown6 October 2017 at 09:21

    Excellent blog, Sunil. I always enjoy reading your blogs. Being a retail business owner myself, I can't agree more with #11 about the 80:20 rule. I have seen lots of 'sales quotes', but the one that has stuck in my mind is the one from Thomas Edison: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." Good luck to you, always.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being a Responsive Manager

These days, I hear a lot of people talking about making responsive websites. I started wondering whether there was some way we could also have responsive managers !! Do they teach this in the MBA Colleges ? Or even in the Corporate World ? What would being responsive mean ? Is there a way a manager can learn to become responsive ? Many such questions !! I thought I would share my thoughts here. U nresponsive people drive me crazy - sending an eMail to someone and then waiting days to hear anything back, is at the top of my list. I have to admit that this happens to me also. Yet, I replay withing 4 - 5 days, even in such situations. What is horribly sickening is not hearing anything at all. A simple question I ask, in job interviews, is “Do you consider yourself a responsive person ?” For me, this is a must-have-attribute . Naturally, everyone says, “yes.” But the way they answer, the speed and the conviction, is obviously the answer to my question. This makes realize tha
5 comments
Read more

Compelling Value Proposition

Value is defined as the worth of something for which something else can be exchanged.  This exchange is by free will. This exchange, in marketing, is with the money that the customer is willing to pay. Many marketing professionals confuse the value proposition, with the value statements that they make from from time to time. One of them - the (dreaded) elevator pitch. 😠 Dreaded elevator pitch makes the other guy in the elevator, press the "emergency" button to get off the next floor, even of he was not intending to get off there. 😠 😠  Even some experienced marketing professionals believe that a value proposition is merely a single statement or a sentence. It is not so. It a comprehensive way to define value, especially from the point of the customer. Thus, an elevator pitch, a Unique Selling Proposition(USP), a Unique Value Proposition (UVP), a Minimum Value Proposition (MVP) are just parts of the value proposition. You can call them the subsets of the value prop
5 comments
Read more

12 Ways to get Referrals and Fast - 2

To continue from the blog of the previous week, here are points 4 - 6. Your feedback will be looked forward to. Cross-Sell your Business Relationships by leveraging  at Industry Events Everyone has, at some point in their life, dreamed of being a social butterfly, right ? Take advantage of it in the right way. At an industry event, which your customers also attend, you have this fantastic opportunity to be that social butterfly. Every opportunity to get introductions from your customers to decision makers, at other companies, whom your customers know, can extend your business network, almost geometrically.  It may not, be called a referral, in the strict sense of the word, but it comes very close. It is a referral, all the same. Collaborate in More Visible Ways To take a strong business relationship to the next level, you have to seek out areas where you and your partners speak to the same audience. So simple. Many a times, without stepping on their toes, there is a very
2 comments
Read more