Use a Process Strategy
The sign of a real sales pro is someone who can fall right into any selling situation and make it work. Here’s the great news. You don’t have to be born with a special gift to be this kind of a sales professional. What you need, however, is a workable strategy, based on careful observation; proven, workable skills; and a little understanding about achieving harmony in conversations over telephone lines with different types of people to generate more closed sales.
This book will guide you through gaining the knowledge and skills to be just that kind of pro. By the time you finish reading this book, you will be making your own kind of music with your customers. The following process acronym will help keep you on track:
P * L * A * Y * I * N * G
The success of this approach involves applying a process to every sales call with different types of customers. The result is more closed sales. In music, the notes, lines, and staffs are the same, but when the keys change, subtle differences occur in the way the melody plays out: sharps or flats may appear; notes may be in octaves above or below the staff lines. The process of PLAYING is similar—using basic skills and adapting them to the needs of various personality types found in customers. It involves you, understanding what motivates your different customers to buy and getting them to buy from you.
Plan for your call
Listen to the customer
Ask high-value questions
Yak less!
Involve your customer
Gain a Commitment
Applying this basic pattern every time you call a customer—whether you are cold calling, following up, making a courtesy customer service call, or thanking a customer for his or her business—will ensure that you make every phone contact count. Your customers are busy doing everything but anticipating your next call, and you are far too busy trying to keep up with your work to waste a single phone call. Getting the customer’s attention is 90 percent of the sale in today’s competitive selling environment.
By adopting this proven method, you’ll find that you are more confident and relaxed on every call because:
You always know what is coming next, because you have a proven strategy for every call using the PLAYING system.
Your customers will respond to the process and not even know why.
Your brain is disciplined to a system—ensuring that you don’t forget a critical element of the selling process.
When the PLAYING process becomes natural and automatic, you will have more harmony in your sales calls because you’ll make better customer connections, experience less stress, and achieve closed business faster than you have ever experienced before.
This systematic approach frees you to be creative as well as to concentrate more on your customers and turn more calls into sales. You will also find that customers respond in a more relaxed manner when you use a natural and logical approach.
This book is devoted to the PLAYING process, ensuring that you have the most effective tools for your phone calls. Now, let’s take a look at this systematic approach one step at a time.