Selling a service

People do business with people they know,like, and trust.

Your service is not something your potential clients can touch or taste, they cant even see it.

They have only YOU who represents the service. You will be the mesuring stock that they will base their judgement on.

To go for it or not.

It’s always easier to say no. If you say yes you stick your neck out as a buyer. YOU are the one being hanged out if the service salesman can not fulfill the promises made.

So as a service seller (like me) you will have to make sure that you project an image of someone they would like to know better, someone they can like, someone they can trust.

These things will be easier to say than to do in the real world.

Trust.

How can you trust anyone? I do trust persons on face value and adjust my trustometer accordingly after new impressions come along. For instance if a person acts trustworthy and don’t have any inconsistency in their approach, sales pitch and answers questions in a nice, knowledgeable and correct way i judge that they can be trusted. (if they slip up along the way this needs to be addressed and pointed out so you can clear out this, or the trustometer will sink fast.)

Likeability.

You don’t like every person you meet neither do i. Most people i meet, i do like and those i try to get along with, and it will be the same in the pitching situation. You can easily judge if you will dislike the customer or if you can get along. Do business with the ones you like and don’t do it with the ones you dislike since that will usually end up in situations that will degrade your value and take a lot of energy to get past. So use your time helping customers who appreciate you and your work.

 

Getting to know a customer.

This can happen in a fraction of seconds. Last time that happened, I was meeting a new client and we just clicked like that and it felt like we known each other for years. Mostly this will take some time to develop and along the way you will just have to be genuinely interested and interesting and things solve themselves. Take a lunch, bring some cake, mail them an interesting article or a link to a blog that concerns your business and feel free to come up with things like this since it strengthen your bond and will get you to know your customer and your customer to know you.

 

Veni vidi vici

www.patrikolson.com

Related articles

• 7 ways to Increase Sales by creating Trust (yoast.com)
• What Do You Call A Salesman You Can Trust (frontofficebox.com)
• Can social media improve online trust for small businesses? (marketing.yell.com)
• 12 Customer Dos & Don’ts (empwaynek.wordpress.com)
• How much faith do you have in trust? (successnetwork.wordpress.com)
• Do You Trust Me? (monkiss.wordpress.com)
• Definition of Trust (hikageinochisan.wordpress.com)
• Do Your People Trust You? (empwaynek.wordpress.com)
• Should the salesman be liked or trusted ? (leadsexplorer.com)
• Goal or behavior oriented (patrikolson.wordpress.com)
• Hiring your salesforce (patrikolson.wordpress.com)
• Reflections on the life of a salesman (dralfoldman.wordpress.com)
• Give away the diagnostic, sell the remedy (cdixon.org)

How do you measure sales success!

How do you measure sales success!

Its easy right?

Yes and No.

What is success for your company?

It could be several factors combined but lets start with racking up some good measuring forms.

 

Number of contracts.

Units sold.

Customer satisfaction score.

Number of returning customers.

Average order /purchase

Average order / new customer

Average order / returning customer

Turnover / time

Profit, sales revenue / time

Potential contacts made (pre sale) /time

Number of new customers / time

Number of existing customers that reorder new products / time

Number of existing customers that reorder products / time

Cancellation rate of existing contracts / time

Cancellation rate of new contracts before fulfillment / time

Referral rate

Brand recognition

 

As you can see these are just a few of all they ways that sales success can be measured and be made into pie charts and other easy to present numbers.

So if you can measure the results you can start to have a very good control over different campaigns or changes you do in the sales process.

 

Lord Kelvin wrote, “If you cannot measure it – if you cannot express it in quantitative terms – then your knowledge is of a meagre and insignificant kind.”

Or in other words if you can measure it you then your knowledge is good and significant.

 

Depending on your company’s sales force structure you will want to combine these to get a the best effects.

 

For example.

Case: Wanting to measure the existing customer base.

Then you want to use:

Brand recognition (how important is your brand to them and will that alone make them stay).

referral Rate. (How often do they refer business your way because you are their number 1 choice.)

Number of existing customers that reorder new products / time (do they do this by themselves or do you have to be active? can you make it easier for them to do this? can you sell other products aswell in this way?)

Number of existing customers that reorder products / time (same as above)

Average order / returning customer (why do they buy again from you and can you make them buy more?)

Turnover / time (can you increase this? should you decrease this? is important for your sales success?)

Profit, sales revenue / time (profit margin is always key and to have profits at all is usually a whole lot of factors being combined).

Customer satisfaction score. (what questions do you ask to find this out? is it the right ones? should you ask more or less ones? Who follows up important tips and complaints that come in this way?)

Number of returning customers. (Wanting to make more profits, then this should be a key factor to increase and keep in check).

 

By taking in this information down to every single person involved in the purchase from pre sale to after sale and back office you will be able to measure where and why you sales is a success or see where you will need to make changes to become the number one player in your field.

 

veni, vidi, vici!

 

Regards

 

Patrik Olson

 

 

 

Related articles

• Does Customer Satisfaction Drive Loyalty? (customerthink.com)
• Show 376 – What is Customer Satisfaction (theengagingbrand.typepad.com)
• You get what you measure for (iowabiz.com)
• Customer Frequency – one true measure of success (bettermanagers.com)
• In 2012, what comes first – the sale or the customer’s satisfaction? (customerthink.com)
• add-on sales (patrikolson.wordpress.com)
• The Answers You Need Are In. Now What? (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• Top of mind awareness and brand recognition (Article) (rkilner.wordpress.com)
• How do you measure the success of your banner advertising campaign? (marketing.yell.com)
• Ignore the 5 Ps of marketing at your own peril (summitdiary.com)
• Are Your Customers Silently Seething? (themarlincompany.com)
• A value-based approach to Customer Satisfaction and Product Metrics (onproductmanagement.net)
• The ABCs of Customer Satisfaction (surveyanalytics.com)
• Five Ways to Fail Your Way to Success (skyje.com)

Seal the deal

Closing!

What does it take to get the contract.

Have you established a need for the customer? So if your product solves the need it should sell itself? It’s your job to sell the product that the customer needs so you better sell it.

So you got about 5 chances to close the deal if your savvy enough to repair the no from the previous 4 closing attempts. Most sellers will only ask the customer 1-2 times for the contract and a majority only do it on impulses that are clear from the client/customer.

Top 10 % of the sellers gets the deal before counting to 5 attempts but the reason they are top 10 is that they can get back to pitching after a no.

First of prepare a place in your pitch / presentation that naturally gives a space to ask the client /customer if they want your service /product. Try it out on real people and see if it works if so try to create 4 more catch phrases / pitch sections in your presentation since they then will give you more opportunities to ask the them again.

So if the customer says no (and they usually do just that the first time you ask them) make sure you have a comeback to rely on.

If you think that your head of sales is saying the same thing as me but in different words your probably right since this the most important point to learn when working in sales!

ps check out this clip with Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross that’s one boss you don’t want to have. ds

The meeting

Congratulations!

You booked your first meeting.

So today is the day your going to meet your potential costumer and hopefully make a good argument for your product / service.

What you do and say has more importance than if the stuff you sell are good or crap.

So first of:

1. Be prepared, read up on the company you are to visit (homepage, news, articles products any and everything you can get your eyes on.)
2. You are a welcome person act like it. (you would not have a meeting otherwise).
3. You are expected so be on time or at the most 5 minutes early.
4. When booking you should have made it clear that the meeting should take somewhere up to 60 minutes.
5. Dress accordingly
6. No matter what be polite (even if they are far from it)
7. End the meeting with a thank you for the business or as you will make business in the future

 

So first thing first. After greetings you should preferably let the customer talk and show you around his or hers company.

They are proud to show you around and you should take mental notes of what they do and how they do it since you will be using this in the sales pitch later in the meeting.

Sometimes however they do not wish to show you around or talk about their company first but will more or less force you to pitch first since this will give them a good advantage when negotiating later.

Try as best as you can to avoid this. If they don’t want to talk about their company go for the personal approach and try to find at least some common ground to stand on. You will get a (hopefully) picture about the other person by the pictures and things they have in their office hook on to some of these to make a topic to talk about. You have 60 min and the actual pitch will usually only take 5 – 10 min and the rest is the parley that you are doing now.

Big company s may stop you even here and send you and their buyer to a neutral meeting room to give you as little leverage as possible. Then you will just try to do the best of it if you can’t or they wont talk anything else than business do that but at every opportunity try to find out how they do things and what use they could have from your product /service.

You will most likely be nervous when doing this for the first time it will show so if its to oblivious then tell the customer that this is in fact your first meeting but that you have worked in this field / you are confident in you product etc. This can create rapport so that he /she feels sympathy for you, makes them go easier and help you land the deal.

They are also humans!

Ok more on this in the next post.