Selling is a science, and it doesn't just refer to a simple transaction, or a response to the quality of a product or service. Sales is who you are and what you have to do with your success. Because selling is about how much you're willing to take responsibility and help others. So it's not just a profession, it's a philosophy of life.
The attitude of the sales is very important, and the idea before the sales event is the key to the success or failure of the project. If you just want to try your luck, then the chances of getting that order drop significantly. A sales attitude is about whether you are passionate, ready to work, understand the context of the project and know the details of all parties involved in the transaction. Do you keep a record of each visit and review it regularly to look for areas for further improvement?
Jeffrey Gitmer, a well-known American writer in the field of sales (9 books), speaker and trainer, defines sales as follows: "Sales is a science, a skill that can be Xi. People who you think are born to be salespeople have worked hard to develop the qualities of a salesperson. Eventually, they mastered the science of sales and put it into practice. Mr. Gitmer has written 750 best-selling books on the list. He edited and published an electronic magazine, Sales Caffeine, which has 250,000 subscribers worldwide.
I have been in sales or managing sales for twenty-eight years. In this process, I have some experience or lessons, and I have also come into contact with a large number of sales elites. I summarized their experience and my own experience into a six-step sales process to share with you, namely: discover customers, understand customers, learn Xi products, provide products, close deals, and manage customers.
Step 1: Prospect for customers.
How to find customers, I suggest you consider three aspects.
a) Customer attractiveness. It can be analyzed from the past and future growth rate of the client and the industry, the size of the enterprise, the intensity of competition, the expected amount of investment, the profitability of the industry and the strategic importance of many other aspects. By asking this client, has the business grown rapidly in the past? What is the annual sales revenue of this industry or this business? Is there a lot of competition in this industry? Do you have a lot of peers serving this customer? Has this customer been profitable in the past? What is the overall profitability of the client's industry? What is the strategic importance of this business or this customer in the market segment?
Doing business in China requires not only a long-term vision, but also a meticulous layout, hoping that the company can develop steadily for a long time. So as a salesperson, you need to do an important thing, which is to carefully study Xi national and first-class policy documents. Taking the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China as an example, in the section on "Adhering to the Harmonious Coexistence of Man and Nature", the report pointed out that "we must establish and practice the concept that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets, adhere to the basic national policy of saving resources and protecting the environment, and treat the ecological environment like life." "This means that Honeywell will integrate its resources to provide customers with complete and effective solutions to build a better home together. The report also mentions that "China's economy has shifted from a high-speed growth stage to a high-quality development stage, and is in a critical period of transforming the development mode, optimizing the economic structure, and transforming the growth momentum. Quality must be adhered to.
First, benefit first". It can be seen from the report that there will be the following changes in the future: first, the economic structure will be more optimized, and quality and efficiency will become more important; The second is high quality and high price, and the future bidding will not only consider the first, but also the quality. Because the report emphasizes "quality first."
First, benefit first". We hope that you will spend more time Xi these reports to find sales opportunities, explore the future direction of the company, and seek a common language between us and our customers, especially the top management of our customers.
2) Another key point in customer discovery is positioning. As a senior salesperson, we must not only understand our own products, services and solutions, but also have an in-depth understanding of the correspondence between our products and services and customers' own needs. Does the customer only purchase once a year, or once a month? The easiest way to do this is to find out how much money the business currently has. Some customers are not afraid of the most expensive when purchasing, they pay more attention to the uniqueness of the brand and products or services, and value whether the products and services we provide can bring them considerable economic benefits.
3) Customer DiscoveryThe last point to pay attention to is which customers you want to identify have development potential. Know what their preferences are? Do they have the right to make decisions about purchasing, or just the right to suggest, whether they have the right to use the product. These are all key points that you should pay special attention to in the customer prospecting process.
What are the channels for customer discovery? Taking the Process Control Division of Honeywell's Performance Materials & Technologies Group as an example, we can refer to the following places to find target customers: domestic and foreign design institutes, existing customers, major investment projects in various places, etc. Understand what existing customers are saying about using current products and services. If the user experience is good, then can you recommend it for us, is there a chance to cooperate again? There are a number of associations in all regions and industries; Now "omnipotent" networks, project libraries, distributors, business schools, alumni associations, hometown associations, WeChat groups, LinkedIn and so on. In a word, as long as you look for potential customers, development opportunities, and development projects, you will always find a variety of information to match.
The second step is to understand the customer.
It is important to understand the customer's motivations. People don't like to be sold, but they like to buy. The role of a sales worker is to help a customer make a purchase decision. When it comes to sales, figuring out what motivates customers to buy is more important than sales skills. Think in terms of the customer's buying needs, not the sales needs. Capturing the customer's motivation to buy also captures the key to sales and the core of their desire to buy. We can discover the motivations of our customers by asking questions and making observations. You can start by understanding the brands of products and services your customers are using now. Pay attention to whether customers are satisfied with the current products and services. Clarify the amount of the customer's last purchase and find out when the customer needs the same type of products and services. Find a way to find out who your customers generally listen to when they buy. Find out if the customer has the technical strength to install and operate the product and service themselves. In addition to this, it is also good to know how long the customer has been with this company? What does he personally say about the company? Is he a ** person? What are your hobbies? In short, there are many details to be done to understand the customer, which can be started from different aspects: such as the customer's budget, preferences, financial strength, position, decision-making process, customer assessment indicators, procurement strategy, customer personality characteristics, psychological activity changes and the customer's organizational structure.
First of all, it is necessary to understand the company status of the enterprise customer. Is there any money? How much money is there? Because our customers' budgets largely determine our sales. Second, it is important to understand whether the customer is a herd mentality, or whether they are independent and assertive. Third, we must have an in-depth understanding of the customer's assessment indicators, and only by being familiar with what the customer is mainly assessed, can we have the opportunity to guide the customer's needs. Now, more and more enterprises are beginning to pay attention to whether there are potential safety hazards in equipment and facilities; For example, in the event of an emergency such as a fire, can employees evacuate quickly in a short period of time? More and more customers pay attention to environmental protection, care about the sales market of final products, and assume corporate social responsibility. These are all things to consider and understand before we do sales.
Also, as a salesperson, you need to prepare five to ten questions before visiting a customer. For example, when visiting a client's office, you should find something different in his office and comment on it, and quickly find one or two common topics to get closer to the customer. As salesmen, we can't expect to get an order on the first visit, but we always have to think about leaving a common topic to talk about for the next visit.
Jeffrey Gitmer has a book called The Selling Bible. There is a lot of easy-to-understand sales knowledge in the book. For example, what to Xi, what to understand, what knowledge and skills to master, and what sales activities to engage in. In the book, Gitmer mentions that customers are also human beings and have desires, such as the desire to survive, possessiveness, they have passions, vanity, and worries. Then when we contact customers, we must understand them purposefully. What do they need? What to worry about? Why worry? What are the risk concerns? This is also the information you need to know before doing a customer visit.
Step 3 Learn Xi product.
Not only be familiar with the performance of the product itself, but also have insight into the technology, services, channels, solutions, and installation and service of the product. As salespeople, we need to learn Xi the products and services offered by our company. Employees of Honeywell should understand the history and characteristics of Honeywell, what products we produce, what services we provide, what core technologies we have, and what major events we are closely related to.
When introducing Honeywell, I like to use the numbers one, two, three, four. One is a high-tech store of more than 100 years, one of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 in the United States, with a market value of more than 100 billion US dollars. Second, there are more than 20,000 R&D personnel, of which more than half are software developers, showing the company's emphasis on technology development, and this "two" character highlights the company's commitment to high-tech and high-quality; Third, Honeywell has entered the Chinese market as early as the thirties, providing a variety of products, technologies and high-quality services for China's development. This "three" character emphasizes the company's inextricable historical relationship with the Chinese market. Fourth, Honeywell has four major business groups, namely Performance Materials and Technology Group, Aerospace Group, Intelligent Building and Home Group, and Safety and Productivity Solutions Group. From airplanes, homes, buildings, manufacturing plants, chains to workers, our technology is committed to the Internet of Everything, creating a smarter, safer and more sustainable world, and this "four" word describes the company's main business.
We need to understand not only our own company's products and services, but also the characteristics of our competitors' products and services. In our Performance Materials & Technologies Group, for example, 60% of the world's gasoline is refined with UOP technology, and 50% of refineries use Process Control technology and products. We successfully developed refrigerants in the thirties of the last century. Intel and TSMC are both our customers. In the 70s, Nixon** brought the only petrochemical company with him on his first visit to China was Honeywell's UOP. The pressure swing adsorption hydrogen purification technology of the UOP department can extract up to 99 purityMore than 9% high-purity hydrogen. Pressure swing adsorption technology was invented by UOP in the sixties of the last century, and UOP also invented 9999% high-purity adsorbents, thousands of companies in the world use UOP's pressure swing adsorption technology. The ultra-low nitrogen combustion technology in the process control department is PM2Nemesis of 5. At present, severe pollution has a bad impact on people's lives, and the main culprit of pollution is nitrogen oxides. The process control division's ultra-low nitrogen combustion technology can be used in industrial and commercial boiler combustion, which not only ensures single-digit levels of nitrogen oxides, but also improves combustion efficiency, saves 2-3% of fuel, and helps customers pay for their investment sooner. The research chemicals division Fluka's product "Hydranal", which is used for the volumetric and coulometric water titration of chemicals, has the widest application in the laboratories of companies in the world, and is certified according to ISO 17025 and ISO 34, the highest standard for chemical certification. In addition, hydranal is the least toxic titration product. It is widely used in petrochemical industry, oil refinery, paper mill, steel mill, etc. It can be said that as long as there is a laboratory, there is a market for this product.
It is necessary to understand what country, industry, enterprise standards and other requirements are in the customer's industry. Based on the needs of your customers, you can list your products, services, and solutions in a targeted manner.
The fourth step is to provide products, emphasizing differentiation and uniqueness while considering the first, value, service, and practicality.
Because the market in which we operate is highly competitive and at the same time our customers are increasingly emphasizing individuality. There are apples in the picture, they are all apples, but one apple is different, the others are all green, it is red, and this is the difference. If in a pile of apples, we put a pear, this is also the difference. If there is a group of competitors who offer the same product, we need to consider the differentiation and uniqueness of our own products. How do we do this as salespeople? This requires the cooperation of sales, technical service, and product departments. We not only understand the needs of our customers, but also understand the products and services that our competitors can offer, so that we can recommend the products that best meet our customers' needs.
The fifth step is to reach an agreement. There are several precautions to reach an agreement: (1) Reaching an agreement requires the customer's purchase and our sales to be negotiated together. In addition to **, payment, delivery date, place of delivery, service, training, packaging, transportation, etc. are all negotiated conditions. A good sales person will put these things together. And inexperienced sales often give the lowest ** to the customer first, then accept the customer's most demanding payment method, and finally leave the most stringent delivery time to themselves. These conditions seem simple, but in fact, they are not easy to talk about, and there are hidden traps at every step. In terms of delivery location, if the customer is located in Hainan or Xinjiang, and our production base is in East China, and you agree to deliver to your door, it will lead to two results. On the one hand, it increases costs, and on the other hand, there may be deviations in the recognition of sales revenue. Assuming that the product leaves the factory on the 30th or 31st, the sales revenue of this batch of goods cannot be included in the current month. After negotiating**, payment method and delivery method (ex-works or CIF price), the customer asked for a professional to come to the training for free or extend the warranty period. Can these requirements be met? Of course, you can, but it will increase the cost.
Sales work also involves invoice matters, including the name of the company on the invoice and the date of delivery. When is the sale agreement completed? Is the contract signed, the advance payment received, and the shipment of the goods completed? Or do you want to deliver the goods to the customer's site, install and debug until the service is completed and the customer is satisfied, which is the end? Or do you also need to consider after-sales service and product upgrading in the future? We don't want our salespeople to misunderstand that the contract is signed and the project is over. There are so many things that need to be carefully considered. Because the slightest dissatisfaction of the customer, there are competitors who are eyeing us and ready to seize our orders and customers at any time.
This article is from *** Sales Director Information (non-profit organization; CSO Information; Assist sales practitioners to better engage in business development).