News - A Commentary on Effective Sales Techniques in a Service Economy

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A Commentary on Effective Sales Techniques
in a Service Economy

Remember. people judge you on your behavior, and we judge
ourselves on our intentions. Put yourself in the other person's shoes.
- Harry Pappas, Jr.

To be a successful salesperson in the modern service-driven economy requires many skills - product knowledge, execution, and follow-through among others. Chief among the required skills, however, is the ability to communicate, and by extension the ability to engender trust with customers. When selling any product, especially an intangible, and most especially a personal and confidential one such as insurance or a financial instrument, the salesperson is selling himself as a representative of that intangible. Securing the customer's purchase is as much about the relationship with the salesperson as it is about the intangible itself. Successful selling is a three-step process: first, sell yourself; then sell your company; and then sell your product.

The four key ingredients to successful selling are product knowledge, a focus on customer needs/wants, a passion for what you do and sell, and good communication skills. At The Latimer Group, we group and label these four ingredients as selling the product implicitly, as opposed to selling the product explicitly.

The implicit salesperson projects that he or she is more concerned with the customer's need than with closing the sale. The explicit salesperson is driven solely by making the sale, regardless of the projection. The salesperson who consistently brings an implicit sales approach to their work, will build trust and loyalty with his customers. Effective, implicit selling is NOT about catch phrases, slick verbal maneuvers or the ability to corner your potential customer into a sale. It is about identifying the customer need and then finding a solution to fill that need.

At The Latimer Group, we are focused on the third and fourth key ingredients of sales success - developing and conveying passion with strong communication skills. We can encourage the other ingredients - product knowledge and a customer focus - but we actively work to build the third and fourth.

Most of us tend to think of public speaking skills as the ability to stand up in front of a group, using a microphone. However, good public speaking skills manifest themselves much more often in small interactions - a meeting in a small conference room, a discussion over lunch or coffee, even while speaking on the phone. Good public speaking skills can and do translate into excellent small group communications skills and are critical to sales growth.

At The Latimer Group, sales training consists of the following:

Developing and harnessing passion for what you do or sell;
Organizing the sales story so that it makes sense and is compelling;
Communicating that sales story clearly and succinctly.

The result of this approach is a more successful, more motivated, and more fulfilled salesperson which will inherently make a more productive and better employee.

There are some aspiring salespeople who just won't make it, but we have found that most salespeople have latent capabilities and untapped potential. We can increase confidence and encourage our clients to trust who they are, what they have to say and what they are selling. We point our clients in the correct direction and help their sales staff focus on selling themselves as honest and authentic people first, before they focus on selling the valuable product or service that they provide.

This sales philosophy is central to how we approach our own client relationships at The Latimer Group, and also to the way we conduct sales training sessions with our clients.

______________________
Dean M. Brenner
President
January, 2003

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