We all know that Negotiation is a form of selling, and our ultimate goal is that everybody wins. Impossible, right? Maybe not. In my book Selling is Not Optional- How to Master the most important skill in business and life I devote a whole chapter to negotiation.
Mutual Success
In the chapter I stress the goal of mutual success for both the buyer and seller. Often, we think negotiations can only succeed one way: we present the product, say all the right things, and get the client really excited about buying. Then we ask for the business and they jump across the desk and hug us, saying, “You saved my life.” Right?
It simply doesn’t happen that way.
What’s your fear?
Often, salespeople don’t even ask for the business for fear of rejection. They are afraid to hear, “No, not at the moment,” or, “I want to negotiate.”
As we have seen from other chapters in the book , mindset makes a difference; you have to be open to the next step. Often, after someone does decide to purchase, they still want to parry a little. People feel it is a bit of a game.
We are all in the game of negotiation. I left the house this morning negotiating with my wife about a couple of things. We negotiate with our partners and our fellow workers, and I can tell you as a parent of teenagers, we negotiate with our children.
Salespeople should avoid cultivating a closed mindset around bargaining. Negotiations are just a form of communication. Consider how negotiations can get you closer to finding a mutually beneficial solution.
A Beautiful Mindset.
Think of the John Nash story, told in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Nash, an American mathematician, proved that when you cooperate, everybody wins, and wins bigger. Game theory demonstrates that cooperation can increase each player’s ultimate reward. Having a collaborative mindset is actually the key to successful negotiation.
Here are some takeaways from my book on the subject of negotiation. (link)
Plan your negotiation approach. Have a checklist. Don’t forget your agreement.
There are often only a few standard areas of concerns for your clients.
Keep your sense of humour.
A new signature, please on all emails from this week.
PLUS: WHENEVER YOU’RE READY…
Here are 4 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether your business is big or small.1. Want to become a Sales Mindset Blueprint Member. Every month you get access to an exclusive coaching session with me as well as full access to my sales programme. Get the deets here.
Try the new ‘7 Days to Sales Success’ framework.Make more sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7-day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
Join our private Facebook group – The Sales Mindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas.Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here
Work with me one-on-one.If you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15-minute brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
In my training I talk about the importance of asking yourself powerful questions when it comes to conditioning your mindset.
To finish off that discussion here are some business questions you might want to think about as you move into another week of selling.
• What am I most happy/excited about in my business?
• What am I most proud of in my business?
• How does it make me feel to employ other people?
• What am I committed to doing to improve sales
systems?
• How/why do I value my customers?
Set up Systems
With all of these questions, you are asking yourself about your business is it not the time to set up systems to routinize these questions for your sales team so their conversations with customers flow more naturally? Efficiency is especially important with today’s shorter buying cycles and your clients are considering several competitive offers at any one time; there is little time to waste.
What does a quality question look like in practice? A quality question is one that cannot be answered with a simple “No.” Can I help you is the wrong question, because “No, just looking” is not the answer you want? Where can you go from there? Nowhere.
The phrase that you thought was helpful has just shut down the conversation you were hoping to have with a potential client. Is it hard to come back from a dead end? You bet.
The Other Guy’s Shoes
How do you get your sales team to open up the conversation? Get them to think about the customer’s experience. Many salespeople are concerned about coming across as nosy. In reality, there are few topics that are truly off-limits. Obviously, you wouldn’t ask anything too personal, but if you genuinely indicate your desire to help, people are quite willing to talk about themselves.
Keep in mind that the customer’s most urgent need at the moment he or she walks in your door may not be to buy your
product.
It may be something much more basic, like a need to be understood. Before they buy anything, they may want to know that you appreciate them.
The importance of considering the customer’s current circumstances is succinctly told in a famous sales story, called The Man in the Desert.* It goes like this: A man comes into a store after living in the desert for months. The store sells best quality food and clothing, but those are not the first things the customer needs.
What he needs is water. The best conversation starter for this man is a glass of water. Maybe after his thirst is quenched, you will learn that he also needs lunch or a new jacket. He might need other things to help him feel better.
If you sell those things, you are in business. You have opened a dialogue that would never have taken place if you had not recognised the customer’s most basic need.
So many people stop at the glass of water. You almost always have to ask more than one question to find out what the client wants. If that person says, “I’m just looking,” you can respect that, but you know they must have come in for a reason. Have the courage to ask another question.
For example, if someone is looking at a product, ask them what they like about it. Get them talking. The only questions that don’t work are questions that close the conversation.
Of course, for a salesperson to be willing to let the conversation wander, he or she must be prepared with the things we talked about earlier, including sufficient knowledge of the product to confidently answer any questions that come back from the customer.
If you know your product well enough, the answers come intuitively, which makes a sales interaction feel more like a friendly chat.
Have a good week selling your stuff.
Mike
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
PLUS: WHENEVER YOU’RE READY…
Here are 4 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether your business is big or small.
Want to become a Sales Mindset Blueprint Member. Every month you get access to an exclusive coaching session with me as well as full access to my sales programme. Get the deets here.
Try the new ‘7 Days to Sales Success’ framework.Make more sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7 day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
Join our private Facebook group – The Sales Mindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas.Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here.
Work with me one-on-one. If you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15-minute brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
In my last blog, I talked about the importance of knowledge, of knowing your products and your clients’ products strengths and weakness better than your competitors.
If you did the exercise, you will now be armed with more tools to sell your product or service.
So far, in the selling journey we have had Mindset, Insight, and now the Path-Evaluating clients’ needs.
The next stage in the selling journey is the Path.
Every sale involves some type of discovery. At this point, you have adjusted your mindset and achieved solid insight into your product or service. You are now ready to get on the path to a sale.
The next step is discovering what your clients’ needs and wants really are. You are not ready to seal the deal, but you are looking down the road ahead of you, mapping out the territory that will lead to the sale.
You will cover this ground alongside your client, by focusing on your clients’ needs and how you can move together down the path toward fulfilling them. Think of “the path” as the discovery process behind every sale, where we find out how we can match up our product with the needs of the customer.
I sometimes put it another way – “Stop selling your solution, and find out their problems.”
We should understand that the intersection is not reached all at once, and the journey is seldom the same twice.
Clients’ needs differ depending on many variables, including timing and general willingness to buy. Our job is to discover the underlying need or want, and to be there when the timing and willingness converge.
We can do that by creating events and taking actions that position us in the clients’ path, so we are there when they are ready to buy.
You can only be truly ready to provide solutions to your clients’ problems if you develop a deep understanding of their wants and needs.
In the first instance, you do this by asking questions. We’ll explore that some more in the next blog.
Evaluate emotional needs
Remember this: Every one of your clients has a need for your product, usually at an emotional level.
What I want you to do is a simple, quick exercise.
Either spend some time with a notepad, or just answer these in your next sales meeting, or do them now on your own.
Why do my clients buy this?
What result does it give them?
What does it do?
What am I really selling? (Are you fulfilling a pent-up desire?)
How do they feel when they buy it?
What emotions trigger a sale?
What are the motivations for them buying your product or service?
There are several more exercises you can do to construct valuable tools and these are found in Chapter 5 On the Path: EvaluatIng Clients’ Needs (Link). Selling is not optional – How to master the most important skill in business and life.
Here are 4 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether you businesses is big or small.
Become a Sales Mindset Blueprint Member. Every month you get access to an exclusive coaching session with me as well as full access to my sales programme. Get the deets here.
Try the new 7 Days to Sales Success Framework. Make More Sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7 day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
Join our Private Facebook Group – The Salesmindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas. Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here.
. Work with me One-on-One. f you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15 minute Brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
I know I talked about the importance of mindset in my last video, and how much that plays a part in the selling journey.
Insight, in the context of sales, means understanding your own product. It also means understanding your own businesses strengths and weaknesses.
For example, London’s traditional black cab drivers rely on what they call “The Knowledge” to set them apart from other transportation services. Pay a visit to London and a black cab will probably be one the first things you will see. London taxi drivers are almost as famous as the black cabs they drive.
Their fame stems from their incredibly comprehensive knowledge of the city. Hail down a black cab in London and you can be assured that the driver will find the shortest route to your destination without the aid of any technology.
London taxi drivers go through stringent training to obtain their licenses. They need to pass “The Knowledge” test; and studying for it is often likened to having an atlas of London implanted into your brain.
To become an All-London taxi driver, you need to master no fewer than 320 basic routes, all of the 25,000 streets scattered within the basic routes, and approximately 20,000 landmarks and places of public interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.
It takes the average person between two and four years to learn “The Knowledge”. This education is a big investment, but the training sets this service apart from the competition, whether they are taxi drivers or Uber drivers, utilising GPS gadgets.
In fact, on the ground, a black cab driver will always out-perform the Uber driver. Their extensive, specific knowledge actually offers an opportunity to re-position themselves as the ultimate experts.
Customers are willing to pay for a service this good, and the only way to make it this good is to have true insight into the product you offer.
Swot Analysis
The question for your business, then, is how do you know what you—and your salespeople—don’t know?
One way to develop insight into your own company is to use a swot analysis on your products and services.
The swot framework comes from Albert Humphrey, who tested the approach in the 1960s and 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute. Developed for business and based on data from Fortune 500 companies, the swot analysis has been adopted by organisations of all types as a decision-making tool. As its acronym implies, a swot analysis examines four elements:
Strengths: Internal attributes and resources that support a successful outcome.
Weaknesses: Internal attributes and resources that work against a successful outcome.
Opportunities: External factors the project can use to its advantage.
Threats: External factors that could jeopardise the project.
Questions to ask during a swot analysis of your sales process:
Strengths: What are you the best at? • Why do customers buy from you? • What are your competitors’ benefits?
Weaknesses: Where do you need to improve? • Are there any gaps in product lines? • should you add a guarantee? • What’s preventing you from making more sales?
Opportunities: How can you take advantage of your new knowledge? • Is there something unique you have to offer? • What do these facts tell you about the future?
Threats: Is this the right product or service for the current market? • What happens when the market changes? • Do you need to evaluate your clients? • Do you have a sales mindset? • Do you train well and consistently? • Does your team believe in your mission?
Evaluating your offerings this way helps you develop the insight necessary to sell them. Let’s look at one example of how insight, or lack of it, affects everyday sales interactions.
Imagine someone comes to your store, intending to buy. They already have an interest in the product. They quite reasonably make an inquiry with the salesperson. This is where the relationship between seller and buyer can quickly break down.
If the customer expresses interest in an item and the person who can sell it to them doesn’t demonstrate enough insight, the sale will drop dead right there.
The once-promising customer will walk right back out that door. For instance, suppose an appliance store supervisor has only trained the sales staff in the bare minimum product knowledge.
The salespeople on the floor know that a washing machine has a lid at the top, and it opens when you press a button, and that’s it. Chances are, your customers already know more than the salespeople.
The internet now allows people to research your product thoroughly. if you are not careful—if you don’t always have some sort of valuable knowledge to add—you will lose the sale.
Work out ahead of time what your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities are, and try to match them up against your competition. You want to be able to convince the customer of the benefit of choosing your product over any other.
Here are 3 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether you businesses is big or small.
1. Try the new 7 Days to Sales Success Framework.
Make More Sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7 day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
2. Join our Private Facebook Group – The Salesmindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas.
Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here.
3. Work with me One-on-One.
If you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15 minute Brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
In many of my blogs I talk about recognising steps needed to navigate the sales journey successfully. I am going to share in these upcoming blogs, the steps of that sales journey.
Before we get more deeply into those steps, let’s look in detail at how our perception of sales informs our understanding of that journey from the start. Sales is shaped more by how you think about it than by what you do.
We are talking about your mindset: your core beliefs about yourself as a salesperson and about selling itself.
All too often, these beliefs are negative and limiting. When you change your perspective, you also change your results.
People think selling is hard and assume that the ability to sell is an inborn trait.
They tell themselves, “I can’t sell. I tried it once and it didn’t work. I will look really stupid if I don’t close the deal.”
They think that in order to succeed in sales, they have to win every time. This leads many talented people to conclude, “I hate sales. I really hate it. I’m not interested. I will never be any good at it.”
People who have a more productive mindset around sales tend to instead think, “Sales is easy. Salespeople aren’t born with something I don’t have. I can actually do this stuff, if I have a great product and I provide excellent service, then I should be able to make a sale. After all, the customer gets a real solution to their problem from me.” A positive sales mindset always comes from understanding that the customer is a person with needs, wants, and desires that you can help them fulfill.
When you think about a sale that way, you will find it much easier to talk to that person about their problems and ask how you can make those problems disappear. The trick is to talk yourself out of the limited mindset and into the more expansive perspective.
When you don’t get a sale, do you think, “I knew it! I told you so, didn’t I? This is impossible.” Or, do you think, “Well, I tried one thing, and it didn’t work, but what did I learn? What could I do next time?” Here’s a story (author unknown, recounted by Jack Canfield and many others) that shows how important perspective is when you’re trying to make the seemingly impossible, possible. Here is a story about how mindset and looking at things differently plays a big part, when you go to sell a product or service.
The newspaper story
A man is busy working at home when his five-year-old son comes into his study. With the enthusiasm that children have in abundance, he asks his dad if they can go to the park.
Dad, in the middle of his work, tries to resist his son’s requests but the child persists. Frustrated, and hoping to buy some time, Dad looks around, lifts up a newspaper, and opens it to a double-page world map.
He pulls out the map, tears it up into small pieces, and gives them to his son. “After you put together this map of the world, then we will go to the park,” he says. The boy takes the pieces of the newspaper in both hands and scurries eagerly over to the other side of the room.
He sets to the task immediately. Dad knows that his son has no idea what a map of the world looks like; he thinks it will take ages to put it back together. Dad goes back to his work. Five minutes later, his son runs over. “I’m finished,” he says, “can we go to the park now?”
Dad thinks his son is making it up, but on the floor is the finished puzzle of the map of the world. “How did you finish this so quickly?” he asks his son. “It was easy, Daddy,” says the boy. Then he turns over the pieces of the jigsaw one at a time, and on the other side of the world map is a photograph of a man. “You see, when you put the man back together the whole world falls into place.”
Here are 3 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether you businesses is big or small.
1. Try the new 7 Days to Sales Success Framework.
Make More Sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7 day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
2. Join our Private Facebook Group – The Salesmindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas.
Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here.
3. Work with me One-on-One.
If you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15 minute Brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
Well managed well throughout incentive programs play an important part in achieving and exceeding sales targets. If you incentives are structured properly they can result in a high level of motivation.
Here are a few basic principles I recommend to my clients.
Avoid incentives where individual salespeople are competing directly with each other to win a single prize. This often causes animosity. It is much better to ensure that every person has a chance to achieve an incentive by reaching a certain level of sales.
2. Incentives should be introduced with some pizzazz and excitement to help generate an air of urgency. Incentives are designed to get salespeople excited and motivated so the way they are presented needs to reflect this.
3. Incentives should not be long-term – usually a month and, under certain circumstances, incentives could be offered for one week only. Don’t’ make the mistake of running incentive programmes more than three months.
The fact is It is hard to sustain interest in incentive programs if they are run the over too long a period of time. Salespeople tend to focus on incentives only when they are close to achieving them. A year-long incentive, for example, will only really generate real interest among salespeople about three months from the end of the year (by which time it’s too late to impact on the result) – for the rest of the year, the incentive seems too far away.
Here are 3 ways I can help you make more sales in your business – whether you businesses is big or small.
1. Try the new 7 Days to Sales Success Framework.
Make More Sales in 7 days. The framework of everything you need to get started in making more sales in your business. The Sales Success Framework is based on a simple 7 day challenge. Click here to find out how you can grow your business by making more sales.
2. Join our Private Facebook Group – The Salesmindset Inner Circle. Get all the latest up to date sales ideas.
Every week we do Facebook Live updates on all things sales. Tips, ideas, free coaching, and much more. Join me by clicking here.
3. Work with me One-on-One.
If you’re a business owner, small or large or in the professional services you might just be a few strategies, tactics and tools away from doubling your lead flow, revenue and impact. Jump on a FREE 15 minute Brainstorm call with me by clicking here.
