Sales Training For Entrepreneurs – What To Know
Sales training for Entrepreneurs is crucial for your entrepreneurial success, because nothing happens until a sale is made.
Entrepreneurs require sales training for a number of reasons; it helps them have the knowledge to train their staff, ensure consistency is followed within their sales team, and to make sure all your potential clients have the same positive experience.
In this article, you’ll learn the various sales training for Entrepreneurs topics required for learning, so you can close more sales, and serve more people in an elegant and non-pushy fashion.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs – What To Know
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #1 – Sales Process
The first important topic in regard to sales training for Entrepreneurs, is for you and your sales team to understand the importance and benefits of using a consistent sales process.
A sales process is the step by step system that your sales staff should follow, so they can guide a potential client on a positive journey and have a road map of what to ask and what topics to cover.
Using a sales process has several key benefits. These include:
- It gives consistency and clarity to your sales team
- Creates certainty for both you and your potential clients
- It allows you to control the sales conversation
Following a sales process, and having clarity on each step is crucial to you and your business’s sales success.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #2 – Qualifying
A famous quote associated with selling is “If you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one”.
This is very true, which leads us to the next topic in relation to sales training for Entrepreneurs – being the importance of qualifying.
Your sales team should know how to qualify your potential clients, so that they can be efficient with the time they spend with clients who fit your buyer persona.
So many Entrepreneurs meet with people who have no business buying their products or services or aren’t qualified decision makers to make a buying decision.
When Entrepreneurs or your sales team know how to qualify correctly, they can put together a sales targeting strategy that helps them with their prospecting efforts.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #3 – Rapport
Many people think of rapport as being enthusiastic, cheerful and bubbly, and perhaps approachable.
Although this is still taught and followed in many circles; rapport is a lot deeper than that.
Sales training for Entrepreneurs should cover rapport, because it will give you and your sales team an excellent edge when learnt correctly.
Rapport covers both conscious and subconscious communication – it covers the way you brand yourself, the way you reach out to your potential clients, and of course – your in-person sales interviews and conversations.
Training should include using the communication ratio effectively.
Topic #4 – Setting Pre-Frames
A very important topic in your sales training for Entrepreneurs arsenal, is the ability to overcome objections early, and position yourself as a trusted advisor.
You can achieve both these things, by doing something called setting pre-frames.
If you can image the sales conversation as a frame; a pre-frame is when the Sales Professional or Manager let’s your potential client know how the conversation will go.
The conversation will entail asking a lot of questions, learning who the decision makers are, and that it is OK if the potential client establishes they aren’t the right fit.
This puts them at ease, so you can have a deeper conversation.
By doing so; you ensure decision makers are present, a buying decision will be made at the end of the conversation, and you overcome sales objections before they even arrive.
It also allows you to be on control of the sales conversation – which means you can consistently close more successfully.
Topic #5 – Asking The Right Questions
Asking the right questions is one of the most important part of a Sales Professional’s tool kit, making this an important topic regarding sales training for Entrepreneurs.
There are a number of various question types you should be using in your day to day sales conversations:
- Tie down sales techniques
- Assumptive close questions
- Open ended questions
- Close ended questions
- Sales probing questions
Each of these question types should be asked with intent – and the intent is to lead the potential client towards the next step in the sales process, and to help them sell themselves on the need for a solution to their problems.
Topic #6 – Help People Sell Themselves
Many sales trainers and sales training ideologies teach that you should use sales scripts, hard closing techniques, or methods that may make your potential client (and your sales team) uncomfortable.
We recommend in your sales training for Entrepreneurs, that they are taught to help guide your potential clients to sell themselves, rather than your sales team trying to do all the heavy lifting.
The best person to sell a potential client is themselves, because nobody knows them like they do.
Your role as an Entrepreneur or Sales Professional, is to lead the client to a conclusion that they need a solution to their problems – and that your product or service may be the solution for those problems.
By learning this methodology, Sales Professionals and Entrepreneurs will have a better conversation with your potential clients, because the conversation will be more focused on their specific needs – rather than your business, products or services.
By framing the conversation in this way, you’ll have a higher chance of building empathy, and closing more sales.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #7 – Finding Pain
People buy things to move away from their problems and find a solution to their pain points. This is on our list of sales training for Entrepreneurs, because without pain – there will be no sale.
Human beings are emotional – we buy for emotional reasons and justify our decisions with logic.
When Entrepreneurs and Sales Professionals learn how to find pain in a non-pushy and elegant fashion, they’ll have deeper and more authentic conversations with their potential clients.
By getting go the deep core of why someone is trying to buy – we remove the false pretence and assumptions of why we think they’re buying and get to the truth.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #8 – Future Pacing
Future pacing is an important sales training for Entrepreneurs topic, because it is the subject of painting what the future will look like for your potential clients if their problems and pain points were solved.
By future pacing; your sales team will know how to dig for their ideal results and outcomes, and then discuss the emotional and logical benefits of what it will mean when they own a solution.
This can be very powerful – because when your potential client owns the solution in their mind – it doesn’t take much to positively influence them to take further action.
Sales Training For Entrepreneurs Topic #9 – Talking About Money
Many Sales Professionals and Entrepreneurs leave budget, and the topic of money to the very end of their sales conversations.
We recommend in your sales training for Entrepreneurs sessions, that you teach them to cover money after they’ve uncovered pain and pleasure.
Money should cover two areas:
- What is it costing them by not having a solution to their problems?
- How much would they invest to solve their problems?
By doing so, it makes it a lot easier to close them at the end.
Topic #10 – Presenting
Do you or your sales team know how to present in a way, that bridges the gap of where they’re at pain wise, and where they need to be with your product or service?
Many Salespeople do something we call premature presentation – this means they present much too early, without using their product or service as a bridging gap between their pain and ideal solution.
By learning how to present correctly, you or your Sales Manager can perhaps do role plays with their team, to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Topic #11 – Handling Objections
We recommend in your sales training for Entrepreneurs process, that you cover handling objections early, and with a structure-based system – rather than using out dated sales scripts.
This will ensure your sales team will remember how to elegantly handle objections, without sounding like a parrot or broken record repeating clearly scripted lines they would have read in an old sales book.
Objection handling is common and will most probably happen in all your sales conversations. Fortunately, when learnt correctly, they can be used as a closing tool.
Topic #12 – Closing
Asking for the sale should be easy; all the hard work should occur prior to this part, and when the sales process is followed correctly – closing should be a breeze.
A lot of Sales Professionals and Entrepreneurs struggle with asking for the sale, because they either get nervous, or they become worried about potentially facing rejection.
When you follow our sales process correctly, asking for the sale becomes a lot easier – because you would have already helped your potential client sell themselves before you get to this point.
Final Thoughts On Sales Training For Entrepreneurs
If you wish to explore sales training for Entrepreneurs a bit more and want to increase your sales more consistently, we’d like to introduce you to our flagship sales program – called The 5% Sales Blueprint.
Our program covers each of the topics mentioned in great detail, as well as bonus modules on inbound and outbound prospecting.
Because it is based online – it’s economically priced which makes it an easy investment – and it can be used no matter where you are around the world.
To learn more about why Sales Professionals, Managers and Entrepreneurs like you are investing in The 5% Sales Blueprint – click here to find out.
