Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been selling for years, it’s important to remember sales don’t just happen – they are the result of pursuing the right activities at the right time. Keep your selling career on track with this handy checklist of essential sales activities.

Pre-Call Planning

1. Are you talking to qualified prospects?
2. Timing: Are you in front of your prospects when they are ready to buy, not when you need to make a sale?
3. Prospecting: Do you prospect regularly and consistently?
4. Positioning (PDF): Do you define how you want your prospects to perceive you, your organization and your products or services?
5. Gather in-depth data about: your prospect’s business drivers, purchasing process, decision-makers, challenges, problems, organizational structure, and competition.
6. Have you identified key players within your prospect’s organization?
7. Time: Choose your daily activities wisely and treat time like inventory – too valuable to waste.

Meeting with Prospects and Establishing Rapport

8. Confirm your appointment (don’t assume that your prospect will remember your appointment).
9. Double-check for materials (business cards, list of satisfied customers, brochures, pens, notebook, calculator, delivery schedules, etc.).
10. Pay attention to your prospect’s personality/behavior style.
11. Pay attention to non-verbal cues.
12. Credibility: You have only seconds to convince your prospect that time spent with your will be valuable.
13. Don’t start your conversation with unsolicited small talk (PDF).
14. Trust: Do your prospects believe you and your organization are credible and you will deliver on every promise or commitment?

Presenting and Asking Questions

15. Forget about generic product demonstration
16. Choose the most appropriate product or service for each prospect
17. Tailor your presentation to your prospect’s needs and wants
18. Focus on benefits, not on features or price.
19. Clear up any misunderstandings that your prospect may have
20. Don’t confuse your prospect or overwhelm them with too many options
21. Ask the right questions
22. Then listen. Listen actively and take notes.
23. Find out: What he/she will buy, how he/she will buy it, why he/she will buy it, and under what conditions he/she will buy it.
24. Don’t focus on what you want to have happen at the end of your sales call.
25. Instead, focus on what your prospect wants to have happen.
26. Do you get feedback from your prospect and make sure that your presentation is on-target?
27. Don’t make price an issue.
28. Remember: Success in sales is driven by margin and volume.
29. Present price after you create perceived benefits that exceed price and perceived emotional cost.

Closing the Sale

30. Never make a claim you can’t back up with facts.
31. Do you provide testimonials from your customers?
32. Try to involve happy customers with your prospect
33. Convince prospects that what you say is true and that the benefits of your product/service outweigh its price.
34. Handling the details: Try to work out any objections or problems.
35. Don’t give them canned responses to objections
36. After the sale I: Do you tell the prospect they’ve made a wise decision?
37. After the sale II: Do you invite your customer to buy more?
38. After the sale III: Do you service your accounts as enthusiastically as you sell them?
39. Be responsible and accountable for your own sales results.

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In all my years of selling and facilitating (quite a few), one of the things I’ve noticed most consistently about salespeople is that they are so eager to get to the close. We as salespeople have been indoctrinated to believe that sales success is measured only by completed sales. But we could complete more sales by NOT focusing so much on the close.

Stop trying to get there so fast! Getting there quickly means forcing the prospect to make a buying decision based on OUR timetable not theirs – and that simply doesn’t work. We could complete more sales by spending more time — slowing down so we could speed up.

We should spend more time on pre-call planning and formulate powerful questions that would lead us to a prospect’s pain much more quickly and efficiently. We should uncover pressing needs, desires and wishes by spending extra time preparing our questions, and referring to those questions to sell our solutions. After all, isn’t this what our prospects really want?

Investing extra time early in the sales process means having to spend less time later in the sales process – time that’s often spent floundering around in front of the prospect if we haven’t done our homework.

For example, if through my pre-call planning I realize that a prospect is facing certain issues or is likely to be dealing with particular problems, I can develop my questions around these issues or problems. By doing this I focus my sales interview on confirming my information and allowing my prospect to talk to me about his or her situation. The more they talk, the more likely they are to buy (all things being equal).

As I listen to my prospect’s response, I can ask additional questions in a conversational way to demonstrate understanding, empathy, and attention to my prospect’s situation. This enhances trust, rapport and attention and increases the likelihood of closing the sale – which is exactly the goal we set out to achieve!

Submitted by: Richard Dickerson

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Last week we had a fairly large crowd in our Conference Center for the IMPACT Selling Open Seminar – 43 salespeople – all from different industries, different areas of the country and three from the Ukraine. But after spending time with this group of salespeople and countless others over the last 13 years, I’ve noticed 3 mistakes that seem almost universal in selling…

1. Too little research and groundwork to really understand the prospect’s business BEFORE meeting with them
2. Too few probing questions to get the prospect verbalizing their needs and wants
3. And the perennial sales mistake of too much talking and too little listening

All of these problems are symptoms of a larger disease that plagues salespeople and eats away at their ability to succeed – Not focusing on the customer. If you can’t take the time to understand their business, uncover their needs and wants and listen to their concerns, why should your customers and prospects trust you or believe that you have anything valuable to offer?

So here’s my advice: Try taking just 5 more minutes…

• Spend 5 more minutes on research and investigation before meeting your prospect
• Spend 5 more minutes preparing questions that will uncover information you need to make the sale
• Spend 5 more minutes asking questions and listening to your prospect before you jump in speak again

Yes, I know that salespeople often think, “I’m not paid to sit in front of my computer and do research…I’m not paid to hang around listening to prospects yak all day…I’ve got to get in there and sell something and move on to the next one.” That’s why I’m suggesting you take just 5 more minutes in these three key areas – that’s 15 minutes more per sale – invested entirely in focusing on your customer. You’ll be amazed at how well those 15 minutes pay off.

Next Monday, I’ll give you some specific suggestions on how to use those extra 5 minutes to increase your chances of making the sale.

Submitted by: Richard Dickerson

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