Essential Selling Skills: A Practical Guide

Making professional propositions is an ability that's common to most successful entrepreneurs and bubooksinesspeople - and this is what cold calling is all about. A cold call is the first call you make to a prospective customer. The customer isn't expecting your call, so no preliminary work has yet been done. It's through cold calling that businesspeople open new doors and generate leads for sales.Although making cold calls may be daunting initially, it's only by doing it that you'll generate new sales leads for your business.Learning the art of making effective cold calls will also add to your career prospects, enhancing your sales successes no matter which market and business arena you move into.This book focuses on several skills you should have when making effective cold calls that lead to appointments and new business: -assess your cold call script and find ways to improve it, -identify key times to call prospects, -deal with gatekeepers effectively, and-overcome common objections that prospects may raise during a cold call.As you practice and hone your cold-calling skills, your confidence will grow. You'll handle potential rejections better and you'll experience fewer of them. And as a result, you'll be better positioned to generate sales.You may be a master of the sales pitch and your persuasive abilities may be without fault. But if the person you're talking to doesn't need what you're offering, you're just wasting time. That's why it's important to evaluate prospects before you contact them. What you want to avoid is calling everyone on a long contact list in the hope that you'll reach someone who's interested.You need to qualify sales prospects or leads. This means determining who's likely to purchase the product or service you're selling.It's these people you want to focus your sales efforts on.You need to find out their requirements so you have appropriate solutions to offer. When you take this kind of approach, it increases your chances of making a sale.In this book, you'll learn what initial planning and research you should perform to qualify a prospect. You'll learn why it's important to conduct a qualification meeting and how to do this effectively. Finally, you'll learn how best to develop a lead you've qualified into a sales opportunity.In sales, there's no point in doing your preparation, contacting a prospect, and delivering a first-class presentation unless you get the result you're after - to close the sale. But to seal the deal, you should use specific strategies that can help you succeed in the final stages.For example, you'll need to leverage your value proposition in a way that convinces prospects to take action.You'll need to time your closing properly. To do this, you'll need to recognize certain signals that the prospect is ready to buy.And you'll have to use an appropriate closing technique, given the situation. In this book, you'll learn essential principles for closing a sale: -how to develop a strong and effective value proposition, -how to recognize when a prospect is ready to close based on the signs the prospect gives you, -how to deal with sales objections appropriately, -which key strategies you can use to close a sale, and-how to follow up with the customer after the sale is complete.By learning and applying these principles, you'll improve your selling skills and enhance your reputation in the minds of your customers.