Selling is Influencing: Managing the Sales Conversation
Selling is Influencing: Managing the Sales Conversation, The first step towards becoming an effective influencer is to stay in control of the sales conversation.
What you will learn?
- Identify your strengths and challenges of your selling behavior and what you need to do to address them appropriately.
- Identify factors that attempt to shift the conversation outside your control, and how you can manage.
- Use suitable tool to measure the outcome of every sales conversation and what you must focus on to take the sales conversation to the next level.
- Practice defined steps that help you stay ahead and on top of your sales conversations. Build “intentionality” to your sales approach.
- Build “Self Awareness” of your selling behavior and “Situational Awareness” of customer’s buying behavior to gain deeper insights into your sales efforts.
Course Requirements
- Anyone with basic experience of front line customer engagement not necessarily for sales
- Field experience with face to face meetings with customers is preferable though not necessary.
Course Description
In increasingly complex, and information-driven selling situations, the challenge before both prospective customers and sales professionals is not a lack of knowledge anymore but an overwhelming abundance of it.
Imagine the quality of background research you conduct every time, before you make a big ticket purchase, sometimes even for smaller and frequently purchased items. The customer feedbacks we go through, the websites we scavenge, the opinions we seek, the information we gather before we actually make a buying decision, is often hard work, but that which we happily embrace before we actually buy.
And when it comes to selling in B2B businesses all this hard work increase exponentially and is well rewarded.
Therefore in sales conversations, the task of the sales professional is not just to attempt to ‘sell’ or ‘close the deal’, but also to identify counter attempts made by the customer to distract the sales professional from achieving his or her goals.
Sales professionals are usually focused on increasing their domain knowledge, technical knowledge, market knowledge etc. to engage with customers and stay on top of such conversations, which certainly is the right thing to do.
But in the emerging scenarios that is no longer proving to be enough. It is becoming equally important to accurately identify how to structure the sales conversation so that the you – the sales professional – is able to effectively, articulate your position, such that the customer is able to see his or her world from your perspective.
It is no longer sufficient to whip out a technical feature to awe and amaze the customer, it is equally important to arouse curiosity and trigger an engaging conversation around it. It is indeed naïve to expect your customer to stay loyal to you just because you offer deep discounts or the lowest price.
None of that any longer works in a sustainable way. Selling is no longer about nudging a customer towards using a certain product or service, but rather about encouraging the customer to change behavior. Sales conversations are no longer about products and services, they are now more about ideas and perspectives.
It is one thing to impress the customer with your offer and advice , quite another to influence the customer to accept and adopt them. In the emerging tomorrow the customer who disagrees is more valued than the customer who agrees. Because for every disagreement between two parties, there is always an opportunity to change for either one. The degree to which you stay in control of the sales conversation determines whether you change or you drive change.
This course helps you do just that. Practicing how to stay in control of the sales conversation. It enables you not just plan and structure effective sales conversations, but also to identify early signals which indicate the pace and direction towards which the conversation is likely to flow. It shows you how to take proactive steps to ensure that you.
The objective of the course is to familiarize you with tools that help you stay situationally aware and also gain self awareness during every sales conversation.
This course also helps you take the first step in reimagining your sales skills, where you transform your self from a sales professional to an influencer.
Who this course is for:
- This learning intervention is for sales professionals who are just getting started.
