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Every positive achievement you get is defined as success.
In the world of business, to achieve success, selling and marketing are a necessity. These two are responsible for your business to make profits, grow and expand. Many businessmen and women find selling quite difficult, and they usually say that salespeople are born, not made. However, this is a myth. Everyone has the potential to become a sales representative. It is all about the perception you hold about something and will execute it as your duty or job.
Great sales representatives make it look easy and a great job that everyone would go for, but all this depends on the time and the attention given to it. As time goes by, sales representatives gain skills in the field and find it easier to pitch and make a sale.
If you want to become a good or actually great sales representative and your goal is to become one of the best selling personnel and highly paid, then there are some keys that you must implement to be successful in that field.
A great sales representative earns admiration, loyalty, and referrals from prospects, while good sales representatives earn trust, respect and are more concerned about their customers or 's issues client's issues. To be successful in selling a product or a service, you must carefully listen to your clients and address their concerns as expected. Let’s get deeper into understanding keys that can help you succeed in selling as a first-time sales representative.
Great keys to help you succeed in selling as the first time sales representative
1. Clearly understand your goals
As a first-time salesperson, it is always good to know, clearly understand your goals and what you are after achieving. Knowing your goals helps you lay strategies on how you are going to work and achieve them. When you clearly know your goals, it also helps to set performance against them. First of all, as a salesperson, you need to know your products or services, what your customers are, what do they need, are they willing to buy even, how much are they willing to pay, what can you do to generate prospects and turn them into buying customers, what time will it take you to achieve your goals, how much revenue do you intend to generate from those customers? And so many more, basically understand every aspect that will help you around making a sale. A good salesman ensures that his goals are smart that is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Understanding your goals is a good key to achieving the target and succeed in selling as a first-time salesperson.
2. Identify your potential customers and stick to them.
Identifying and knowing your customers is a crucial and important aspect of selling and business; if you don’t know who your customers are, you will never make a sale. Identifying potential customers includes knowing who they are, where they live, and what they do? Once you identify a customer, then stick to them until you get what you want; that will help you in generating sales. Research about your customer, know if they will buy or not, show them the reason as to why they should buy and how your service or product will be of help to them. Being able to convince a customer to buy is one of the best keys to succeeding in sales.
3. Understand the whole sales process
Selling is not something that you wake up in the morning, do, and then it is done there and then, but it is a process that follows certain steps until the end is reached. Selling goes through various steps right away, from prospecting to closing the deal and delivering the product. A great salesman who understands this whole process finds it easier to transact a sale irrespective of the time it takes.
Here is a perfectly consistent sales process every salesperson should follow to succeed in making a sale. Checkout at Monkeypesa website for further reading and understanding
· Prospecting, Prospecting is the process of sourcing and identifying new leads or clients to begin working through the sales process.
· Connecting and Qualifying, The connecting process involves representatives initiating contact with those early-stage leads to gather information. Qualifying new leads involves deciding whether or not they're a good fit lead for your business and whether or not they will likely move forward in the buyer's journey.
· Initial meeting: This involves scheduling the first appointment with the leads after confirming that they have fully qualified.
· Researching, Researching involves representatives knowing more about the prospect by digging deeper; when representatives learn more about each prospect and company, it allows them to offer a more tailored and personalized experience and improves the likelihood of closing a deal.
· Presenting -This involves a salesperson running a formal presentation or demonstration of your product or service for your prospect on how he or she will benefit from it.
· Handling Objections -This involves listening to the prospect's objections and questions from prospects; this helps representatives drive your product or service to fit the prospect's prospect's needs and wants.
· Making an offer, negotiating and finalizing -When the needs of the prospect are understood, then you choose to make an offer or not. Still, once you choose to make an offer, you will need to negotiate the final terms and conditions.
· Closing the sale - This involves coming to a conclusion or reaching an end by the prospect and the representative. The close step is what every salesperson works toward. This is expected to result in a mutual benefit and a contractual agreement between the prospect and the seller.
· Deliver the product-This is the last stage in closing a deal where the representative delivers the product or service to the customer physically.
4. Decide on what you want and love what you do.
Decision making is an important aspect of life; without taking decisions, we can’t move from where we are to the next step. Good decisions guide our thoughts until we reach our estimated goal, while bad decisions worsen what there and the yet to come is. As a great salesman, therefore, you ought to make excellent decisions regarding the work you execute or your job. If you decide to take on sales as your career goal, you must choose what you have to do to excel in that field. Set your goals and document them; this helps you to follow them up accordingly one by one until they are achieved. When you choose to take on a sales career, you must love it as your job; loving what you do gives you daily passion and courage to take it on for more years. All successful and highly paid salespeople love their sales career. You must learn to love your work and then commit yourself to become excellent in your field. Investing whatever amount of time is necessary to improve your sales career; pay any price; go and distance, make any sacrifice to become the very best at what you do; this one of the best keys to guide you in succeeding with sales.
5. Build stronger relationships with your prospects
Most businesses end their relationships with customers immediately after making a purchase and never mind following up; however, the truth remains that this is not a good practice at all. If you want to be a great salesman, you must spend more time with them after finding the ideal customers. Research recommends spending 80% of your time with the prospects while prospecting morning, noon and night. Remember that the more time you spend with your prospects, the stronger a relationship grows between you two. The problem with many salespeople is that they focus on selling their product or service than anything else other than building rapport, trust, credibility and reliability with the prospect. Yet, these are very important, especially on the customer's side, before they make any step to give you a deal. The most successful salespeople take as much time as necessary to establish trust with that client. They ask good questions and listen closely to the answers. They seek to understand the customer’s situation and needs before making any attempt to talk about their product or service. The truth remains that if a customer likes you and trusts you, they won’t delay or take long to give you the idea,l, thus succeeding in sales.
6. Listen to your customers carefully and allow them to be the pioneers of their own decisions.
Great salespeople don’t rush into pitching a sale as most people do. No, they take their time to listen to their customers carefully, know what a customer wants, finds out whether his or her product will be of help to the customer, what the customer does, who the customer is, how much a customer is willing to buy and how much he or she is even willing to pay. As a salesperson, you are reminded that the buying process is not about you and your wants and needs dead, but rather about a customer. Many of you salespeople meet your customers when you already have your own agenda; sometimes, you don’t give attention to your customers’ needs; instead, you are thinking about whether the sale will be closed today or not so that you can earn a commission. Dearly it’s not about you but rather the wants, needs, interests and expectations of your prospective buyer. Most salespeople tend to push harder to make a sale other than listening to their customers carefully; I will keep reminding you that if you want to be a great salesman, focus on your customer and how your product can best serve their hopes, dreams and goals. Don’t forcefully persuade your customers to buy the deal but leave them to make their own decisions; after all, a better decision is an informed decision taken by the customer out of his or her will. Don’t forcefully persuade your customers to buy the deal.
7. Time management
Time management is important in all aspects of life, even in your daily activities. It would help if you still managed your time. A good salesman is a good time manager and executes his work excellently.
Final words and last thoughts
To succeed in business originates from how you want your business to be and what you want to achieve with your business. However, MonkeyPesa has provided you with the basic 7 keys to succeed in sales as a businessman /woman, entrepreneur, owner, small startup owner, or small startup owner.
MonkeyPesa is here with a ready-made Business Management Suite that helps streamline everything from Leads to Deals, Tasks, Accounts, and contacts. MonkeyPesa is genuinely built for Sales teams. It is simple but well streamlined and organized. This Software allows for the integration of services like Email Marketing, SMS, and Social Media marketing, and customer support, all in a single business system. You can contact us on or by a phone call or WhatsApp at +256757537658. Subscribe to the YouTube Channel for News and Shows on Tech and Business in Africa.