Are You Selling Quantity or Quality?

If you have sharp enough sales skills to ask great questions and uncover a precious few vital needs that a customer truly cares about, why don’t you then go ahead and sell to those needs—only those needs?

Before you say, “But I already do that,” ask yourself this: How often do you edit out most of your standard product capabilities when making presentations to customers? If the answer is seldom or never, then you might be losing sales during your product presentations. You need some sales coaching.

Most sales training programs point out that questioning is a vital sales skill. Reps emerge even from average sales training courses knowing that they are supposed to question customers in order to find out whether the customers have any pressing needs for which the salesperson’s products and services might provide solutions.

A great sales training program, however, should teach you how to uncover high-priority needs, then show the customer how your product or service can uniquely solve problems or create opportunities. If you can do that, then you have created an extremely high-value proposition—and you are talking to a very interested customer.

Don’t flood an engaged customer with data.

But when it comes time to present your solutions, are your sales skills well-honed enough to keep the customer engaged? It’s a huge mistake to fall back on a generic product pitch that describes all of the features and benefits this customer doesn’t care about right along with the ones that actually matter.

In selling, it’s all about quality, not quantity. Any sales training course worth its salt should point out that no customer has a dozen or a hundred unique, high-value needs that your products can serve. But with great questioning skills, you might uncover three. Why would you then throw away the fruits of your excellent work by subjecting the customer to a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation that mightinterest a generic person?

Action Selling ®’s sales training programs teach the TFBR method to ensure that your sales presentations are short, sweet, and focused entirely on the things that matter most to the individual customer in front of you:

T – Tie-back to a high-value need that the customer already has agreed on.

F – Present the product Feature that solves the need.

B – Explain the Benefit to the customer when the need is solved.

R – Ask a Reaction question that lets the customer tell you how the solution will help them.

Sales training programs based on the Action Selling ® system teach that this simple formula is all you need to create a genuinely great product presentation. Three TFBRs, tied to three high-value needs, and you’re done. Throw out the rest of your canned pitch; it’s extraneous.

That’s your sales coaching lesson for today.

For information about how to improve sales skills and make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.