Categories: Sales Conversation | Differentiation
With the new year, new goals and likely new initiatives all underway, now is the time to prepare to crush your number this year. Here are ten ways to make it happen:
1. Plan to Make Your Plan
Whether you’re coming off of your best year yet and want to repeat that success or are looking for ways to improve this year, now is the time to put in the work and ask for what you need to do to make it happen. How are you going to make your plan this year? What do you want to deliver? Here are three areas you can focus on when coming up with your action plan.
2. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
Stay focused on the fundamentals of great selling. Even the most veteran sellers can lose sight of the basics in the rush to get a prospect on the phone or move the deal forward. Being prepared for your sales conversations sets you up for success. Here are five actions to take before every conversation. It's often the simple, yet important steps like these that separate the most elite salespeople from the rest.
3. Ask Great Questions
In order to effectively map your organization’s value to their business problems, you need a method for uncovering their business needs. Knowing which discovery questions to ask, and when to ask them is a vital part of the sales conversation. Effective discovery helps separate you from other salespeople, putting you in a better position to influence the decision criteria, instead of simply reacting to it. Executing an effective discovery process is pivotal to selling at a premium and helping your customers achieve their desired outcomes. Here are some of our most popular resources on executing effective discovery. Use them to your advantage this year and sell more.
4. Highlight Value in Your Sales Conversations
So you’ve done all the work to get on the phone with a decision-maker. You've uncovered their business needs. Now what? You have to be able to articulate the value you bring to the table. Without an effective process for highlighting your value, you’ll quickly lose these big opportunities. This year, focus on leveraging a value-based approach, where your sales process naturally progresses your buyer from his/her pains and objectives to a well-thought-out solution that gets them to their desired positive business outcomes (PBOs). Use these five steps of a value-based sales conversation to build out an impactful business case that favors your solution and helps your buyer achieve their desired PBOs.
5. Tell Impactful Stories
When you're looking to attach your solution's value to what's important to your buyer — a good story will make you stand out from competition (including a do-nothing or do-it-internally competitor). Any salesperson can tell a good story. Styles may differ, but your message is what matters. A great story helps your buyers understand what’s possible and how they can achieve their desired outcomes. Understand how to improve your storytelling skills and what to focus on to have a bigger impact on your buyer. In this podcast, John Kaplan shares a few storytelling tactics you can use to elevate your approach and move your deals forward, faster.
6. Be Ready for Multiple Buyers
Making the shift from selling smaller deals to enterprise solutions that require multiple decision-makers is a common career progression path. If you’re at this crossroads, congratulations, you’ve done the hard work to progress your sales career to this point. Now, prepare for and adjust your sales process in a way that accounts for more complicated deals. Knowing how to properly engage with multiple decision makers is a powerful tool for increasing your wins and quotas. Here are three steps you can take to successfully sell to more decision makers.
7. Differentiate Against “Do Nothing” and “Do It Internally”
Two of a sales organization’s greatest competitors are the buyer’s option to simply “do nothing”, or “do it internally.” To effectively differentiate yourself from these silent competitors you must know the right questions to ask and how to respond to a buyer’s reservations. Here are a few key areas to focus on to ensure you stack the deal in your favor over a do-nothing or do-it-internally decision.
8. Maximize the Impact of Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials are often the nudge that a buyer needs to move forward in the sales process. They provide proof and reassurance that you can deliver what you say you can. By including testimonials into your sales process at the right times, you put the buyer’s reservations to rest and increase your chance of making the sale. The most elite salespeople look for the right opportunity to have the greatest impact and maximize the effectiveness of their proof points. Here are four examples of how and when to use your testimonials to make an impact.
9. Go Back and Reassess Stalled Deals
Every salesperson has worked with a prospect that has dragged their feet on making a final decision. You may be working with one right now. Understand how to reassess the deal you’ve been working on for too long and determine the right way to move forward. Here are questions you can ask yourself to define where you may need to go back and reassess an opportunity. If you're not working on a stalled deal now, save this article for when you're in a pinch or give it a glace to understand what you can do ahead of time to avoid any stalls in your pipeline.
10. Focus on Truly Differentiating the Way You Sell
Sales is a game of inches. How you make your approach stand out from the competition (including do-nothing or do-it-internally options) can set you far ahead, or behind. We often say there is as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell. But how exactly do you differentiate your approach? Hear five key steps you can take to make yourself stand out from the competition, bring value to your buyers and exceed your own, personal sales goals.
Exceed Your Sales Goals This Year
Heading into a new year, you've likely got personal sales goals you're preparing to hit. The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast is built for those who are willing to go the extra mile and do the uncommon actions that lead to bigger deals and larger quotas. We publish new episodes every week. Download, listen, and write down some top takeaways. Save each episode for a refresher when you need it. You can subscribe to our podcast on all the major streaming platforms.
