Finding Your Sales Bones

About the Book

Learn the secrets of growing your company, increasing your sales, marketing effectiveness, and adding to the bottom line without increasing your labor costs.

Learn how to recognize the kinds of employee personalities that you can utilize in increasing sales.

Learn how to train non sales types in the art of sales. Recognize how a sales person looks and acts?

Learn how to spot sales acumen in your organization. Good sales personality traits - what are they?

Persistence and paitience are the bywords.

The individual roles of marketing and sales.

The types of employees that can help you make sales?

Training the non sales type to make a sale. Order takers versus selling.

Relationship selling.

Building a group to aid in sales.

The most important factors in selling.

Overselling the great deal killer.

Reselling your customer.

About the Author

Mr. Stern spent over 30 years in Corporate America as a Senior Executive. While not a sales professional and not primarily responsible for company sales, he was continually challenged to increase his company's growth.

The methods and techniques described in the book were born out of innovative efforts to add to the bottom line without continually increasing costs. His success was a testament to the problems encountered in these efforts and the creative methods and solutions employed to achieve his goals.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

In today's competitive business environment one of the greatest challenges for many businesses is how to position themselves to increase sales and promote growth. The primary frustration many business owners or executives have is that their people are stuck in the old way of thinking or in the old way of doing business. This frequently happens in the sales department.

Often, sales people will function more as order takers than as proactive sales consultants. In order to solve your customer's problems you have to be willing to consult with them, not just sell them.

You may hear your sales people say that sales are down because the company is not advertising enough. Maybe you've even said it yourself.

Advertising is important and when done effectively, it can be a part of a good marketing mix. However, far too many sales people rely on the advertising to make the sale for them.

Selling is not just an action, it is an art. It is the art of building relationships and solving your customer's problems. It is also the art of understanding your customers' or clients' concerns.

Today's turbulent economy has spurred a number of changes that affect the ways that managers manage, train, and motivate their sales forces. Perhaps the most important trend is the tension created by corporate down sizing and the increasing need of customers to maintain a stronger relationship with their suppliers.

While sales managers must contain costs, they must also increase the sales force's ability to cultivate relationships and gather strategic information. Sales training budgets are being slashed reducing the ability of sales managers to communicate goals, to produce strategies and utilize the necessary resources. Meanwhile, there is a demand to decrease sales cycles dramatically. Customers are also demanding more personal quality service.

Market shifts have sales managers finding themselves managing several channels of delivery. Salespeople have to become jacks of many trades.

Just mention the sales process and the heart rate jumps. It evokes sweaty palms and you can almost see the words "Oh no, I can't" form on the person's lips.

Is the economic sales slump we are experiencing just due simply to a lack of sales? Or, is it a lack of talent? Is it poor management?

Do we have the sales talent to meet both our short-term and long-term goals?

Which of our sales people are under-performing, under-qualified or wrong hires? If we don't have the talent, where and how will we get it?

Since the beginning of time, people have been selling one thing or another to each other. Almost all of us have a God-given sales talent to a greater or lesser degree. The sales process is a necessary component to survival.

The traits that make a good sales personality have changed little over the millenniums. Basic sales techniques have changed even less during these modern technological times.

The traits that make a good sales person are the same now as they were fifty or one hundred years ago. One of the intentions of this book is to remind you about these valuable sales traits which are inherent in many non-sales resources.

You must learn to recognize hidden sales talent. You can discover it in almost all employees. On the other hand, you must also learn to recognize the types of employees who can hurt your best sales efforts.

There is an enormous amount of sales skills in your organization and it is not only located in your sales group. There are many personalities in your current staff who possess valuable sales traits. You can use these non-sales types in almost every facet of the sale. Sometimes these innate skills can be honed with only a modest amount of training.

Many of your employees or co-workers have the ability to form lasting relationships. This is an overlooked but essential selling tool. Utilizing this hidden talent in your organization will allow you to expand sales to new customers, and keep selling your current clients.

In this book I will show you how to recognize the personality traits that help and hurt in a sales activity.

Getting to know the skills, abilities, interests, and the personality factors it takes to be effective and successful in sales is only a casual undertaking in many companies.

This book was written to help companies increase their ability to sell without spending the additional dollars usually associated with that increase. I will show you how to utilize your existing staff to make the selling of your product and or service more efficient. I will also show you how to use your non-sales staff to both build and foster relationships as well as increase sales to existing customers.

Let's face it. All of us are sales people to some degree. Whether it's a husband selling his wife on that expensive sports car or it is a wife selling her husband on that new sofa that would look so nice in their living room. You must sell your boss to get that much deserved raise. You convince a co-worker to do something your way. These are all act of sales!

It starts early in our lives. We convince our parents we need money. We convince our teachers that our grade should be higher. We convince an employer that we would be a good hire. Some of us are just better at it than others. But the ability is there in all of us.

So why not harness that sometimes hidden talent to benefit your organization?