Synopses & Reviews
Open your ears, close your mouth, and see your sales increaseThe classic "features and benefits" sales approach is dead. To sell today, you must add value, provide perspective, and show customers how your product will quickly and consistently solve their specific needs. This requires that you first listen to your customers--to discover exactly what their specific needs are.
The Sales Success Handbook outlines a battle-tested, six-step program for hearing and understanding exactly what your customers have to say and selling solutions instead of just selling products. Renowned sales trainer and author Linda Richardson presents twenty powerful lessons you can use to:
- Learn from your customers
- Develop a questioning strategy
- Drill down to needs
- Listen to question meaning
- Position solutions
- Use objections to win business
- Avoid closing tactics
- Leverage your resources
- Build your dialogues
Selling is more difficult than ever before. Internet-savvy customers already know what your product is; they need you to explain what it can do for them. The Sales Success Handbook will show you how to sell to customers not by what you tell them, but by how well you listen to what they have to say--and persuasively position the value you bring to meet their business and personal needs.
Your customers no longer see you as an expert. They see themselves as the experts and you as a frontline resource, one who can add value primarily by taking the time to understand and give them what they want and need.
Top producers understand this truth. Do you?
The Sales Success Handbook shows you how to replace outmoded product-selling techniques with newly-developed interpersonal tools that will help you open true sales dialogues, confidently work toward the close through each stage of the dialogue, and consistently create lasting sales relationships. Whatever level your sales career has reached, this results-driven guide will provide you with:
- Descriptions of the six critical skills for making dialogues fluid and productive--presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, and checking
- Tips for optimizing your opening, and establishing invaluable rapport instead of engaging in generic product discussion
- Guidelines for asking better questions, by phrasing, positioning, and sequencing questions to get your customers to open up and verbalize their wants
- Non-offensive techniques for naming your price based on your schedule, instead of your customer's
- Customer feedback strategies to help you achieve buy-in, seamlessly fine-tune your approach, and keep moving forward
- Resource-leveraging skills for turning six degrees of separation into seven-figure sales
- A three-phase closing process for setting pre-call objectives, making mid-call adjustments, and asking for the customer's business
- A follow-up system, both within your firm and externally, for avoiding the "out of sight out of mind" syndrome
Top producers know that business has changed and to keep an essential edge they can no longer get by on product expertise alone. To reach or maintain the top five percent level, it is urgent that you keep up with this change. The Sales Success Handbook walks you through the entire process, drilling you on the six critical skills of successful sales talk and shifting you from the mindset of an expert to that of an essential, invaluable, and irreplaceable resource.
Synopsis
THE MCGRAW-HILL PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION SERIES
These quick reads, based on McGraw-Hill bestsellers, are designed to meet the needs of busy people. Titles in the series focus on each book's main themes and action ideas, reduced to a manageable page count for on-the-go readers.
A six-step program for hearing and understanding customers' needs, and then selling solutions instead of products.
Synopsis
To sell today, salespeople must add value, provide perspective, and show customers how a product will solve their specific needs. The Sales Success Handbook outlines a six-step program for hearing and understanding exactly what customers have to say and for selling solutions--instead of just selling products.
About the Author
Linda Richardson is founder, CEO, and president of Richardson, a leader in the global sales training industry. A pioneer in the ongoing move to consultative selling and popular speaker at industry and client conferences, Richardson also teaches sales and management courses at the Wharton School and Wharton Executive Development Center. She has been featured in Forbes, Nation's Business, and other national publications, and is the author of influential books including Stop Telling, Start Selling, Selling by Phone, Sales Coaching, and others.