Mind you the rep in question is getting the appointments, making the calls but is falling short in getting the orders. I too struggled with this in my early years of selling, the problem for me in the early years is that I had no one to mentor me. For me, it took some 18 years in the industry before I had a true mentor. Imagine that, no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to help hone your sales skills, basically you're marooned to take care of yourself.
Nowadays with the Internet there are many ways to get self help for sales, even on the Print4Pay Hotel forums we'll bounce ideas off of one another and there's even a forum titled Recommended Reading for Sales with over a dozen books mentioned.
Years ago I turned to "Act Like a Lamb and Sell Like a Lion" by Tom Hopkins, this book turned around my sales career! As I read theboo for the first time I told myself, dam this stuff is corny and it won't work. Alas, I had no other options but to make sales work. Hence I continued to read and learn. After a few sales calls I found my self hearing a certain reply or a trigger word that sparked a response from the book. Yeah, it was corny stuff, but it worked!
I guess the moral of this story is that there is a "art" to selling, guiding the prospect to the end result of buying your product and services. If you're an excellent listener the prospect will tell you where they are in the sales cycle. If they are not convinced that they want your product you'll hear replies like "let me think about it", or "we haven't made a decision yet" and my favorite "we're going to check out competitors models". "WHY" it's an awesome reply isn't it??
Back to our rep, I brought the book in the office today and told him make sure you give it back to me, and I also told him to read a few pages at a time and take it everywhere you go, it's your key to success.
-=Good Selling=-
No comments:
Post a Comment