The Top Seven Critical Success Factors Affecting Your Sales
Having the needed skills is not enough; to maximize the benefit from those skills, you need to learn where and how to use them most effectively. As a salesperson, there are seven such areas that can be improved and could increase or even double your sales.
Here is what you need to know about these seven critical success factors:
1. Prospecting
The initial step towards generating leads is prospecting. If you are not prospecting properly or sufficiently, you cannot expect your sales to grow.
Use your database or any other means you have to keep prospecting regularly.
Since prospecting is crucial for your sales, setting a defined period for it in your schedule is essential. Otherwise, you might never get around to actually doing it, or consistently maintaining it might become difficult in the long run.
2. Building Trust and Rapport
Being in harmony with your customer not only lessens needless reservations on their part but also makes them more open to your product and suggestions.
Your relationship with your customers needs to be prioritized over all else if you want to maintain and increase your sales.
Build a sincere relationship with them by finding common grounds, listening attentively to their thoughts, and providing honest and meaningful answers to their queries.
As you converse more with your client, your interactions with them will become more harmonious, and you will become more trustworthy for them with time.
3. Identifying Customer Problems
Most often, even customers are not completely aware of their needs. Whether it is due to the price or need of the product, they might try to convince themselves that they are better off without it.
Your job as the salesperson is to get rid of such convictions that are holding them back from buying your product. While conversing with the client, you need to identify their reservations and worries so you can answer them properly.
Your sale depends on the question of why a specific product is the best choice for the buyer. And depending on the customer’s interest and problems, your answer might be different each time.
Rather than a customer who is not that reactive, you will find it easier to address the worries of those who ask questions. However, even if the client is less reactive, you can still identify the problems needing to be addressed, such as the product not intriguing them enough to take an interest in.
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4. Presenting
The quality of a product is ineffective if people do not know so. It is not the client’s job to thoroughly understand your product themselves to see the benefits you did not mention. Otherwise, there would not be a need for salespeople.
An unconvincing and unstable presentation can diffuse a customer's interest even if the product itself is quite decent.
On the other hand, well-developed and logical presentations have the opposite impact. If you convincingly sell the use and benefits of a product to a customer, they themself would want to know more about it. And this interest is what will ultimately lead them to purchase the product to try out the benefits themselves.
5. Overcoming Objections
Whether or not the customer understands the benefits, they will, at least initially, have concerns about the product regardless of its quality. As a salesperson, you need to answer those objections as convincingly and confidently as possible.
The objections are signs that the customer is taking a logical interest in the product, meaning the likelihood of them purchasing the product is very high if their concerns are addressed reasonably.
6. Closing the Sales
If the conversation goes on, it could go on indefinitely, or the customer might say they would think it over. Both options are not optimal for the salespeople. Delaying too much can make the customer lose interest in the product even if they were excited about it a while ago.
To not lose customers this way, you need to ask them to make a decision. And you might need to repeat yourself more than once while trying to convince them.
The moment of the decision is most tense, so you need to ensure that the customer is satisfied. Refined professionals always watch out for signs when there are no lingering reservations when asking the client to close the deal.
Close in a confident and professional manner, so if not anything else, the customer will buy your confidence and make the purchase.
7. Referrals and Re-sales
Only always looking for new clients is ineffective for sales success. Viewing your customers as one-time clients means you are losing significant potential. Great professions understand the value that previous clients hold and ensure good relations and business interactions with them even after the sale.
Return customers are crucial to any business. They provide a stable and sustainable way of continuing the sales function. And even if the client themselves do not remain in need of the product after one purchase, the positive purchase experience will lead them to look at other products under your service.
These positive purchase experiences are also the reason why customers refer the product or service to others in need of it. And while the customers might do this themselves, it is always good to ask them for referrals as well. This way, if someone they know is in need of a similar service, yours will be the first name to pop up in their minds.
Being a confident professional that makes a customer’s purchase journey memorable and reliable is the gateway to increasing sales. Make it a habit to think in terms of resales, and ensure that you provide customer service that makes them want to come back to you.
And as you prepare for your next sale, keep these seven points in mind and watch your sales go up like never before.
