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We hope you have enjoyed our series of blogs about ‘what we have learnt about selling’. In this final part, we cover our final four findings (view the previous blogs here part 1, part 2.)   “Far too many proposals are ineffective and are written with no qualification of the opportunity”. Proposals. They’re the bane… View Article
Things we have learnt about selling – part 3

We hope you have enjoyed our series of blogs about ‘what we have learnt about selling’. In this final part, we cover our final four findings (view the previous blogs here part 1, part 2.)

 

“Far too many proposals are ineffective and are written with no qualification of the opportunity”.

Proposals. They’re the bane of many a salesperson’s life. Especially when all that time and effort is applied to putting together a plan and presenting it in a nice document, only for the client to turn around and say they’re not interested. Therein lies the problem…Wouldn’t it be much more sensible to get to a point where you were quite certain of the client wanting to proceed before you launched into full on ‘proposal mode’? Not only would you save time by avoiding writing pointless proposals, but you could ensure that more time and effort was applied to the better prospects, further strengthening the likelihood of conversion.

 

“Few sales people are confident enough to meet senior executives within their accounts”.

Confidence is something that is assumed most sales people have in droves. But actually, when it comes to the crunch, we frequently find that sales people seriously stumble when they get in front of senior executives. One of the fundamentals for a successful career in sales is the ability to be comfortable talking to anyone – and that includes Chief Exec’s!

 

“Few sales people are effective at presenting”.

There’s no doubt about it, presenting well is a real skill. Unfortunately, it isn’t one that most sales people seem to get taught! Throughout our careers delivering sales training courses, we have found that over 75% of course attendees are nervous and actually pretty reluctant to present. That’s a fairly significant figure! Presenting is absolutely fundamental to successfully explaining and selling a proposition. Presentations should start with a clear objective and finish with a clear action plan. Most don’t.

Our final finding is…

 

“Sales training can have a significant impact on results”.

Whilst one could be cynical and comment: “well, they would say that”, we do in fact have some stats to back it up…An analysis by IBM of the sales training provided by the Japenic team found that those that had attended the course showed an 18% improvement in results. Wouldn’t you like an 18% increase in your sales force’s performance? We thought so…

 

We hope you’ve found our top 10 findings on selling and the sales industry interesting; perhaps some of the points have even struck a cord. For more information on how Japenic can help address any issues within your sales team, please get in touch today. We’re offering businesses a free skills audit to help identify and tackle areas for improvement.