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MarshallCavendish - Bob Etherington

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90 pages

English

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Nearly everyone within a company is involved in selling at one level or another. Yet, the majority of those people are not professional frontline salespeople - they have never received any training in selling or in dealing with customers. As a result, opportunities are missed and, worst, you may even have wrecked the relationship with the customer for the long term.

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Marketing et communication

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Publié par	MarshallCavendish
Date de parution	01 août 2008
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9789814312394
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SELLING SKILLS FOR COMPLETE AMATEURS
Bob Etherington
Copyright 2008 Bob Etherington
First published in 2008 by:
Marshall Cavendish Limited
5th Floor
32-38 Saffron Hill
London EC1N 8FH
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)20 7421 8120
F: +44 (0)20 7421 8121
sales@marshallcavendish.co.uk
www.marshallcavendish.co.uk
The right of Bob Etherington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain permission where required for use of copyright material. Any omissions or errors are unintentional and will be corrected in future printings upon notification by relevant copyright holders.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the rights holders, application for which must be made to the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-9-814312-39-4
Designed and typeset by Phoenix Photosetting,
Lordswood, Chatham, Kent
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD
Contents
Introduction
1 Who sold you this then?
The classic mistakes made by amateur sellers
2 Never make a statement when you could ask a question
The most powerful selling tool in the world
3 Stop selling: start asking SWOT
Getting sophisticated with selling skills
4 Features, advantages and benefits
Know your product inside out and avoid price problems
5 I object! (Objection overruled!)
Deal with objections and don t give away the shop
6 How to sell in the worst of times
When markets go down your sales should stay up
7 Getting your contract signed
The art and science of never losing control of the situation
8 The ubiquitous sales letter
When you need to write, you must know AIDA
Introduction
It s the hardest thing to do in the entire acting realm. You ve got 24 seconds to introduce yourself, introduce the product, say something nice about it and get off gracefully. The words of an American named Dick Wilson. He was an actor not a salesman. But due to the uncertainty of permanent employment in his chosen profession, he started selling and became well known across the USA for his TV salesmanship promoting Charmin , one of the most successful brands of toilet paper.
Dick was ninety-one when he died in November 2007 and, well into his old age, was still the face of Charmin and extremely wealthy. Not the most glamorous product in the world but a multimillion dollar market. Not how Dick dreamed of applying his talent but one of the most necessary activities in the world.
The book you have in your hands shows non-sales people (like you), exactly how to sell brilliantly (just like Dick) whenever the need arises.
I know you probably don t want to spend everyday of your working life selling anything. That s quite OK ... it s nothing unusual. That s why you do the job you do in your company and leave the selling to your trained sales people.
But the basic fact of business is that nothing happens in any commercial organization until somebody sells something. And until it s sold, your business doesn t need what you do every day. It doesn t need accountants, engineers, geologists, doctors, technicians, PAs, traders, dealers, actors, marketers, artists, designers, COOs, CEOs, MDs, CIOs, CTOs or Chairmen. Or, indeed, anybody else. Because the only thing that says you have a viable business is your answer to this question:
Do you have any customers?
You can sell a product or service long before you are actually in a position to deliver it. (I know because I have ... many times and very successfully.) The much worse (and very common) position is to spend a fortune on offices, headed paper, computers, product and all the other office paraphernalia, then find you can t sell it. The hard truth is that for most markets in the world there is plenty of product out there. There is actually no global shortage of product .
The area of international shortage is in people who know how to sell. And within that dearth an even bigger shortage of senior management, middle management, technical and support staff and other executives who have bothered to find out what persuades and what dissuades. When these non-sales executives (Amateur Sellers) get in front of customers they make professional sellers cry.
It is why you, as a senior , will find this book a godsend. You will know how and your other management colleagues won t. You will be popular with your sales force, they will not. You will be welcome to attend customer meetings, they will not.
What this book gives you:
Insight.
Persuasive power.
Sales knowledge.
Even though knowledge is power, most managers and senior executives just don t have it when it comes to selling . As a result they talk themselves and their company out of some excellent sales everyday because they don t know. Indeed sales technique is seen as something slightly underhand; even manipulative. An engineer in an entrepreneurial company which had just developed a new type of electronic X-ray chip , told me so just a few weeks ago. I watched him addressing a room full of customers shortly afterwards.
His sales spiel was about co-valent bonding, rads , electromagnetic sensitivities, micro-volts and milliamps. Half an hour later, the emerging audience from all over Europe were visibly confused and shaking their heads. I don t get it, said one man. I just want to know, what s it all about? What will it do for me?
The engineer had set out to impress with his technical knowledge. He had piled-up all his technical stuff in his PowerPoint sales presentation. At the end we, in the audience, had an idea that the product was a sophisticated X-ray chip. But what would it do? What problem did it set out to solve for us?
The answer was incredibly simple and wonderfully useful. Its brilliance was that it would allow X-ray images to be recorded with 1/500 of the radiation power normally required for any X-ray. The uses for both industry and medical use were (and are) huge. But it took me ages to get him to explain this to me. In industry the manufacturers of mobile phones could examine 1000 phones an hour for circuit faults compared with the 100 currently possible on each factory line. In the medical world, hospital radiologists could see many more patients each day without the danger of radiation poisoning.
Yet none of this was mentioned during the previous presentation. The engineer left it to the audience to see the advantages. And they all failed to see what was under their noses. Millions of dollars disappeared out of that company s door that day.
And this happens every day in various businesses around the world.
Customers are not stupid but their brains are generally lazy.
It is the job of the professional seller (and the re-trained Amateur) to wake up the brains of potential customers as soon as possible. Before somebody (like me) comes in under your radar and steals your business from you.
Kick-start poster
To lead you straight into this I have provided you with a mini poster on the next page. It is a page which you can tear out of this book if you wish (once you ve purchased it) and pin to the wall in front of you. Everything you need to know about business persuasion and selling is encompassed in the few words on that poster.
Understand this concept and you are home and dry. Not only that but your sales staff will think you re some sort of Sales God .
What could be better than that?
I look forward to hearing about your success.
Bob Etherington
1
Who sold you this then?
What s the answer, Ben? ... How did you do it?
WILLY LOWMAN: (TRAGIC CENTRAL FIGURE IN ARTHUR MILLER S DEATH OF A SALESMAN) TO HIS SUCCESSFUL BROTHER BEN
In 1974 the comedian John Cleese made an excellent corporate training video. Its title was Who Sold You This Then? It was one of a number of training films released through his company Video Arts Ltd. The training objective of this particular film was to make service engineers and similar support staff, aware of how easy it can be to unsell a product or service once it has been sold and installed.
In one memorable scene Cleese (the service engineer) is attending a customer with a broken machine. He examines it for a few minutes and then gives his verdict: You know what s wrong with this! You ve been using it haven t you?!
It makes us laugh mainly because we ve all heard the same and similar remarks in real life. Peter Sellers, the comedy actor who used to play the incompetent French Detective Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, said that what made Clouseau funny was that he did stupid things seriously.
The real life problem (and the point of this book) is that real sales are often messed up by well meaning non-sales - and often very senior - executives saying things (seriously) to customers which are best left unsaid and doing things (seriously) which are better left undone. And all this before the sale has actually been closed!

OK let s cut to the chase ... Does anyone here actually know how to sell anything?
Yes ... the thing is ... the awful truth is ... dare I say it? ... OK here goes: these people (YOU?) are obviously very good at their day-to-day job but they simply don t know how to sell! And it s no joke.
Don t mention selling round here
I m a long-term international salesman with a sales history stretching back into the 1970s. Nowadays I run an international sales training company mainly for the guidance of professional sellers. But I am often asked to provide a few pointers on effective, persuasive, selling skills to very successful non-sales people (CEOs, MDs, COOs, CIOs, CFOs, CTOs, plus software designers, engineers, geologists doctors, dentists, ac