Inspiring Solutions Newsletter

Inspiring Solutions Newsletter - Volume 34 - February 14, 2007

Split Second Selling - Drew Stevens, PhD

Why read another book on selling? Simple. Today’s client is more informed more sophisticated and has more access to information. Selling professionals today need be keener to fulfilling the needs of the client by offering value, and most important trust. More important, the selling process has changed and must now be aligned with the overall business process. Sales forces are much too tactical. In the increasing age and rage of globalization and the internet, competition rises. Assisting to thwart competitive forces, organizations typically hire more talent to sell more products or push one brand over another. Present organizations must sell smarter not harder.

 

Split Second Selling

Customers are seeing right through the selling representative and deplore the selling approach. Sales representatives are myopic to the needs of the organization focusing only on the “product/service” of the day. For many firms a client obtains mixed messages and misunderstands the message of your organization. Rather than use your existing lines of business, clients turn to your competitors. This loses your bargaining power, your client value, and positioning. The solution lies in adjusting to your client by offering measurements and value.

Clients need to understand value as it equates to return on investment. As shareholders continually question performance and expenses, calculated returns diminish consternation. Helping clients save time, money, resource focuses on bottom-line performance and instills customer value.

Split Second Selling will show you how to increase your sales and align with customer value. Based on over 26 years of research and experience, Drew Stevens provides a simple and easy to use formula to get you from the starting line to the finish line. Drew has condensed the myriad of selling concepts and ideas into a simple and easy to remember formula known as PRACTICE™.

The PRACTICE formula takes the selling representative from tactician to strategist. Strategy creates value and commissions, tacticians create competition. Athletes practice to strategize their game plan through repetition. The selling profession emulates athletics. Strategies and efficiencies are creating by practicing sales! To get finish line results and higher commissions, you must PRACTICE every day! And similar to the athlete, repetition is the key to individual success.

As Mohammed Ali once said, “It's the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief.”

The seven steps of PRACTICE are:

  • Planning – The most vital process for any successful sales professional. Sales professionals must plan each call and be prepared to offer prospective clients all the essential information.
  • Rapport – Building rapport is one of the largest hurdles for any sales representative. You have to get to know strangers. You must always discover new ways to connect to people and help them resolve their issues.
  • Attention – Buyers today are distracted by email, voicemail, the internet, remote controls, cell phones, etc. Sales professionals must rise above the din to be heard. And, more importantly, you must keep the buyer’s interest in spite of the multiple distractions that are clamoring for their attention.
  • Conviction – Each call must be customized with the tools and techniques that can truly reach the buyer. Items such as testimonials, statistical studies, charts, graphs, and schematics are just some of the items you will need.
  • Trial Close –The only way to determine if you are in line with the prospects’ wants and needs is to ask. Many sales professionals don’t.
  • Interest – If you want someone to buy something from you, it is necessary that you interest them. This means using tools like rapport-building and fact-finding to determine if there is alignment between the prospect’s interest and the perceived value.
  • Close – Never forget to ask for what you came to obtain. Closing is one of the most vital steps in the sales process. If you do not close, you do not make any money.
  • Education/Enthusiasm – Selling is a unique business. Your interest or lack thereof will illustrate itself during every presentation. And your enthusiasm must reign, even though you will get much rejection in the sales game. Sales professionals can learn something with every call or presentation. Always have an open mind and be learning, and you will gain much.

Split Second Selling not only includes selling techniques and procedures but also includes ideas and principles that will help you to add to the quality of your life and your career. Split Second Selling will illustrate how to:

  • Identify client needs easier
  • Become more efficient and productive in the selling process
  • Enhance customer relations
  • Understand the role of today’s sales professional
  • Improve your ability to communicate with others

Pick up this book and begin using it now! Let it illustrate how to create confidence, enthusiasm and passion for selling. Let the book become the catalyst that provides a path to finding the decision maker, the ideology to convince your prospective buyer, the mechanism that defies objection barriers and the structure that clearly sends you straight to the finish line! There exist a host of assets in this book long before you finish reading it. These ideas are meant to provide split second results!

About the Author

Drew Stevens PhD assists organizations sell more in less time through high level sales and customer service consulting and information sessions. Drew is the author of four books including Split Second Selling™, and Split Second Customer Service™. Drew Stevens has been interviewed and quoted frequently in the media and his clients include American International Group, Hilton Hotels, AT&T, The Federal Reserve Bank, Reliv International, The New York Times, Mercy Health Plans Quicken Loans and over 200 other leading organizations. For more information please visit www.gettingtothefinishline.com or call Drew Stevens at 877-391-6821.

Drew Stevens PhD

 

Inspiring News...

  • Congratulations to Make Technology Work for the acceptance of their Making Websites Work Podcast into the Apple iTunes store. The short, weekly Podcast features "Acroynm Soup" defining tech terminology and "Special Delivery" with tips for delivering digital content. Check it out at: http://maketechnologywork.com/podcasts
     
  • Jon Weston and Michele Matt will be honored as a 2006 Emerald Award winner at the Inscape Publishing’s MindLab Training Conference in San Diego on April 20, 2007. Emerald Award status is based on qualifying purchases of instrumented learning assessments and support materials from Inscape. Those materials are integrated into client solutions, focusing on leadership, management, team-building, and other employee-development initiatives. Emerald is Inscape’s second highest award level. The top two award levels are achieved by only 2% of Inscape’s independent consultants world-wide. “The DiSC Classic was our most popular profile and our clients’ use of online assessments through EPIC really fueled this increase in volume.”
     
  • Dick Kendall of Chosen Path Profiles in Appleton, WI has become a distributor for Inscape Publishing. As a new independent distributor, he will receive support and resources to assist him in utilizing a variety of assessments and training programs with his clients. To find out about becoming an Inscape Publishing Distributor, visit: http://www.michelematt.com/distributor.htm
     
  • Happy Valentines Day wishes to all from Michele and Jon!
     
  • Got News? If you and/or your company have something worthy of recognition…please let us know!

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