What are the most effective sales techniques for beginners?

As a new person, one of the best things you can do is to know your product through and through, but also know how the features of your product can truly help and benefit the clients you're working with. Communicating value starts with you providing value for THEM, not making it all about your pitch and the cool features that your product has. Remember to identify their needs with excellent discovery questions, and you'll be able to tailor-make your pitch with value as you propose your solutions.

A good value proposition should be: 1. Clear and straight to the point 2. It will show the results your customers get 3. It shows how you are different or unique 4. It is quickly understood When I'm training, I often use the value propositions from Uber, Apple and Slack as good examples.

Get them to read Rudyard Kipling! I'm serious! "I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who." (from The Elephant's Child) Tell your sales people to stick a copy of this poem somewhere they can see it all the time!

Instead of asking questions that can end in a "yes" or a "no," focus on open-ended questions that require the client to think deeper into their particular situation. This is where they can share their thoughts, feelings, and you're able to uncover more of the pain points that they have been experiencing. A few examples would include "What have you been doing so far for (problem)?" "How has that been working for you?" The more open-ended you stay, the more you build trust and the more open you will find your prospect can become with you.

Instead of just focusing on what you're going to say next, sometimes it's about slowing down to speed up. With prospects, taking time to empathize with their situation is key. If they've been pretty frustrated, acknowledge their emotion. One of the biggest reasons why people get frustrated is that they don't feel heard emotionally, and feel people have ignored them. The more you can address a prospect's emotion that's associated with their problem, the more likely you'll have them buy. People buy based on emotion, not logic, so the earlier you can hit the emotion, the better.

Active listening is a way of demonstrating you are listening without a hard silence but also without interrupting. So you will make little sounds like: ah ha ummm yes go on OK and also nodding your head This shows you are paying attention and encourages them to speak more.

The more you grow in your sales career, the more success stories you will gather. By consistently using success stories about your product that relate to the prospect, it provides a feeling of "Wow, they're just like me," which ties into the emotional side of the sale. The more we can have success stories that are similar to the client we're working with, the better chances we have for them to buy.

Objections will come in a sales call, but this comes down to preventative maintenance. If you are doing a proper discovery, with many open-ended questions, empathizing, actively listening, and tailor-making your pitch for your client, the objections you receive will typically be a lot less than if you didn't do those things. When you do receive objections, acknowledge them, remind the client of how you can help them with your product to get them back to doing what they want to be doing, and then continue moving on with the process. ARM (Acknowledge, Respond, Move on) is a great acronym for this.

A mistake made by many salespeople, especially new ones, is to wait until the end to ask for the sale. There should be tentative closing taking place throughout the sales process. In other words, their should be points ALONG THE WAY where the seller and the prospect both agree that specific aspects of the product or service being offered do meet the needs of the prospect. These step by step points of agreement strengthen the commitment of the prospect and makes the final 'asking for the sale' (or more accurately, 'asking for a contract signature or payment from the prospect') simply a natural part of the entire process.