Profitable Sales Strategy

Create an effective sales system plan with these helpful tips.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 4:19 — 3.9MB)

Video Highlights:

00:41 – Focus on increasing your conversion percentage
01:10 – The opening Step – The Introduction
01:27 – Step two – Asking the Right Questions for More Valuable Solutions (I recommend SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham)
01:52 – Step three – Prove that your solutions work
02:08 – Step four – Call To Action
02:20 – Always remember to follow-up
02:31 – Find a handover spot and focus on buying experience first
03:24 – Create a template for your sales system and use that checklist every time

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Transcription:

James Schramko here and in this business tip I’m going to be covering a successful sales strategy that you can use to make your business really profitable.

Developing My Sales Formula
In my previous roles, when I was working for other people, I used to work as a salesperson and in that sales role, I read everything I could about sales and developed a system that might be useful for your business.

What I did was I broke down the stages of a sale. Now, everyone obsesses about making sales but if you want to go to the very core level, think about it as leads and conversions equals sales (leads x conversions = sales). So the first part is leads and there is a lot of information about getting leads. And then, there’s conversions.

Formulate A Sales Strategy

Increasing Your Conversions
My first tip is focus on increasing your percentage of conversions rather than just the dollar value or which is going to pay you the biggest commission upfront. Focus on increasing your conversion percentage because even small sales at a high conversion can give you that customer who later on can repurchase and increase the gross per person. Think of yourself as a problem solving machine and only ever sell solutions that are perfect for your customer.

The Opening Step
Here are few of the steps of a sale. There’s going to be the “Opening Step” where you get introduced to a customer. It may be over the phone, in which case you want to make an appointment rather than sell high-price products over the phone. It’s generally better to sell them face to face if you have a face to face environment.

Investigating Further
The next phase is the “Question Phase”. This is where you investigate and find out everything you can about the current situation of the customer so that you can then solve it. The more aware of the problems your customer becomes, the bigger the solution value. And this will be useful for you to go on look up SPIN Selling, that’s where I found out a lot about this information. SPIN Selling by Neil Rickham is highly recommended.

Show Proof That Your Solutions Work
After you’ve investigated and found out the likely solution, you want to demonstrate that that is the right solution, so demonstrating capability. In the case of cars, it was simple – you go for a test drive. In the case of other things, you might want a demo or a trial version if it’s software perhaps.

Better Follow-ups Equals Better Sales
After that comes the Call to Action. You want to ask for the order; be clear about this. A lot of salespeople never even ask for the sale. You won’t sell everyone straight away so that’s why you have follow-up mechanisms. A lot of people forget about the follow-up. It’s the follow-up where you get that extra percentage of customers where other people would leave them. If you follow up better, you’ll make more sales.

Offering Quality Customer Experience
Now a few things when you’re putting together this series of events or these phases. It’s okay to do things differently to everyone else. A perfect example of that: In the car dealership, most salespeople will throw the customer the keys for a car. I used to drive the car first and find a convenient “handover spot” to demonstrate the features of the car and then to make sure that my customer was comfortable

Rather than having to drive off in a busy dealership in a brand new car, they were now in a quiet place where they could comfortably focus on learning this new vehicle and that would make a better experience. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to explain some of the features of the controls of the car to set the radio, to set the air-conditioning, to point out some of the experiences that the customer is about to experience to build up that excitement, and it really worked. I was able to sell more than everyone else.

Formulate A Template For Your New System And Implement It
So when you start implementing your sales system, you’ll start to get better results than everyone else. And a great way to do this is to lock in that system with some kind of template, framework or document. So I used what’s called a “Write-up Sheet”. It had all the things on it that I needed to do every time. So just like a Standard Operating Procedure, use the checklist every time. Build in a sales system checklist for your business and you’ll be profitable.

I’m James Schramko and I’ll speak to you soon.

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