Qualifying

One of the ways we can differentiate on how we sell instead of what we sell is to engage our prospects emotionally in the causes of and solutions to their problems.

Creating a consistent, repeatable, scalable sales function means we need all of our salespeople to interact consistently with prospects and clients.

Our prospects have been trained, by salespeople seeking to get their needs met at the expense of rather than in service to their clients, not to trust salespeople so they developed mechanisms to reduce the “influence” that salespeople have in the buying process. One of the most common is to put up a (virtual) paper wall by requesting a proposal/quote/information from us before we’ve even gotten to “hello.”

Mike Montague interviews Brian Jackson on How to Succeed at Your 30 Second Commercial. Brian is an award-winning Sandler Trainer in San Diego, CA.

A salesperson’s only valuables are their time and information. Many salespeople waste time with suspects instead of real prospects because they have no process to support them in quickly sorting out the time wasters from the true potential clients.

Troy Elmore, Sandler trainer, shows you how to succeed with the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques needed to be more successful at dealing with the competition and selling a crowded marketplace. Get the best practices collected from around the world.

Listen Time: 21 Minutes

Having a big pipeline of “prospects” is typically seen as desirable. The more prospects you put into the pipeline, the more will eventually emerge as customers. At least that’s the theory. And the theory is partially true. Some of the people you put in the pipeline will become customers. The question is, “How many will be customers and how long will it take for them to materialize from the other end of the pipe?”

At Sandler Training, we believe in not solely talking about features and benefits during your sales call, but rather focusing on the prospect’s needs. However, there is a time for presenting, once you have qualified the opportunity. Once a prospect is fully qualified in Pain, Budget, and Decision, then it is time for you to make the presentation, and you want to make that presentation as persuasive as possible.

If your goal is to find more prospects, get more and better referrals, and make more commission dollars in 2016 than you did in 2015, consider upping your social selling game. Here are four quick tips that will help you to avoid some common mistakes online.

Creating an effective sales pipeline can be a massive headache for sales leaders because reps have been known to stuff the pipeline with opportunities that have zero chance of closing. In a previous life, I took over a product specialist role selling a web-based media monitoring and crisis communications program. My first six weeks in that role was spent culling a $3 million pipeline down to $160,000 of real, qualified opportunities

Does this sound familiar to you? Prospect A says, "This looks very good. I think there's an excellent chance we'll do business." The salesperson thinks, "I've got one." Prospect B comments, "Your price is higher than we expected." The salesperson thinks, "I'll have to cut the price to close the deal." Prospect C reveals, "We were hoping for a shorter delivery time." The salesperson thinks, "I'll have to push this through as a rush order to get the sale."e