Get help

We all need help to maintain our business at peak performance. Sometimes we get a little careless about standards and need to be reminded of them. Sometimes we miss new opportunities because we are so busy focussing on what we know.
 
Either way, having someone around to question us and perform a quick reality check, will keep us constantly on top form. That is why, at Precept, we have our own business coach. It is also why you should do the same.
 
As we usher in the New Year most of us will be thinking about the changes we want to make in order to have a better year than the last one. Many of us will make New Year resolutions. And most of us will break those resolutions before the end of January.
 
If you truly intend to make progress in 2014, you will be much more successful if you share your ideas with someone you trust, and charge them to hold you to your good intentions, and support you in achieving them.

You can contact Mick on 01981 580192
or visit http://www.precept.uk.com/

Use questions to find the pain

We’ve talked about the power of questions to get to the real issues before. We’ve also talked about finding the customer’s pain. There is a specific type of question to use to get to the pain.
 
We call these questions issue questions. They are the questions that get to the problems the customer is experiencing – problems which you can solve.
 
In order to get a better sense of the way these questions are used, let’s take an example. Imagine you are selling simple components. You have built your reputation on always having stock, so you have the best delivery record in your industry. If you are meeting a new customer, you’ll ask all the factual questions about what they buy, how often, what they pay, etc. But the issue questions, like, “what happens if your supplier is out of stock?” will allow you to have a discussion about all the lost  production, the late nights catching up on orders, the overtime payments to meet their deadlines, all of which are painful to the customer.  Then you can tell him about your stocking policy, and the reason it will save him from all that pain.
 
Issue questions are incredibly powerful for getting you to the point where you can really sell your benefits. Why not create a list of questions now that are relevant to your business?

Always be closing

We've often talked about helping people to buy rather than trying to sell to them. However, that doesn’t mean you should sit passively by and wait to see which way the customer decides.
 
Your job is to help the customer to recognise that the best solution to her problem lies in buying from you.
 
To do this you need to be always moving the process in the right (ie your) direction. Can you break the buying decision down into a series of smaller decisions, each one of which takes the customer a little closer to buying from you?
 
Once you do this, you will be able to gently encourage them, step by step, to the final, and all-important decision – to buy from you.

Believe you can win the business

Never underestimate the power of belief.
 
Over the last few weeks we have been reading about some of the experiments being done in the field of Quantum Physics (and you thought we were just a little bit mad). What Quantum Physics is teaching us is that we really don’t understand the world we live in at all. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the interactions between people.
 
At an unconscious level we pick up very sensitive pieces of information about the people in front of us. At a conscious level, we can usually tell when they are lying, and we can tell when they are happy and when they are sad. Unconsciously we can tell much more, and unconsciously we react to that information.
 
This explains why salespeople have great spells, and terrible spells; they are unconsciously giving out subtle signals about how confident they feel, and the buyers are picking up on those.
 
If you are to consistently succeed, you must put all doubt out of your mind and truly believe you are going to be successful. Achieving that will not be easy, and will take lots of practice. A quick pep talk before you meet the customer isn’t going to do the trick.
 
There isn’t enough space here to cover how you do this in sufficient detail. If this tip resonates with you, you might like to call us to discuss in more detail how you can truly improve your sales conversions, just by believing you can.

Test the relationship
Once we have a customer that we value we are often very sensitive to anything that might put them off buying from us.
 
On the one hand, this is a very good thing, as we do need to recognise the true value of our customers and to make sure they stay with us for as long as possible. However, sometimes this can lead to us missing opportunities to strengthen the relationship and do even more business.
 
For example, many people won’t ask the customer for referrals, or raise the need to increase prices, for fear of damaging the good relationship. Our experience is that relationships become stronger for being tested, as long as they are not tested too much.
 
We have seen many examples of customer relationships coming through adversity and emerging much stronger as a result. If your customer truly values what you do, they will want to help you be successful, and they will understand that sometimes you have to increase prices.