Learn to Speak To Sell To Grow Your Business!

Whether we like it or not, we are all salespeople to some degree. Whenever we recommend a restaurant, or a movie, or a holiday destination to someone, we are effectively selling that thing to them.

Naturally, there is more pressure to sell in a business context because we are actively trying to earn money. However, no matter the context, if you can master the following principles, you will become much better at sales.

Establish A Connection And Start Building Trust

If you come across as confident and knowledgeable about your subject when you interact with someone, then you will transfer certainty, which is an essential early step towards building trust.

Imagine trust as a piggy bank and then build it up by adding coins to it. Each coin represents an extra layer of trust. However, if you say or do things that make your audience doubt you, the piggy bank will start to lose coins.

Influence Your Audience

Gaining someone’s trust is a significant achievement on its own, but it is only half the battle when you are trying to grow your business. The other aspect involves encouraging your clients to make changes to their lives immediately rather than waiting to see what happens a few months down the line.

As American author and businessman Seth Godin puts it, “If you want to grow, you’ll not only need to get someone to decide that you’re worth their time and money, but you’ll also need to motivate them to act now instead of later.”

Positively Persuade People

Once you get your tone and your body language right, then you need to present your audience with the right information to add value to their lives.

For example, if you are pitching a new training programme to a room full of company directors, it is important to make sure you highlight the ways in which that programme will improve the performance of their staff and make their businesses more profitable.

Show Your Passion

If you want to lift your selling ability to the next level, you need to show your audience how passionate you are about your company and what it offers the world.

To do this, think about what gets you up in the morning and motivates you to work. Think about why you run your business and what you want to achieve with it. Then share your reasons with your audience and they will hear the passion in your voice and see it in your body language.

Know Your Business

Imagine if you gave a great speech and got a round of applause from the audience, which put them in a receptive mood to buy from your company.

Now imagine an audience member asks you an important question about one of your products and you freeze completely because you do not know the answer. In that moment, some of the trust you have built up during your presentation will disappear.

This kind of scenario highlights the importance of knowing your business and your products inside out. Each time you competently answer a question from the audience, it backs up everything you have said in your speech, and adds another coin to that piggy bank of trust.

Solve Problems

During a presentation I gave while I worked for an engineering company, I began one of my stories with the following words: Imagine you don’t have a business anymore. Imagine that if you didn’t invest in innovation, your business would stop working.

Then I explained the problems they were likely to face and the impact these could have on their businesses, which put them in a receptive state of mind to consider the solutions my company could provide.

This is a powerful structure for persuasion: begin with an attention-grabbing introduction, follow up with an explanation of a problem and then present a solution for it.

Summary

There is not one all-powerful secret when it comes to speaking to sell. Instead, there are several key elements you can constantly improve in order to become a better salesperson.

If you would like to learn more about how to become better at selling, join my Speak To Sell Show.?