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sales training

Is your Ego killing your business?

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Is Ego Killing your Business?Ego taking over - Tadpole Training
If you run a business, you do need to have a certain amount of self-belief – after all, you will come across plenty of people who don’t like what you do, or even think you’re crazy to try. However, if you take it too far and let your ego take over, you could genuinely be impacting on your company’s bottom line, which of course is going to make your job harder and more stressful. Even if your company survives, you may find that once you leave, you were such an enormous part of the business that the whole thing just falls apart.

Is this just bad luck, or is it because of self-obsession, ego, focus on maintaining control and of enjoying high status?

What is the ego?

There are many different definitions of the ego but you could think of it as the part of us that feels the need to be special. It’s that part of us that Read More

Are you talking yourself out of a sale?

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Are you talking yourself out of a sale?Don't talk yourself out of a sale
Michael ran a design business and believed passionately in what he did. He was versatile and so had a good base of potential clients. However, because he was foremost an artist, he struggled with the business transaction side of his work, much preferring to discuss the design and creative elements.

When a potential client was interested in engaging him, he would talk passionately and with knowledge about what was required, taking trouble to understand the requirements of the project. Although he never seemed to directly ask for the work, he often got jobs because he was so clearly a good fit and because people loved his enthusiasm and his obvious skill.

One day he did just this – he met a potential client, who liked him and his work and the project was his!

Michael should have concluded the deal, shaken hands and arranged the start of the job right then. Instead, because he couldn’t quite believe his luck, Michael continued to talk about design, previous clients, his working techniques and anything he could think of. It was during this nervous chatter, that he revealed a previous job he had worked on. His new client was familiar with it (he was in the same industry) and it turned out that he didn’t think much of the final result. To make matters worse, he knew the person who had been in charge of the project and had heard from her that the designer had been difficult to work with – rather too fussy and had missed some important deadlines.

The new client quietly made his excuses and left. Michael never heard from him again.

A hard lesson was learned. 

If you find yourself in a similar situation, there are some simple things you can do:

Once the customer has definitely confirmed they want to buy, then stop talking and deal with the practicalities

In other words, sort out the payments, the order form, the invoice or whatever, and conclude the transaction.

Don’t try and fill the silence

It is human nature to try and fill uncomfortable silences with words, especially if you are nervous. Resist the urge. If you must talk about something, revert to small talk – the weather, the traffic, anything harmless and uncontroversial.

Your customer doesn’t need to know everything

If your customer has decided to buy on the basis of what you have told them already, then they don’t need to know the other 101 features of your product or service. Everyone is slightly different and what matters to one person may not matter to another, so trust that you have said enough.

It can be hard to get customers to say ‘yes’ in the first place. Don’t do all the hard work and end up losing the sale once you’ve won it.

 

Janet is based in Enfield, north London and trains small businesses and entrepreneurs how to sell more. She has recently reached the final of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management’s national awards (BESMA 2016) in the category of Sales Trainer of the Year.

If you enjoyed this article and you would like to receive a free download: Janet’s 8 Proven Sales Tips, please click on this link now.
Click Here for 8 Proven Sales Tips

The best sales people know when to shut up

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The best sales people know when to shut upclosing sales by knowing when to be quiet.
Have you ever been in conversation with someone, there is a lull, no one speaks and you have the strongest urge to fill that silence with something, anything? We human beings don’t like uncomfortable silences and it is a natural reaction to try and fill this void with words or noise of some sort.

Have you noticed the way that time stretches in moments like this? A few seconds can feel like forever. It makes us feel uneasy and we don’t like it. 

Sometimes we take this to extremes. Who hasn’t chattered nervously about the most inane things because we feel we should? And it can be even tougher when we are in front of a customer. I was talking with someone at a business exhibition a few weeks ago and he was telling me how frustrated he was that he could think of several occasions where he had won the deal and then gone and talked himself out of it again! Read More

Upselling? Cross-selling? Help! I’m Confused!

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Upselling? Cross-Selling? Help! I’m Confused!

Upselling and cross-selling. Do you these two phrases confuse you? If they do, you’re not alone. As if it isn’t enough to worry about selling the main thing that you do, you now need to sell other stuff too? Don’t panic!

It’s not actually that complicated. Let’s quickly explore what they both mean and how they can genuinely help you sell more in your business.

Upselling
This is where you try to get a customer to buy something in addition to the primary thing they want to buy (thereby making the primary product more expensive). For Read More

sales training - keep those leads hot

Effective follow up strategies to stop your leads going cold

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following up customers - picture courtesy of HubSpotEffective Follow up Strategies to stop your leads going cold

We’ve all been there – you get a great enquiry from an interested customer, you’ve talked, asked and answered questions, they are absolutely hooked and then….. you never hear from them again.

If you sit there just waiting, you are guilty of ‘failing to follow up’ and it’s one of the most common reasons why you don’t make more sales. So let’s have a look at some practical tips to boost your success rate with follow up: Read More

In sales, sometimes you need to get out of your own way

By | customers, entrepreneurs, sales tips, sales training | One Comment

In Sales, Sometimes you need to get out of your own wayIn sales, sometimes you need to get out of your own way
This is about lacking self-belief, something which I proved to myself spectacularly yesterday. 

To give you the background, the Christmas before last, I went over a speed bump too fast and knocked off the right side of my car’s bumper. I shoved the broken bit in the boot, gave myself a good telling off for not taking more care and got on with things.

Over the next few weeks, I kept thinking ‘I need to get that fixed’ but put it off with a variety of excuses – I haven’t got the time, it will cost too much to order a new bumper, it will be inconvenient to take it to the garage, it doesn’t really matter, blah blah. 

After a while I got used to having a broken bumper and it sailed right down my list of priorities. 

Yesterday, I was clearing out the boot of the car and, tucked right at the back was my broken bit of bumper. My current mindset is a lot different to my mindset 18 months ago and I looked at this piece of debris and Read More

How good are you at managing your customer records?

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How good are you at Managing your customer records?Tadpole record keeping
I admit I love a good sales database. At Tadpole, it was one of the first things I made sure I had, because in order to grow my customer base and so sell my services, I needed some prospective customers and I needed them fast.

So how good are you at keeping records? Have a look and see where you fall on this scale:

  1. I have a formal CRM system
  2. I have a proper indexed filing system (i.e. postcards)
  3. Pile of business cards
  4. It’s all on my phone
  5. Scraps of paper
  6. It’s all in my head
  7. Errr….what records?

Now, you will be relieved to know that I am not going to spout off about how a pile of business cards is no good, or that in this Read More

Are your customers thirsty enough?

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The Parable of The Young SalesmanSales training - great poster

I recently saw this terrific Oasis advertisement and it reminded me of the following Parable:

A young Salesperson was disappointed. He had lost an important sale. In discussing the matter with the Sales Manager, the young man shrugged. “I guess,” he said “it just proves you can lead a horse to water, but you can not make him drink.” “Son,” said the Sales Manager, “let me give you a piece of advice: your job is not to make him drink. It’s to make him thirsty.”

I reproduce this lovely little parable because it sums up what selling really is and what it absolutely isn’t.

Read More

5 Reasons Your Customers Will Not Buy From You

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5 Reasons your customers will not buy from you.Sales trainer - men walking away from a sale

As a sales trainer, I spend a lot of time trying to help people sell more. But it’s also useful to know what things you shouldn’t do – the sort of things that will have your customers running for the hills (or at least hanging on to their cash). If you are doing any of these, please stop now – it’s costing you money:

1. Talking too much. It’s a cliché that a good sales person must have ‘the gift of the gab’. You are never going to persuade anyone to buy from you by talking them into submission. So ease up and, to use an old sales maxim, remember that you have two ears and one mouth and use them in that proportion. Read More