The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques: How To Create New Prospects And Make More Sales

The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques:

How To Create New Prospects And Make More Sales

By Dave Donelson

DSDA Publishing, Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Dave Donelson

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

About This Book

Chapter 1 - Creativity In Sales

Creative selling enables you to find needs even when the prospect doesn’t know he has them.

Chapter 2 - Tactical And Strategic Advantages

Satisfied customers are repeat customers, the most profitable customers of all.

Chapter 3 - Selling A Basket Of Solutions

The creative part of the sales process is in finding new uses for the product.

Chapter 4 - Sell On The First Call

Most prospects expect the seller to have done their homework before they come in the door.

Chapter 5 - Prospect Knowledge

The more you know about your prospects, the more sales you’ll close.

Chapter 6 - How Much Can They Spend?

You’ll be working smarter, not harder, when you estimate how much the prospect is worth before you call on them.

Chapter 7 - Uncovering Prospect Needs

Invest a few minutes in a one-person brainstorm.

Chapter 8 - Ideas To Sell

You’ll never grow bored with your job because you’ll be putting something new into it every day.

Chapter 9 - Price It In Writing

Making a proposal too small is a common obstacle to sales success.

Chapter 10 - Your Written Proposal

The customer is the focus of the proposal.

Chapter 11 - Alternative Proposals

"How can there be three best plans?"

Chapter 12 - Demand Stage Selling

The salesperson who carefully listens to their prospect avoids mistakes.

Chapter 13 - Getting Your Foot In The Door

There are many ways to skin a cat—or to get an appointment.

Chapter 14 - Getting Past The Screeners

As long as you’re polite and conversational most people will give you a little information you can use.

Chapter 15 - Getting A Cold Call Appointment

Make it worthwhile for the prospect to spend some time with you.

Chapter 16 - Persistence Counts

Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Chapter 17 - The Brochure Brush-Off

The first step is to fight off your own desire to take the easy way out.

Chapter 18 - Essential Presentation Skills

Your task is to constantly bring their attention back to your pitch.

Chapter 19 - Your Creative Presentation Script

If you won’t shut up and let them talk—they can’t give you an order.

Chapter 20 - Honing Your Presentation Skills

Stage fright is your friend—all you have to do is control it.

Chapter 21 - Fear Of Closing

Closing is more of a process than an event.

Chapter 22 - Buying Signals

The most important part of the close is not the clever way you phrase the question, it’s the amount of attention you give to the answer.

Chapter 23 - Closing Techniques

Use only positive action words.

Chapter 24 - Objections In Four Steps

"The first step in handling an objection is to listen to the prospect."

Chapter 25 - Four Non-Price Objections

Don’t try to win the argument—just walk around it.

Chapter 26 - The Path Around Price Objections

Find out what kind of price objection you’re dealing with, then answer it appropriately.

Chapter 27 - The Maybe Challenge

Actively helping the customer make a purchase decision is part of the service.

Chapter 28 - Successful Call-Backs

Time is money, and time spent waiting for a decision is money spent on nothing.

About This Book

My very first sales call was a debacle. The general manager of the radio station where I worked picked a listing out of the yellow pages—he chose a neighborhood restaurant named Ma’s Diner. Then he handed me a map showing that our signal covered most of two states and told me to go sell the diner’s owner a $300 package of radio spots. Other than that, my sales training consisted of his advice, Don’t leave until Ma says ‘no’ three times.

Being young and foolish, not to mention eager to earn the $36 commission from that $300 order, I sallied forth into a career in sales. If you guessed that I didn’t make that sale, you’d be right. In fact, Ma literally chased me out of the diner waving a very dangerous-looking spatula. I took that for the third no.

After more than a few calls like the one on Ma’s Diner, I started learning how to sell—a process that continues to this day. Along the way, I developed the Creative Selling System, a simple method that turned selling into an enjoyable and satisfying experience for both me and my customers. I also made a pretty good living at it, if I do say so myself, although I never did sell anything to Ma.

The Creative Selling System came about through trial and error. I kept using different sales techniques on my own prospects and accounts until I found the ones that worked best for me. Later in my career, I observed the salespeople I hired, trained, and managed as they sold in different ways, a study that confirmed my beliefs about selling creatively. Finally, I dissected the best sales methods and turned them into a step-by-step sales training program—the Creative Selling System—that I marketed quite successfully throughout the United States.

That sales training program served as the basis for my first book, Creative Selling: How To Boost Your B2B Sales (Entrepreneur Press, 2000). Some of the material in that book has been updated and included in this ebook, The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques: How To Create New Prospects And Make More Sales and the companion ebook, The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To More Sales: How To Nurture Customer Relationships And Grow Your Business. Both books also include columns and case studies that I wrote for the national business and trade publications you’ll find listed in the bibliography. This first volume covers basic sales techniques from how to introduce yourself to a new prospect to how to close the sale. The second goes beyond the basics to give some insights into maximizing good customer relationships and turning them into increased revenue for your company.

This book isn’t about theory—it’s about doing. It’s a how-to book outlining the steps to a successful sales career and some of the alternative strategies you can use along the way. There are a couple of ways you can use this book. First, I suggest you learn by doing. Read a chapter, then apply the techniques in it as you sell to your customers. If you take about a week to absorb and practice each chapter, you’ll better understand the process and use it more effectively. Participants in my training programs were required to use each step with a real prospect before they could go on to the next one. It takes a little more time, but the results were spectacular. If you are a sales manager, you can guide your staff through the process in this way.

The really great thing about Creative Selling is that it gives you control over your own success. Creative Selling works in good economies and bad, whether you’re selling widgets or financial services, roaming a nationwide territory or confined to a retail store. That because Creative Selling isn’t about hoping a willing customer will come along and listen to your pitch, it’s about making your own luck in a simple, straightforward way. Good salespeople seize every opportunity that comes along. Great salespeople don’t wait—they create opportunities for themselves.

No matter what you do, don’t just read about Creative Selling. Do it! Unleash your creative sales power. You’ll make more sales and have a lot more fun.

—Dave Donelson

Chapter 1

Creativity In Sales

Creative selling enables you to find needs even when the prospect doesn’t know he has them.

In business, creativity is often thought of as an exciting, dangerous thing. The word itself conjures up images of wild-eyed people dressed in black doing strange things that have little to do with making a profit. But aren’t salespeople creative? I think so, since the really good ones create things all the time. Like opportunity. And demand for products and services. And customer satisfaction. What about wealth? The best salespeople certainly create wealth not only for themselves and their companies, but often for their customers as well.

The nature of the sales process itself is creative. A good salesperson creates demand where it doesn’t exist. He or she creates a message (the sales pitch) using various media (face-to-face calls, telephone pitches, PowerPoint presentations) that alters the thinking of the audience (the prospect). A salesperson explores new territories in their craft through cold calls, brings new ways of thinking to their audience by persuading prospects, and makes the world a better place by providing customer satisfaction.

These may not sound like the things you or your salespeople do. Lots of perfectly productive salespeople are nothing more than harvesters of existing business. They take orders, fill out the necessary forms, collect their commissions and go home. They never break rules and they hate new products and changes because they disrupt the orderly nature of their existence. To them, new customers are generally a pain in the behind because it takes so much work to make them into old customers. Besides, it’s much more profitable to service existing accounts anyway.

Salespeople like that used to play an important role in our economy. Today, of course, they are well along the road to extinction. Just ask your local bookseller what Amazon has done to their business. Or your stockbroker how he or she has been affected by online trading. If a salesperson isn’t looking for new customers or better ways to serve existing ones, he’s doomed. On the other hand, there will always be a need for people who have the energy, fearlessness, and drive to create new sales opportunities.

The Creative Selling System

I’ve had the immense pleasure of studying, practicing, and teaching creative selling for many years. I’ve worked closely with, managed, and observed thousands of salespeople, both creative and not. I found that selling creatively unleashes your idea power—your ability to make more sales and create more personal wealth by selling ideas for solutions instead of products. That’s what the system is about.

And it is a system: the repeated application of proven techniques to accomplish a desired end. My system repeatedly applies creative selling to the goal of producing more sales. It is also a framework that enables you to be a more effective, efficient salesperson. When you work within that framework, you apply creative techniques to every step of the selling process from prospecting new accounts to servicing old ones. You use your personal creative talents (and we all have them) to solve problems and create opportunities for your customers to use your products or services—and for you to make more sales.

Just as in my training programs, we begin with the basic assumption that you are a pretty effective communicator, know your product or service, and are interested in professional growth, job satisfaction, better customer service, and making more money. These are pretty safe assumptions because almost everybody in sales has these qualities.

We also assume you are willing to invest your time, money, and effort to achieve these goals. Nothing good happens without effort, especially in sales. Learning to use the Creative Selling System is the same. As I have advised thousands of salespeople, if you’re not willing to invest the time and effort to practice, you’ll never reap the rewards. If you’re one of those people looking for an effortless way to get rich through sales, stop reading and go do something you really want to do. Life’s too short.

Still reading? Great! That means you have an open mind. And an open mind is the single most important component of creativity.

Creating New Business

In this book, our focus will be on developing new business. Not because existing accounts aren’t important, but the same techniques you use to sell new accounts will work even better on the ones you already have. It’s also because, as every salesperson knows, you have to constantly work on new accounts because your old ones are never 100 percent secure. Their plans change. Their business changes. Their own customers change their habits. Their competitors zig, causing your customer to zag in response. And every change in your customer’s business has the potential to change their relationship with you and their need for your products and services. If you sell retail, your best customers have an irritating habit of moving away, or their kids grow up, they retire, or they lose their job. All those things cause them to change what they buy and why they buy it—not to mention where they go to shop besides your store.

Your competitors are always there, too, nibbling like ducks at your existing customers. Contradicting what you say, bringing in new products, even—horror of horrors—undercutting your prices! Even the smallest competitor can hurt you by taking away an account here and there. And a big one can devastate your sales and income like an elephant stepping on a grasshopper.

If you’re not constantly working on bringing in new accounts, your sales and commissions are going to wither away. And that may not be a problem that’s way out over the horizon. In some industries, customer loyalty is so tenuous that they experience 40 percent account turnover year-to-year. In other words, they have to replace nearly half of their account base every year just to stay even.

In most companies, there’s another reason the salesperson should be developing new business. That’s because it’s their job. Almost every sales job description includes the direct or implied function of introducing new users to the company’s products. If the orders just came in, there wouldn’t be any need for salespeople. All you’d need would be an order-processing department. So you should think of new business development as job insurance.

But the main reason you should work on new accounts is that it’s fun. The work, the challenges, the risks of failure are tremendous. But there’s little in life that matches the excitement, the edge-of-the-seat suspense, the joyful exhilaration of creating an opportunity and closing a new account. You created it. And creativity is fun.

Creative Selling Principles

Now, down to business. There are three principles to creative selling that guide every strategic and tactical decision you make in the Creative Selling System.

The first principle is to focus your efforts on the largest potential prospects. Obvious, isn’t it? If you only sell the biggest accounts, you’ll sell more and work less. But many salespeople gravitate toward smaller accounts. Sometimes they think it’s easier to get a small order than a big one. Or they’re intimidated by a big account and the layers of bureaucracy that often comes along with that territory. There are other reasons for this tendency, but if you have it, lose it! It’s just as easy to ask for one hundred thousand as it is to say a thousand and the rewards are obviously much greater. You’ll also find there are many other reasons to concentrate on the largest potential prospects that we’ll get into later. At this point, trust me: it’s important.

Principle two is that you must know the customer’s business