Tool Box
Issue No. 43 - October/November 2008
Sharpen your sales saw
by Craig Stubing
When he wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey reminded us to ‘sharpen the saw’ if we wanted to be effective as a person. In doing so he referred to the need for self-renewal in life generally.
We can borrow his analogy and apply it to the business of selling.
In sales, having a blunt saw results in wasted effort and resources, with sales being lost when they should have been made. This in turn results in decreased profitability and lessening enthusiasm. Unless something is done it can start a serious downward spiral. Whether you are an employee-salesperson or a business-owner-salesperson, if you think that your ‘sales saw’ has got a bit blunt, here are five back-to-basics steps you can take to help sharpen it.
1) Remind yourself of the benefits that your products provide to your customers
Customers don’t buy products or services, they buy the benefits that a product or service provides. If you have been focusing on your product or service when selling to your customers and not focusing on the benefits that your product or service provides, you have been compromising your sales results. An ideal way to fix this is to do, or re-do, a Features and Benefits analysis for each of your major products. Take some sheets of paper - one sheet per product - and draw a vertical line down each sheet so as to give two columns of about the same size. Head the left column of each sheet Features and the right column Benefits. Under the Features heading list, ‘bullet-point’ fashion, the various features of the product; then under the Benefits heading describe the benefits that each of these features provides your customers. Now you can concentrate on talking benefit-speak, not product-speak when talking with prospective customers.
2) Remind yourself of what’s so special about you and your business
This is about knowing and promoting the positive points that set you apart from your competitors; these are your ...
