Many people seek presentation skills training to learn how to sell to crazy busy buyers. If you want to set yourself apart from these common practices, learn 6 steps for holding a true conversation everyone values.
What are frazzled customers fed up with? One directional pitches. The ones that sound like the professional is spitting sand. Conversations are the heart of a successful relationship, and a successful sale. If you’ve ever tried to get a point across to a lover or spouse, you know that doing all the talking is the fastest way to lose. The same holds true for talking with target buyers.
Here is a short list of simple steps to hold highly effective conversations that move you toward the close. By following these steps, you will be able to start, hold, and lead conversations with skill and mastery.
Step 1. Set Aside Time
If you’re booking appointments with clients and prospects in a super tight time schedule, you are killing opportunity before it is born. A by the numbers meeting with a client might keep you organized and on schedule, but is it the best way to open up discussion?
Not likely. Set aside time to have conversations. If you have fewer meetings but get more sales…well, you do the math.
Step 2. Be Yourself
While many sales trainings instruct you to become more forceful, extrovert or directive, this may not match your unique strengths. Use your specific personality and core strengths to find your personal style.
In conversations, buyers are looking for clues from the tiniest detail to the most obvious point. They are tracking information intuitively about your body language, tone, pace and presence. It’s a lot to keep track of-if you’re trying to emulate someone else’s style.
But if you’re being authentic, you won’t have to worry. You’re already the best version of you.
Step 3. Ask Key Questions
Rather than relying on a corporate script or a sales training prescription, ask relevant questions. Ask questions that expose the buyer’s core needs, desires and problems.
By asking highly relevant questions, you will find that your clients and prospects get engaged. They want to tell you what’s bothering them. That’s when you must do the all-important next step.
Step 4. Actively Listen
Shocking, right? You must actively listen to what your clients are saying. Otherwise you fall into the vast sea of sales professionals who are just waiting to say their next selling point.
When you listen with full attention and total presence, you will hear your client’s core needs. You’ll be in a much better position to customize solutions on the spots.
Step 5. Personalize
What’s vitally important to your customer or prospect? That you are speaking directly and personally to them. They appreciate that you’re authentic, asking questions and listening. But now they want to see that you’ve been truly paying attention to what they are experiencing.
This step is all about satisfying your client’s desire for personalization. Speak directly to the benefits they’ve told you are important to them. Ditch the order of a ‘say this-do that’ script in favor of responding to the person you are talking with.
Step 6. Open The Zone
Open up the room, space or zone for your client to step into. By this point in the conversation, your target buyer wants to make an intelligent decision. By guiding the conversation with a clear, structured process, you can sell your services without being pushy, ‘salesy’ or unethical.
Keeping with the highest standards of integrity, open up the options. Discuss the merits of your complete solution, tiered approach, or white glove treatment. Open up the room for your client to step into the solution that is best for them.
Follow these 6 steps. Giving awesome presentations and guiding powerful sales conversations just got a whole lot simpler.