Selling is an essential skill in business. But even the most highly skilled salesperson is not guaranteed to get fantastic sales results.
That’s because there is more to being successful in sales than just having great sales skills.
Your recipe for sales success has three critical ingredients.
#1 Sales Skills
I teach relationship-based sales skills to people selling a wide variety of business-to-business services and technical products. And I’ve seen training delegates pick up new skills and realise they actually can sell. It’s not as difficult as they first thought. They leave the training workshops confident, re-energised, and ready to use what they have learned.
Having the skills is one ingredient.
However, sometimes the company they work for is missing the other two essential ingredients for success.
What are these other ‘secret’ ingredients?
They’re not often talked about. That’s because many people don’t understand them. And they usually mean more work has to be done.
So it’s tempting to gloss over these ingredients and just hope for the best.
#2 Your Sales Process
Ingredient number two is to understand the Sales Process for your company. Your Sales Process is the series of specific steps you go through to achieve a successful sales outcome. This can vary from business to businesses, even within the same industry.
To develop your Sales Process you need to look at the crossover point from your marketing activities to your selling activities. There is a big difference between marketing and selling, and you must know where one stops and the other starts.
#3 Your Business Development Plan
Ingredient number three is to have a proactive Business Development Plan. This plan will guide the sales strategies you choose to build the sales territory, or the overall business.
For some companies the business development plan will be quite detailed. It will need to manage multiple communication channels across various personnel within the client organisation. In other companies the business development plan may be based more on geographical factors, requiring the sales person to expand their territory, or to achieve greater market share.
You see, having great sales skills is only part of the recipe. To be truly successful in building sales for your business you need to understand how to manage each sale (using a specific sales process), and also have a forward-looking business development plan (to prioritise your sales activities).
If you are managing a sales team, or running your own business, you need all three ingredients to be successful.
To get help with your sales recipe you are welcome to contact me.