A few months ago I spent time training some telephone sales agents who were new to selling. They'd mainly been involved with handling incoming calls but now their company needed them to do some out bound sales calls. I spent two days running a sales workshop for them and another three days coaching them on the job.

The biggest challenge I had was trying to stop them selling. Or at least their idea of what selling is all about.

Many people who are new to sales and also some experienced sales people want to keep talking about their product or service. They open the conversation with one or two general questions which are often irrelevant to the customer and then launch into their sales spiel.

What then happens is that the customer thinks "Oh no, I'm being sold to" and immediately disengages the brain and stops listening. The sales person then has limited success as far as getting a sale is concerned.

My job with these people was to try to get them to stop selling as they knew it. The most important thing in any sales call is to find out what the customer's needs are. The customer won't readily tell you what his or her real needs are so the sales person needs to do some careful probing. Questions need to be asked that are relevant to the customer's needs and relevant to your product or service.

It is often useful to open an outbound sales call with the question "Mr Customer I'm not sure whether we can help you or not, however I would like to ask one or two questions which will establish whether our product would meet your needs and benefit your business, is that OK?"

This statement is perfectly true because, you don't know if your product or service will benefit the customer until you ask him or her some questions about their business. It will also have the effect of relaxing the customer if they feel they're not being sold to and that someone is interested and cares about their situation. If the customer believes this then closing the sale becomes so much easier.

Alan Fairweather

Alan Fairweather is a business development expert who, for the past twenty-seven years, has been turning ?adequate? managers, sales and customer service people into consistent top performers.

After training as an engineer, Alan moved into sales and management and held senior positions in the Electronics, Industrial Supplies, Car maintenance and Drinks Industry.

He?s a qualified Psychotherapist and Hypnotherapist (no, he won?t put you to sleep) and he founded his business as a Professional Speaker in 1993. He works with people and organisations to achieve business results through behavioural change.

Alan has broad experience across many industries and runs seminars and workshops for people in ? Financial Services, Telecommunications, Hospitality, Healthcare, Property Management, Legal, Accountancy, Printing, Media, Computer Hardware and Software.

Results ? That?s what Alan?s about and he?s committed to helping your business find new customers fast, lose fewer customers and win more sales from existing customers.