Skills blog

You’re involved in a major sales pitch. After months of work you’re told, with regret, that you have not won the business.

In sport, the performing arts and business, focus is essential, but what exactly is focus? Focus is a quick form of mental preparation. To use it, simply lock your mind on to the picture of the outcome you want.

So you have identified a potential customer, built rapport with them and used your sales skills to get them to want to buy from you. But once they have decided to buy, they turn their attention to getting the best deal, the best price, the best terms. They start to negotiate.

When you cut away the layers selling against competition, comes down to one core concept – Sell The Difference.

Resilient people in leadership and sales roles cope well with high levels of pressure and bounce back quickly from setbacks. Resilient people cope well when the going gets tough.

Imagine your business in five years’ time. Assume you have six new competitors all offering the exact same product at a similar price. These organisations have set up in your vicinity and market themselves in a similar way. Competition is massive.

To better understand the structure of the sale it is useful to visualize a conceptual black box. This black box has four separate controls. It’s portable and weighs about three pounds. At the start of every sale you take it out and begin by turning control ‘1’. You continue to turn it until you get the desired reaction.

If you’re like most people, you target your sales efforts on the relevant departmental manager: head of IT, head of manufacturing, head of finance. However, if one of these managers has a proposal that requires funding, who is their only source of funds?

Successful sales managers know that the sales person who masters follow-up, masters selling. Just like a golf or tennis shot, the power is in the follow-through.