Digital Selling and Sales Training Journal

What is a sales cycle definition What is a sales cycle? Let us begin by explaining what is a sales cycle and why it is a critical component of any sales strategy. A sales cycle is a map that lays out the step-by-step process that salespeople will follow that maximizes the possibility of a sale.  They can be long (in enterprise sales a year is not unusual) or short (in transactional selling it can be less than 30 minutes). It is the roadmap for a salesperson as they undertake sales activity because it guides them along the path to reach their end destination. Most sales cycles are aligned to the buyer’s journey that a customer follows to buy a product. Understanding the Sales Cycle When sales activity is broken into steps, a business can gather information on where customers enter or leave the buying journey. The success of each step becomes

  Sales techniques examples for an ever changing world to which all salespeople now find themselves selling into. We know that sale success is a based on two main things, hard sale skills, like product knowledge, and soft sale skills, which are harder to define. There is no doubt that selling today is highly competitive. Customers are more demanding than ever and even getting their attention is a huge challenge. Advancements in technology have made it so that customers can buy the products they need without you, or they can buy them from someone else without ever even leaving their office. So, every salesperson has to try to differentiate themselves. This means the needs and goals of any sales professional should be secondary to the needs of the customer. But first, maybe a good starting point to is try and define what sales means today. What Is Sales? Selling means exchanging value for value. The basic rule of selling is that people do not buy products; they buy benefits

Selling techniques are a moveable feast, to keep pace with the dynamic change in the selling environment as digital channels overtake traditional B2B sales methods. The role of a salesperson is to be effective, so your sales activity facilitates the decision making for the customer.  To do this, you must be able to. Open meaningful conversations with a customer. Understand the business issues of the customer. Help customers to understand these issues. Build an effective solution. Link your solution to the identified issues. Change Your Mindset in your Selling Techniques Before you work on your selling techniques, consider changing your perception of what it means to be in sales today. Sales techniques are not about picking up the phone or sending LinkedIn messages to people you know nothing or little about. Selling is about the exchange of real value, if you have real value to offer so

Sales Tactics for real selling Most sales tactics today are directed by the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) business world that we have to sell into. There are the new rules that will reshape many of the components of selling, from prospecting, to sales conversations, to closing and building relationships. The future of sales tactics is to be insight driven and to be built on a platform of data, information, and knowledge. This will provide a better understanding of trends, relations, and processes to manage all stakeholder experiences, both the digitally-driven sales team and the digital-age buyer. Interact with your customers like a friend. Your intention is to listen, understand, guide, and help them. With the growth of the digital age, the art of selling has become a bit more complicated. Salespeople are now encouraged to use adaptive selling, meaning that they adapt their sales approach to that specific customer, a process that involves a per

Selling Skills To Master There are a multitude of selling skills to master to navigate your way into today’s selling environment. The critical skills in selling you need to develop include, Listening, Asking Questions, Using OPEN Question Selling, Prospecting/Networking, Establishing Rapport, FAB (simulation), Handling Objections, and Closing. Listening Selling Skills There is no point in asking the right questions unless you listen to the answers. Listening to the client will allow you to: Find out exactly what they want. What the most important issues are for the client. How they expect to be dealt with. Listening actively to your client brings with it several advantages: Better understanding, Increased ability to respond, Makes the client feel important, Build a rapport, Reduces the chance of conflict, Builds relationships and Learning. Why We Listen Badly! There are several reasons, including: Lack of interest, Prejudice and pr

Sales skills for the digital era requires a change in both mindset and skill application. We know that selling is not getting any easier. Hard to reach buyers will only rethink their current position or reset established buying needs, when given some compelling reasons to change. For salespeople to improve selling opportunities they need to apply a level of research that creates valid reasons for any buyer to listen to them. Time is in short supply; they need to understand buyer motives. What is the likely cause of their pain, what would they want to gain plus what value can they bring, to open the buyer to change? All this before even contacting the buyer! Sales skills true meaning is the ability to get a buyer to listen, open genuine sales conversations and recognizing if they have a true motivation to change. Then we can start aligning presentations and solutions to match their needs. Paradoxically, research shows that too much choice or information in sales proc

Implementing sales best practices for successful selling should not only lead to higher levels of sales performance but also in more loyal customers. They are a set of guidelines baked into the DNA of the business to help the sales team run effectively and efficiently. We all accept that the digital era has demanded a shift in the way salespeople sell. Even a small SaaS monthly subscription can have multiple decision makers and extended sales cycle. Then the sales teams have to be active in multi-channel selling, overcome the barrier buyer, changing business needs, and prospects who are increasingly well-informed. Sales leaders today seem to have more questions than answers. No article could cover the topics to help build your sales plans. However, here are our sales best practices that just might help: Sales Best Practices. Create a customer journey. These are all the stages and touch points to which a customer passes through in th