As he asked for another from the bartender that thought a Commodore 64 was an old car, I realized that Bill was right on the money; we can\u2019t forget about how we got here.\u00a0\u00a0 No, it wasn\u2019t a discussion about creation versus evolution and it had nothing to do with me forgetting how to get home from a state (physical not mental) seventeen to the left of New Jersey.\u00a0 It was a discussion about sales.<\/p>\n
Bill is a 40+ year old sales professional in an industry that has gone through a lot of change.\u00a0 He and his lovely wife are raising three great kids in a small, family friendly Midwestern town where the nearest airport is 45 minutes away and it takes two connections to get anywhere (I saw the pictures on his battered and bruised iPhone that looked as though he used it as a door jam; twice).\u00a0 Bill prided himself on his past success and while not completely happy with the commissions he earned this year, he knew he earned every penny he was paid.<\/p>\n
So, here he and I were.\u00a0 Two lonesome sales professionals on the road eating food only reserved for those carb loading before the Boston marathon and telling tall tales about our sales success when we got on the topic of social media and its impact on our professional lives.\u00a0 We both agreed that social media has, and will continue to have, a huge impact on our profession.\u00a0 But the point of our discussion was not to convince one another the virtues of social media but rather what\u2019s next, and not what\u2019s next in the philosophical world reserved for those who are smarter than I.\u00a0 Rather, the discussion was on what\u2019s actually the next step in the sales process once a potential customer reads our brilliant blogs and sees our wickedly luminous soliloquies on Facebook.<\/p>\n
The answer, he and I both agreed, was from both of our pasts; professional consultative selling.\u00a0 Now more than ever, professional consultative sales skills are the key to sales success.\u00a0 Bill and I were both unanimous in our opinion that while consumers have a greater thirst for and access to information than ever before in the history of our industries, they need us to be the best that we have ever been to help them the way they want to be helped.\u00a0 Our potential customers are reading our blogs, viewing our posts, pondering our tweets with the need to find the sales person that they feel will help them.<\/p>\n
Is this a new notion? No, but we\/I tend to forget.\u00a0 What are professional consultative selling skills?\u00a0 There are numerous books written by scholars of varying backgrounds from a variety of industries \u2013 but nearly every book will describe how people desire to work with a sales professional that understands their wants and needs, has a strong working knowledge of the product and market they serve, and above all else, listens to what they (as the customer) have to say.<\/p>\n
Together, Bill and I have apparently read every sales book written since the break-up of Pangea (go ahead and Google it,) and came up with three distinct chronological sales milestones that we both agreed are necessary to ensure success.<\/p>\n
#1:\u00a0 Building Rapport \u2013 <\/strong>once your customer finds you through the many social media outlets, always keep in mind that most people like doing business with someone who understands their needs.\u00a0 How do you find out their needs?\u00a0 Ask the correct open-ended questions.\u00a0 Rudyard Kipling once wrote; \u201cI know six honest serving men that have taught me all that I knew\u2026.their names were what, where, when, why, how and who.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n #2: Sharing Expertise \u2013<\/strong> knowledge is a powerful edge in sales.\u00a0 But applying your knowledge to what you learned about your customers\u2019 needs during your rapport building is the difference between your customer believing that they made the correct choice when they selected you, or not.\u00a0 And finding customers is too hard and expensive for it to be a \u201cnot\u201d.<\/p>\n #3:\u00a0 Gaining commitment \u2013 <\/strong>asking for the sale is absolutely appropriate and the right thing to do for your customer to help them think through their final decision if you performed the first two milestones correctly.\u00a0 If you missed on the first two milestones, you don\u2019t know how to continue to build value and are left talking only about price; which always seem to move inversely to income!<\/p>\n When last call came, Bill looked right at me and said, \u201cwell, this was boring!\u201d\u2026\u2026\u2026.. and then said \u201cthis all kind of reminds about that movie with that guy driving that car that went back in time.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing \u2013 with all the new tools we use \u2013 we always come back to what we learned in the beginning: sales success requires professional consultative sales skills.\u00a0 We can\u2019t forget how we got here.\u201d<\/p>\n What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As he asked for another from the bartender that thought a Commodore 64 was an old car, I realized that Bill was right on the money; we can\u2019t forget about how we got here.\u00a0\u00a0 No, it wasn\u2019t a discussion about creation versus evolution and it had nothing to do with me forgetting how to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":181,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,61],"tags":[1351,3341,4831,5721,5761,8821,9441,10561,13711,13961,14041,15871,16951,20671,20891,21741,23081,27031,27371,27901,28811,30841,32331,33041,33841,33981,37411,37601,38671,39481,39691,39901,40221,44281,44381],"class_list":["post-4192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brokerage-operations","category-commentary","tag-agents","tag-bartender","tag-blogs","tag-brokerage-of-the-future","tag-brokers","tag-commitment","tag-consumers","tag-customers","tag-evolution","tag-expertise","tag-facebook","tag-future","tag-google","tag-impact","tag-industry","tag-iphone","tag-knowledge","tag-milestones","tag-mobile-phone","tag-movies","tag-new-jersey","tag-pangea","tag-potential","tag-professionals","tag-rapport","tag-real-estate","tag-rudyard-kipling","tag-sales","tag-selling","tag-skills","tag-smartphone","tag-social-media","tag-social-networking","tag-tweets","tag-twitter"],"yoast_head":"\n