Sales Training for More Sales? But Will it Win Business?

Have you ever been on the receiving end of a phone call from the ‘welltrained salesperson’? You can spot them a mile off: "May I ask you some questions about your business?" i.e. get permission from the prospect client. "How many people do you employ?" We are trying to find a need here! "Have you thought of growing your market share?" No, that's a closed question. The course told me to ask "How do you intend to grow your market share?" It's so obvious, so manufactured, so 'trained.' And that's the world of sales training!

But, perhaps there is a way people can get help, not so much by learning tricks and techniques, by ‘spinning’ or ‘acting’. It is a case of focusing on the client or prospect and using the skills that nature has given most of us. Most of us can be pretty persuasive if we want something at home - even nagging has a shelf life! Most of us 'sell' when we have a conversation. So, to succeed with developing more business from an existing client, or to make a new sale, let’s analyse what we do naturally, put that into action when the pressure is on, and you'll start to build a relationship that wins business.

I'll give you an example. Watch a conversation getting going. We don't usually dive in with any fancy sales tactic like "Have you ever thought of moving house?" leading of course, if you say yes, to "I can sell you one!" No, we usually get a conversation going by asking some obvious questions: "Where do you live?" or "Isn't this filthy weather?” If we get little in the way of an interested response, we try again with something else. When we do get an indication of interest like "Well, I live three blocks away" or "Out in the sticks” we might ask one or two more obvious questions and then we know we have a subject worth pursuing, so we probe a bit. Only when we have probed a bit and established an area of mutual interest, do we get seriously engaged in conversation. Then we start discussing house prices (a favourite English pastime!) or the pleasures of being near the golf course. And so the conversation develops.

Turn that into a business meeting and you can quickly have your client or prospect talking about how they would like to be nearer work, or closer to the shops. If you're an estate agent, you have your prospect talking about their needs without any clever sales techniques - just plain conversation! If you want an acronym, because 'trainers' love acronyms, you can call it OPEN questions: Obvious, Probing, Engaging, Needs.

But how many people really know what makes conversation work? That's the trick! It's not sales training per se. It's understanding what is going on when the communication is working, keeping the interests of you and your ‘sales prospect’ closely aligned, and putting those natural skills into action when the pressure is on.

So do Kingstree do sales training? No. But we do help people to win business! Isn't that what we all really want?