Sales Training Articles

My father was the quintessential salesperson. He believed completely in his product. He was confident but not arrogant. He truly cared about the well-being of his prospects and clients. And they knew it. It was a pleasure to watch him interact with his customers. Needless to say, he was very ...

One of my Ezine subscribers recently sent me this question: "I really struggle with the highs and lows of field sales. Most days I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders. In this economy, especially, it's difficult to stay positive. Any suggestions?" n This is one of those rarely voiced issues that every sales person must confront sooner or later. Sales is an emotional roller coaster, and unless you figure out how to manage those emotions and keep yourself motiv

© 2005nhttp://www.learn-copywriting.com nn"We don't have any competition. We're a truly a one-of-a-kind company." I've heard that line from clients for years. I wish it were true, but it's simply not. In fact, it wouldn’t matter if you held a monopoly on your particular product or service; you'd still have competition. How? Because your competition doesn't come from a singular source. nnThere may be no other businesses that sell the product or service you sell, but you sti

© 2004nhttp://www.marketingwords.com nnIt only makes sense. You have an e-commerce catalog site. You want lots of visitors to come to your site and buy. The best (and most cost-effective) way to do that is with great search engine placement. However, search engines are text machines, and most catalogs don’t have a lot of text, so herein lies the problem.nnThe obvious answer is that you need more copy on each page. However, the pictures of your products are just as importan

Prospecting is a key selling skill and a critical skill to develop if you want to increase your sales and achieve long-term success in sales. Yet, most sales people don’t invest enough time to this integral sales strategy. Part of the problem is that very few companies teach sales reps how to prospect. Here are five prospecting best practices for you to consider. Allot a specific amount of time every day/week or month.rnWhen my wife first started her software training busin

Take those steps to successful sales Imagine you could avoid reluctance and avoid rejection on your sales calls. Now who would not like that? To be a professional sales representative you need to go through a process of steps. In sales training courses it is said that if you do not go through theses steps it would be similar to a professional builder building a house and leaving out the foundation, the house will inevitably fall in on top of you and you will not achieve your

Being a salesperson for any industry can be very difficult. Even if you have a natural charisma and very outgoing personality, you are not guaranteed any success as a salesperson. You might, for example, have a low quality product that you are selling or there might be some other factors that are out of your control that can make your job especially tough. With that being said, there are certain steps you can take to become better at your job and improve your chances of succe

You are in the middle of a call and you are leading them to their desire to their water but the problem is you can not get them to drink it. In sales training courses we explain to participants that you do not need to make them drink the water you simply want them to realise for themselves that they are thirsty. How can you guide people into realising that this is what they want? The fundamental truth is to ask the right questions. On a recent sales training course I noticed

I am sure you have heard about salespeople earning $200-300k, a million or even more. Do you think this sales person is better than you are? They are not much different from you; they are not geniuses or impeccable experts in their field. They probably don’t know much more about their products ...

Author and Business columnist Harvey Mackay had once commented, “The sale begins when the customer says yes”. Funny it may sound, but it simply puts the whole essence of sales out on the face. Reflecting on the quote, we can state that the sale begins or rather becomes a sale only when the customer agrees to you and is convinced about your product. However, seasoned sales people know what it takes to make the customer say yes. After hours of research, sales training and g

There are several other reasons why the end game of selling is stressful and difficult.nn Fear of Failure nThere are several other reasons why the end game of selling is stressful and difficult. First and foremost is the fear of failure experienced by the prospect. Because of negative buying experiences in the past, over which you could have no control, prospects are conditioned to be suspicious, skeptical and wary of salespeople and sales approaches. They may like to buy, bu

People often ask me, how can I increase my sales? Will sales training help me? How can I hit my target every month etc. Well the obvious answer to the question of sales training is yes it will help depending on the quality of the sales training course you attend. One caveat to the above is that the essence of knowledge is using it and there is no point attending a sales training course, developing new skills gaining new ideas and not putting them in to action. People often r

Never Have a Bad Month Agai That's right. Never miss your goal, target or number again. Today I'll show you how. You'll need some of your crucial ratios like your monthly goal, the length of your sell cycle, your closing percentage and your average sale (or account). Here's what you need ...

Learn how to streamline your life and increase the efficiency of your business with the automate, delegate, delete (ADD) system – it’s simple and highly effective! Adopting the ADD lifestyle means that you automate, delegate or delete tasks taking up time in your life. This system will reduce your stress thanks to improved time management and you’ll gain efficiencies that will boost your revenue. To get started, monitor your activities for a week. Identify tasks that could be done by someone else or activities that are not directly contributing to the bottom line. For example:

You know that hundreds, if not thousands, of people want and need your products and services. You're spending good money on advertising and mailings and you have a great looking website up, but you're still not getting all the clients you want or could handle. Why aren't more people responding to your marketing? The most likely reason is your small business marketing materials aren't answering the questions your prospects are asking about your goods and services. Imagine yo

How many times have you attended various business, personal and networking functions feeling quite uncomfortable because you did not know anyone there? Has this gripping fear and discomfort ever actually prevented you from attending an event? Have you ever found yourself leaving shortly after ...

If you want to have a fulfilling career in sales, you must first and foremost ask yourself these two questions: Do you enjoy serving people? Do you want to make your customer’s day better than it was before he or she met you or talked with you?” If you answered yes to these questions, then ...

After you've done a needs analysis, do you get a lot of not now's and other objections? That's because you're incorrectly implementing the right idea. And that happens because you think a needs analysis is a product sales tool and it shouldn't be. n n You see when you do a needs analysis you’re doing it so you can figure out what product you can sell the prospect. This is a backward approach, and an incorrect implementation of the concept. And the reason it backfires on

As a leader you must never forget that you are the boss. You have power, and your decisions impact the lives and careers of the people on your team. Because you are the boss your people watch and analyze your every move—looking for meaning and clues to what you are thinking. What is most important to understand is that your people place meaning on your behaviors based on their own unique perspective.

It’s Thursday and I’m meeting with a CEO of a wholesale company. “Yes we have a very experienced sales crew, many of them with over 20 years of selling in the industry.” was John’s, the CEO, response. “If that is so, why such a challenge in getting more market share?” I asked. “Well, here is ...

Imagine you’ve just thrown a rock into a pond. SPLASH! Ripples begin extending around the point where the rock hit the water. An interesting observation is that the ripples closest to the rock are actually the smallest ones. Then each ripple creates another larger ripple…until finally it ...

One of the single biggest areas that delegates on my sales training want to cover when we look at cold calling and appointment setting is CONFIDENCE. When we set goals at the beginning of the day almost everyone wants to walk out of the door more confident in their ability to make cold calls. The challenge very often though is that when I ask some of the following questions I get blank looks: Do you truly believe in the value of your product or service? How well do you know businesses of your target clients?r

Due to financial crunch and with an aim to save some money so that the profits accrued can be more, many companies want to do away with a system of proper and an elaborate sales training course. What they do not realize is that though this step may not have immediate repercussions, there are bound to be future effects for sure. Brooks Group realizes this situation and has therefore, devised intelligent and smart solutions to impart sales training courses in a very cost effect

Have you ever been told, “Here’s your business cards, there’s a street. Now go and bang on some doors.”? Or how about, “Here is the phone book, start dialing!” Although these shotgun methods of prospecting may produce results, it really is sheer luck if they do. The chances that you happen to knock on the right door, or dial the right number, at the exact time when a prospect is ready to buy are actually quite slim. Granted, sales is a numbers game, requiring you to make a certain number of calls to find one prospect, but what if you could improve the odds?

© 2003nhttp://www.copywritingcourse.comnnAs a professional copywriter, I’ve seen my share of copywriting mistakes. One that seems to be particularly common is writing copy that’s “upside down.” When you do this – when you don’t relay your message in the correct order – you lose your audience’s attention, and the sale!nnYou’ve probably seen copy that reads something like:nn Professional Virtual Assistant ServicesnFor over seven years, we have been providing

Every year around this time, we begin to reflect on the year that was, sometimes with pride for a job well done and sometimes with regrets. We wonder why it perhaps didn’t turn out the way we had planned – AGAIN! How come I didn’t quite reach the mark! And each year you reflect and dream again for what might be for the next year, knowing deep in your heart, you don’t quite believe it, but you hope it will come true this time - sound familiar? Therein lays the problem – HOPE

1. Never ask if it’s a good time to talk. This gives the other person a perfect excuse to end the call. If you are unsure if the person has time to talk, then state up front that the phone call will only take 3 minutes. When you give the person an exact time be sure you time the call. After the ...

Rapport vs. CompliancennThere is a lot of talk in the persuasion and NLP community about rapport and how to gain it.nnYes, it is absolutely true what they say that "With rapport anything is possible and without it nothing is possible." Plenty of trainers have dedicated a LOT of seminar time to rapport building exercises like mirroring and matching.nnThat said, I want to go up a level and talk about what we are really wanting to achieve in persuasion and that is compliance.nnF

The people who make the decisions in any company, large or small, hate cold callers with a passion and they consider them to be one of the biggest time wasters that they know of. They will often refuse to take your calls because they assume that you will just be wasting their time. End of, they won't even discuss their reasons with you.

A questio I am often asked when delivering sales prospecting training is 'should I be using twitter for business to business sales prospecting?' Why Use Twitter: Twitter is a fantastic way to quickly and easily begin a dialogue with key targeted people and form relationships with them. You can search for people by the phrases they are tweeting, the words in their biography and even their location. Some of the things you can do are: Find your competitors and follow their followers.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Why is it, then, in our conversations, in our written correspondence, and in our presentations, we act as if the opposite is true - that a thousand words will create the picture we want? n Metaphors and analogies are two similar but different word ...

They say people buy based on emotion; to alleviate or avoid some sort of pain. The challenge for salespeople is to find that pain. Sometimes it is very clear and other times it is hidden.

how to prioritize potential opportunities - leads - that come your way, or that you uncover, so that you invest your time in such a way as to maximize your income. n First, let's define what a lead is. Dictionary.com defines "lead" (in the business sense) as "an indication of potential ...

Not too long ago I was having a conversation with a small group of clients about how to improve their “Yes Factor” (the number of people who bought from them). Two of the participants spoke up to say they were highly uncomfortable with selling. They preferred to just tell people what they do and let the prospective client make up their own mind about whether to hire them or not.nnAnd by their own admission, they weren’t working with the number of clients they wanted. (I

Please… Return My Callr By Eric Slife Getting prospects to return your calls is one of the most frustrating problems you experience. You can be 90% sure a deal will close in the next week and suddenly, silence. If you keep calling, you appear desperate and annoying, so what do you do? Before you drive yourself completely crazy, take solace in the fact your competition faces the same problem. However, that alone won’t pay the bills. Before exploring some tactics that will he

At a business networking event last week, everyone was asked to share their best strategies for gaining new business. Sometimes, what you think EVERYONE knows is really only evident to you. The old adage – “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt” – isn’t always true! (Well, for most of us anyway!)

© 2004 http://www.copywritingcourse.comnnIt’s a common approach to writing copy. You begin by asking questions. Why? To evoke thoughts in your readers' minds, to stir up emotions, and to get customers thinking in the way you want them to think. But have you ever thought about how you phrase your questions? Are you doing it in a way that will have the greatest impact on your readers or are you just throwing questions on a page?nnBehaviorally speaking, not everybody responds

There is so much being written at the moment about cold calling being outdated, outlived and down-right dead. I couldn't disagree more. Yes, we all know there are more sophisticated marketing and sales methods around. We would all like our phones ringing off the hook with potential clients ringing us. Not everyone has that pleasure. When done properly, cold calling is one of the greatest ways to win new business. The key here is 'when done properly', which is rarely the case. Back to cold calling is dead. Let me pose a situation to you:

Salespeople often overlook one of the most effective and quick ways to both establish themselves as experts in their field and generate a pipeline of quality prospects. While most salespeople who sell directly to consumers are all too familiar with cold calling, purchasing leads, sending ...

I lovvvvve going to a psychic. Getting my tarot cards read. Cracking open fortune cookies..and all that jazz. It is fun, sometimes enlightening and usually thought provoking. Are you sitting down? I am going to reveal your future in the Sales Diva crystal ball!And it is in the form of a ...

2003nhttp://www.copywritingcourse.comnnCopywriting is a primary factor when it comes to achieving good search engine placement. However, many times all that is done is to include keywords in the tags of a page and to include a few keyword mentions. While not extremely difficult, writing for the engines is a little more complicated than that.nnKnow Your Keyphrases Before You WritennIt is much easier to create search engine copywriting if you know which keyphrases you'll use be

I believe that the role of a persuader in marketing and sales is to encourage and make sure that your clients will take a positive decisions and actions. This actions includes when your clients agrees and repeatedly says the magical word ‘YES’ during your persuasion. I will give you some tips, a persuasive tips on how you can start hearing the magical word. Using this persuasion technique, you need to use them in your advantage. When we persuade clients, we are triggering

© 2003nhttp://www.marketingwords.comnnI see it almost every day. People who want to generate a press frenzy, but go about it in just the opposite way that they should. nnThere are some definite strategies you need to use when writing a press release that gets results. There are also some long-standing, proven ways to completely and totally ruin your release. In an effort to help you get what you want out of your next press campaign, I’d like to share the top three “bombs

6 Steps to getting delegation buy-in. You mean to tell me another time extension is needed to get this done. Haven’t you already had two extensions and increased budget for this project asks the president. Yes we have and there have been all kinds of problems that have come up, we ...

Are your well-intentioned plans from January a distant memory? Has your excitement dwindled to the point of feeling like drill? Are your work hours increasing while motivation is simply a word that one of your all-too-perky and over-caffeinated work colleague’s could do with less of? If so, then it may be time for a fresh dose of inspiration! Check out these three instant ways to add inspiration into your overwhelmed or overworked business brain. 1. Get out!

by Karon Thackston © 2006nnMy soapbox is just about worn out. I've been preaching the necessity of knowing your target audience for at least 10 years. "You can't write effectively to someone you don't know," is how my spiel would normally go. When one day someone asked me to show him what I was talking about. "I'm writing copy for computers," he said. "Everybody needs and can use a computer. How could a general product like that possibly have different target audiences?" I'l

During a recent presentation we were discussing the importance of being able to deliver a clear, concise message when you first meet with a prospect and we agreed that a quick, thirty second introduction would be an effective approach. A participant challenged me, saying that an introduction of this nature sounded canned and rehearsed. As he recited his opening message, I fully agreed with him—it did sound canned. Not to mention extremely difficult to understand.nnUnfortuna

Making appointments is an essential part of the sales process in all direct selling situations. We need an appointment to give us our platform where we can apply our excellent consultative sales skills to the advantage of both parties. But making those awful appointment calls! Who wants that much rejection? They do not even give you a chance! Secret Number 1 – Use Active MotivatorsrnYou do not like making appointments? No-one does, and you never will! Do not even TRY to lik

If you have a web site that's not pulling in prospects and sales, I have a marketing secret to share with you. Your s.ales and profits will increase as soon as you apply it. Whether you're marketing on the web, in print or in person, you are guaranteed to improve your web site marketing and make more sales. Here it is; people buy from you when you give them what they want. Sounds obvious, but most people don't apply this secret to their online and offline marketing. Many pe

Is your stomach still moving? The market opened yesterday with the Dow dropping over 400 points as everyone in the world worried about the economy. Let’s set the record straight. The economy is in trouble for a number of reasons and the only way you are going to fix your economy is to ...