The Complete Manual for Humanizing Your Sales Approach
Benefits of Personal Selling
You have an advantage if you sell yourself. A staggering 92% of consumers demand a customized experience. Furthermore, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from businesses who excel at customization.
It should not be surprising that personal selling has a number of important benefits. This encompasses the subsequent items.
It is possible to establish solid relationships.
You may establish trust and solid client connections by communicating in-depth and individually with each client.
You’re fast to respond to objections.
With a thorough understanding of potential customers’ demands, your sales team may customise responses to any queries, worries, or objections they may encounter. In the end, this might encourage them to make a purchase.
You are able to determine needs and provide assistance.
You can more accurately determine the demands of prospects when you take the personal, one-on-one approach. This covers their objectives and the reasons behind their interest in your offering. Then you can provide the appropriate kind of assistance.
Higher success rates are possible.
Your salespeople have a 50% higher chance of closing a deal for a third of the price of conventional techniques when they have a personal relationship.
Churn can be decreased.
Developing a solid rapport with your clients increases the likelihood that you will meet their demands and foster loyalty. They are less likely to depart as a result.
Stronger relationships and higher levels of loyalty and trust are the result of deeper connections. Your consumers will reward you with their business and recommendations if you demonstrate your concern for them.
The Drawbacks of Personal Selling
There aren’t many drawbacks to personal selling. It’s a procedure that usually gives organizations more benefits than drawbacks.
Having said that, it’s a good idea to be aware of any potential problems your team may face.
Personal selling requires a lot of resources.
Research can require up to six hours per week, which is why personal selling may initially appear more costly. Still, the return frequently justifies the initial outlay.
It takes time to succeed.
Reaching out to as many prospects as you can in a little amount of time could result in more sales right away than personal selling. On the other hand, the customized aspect of personal selling results in longer-lasting connections and a greater close rate.
It’s possible that your pool is smaller.
Although representatives are unable to contact a big number of individuals at once, they spend time in the process discovering qualified leads who are a suitable fit.
As you may have noticed, these disadvantages typically result in more benefits and favorable outcomes.
Consider it this way: While personal selling can be costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming, these aspects also ensure that representatives are building solid, reliable connections with qualified leads. These leads have a higher probability of becoming paying clients and remaining for a long-term collaboration.
Let’s now go over a typical method of approaching the personal selling process and its components.
There are seven equally significant steps in the personal selling process. In the end, this results in increased close rates and customer happiness since it helps your sales force better understand and service your prospects and clients.
Get these 101 inquiries to pose to contacts during the qualifying, closing, negotiating, and upselling processes.
1. Making introductions
The process of personal selling begins with identifying potential clients, sometimes referred to as prospects or leads.
Inbound marketing, cold calling, in-person networking, and internet research on social media sites like LinkedIn are some methods of prospecting.
The lead qualification phase of the prospecting stage is crucial. Recall that the main goal of personal selling is to assist your clients in discovering solutions. But not everybody is suitable to be a client.
You’ll maximize your time if you try to learn as much as you can about your prospects before making a call. Additionally, you’ll show that you’ve done your homework.
Lead qualification takes time, but it’s time well spent. When sales representatives fail to qualify leads, they lose two thirds of the sales.
In order to reduce customer churn and prevent wasting valuable time and resources on prospects who have little to no chance of becoming customers, you must qualify your leads.
To learn how to create a lead qualification framework for your sales and marketing teams, take a look at our free Sales Enablement course.
2. The preliminary approach
Your sales team should get ready to follow up with any leads they have found through prospecting during the pre-approach phase.
Pre-approach usually entails a thorough investigation of the prospect, the industry, and his or her enterprise via the internet. Creating and rehearsing a prospect-specific sales presentation is another aspect of this phase.
3. Method
During this phase, the sales team should reach out, introduce themselves, and strike up a conversation with a potential customer. This could take place over the phone, over video, over email, or in person.
Gaining a deeper understanding of the prospect and being aware of their requirements, issues, and desires is the ultimate aim of the approach stage. In order to determine whether and how your solution may address their pain points, your sales team should concentrate on asking questions at this phase.
You may better adapt your presentation to meet their unique needs by using the information you gather from those queries.
4. Display
Your sales staff shares your product or service during the presentation phase.
Using the data acquired during the pre-approach and approach phases, your sales team should concentrate on how your solution helps the prospect throughout the presentation. By doing this, you may make sure the presentation is pertinent to the prospect’s needs.
To equip your sales staff with an effective presentation that will help convert leads into customers, download this free handbook.
5. Managing Objects
A prospect is probably going to have concerns and queries at this stage of the personal sales process. It’s the job of your sales team to correct any misconceptions, handle any objections, and answer any questions — without seeming pushy or losing trust.
The purpose of this stage isn’t to change a prospect’s mind or force them to buy. On the contrary, it’s simply to learn more about how to best help the prospect reach a solution.
If your prospect doesn’t reach out with any questions, encourage your team to follow up to see how they can help.
6. Finishing
After overcoming any objections and barriers to the sale, your team should try to finalize the sale — otherwise known as “closing” the deal. This stage involves settling any negotiations, payments, invoices, contracts, or paperwork to wrap up the deal.
7. Follow-up
The final stage of the personal selling process is to follow up. Here, your sales team contacts the customer after a sale to ensure they’re having a great experience and receive effective onboarding.
This stage is important because it allows your sales team to maintain customer relationships. This can secure future renewals and upgrades.
Following up also gives you insights into potential challenges and allows you to connect customers with your service team if necessary. Customer service is critical.
90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company.
80% of American consumers will switch providers because of poor customer service.
89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
More importantly, happy customers become brand advocates who refer you to their friends and colleagues. And not only are people 92% more likely to trust referrals, but up to 87% of marketers and sales reps agree that referrals are the strongest leads.
For that very reason, you might say that there’s an eighth step — asking for referrals. This should be part of your ongoing follow-up process. Because you want to ensure customer satisfaction before asking for a referral, it remains part of the seventh step.
Now, we’ll review some strategies you can incorporate into your personal selling process to make the most of your efforts.
Personal selling can be a complicated job. Here are some personal selling strategies to help diversify the way your team approaches selling to customers.
1. Be natural and personable.
The first thing your sales reps are selling is themselves. If a prospect doesn’t like a rep, they won’t trust anything they say.
Encourage your team to ask questions and build two-sided relationships. Having greater connections and natural conversations allows you to show empathy, all while opening the door to sharing success stories and building trust.
2. Remember your buyer personas.
As your team prospects and qualifies leads, ensure they remember your organization’s buyer personas. If your company typically targets customers with a certain budget or team size, don’t waste time working with leads outside of those specifications.
Salespeople often make the mistake of trying to sell to anyone and everyone. However, by focusing on nurturing good-fit leads, they’re 50% more likely to make the sale, and at 33% lower costs.
3. Ask the customer plenty of questions.
Your team should listen more than they talk. They won’t know how to help and sell to customers if they don’t know their questions or concerns.
Also, encourage reps to ask questions about what motivates prospects. Here, you can learn what features match your prospects’ goals and needs.
4. Focus on end benefits, not product features.
Once your team learns about what your prospect needs, have reps focus on explaining how the prospect will benefit from your offering.
Consider making a list of all the benefits your product offers. This can help you paint a picture of how you can help customers. This preparation will help your reps talk with your customers instead of talking at them.
5. Personally address any customer concerns.
As your team works with potential customers, they should consider themselves personal advocates. If prospects have any concerns or questions, your reps should do their best to personally address each objection.
This builds trust with prospects and moves them closer to purchase. After all, 88% of customers say trust is the most important thing, even in times of change.
6. Ask for the sale.
Fourty-eight percent of sales calls end without an attempt to close it — which decreases the likelihood of success.
Your team should ask for the sale after you address any concerns or objections. Research and test various closing phrases to see what comes naturally to your sales team.
7. Follow up after purchase.
Your relationship with your customers doesn’t end once they buy your product or service. The simple act of following up can be a differentiator. In fact, 48% of salespeople never follow up.
Following up with customers (via phone, email, or in person) keeps the relationship alive.
8. Consider using email tracking software.
Personal selling involves a great deal of tailored communication and interactions with leads and prospects. Email tracking software can alert your team when potential customers open their emails so they know who’s interested and who to follow up with to stay top-of-mind.
While 88% of people are more likely to respond to personalized emails, knowing how many times each email is opened gives you strong indications about how interested people are, even if they don’t respond.
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