How to gain a winning edge in sales?

There are seven key areas for achieving top sales results:

1. PROSPECTING

Finding clients/customers who can and want to become users of a product or service within a reasonable period of time. Finding those clients who are good prospects with whom a higher sales result can be achieved and with whom sales advisors can have a quality time.

2. ESTABLISHING A BRIDGE OF TRUST

Getting to know a potential client / customer in a way that he/she feels closeness and trust. Flexible approach and the ability to approach and talk to completely different people in different ways that are acceptable and desirable to them. This is where relationship selling skills come into play.

3. IDENTIFYING OR CREATING NEEDS

Accurate identification or creation of wishes and needs of the client/customer prior to the presentation of products or services. This phase of the conversation is one of the most important phases, while experience has shown that it lasts a relatively short time and that we move on to the product story too quickly. This phase arouses emotions and requires exceptional focus.

4.  PRESENTING THE SOLUTION

An orderly and logical way in which previously defined wishes and needs are combined with the characteristics and advantages of products or services. This is where the skills of applying consultative selling come to the fore, focusing the client/customer on the benefits and advantages of using the product or service.

5. SOLVING COMPLAINTS

This is an appropriate response to the fears that a client/customer has when encountering your presentation. Successful sales conversations have twice as many complaints as unsuccessful ones. For that reason, complaints are desirable because the client sends us a message: I am here. I’ll take it if you solve this dilemma for me. The most dangerous situation is when the client is silent or has no objections at all.

6. CLOSING

Overcoming inertia and hesitation, as well as encouraging a potential client to make a firm decision and enter the realisation. Research has shown that more than 50% of conversations end without the closing phase, i.e. without a specific question for the client/customer to make a decision. Reason? A deep-seated fear of rejection by sales consultants.

7. GETTING REFERRALS

When a client/customer says YES, he thinks we owe him something because he could satisfy his need in many different places, and yet he chose us. That is why it is necessary for us to do many quality things that belong to relationship selling so that the client would not change his opinion. Also, a good potential client is always the source of a large number of referrals. Statistics show that it is almost 10 times easier to do business with a client/customer someone recommended us to than with a stranger we have no connection with.

So, all these phases are one vicious circle and closely interconnected. Sales consultants can be very good at prospecting, but if they are bad at closing, the same will happen with the result and vice versa.

These are the vital functions of any sales professional. Vital functions such as heart rate, brain activity, blood pressure are key indicators of an individual’s health. Failure of vital function can lead to death.

How to gain a winning edge?

Top mentors precisely prepare sales advisors for each separate phase of selling. When advisors become good at all stages then they begin to work with them on the development of the Parthenon Principle. Namely, if each of those phases is improved by only 10 percent, then a chain reaction occurs. What does it mean?

If next to these seven areas you write the number 1 as the starting point and increase each of them by 10 percent, you will get the number 1.1. When you multiply 1.1 by 1.1 and then do that seven times you get a result of 1.94, i.e. almost double the result in sales.

Increasing each individual phase creates more possibilities for the next one and so on. With such systematic work with their advisors, top mentors know how to double their sales results in one year. This is how the WINNING EDGE is achieved.

There are three keys to applying the winning edge concept to sales teams:

DECISION – management’s decision to redesign the organisational structure, adapt it to this concept which gave top results worldwide in many companies. The decision of individuals to be among the best in their field. The mentor’s decision to be a top mentor. The advisor’s decision to take every necessary step.

PLANNING – plan each individual step. Define books, audio and video materials, professional trainers from whom much can be learned.

APPLICATION – in order for a karate practitioner to practice a strike, he/she must repeat it 20,000 times. Only then does it go straight to the centre with millimetre precision.

The key to success is to approach the sales process professionally, systematically and scientifically. Then the concept of winning edge gives top results.