Sales and selling is the next logical step after Marketing, you have generated the leads, now what are you going to do with them? Convert them of course!

To me Sales and selling are much more tactically oriented that marketing, while there are subtle steps to can take to become a much more effective salesperson, sales is very tactical.

Remember, Tactics are defined as actions, methods or techniques used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective (converting the prospect), or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, orchestrated and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

So that if you have honed your company’s sales skills and the methods and manners in which you sell are consistent and orchestrated – then they can be considered strategic.

What are the steps in selling? Do know them? Well, there are seven steps in the sales process and they are:
Building Rapport
Qualifying the Buyer (Finding the Need)
Building Value
Creating Desire
Overcoming Objections
Closing
Follow Up

Now, most business owners believe that they should concentrate more on the back end of the process (Building Value to Closing) and spend the majority of their time and effort there. And they often ignore the follow up step.

But sales experts will tell you that Rapport (at 40%) and Qualifying the Buyer (at 25%) is where the majority of your time should be spent. If you can become masterful at these two steps the other four – follow up is so critical that it is a whole other subject for another day – steps are much easier.

If you can build significant rapport with your prospects, qualifying them is much more simple. They’ll open up and tell you just about anything – about their buying criteria, how you can change it, what they value and so on.

Once you have qualified them (deciding whether they are the buyer your looking for), again assuming your were masterful at building rapport, they have already told you how to build value and create desire in them. From there, overcoming objections is very simple – isolate the objection and annihilate it with your logical conclusions.

Closing is now simple – if they don’t ask you, just ask them – “So, lets write that up right now”.