Selling Skills Best Practices, Part 1: The Biggest Mistake Salespeople Make

What‘s the biggest mistake that salespeople make?

Selling is not telling. Selling is about serving. It's about them, the client, it's not about you at all. In this short video clip, Joe Friedman highlights the biggest mistake that salespeople make and how to avoid making it.

Selling Is Not Telling

When I took my first sales class, 25 years ago, the answer to that question was: “They don‘t ask for the business.” Over the years, sellers have gotten very good at asking for the business. So, that’s not the biggest mistake they make.

The biggest mistake sellers make is that they continue to talk too much. Sellers love to focus on the companies they represent, the products they sell, and the amazing features and benefits they can provide to their customers.

Think of this scenario: Have you ever walked into a store and immediately salespeople descend upon you and ask “Can I help you?” “Can I show you something?” “Do you have any questions?”

How do you feel when salespeople treat you that way? And we always ask our clients, “Would you ever treat your prospects and clients that way?” And immediately they say, “No! We’d never do that.” But is it any different when, too early in the conversation, we turn the focus to us, our company, or the product we sell.

Selling is about serving…it’s not about you at all.

The answer to what you ought to do is as old as the problem. Selling is not telling is a saying that has been around for years. It focuses on the need to ask questions as opposed to talking. Selling is about serving. Selling is about them—the client, the prospect. It’s not about you at all. The more you focus on them, the better off you’ll be when you’re selling.



ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN offers a full range of selling skills courses to help you sell better.

Read more here: http://zehrenfriedman.com/skills-training/sales

 

Cold Calling Tip #5: Value to “Them” Gets You in the Door

Cold Calling Tip #5: Value to “Them” Gets You in the Door

What happens when you’re cold calling and someone answers the phone? There are some basics you need to have ready. You won’t have a lot of time. What is the purpose of your call in terms of value to them?  Expressing the purpose of your call in terms of value to the person you’re calling can get you the time you need to get the meeting.

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Cold Calling Tip #3: How to Make a Cold Call Warmer

Cold Calling Tip #3: How to Make a Cold Call Warmer

One of the challenges that we all face when we're cold calling is the fact that it's cold. I'm calling someone up out of the blue; I don't know what to say; I don't know what they're going to say. And so it begs this question: Is there something I can do to make the cold call warmer? Is there something that will make it easier for me? Joe Friedman suggests how in this cold calling tip #3...

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Cold Calling Tip #2: Why Make Cold Calls?

The Purpose of Cold-Calling Is to Get Face-to-Face

The purpose of cold calling is simple and clear. But so often we become diverted from our objective. This is the second of several tips from Joe Friedman on how to make more effective sales calls. In the first tip, Joe highlights how prospecting is a game.

Transcript:

One of the first questions that we ask people when we’re talking about prospecting, cold calling, or introductory calls: What’s the objective? And I can tell you we normally fill a flip-chart full of people’s ideas: gain information, find out if we’re talking to the right people, maybe do some need discovery, get a meeting, have a discussion, present product ideas. It’s actually a trick question.

There’s only one objective when you’re cold calling and that objective is to get a meeting.

The real power in selling happens when you’re face-to-face. As a result of that, our objective when we’re cold calling is to do nothing more than that. And yet, frequently we get diverted: “Tell me a little bit more about your company.” By the way, if somebody says that to you, your response should be: “It will be better off if I show you.”

Remember: your objective is to get face-to-face. And that’s what you need to come back to—regardless of what they ask, what they say, and what the other person does in an attempt to divert the conversation somewhere else. You want to keep coming back to the need to be face-to-face. That’s where relationships get created.



ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN offers a full range of selling skills courses to help you sell better.

Read more here: http://zehrenfriedman.com/skills-training/sales

Cold Calling Tip #1: Prospecting Is a Game

About 10% of us like to make cold calls the rest of us don’t like doing it at all. You can get better at making these kinds of sales calls and they don’t have to be drudgery. This is the first of several tips from Joe Friedman on how to make your cold calling more effective.

Cold Calling Is a Game

Transcript

In this segment, I want to talk a little bit about cold calling or prospecting or making introductory calls. We don’t distinguish between any of those three. And yet it is a part of the sales process that most people really don’t like.

I would say in our experience about 10% of people that we come into contact with love prospecting. And 90% of us really don’t like it at all. We teach it. I do this as part of my job in selling. But it is not one of my favorite things on the planet to do.

Why is that?

  1. Number one, it’s hard work.
  2. There’s the amount of rejection that we all get and nobody likes that at all.
  3. People think it just doesn’t work.

Well, I can tell you depending upon the sales cycles that exist for your products, it does work. It takes time. It takes effort. And you have to look at it as a game. In most cases, the behavior that you will use when you get face to face with someone is 180 degrees different from the behavior you use when you’re prospecting or cold calling.

It is a game. You have to be tenacious. The game is cat and mouse. They are the mouse. You are the cat. Our job as sellers is to pursue those people to force our foot into the door to find a way to get face to face with them. And as a result, you have to look at prospecting as a game.



ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN offers a full range of selling skills courses to help you sell better.

Read more here: http://zehrenfriedman.com/skills-training/sales


Joe Friedman

Joe has over 20 years experience in sales, training, and consulting. Selling and delivering training is Joe’s passion. Joe’s career path has taken him from the faculty at Northeastern Illinois University to First Chicago, to another training firm before joining his friend David (who kept calling, and calling, and calling) to form ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN.

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