Selling is Influencing: Managing the Sales Conversation.
- Description
- Curriculum
- FAQ
- Reviews
In an increasingly complex, and information driven selling situations, the challenge before both prospective customers and sales professionals is not lack of knowledge anymore but an overwhelming abundance of it.
Imagine the quality of background research you conduct every time, before you make a big ticket purchase, sometimes even for smaller and frequently purchased items. The customer feedbacks we go through, the websites we scavenge, the opinions we seek, the information we gather before we actually make a buying decision, is often hard work, but that which we happily embrace before we actually buy.
And when it comes to selling in B2B businesses all this hard work increase exponentially and is well rewarded.
Therefore in sales conversations, the task of the sales professional is not just to attempt to ‘sell’ or ‘close the deal’, but also to identify counter attempts made by the customer to distract the sales professional from achieving his or her goals.
Sales professionals are usually focused on increasing their domain knowledge, technical knowledge, market knowledge etc. to engage with customers and stay on top of such conversations, which certainly is the right thing to do.
But in the emerging scenarios that is no longer proving to be enough. It is becoming equally important to accurately identify how to structure the sales conversation so that the you – the sales professional – is able to effectively, articulate your position, such that the customer is able to see his or her world from your perspective.
It is no longer sufficient to whip out a technical feature to awe and amaze the customer, it is equally important to arouse curiosity and trigger an engaging conversation around it. It is indeed naïve to expect your customer to stay loyal to you just because you offer deep discounts or the lowest price.
None of that any longer works in a sustainable way. Selling is no longer about nudging a customer towards using a certain product or service, but rather about encouraging the customer to change behavior. Sales conversations are no longer about products and services, they are now more about ideas and perspectives.
It is one thing to impress the customer with your offer and advice , quite another to influence the customer to accept and adopt them. In the emerging tomorrow the customer who disagrees is more valued than the customer who agrees. Because for every disagreement between two parties, there is always an opportunity to change for either one. The degree to which you stay in control of the sales conversation determines whether you change or you drive change.
This course helps you do just that. Practicing how to stay in control of the sales conversation. It enables you not just plan and structure effective sales conversations, but also to identify early signals which indicate the pace and direction towards which the conversation is likely to flow. It shows you how to take proactive steps to ensure that you
The objective of the course is to familiarize you with tools that help you stay situationally aware and also gain self awareness during every sales conversation.
This course also helps you take the first step in reimagining your sales skills, where you transform your self from a sales professional to an influencer.
-
2
Sell yourself a dreamHere we discuss the importance of the ability to dream. While the word dream sounds like a very wishy washy term what it means for the sales professional is his or her ability to visualize the future. When you dream how do you visualize the future?
-
3
Identify your strengths and challenges using the Ability / Access matrix
Make a bucket list
Sales professionals eat, breathe and dream of achieving their targets and goals. In this lecture we discuss how we can better understand classify the obstacles and hinderances that stand between us and our goals. Our goal is to identify areas that are our strengths and areas that challenge us. In this lecture we explore the Ability / Access matrix which help us do just that.
-
4
Using the 2x2 Ability / Access matrix
In this lecture we learn to apply the Ability / Access matrix as a tool to real world selling situations.
-
5
SOSB: What I learnt from my guru
In this lecture I share a small story about a great learning and how my leader helped me grow, showed me my true potential and guided me towards professional success.
-
6
Differentiating between issues and concerns
Is it an issue or a concern? A key question that all sales professionals must ask during a sales conversation. Here we understand what are they and why is it important to explore it with the prospective customer.
-
7
3 Key objectives of SOSB - Reflecting back on the sales conversation
Questions that you must ask yourself immediately after the end of every sales call.
In this lecture we look at the key questions that every sales professional must ask immediately after the sales call. Here we would strongly recommend that you download the lecture notes use it for practice in the actual sales situations.
-
8
1: Identifying Customer Responses that fall in the 2nd quadrant of 2x2 matrix
In this lecture we look at the characteristics of sales conversations that can be assigned to the second quadrant and understand why they are so.
-
9
2: Another type of customer response that fall in Quadrant 2 of the 2 x 2 matrix
In this lecture we ask and understand
Why do we refer to factors mapped to the second quadrant as opportunities.
-
10
3: Customer Responses that fall in Quadrant 3 of the 2 x 2 matrix
In this lecture we identify the characteristics of sales conversations that fall in third quadrant and what are the signals that we should look out for in a sales conversation that will tell us that the conversation falls in the third quadrant.
Here we would particularly like to draw your attention to the downloadable resource attached to this lecture. We recommend you using it in actual selling situations as a guide to help you identify the nature of the sales conversation.
-
11
4: Customer Responses that fall in Quadrant 4 of the 2 x 2 matrix
In this lecture we continue further and learn how to identify signals that would assign these conversations in the fourth quadrant of our Ability / Access tool. Again we would strongly recommend that you download the learning resource and use it as a guide in actual selling situations.
-
12
Structuring questionsArrange the questions in an order which will make it easy for you to identify where the customer's response would fall on the Ability / Access matrix
