Best practices in sales training teaches that after every call on a customer, you should mentally review everything that happened, step by step. If you replay what worked and what didn’t after the call you can uncover valuable information that will help make your next sales call a success. Here are some questions you should ask yourself after every call.
- What did you do right?
- How can you repeat that success in future calls?
- What errors did you make?
- How can you correct those errors?
- Were there any nasty curveballs that caught you by surprise?
- How might you anticipate and deal with them the next time they show up?
Good sales training teaches how to do a brief replay faithfully, after every call; it becomes a habit of mind. You are practicing the sales skill of learning from experience. You are doing it deliberately and purposefully. When you make that a habit, believe me, you will learn valuable things. You will get better at your job.
When you get better at what you do, you make more money.
The value of sales training
The structure of a sales training program can give you an ideal framework to review the entire sales call quickly, thoroughly, and methodically. Start with goal for the call that includes a commitment from the customer: Was commitment appropriate for the point you had reached in your sales process? If you had to change your commitment goal on the fly, did you choose the best possible alternative?
Since questioning skills play such a large a role in the sales process, pay special attention to the questions that you asked. Did you really ask the “best questions” you might have put to this customer? What kinds of queries would have been better?
Here’s a question that’s always worth asking yourself when you replay a call: If you want customers to see you as a business partner and not just as another salesperson, what did you learn about this customer’s business needs that you don’t know before the call?
“Practice makes perfect” is a motto worth remembering. Few things are more worthy of practice than the selling skill of learning from experience.
The rest of the story…Watch for how sales training in action improves Replay the Call selling skills.
For information about how to make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.