5 stages of a successful sale: how does the ability to “sell” yourself help to realize the product?

One ​​of our previous articles dealt with the topic of brand promotion, but you won’t get far on it alone if you don’t know how to speak, listen, analyze, or, more simply, that is, directly sell. Speaking of sales in business, a myriad of salesmen with phones in their hands or flocks of consultants on the trading floors immediately come to mind, who pounce on a buyer who has looked at them.

Or imagine an entrepreneur frantically looking for an investor, negotiating a lot, pitching demo days to an endless stream of investment funds. And where else is this skill to sell? Yourself, your product, your company?

For example, when creating a team. After all, not only candidates “sell” themselves at interviews. The company also sells itself as an employer. And the rules in such a sale are exactly the same as those used when selling a product or service to a client.

I think everyone knows these five stages of selling:

• Establish contact.
• Needs identification.
• Formulate the proposal.
• Working with objections.
• Completion of the transaction.

Now let’s take a look – what happens at the interview with the candidate?

• Establish contact. The better the contact is established, the better our candidate will be revealed. The answers to our questions will be detailed and we will get more information from him. Depending on the answers received, we will be able to accurately measure his competence and personal qualities.
• Identification of needs. Each person has different needs, values, and individual motivators. Each candidate has certain criteria for choosing a place of future work. Therefore, the better this is revealed in the interview process, the easier it will be to “sell” the company.
• Formulating a proposal. Selling “what we have” is a thing of the past. Now the sale is carried out according to the principle “we have what you need.” Those who have not rebuilt yet are experiencing serious difficulties in areas where it is necessary to use sales skills.

I’ll tell you a story about an interview in a company that we helped fill a vacancy for a sales manager. The company that filled this vacancy was at that time regional, had an office in Novosibirsk and was just starting to grow, although it was already planning to open a branch in Moscow. And a guy comes for an interview with experience in federal networks, appropriate training and ambitious goals. He looked at the office (decent, by the way, but it is clear that the company is not large), and it immediately became clear that this office did not impress him. Well, there is nothing to do – let’s go to interview on the program, measure competencies, identify needs and motivators.

So, answering the question “What are your goals for the next 3-5 years?”, the guy said that in 3 years he was not going to live in Novosibirsk, but would already be in Moscow. He doesn’t know how yet, but there is such a goal. I think that those who have carefully read the previous couple of paragraphs and have already understood what offer was made to our candidate. Yes, our selling presentation of the company included the needs that he had (like true sellers, during the conversation, the information was recorded on the candidate’s questionnaire). But the key offer, which our candidate, of course, could not refuse, was the announcement of the opening of a branch in Moscow in the next 3 months and that the best salesmen would go there to live and work. And it is clear that the sale took place. What the employer did not regret for a second. So, the better you (or your hiring staff) are at selling technology, the more awesome team you will assemble. What’s the next step?

• Working with objections. Easily! What are the objections if you made an offer that is impossible to refuse? Do you understand what I mean? The better the seller coped with the stage of identifying needs and presenting based on them, the less likely they will be objected to.
• Well, don’t forget to invite the candidates you like to work. We complete the deal.

Thus, we have analyzed the sale of our company at the interview.

Work for the result – quantity and quality

A similar pattern happens, or should happen, if you want to get a result, in other areas of our life, where you want to get something from another person. How to develop these skills if we want to upgrade our business?

And here you need to move in two directions at once: quantitative and qualitative.

• Quantitative indicators are, in fact, how many actions we do. Because skills come only with experience. Learning sales technology will get you nowhere until you start to master it in practice – our knowledge of how to do it right is worthless.

And so that we do not merge with the process and continue to fill our tongues in training, we begin to count and plan our actions. This applies to both entrepreneurs and our employees whom we want to upgrade. Until we start setting specific measurable plans, the process will stall.

• Quality indicators. It’s the learning itself. Moreover, it is advisable to constantly monitor the situation in the market. After all, it’s no secret to anyone that the sales methods that worked a few years ago, today, in a rapidly changing world and with a changing consumer, no longer work.

By the way, it is also desirable to measure quality indicators. With the help of conversion. That is, the ratio of the number of negotiations conducted to the number of successful transactions.

For example, you, as a novice entrepreneur-producer of healthy cakes, are looking for access to chain stores in order to get on the shelves there. As one of the options, we decided to use investment funds to find the right connections (we understand that investment funds are not only about money). We made a presentation of the project at 5 investment days, got direct access to the right people and got into VkusVill. Hooray! Out of 5, one sale. Conversion — 20%.

With an increase in the quality of sales, the conversion will grow and it is important to track this process in order to:

• Praise yourself. It’s useful, but it’s not the main thing.
• The main thing is to analyze what improvements led to an increase in conversions. Look for those “tricks” and “life hacks” that work for your company at this stage and improve in the future.

And there are two more important points that should be mentioned.

When they think about the stages of sales, 5 of them are called easily, they talked about this at the beginning of this article. But at the same time, we miss the initial and final stages of sales and negotiations.

• Initial stage. This is preparation for the sale. The better the employee is prepared, the higher our performance. This includes training, and studying the prospective negotiating partner, and the obligatory mood for a meeting.
• The final stage. Analysis of the sales process. If you do not forget about this stage, then the regular practice of sales and negotiations will turn into an independent learning tool.

This is when, after a meeting, you carefully analyze what worked, what worked, what didn’t. In order not to step on the same rake next time or not to miss the words that worked great.

Summing up, let’s highlight the important things to pay attention to when developing the skill of both personal sales and negotiations, and the skills of employees.

• Sales and negotiations are present in our lives everywhere, and not just when working with clients.
• To improve personal selling skills or employee skills, you need to work regularly and take into account both quantitative and qualitative indicators.
• We pay special attention to the initial and final stages of sales – preparation for the sale and introspection.

EXITERRA WISHES YOU SUCCESS AND INVITES YOU TO DISCUSS THE ARTICLE

Do you try to sell yourself as an employer in an interview? Do your employees approach sales responsibly at all stages?

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