Listening is an essential sales skill
Ann Hawkins
Creating opportunities for collaboration. Advisor and mentor to small businesses. Accountability to stay on track to achieve your goals. Steward of the Citizen Collective.
Ask what makes a good sales person and the unequivocal answer is “be a good listener”.
Here’s the thing: Listening is just as important on-line as in person.
When someone is looking for recommendations for services or products they prefer to ask people they trust rather? than rely on advertising.
With a little bit of practice and some simple tools you can catch those conversations when they happen on-line but just like eavesdropping in the pub, you don’t jump in to somebody else’s conversation with a sales pitch.
If you spot someone who looks like an interesting prospect you can see where they hang out and start to interact with them.
Create rapport
Every good sales person does a lot of research before meeting a prospect. Social networks are great for doing this. Before you have a ‘real’ conversation you’ve probably already had several interactions and built a relationship.
You’ll certainly know: The size of their business The culture of their business Their beliefs and values Their interests and activities Their attitude to their customers and staff What contacts you have in common What’s happening in their world – both personal and business What specific problem your service or product could solve A LOT about their competitors
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Hopefully, you’ll already have a good reputation and relationships with people who can recommend you and the potential customer will start to check you out.
They’ll want to see that your social networking accounts show that you understand their needs and their values.
They’ll check out the way you talk to people, the way you interact with existing customers and, especially, how you handle complaints.
Marketing isn’t enough
Small businesses often shy away from selling from a fear of seeming pushy and instead, spend disproportionate amounts of time and money on marketing without following up on opportunities. The thing that makes a BIG difference to your bottom line is learning how to sell in a way that makes your prospects glad they found you, because you’re offering a solution to their problems. With social selling the pushy pitch is redundant because the conversation is all about the prospect.
If you’d like to talk to me about how to work smart in your business, just DM me to get the conversation started.
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