5 x Effective Tips To Improve Your Sales Conversations

Every sale initially starts with a conversation; therefore – improving your sales conversations are critical to your closing success.

But what makes an excellent sales conversation?

And how do you utilise them to make them effective?

In this article, you’ll learn five critical tips to improve your sales conversations, so that you can win more sales, and serve more people consistently.

5 x Effective Tips To Improve Your Sales Conversations

Effective Sales Conversations Start With Rapport

As per Business Dictionary’s definition, rapport is a positive or close relationship between people that involves mutual trust and attention. Those that develop rapport have similar interests, values, knowledge and behaviours.

Simply put – rapport is the art of building commonality between people.

To enhance your sales conversations, it’s important to start by building commonality between you and your potential client, because your prospects trust people just like them.

Naturally, people believe their own stories, values, beliefs, standards and interests as being important.

When people demonstrate that they can be aligned to those same standards and beliefs, it makes a potential client also feel a subconscious bias towards you because you share positive commonalities.

Rapport is crucial and the first step in building sales relationships for the quick wins, and long term too.

There are a number of key things you can do to effectively build rapport and improve your sales conversations. These are:

• Your appearance and dressing for sales success
• Displaying a sense of relaxation and comfort
• Building commonality
• Showing empathy
• Matching and mirroring
• Asking well thought out questions

To learn how to do these in more detail, read the linked article below to find out how.

Further reading: A Guide To Building Sales Relationships/ Building Rapport

Effective Positioning

A second common mistake when Sales Professionals begin their sales conversations, is they miss the opportunity to position themselves as a trusted advisor.

Positioning in sales is very important if you want to stand out from the competition, improve your sales conversations and close more clients.

Positioning in sales means to create a perception with your potential client that you are the best person to speak with, to solve a specific problem and offer a solution to an issue they have.

Successful positioning in sales means to position yourself as a trusted adviser, and as a person who isn’t just there to ‘take an order’.

A person who positions themselves as a specialist and adviser, will win more clients than a person who merely positions themselves as a commodity.

Prior to starting your sales conversation, is imperative for your effective positioning in sales efforts that you start with something called a pre-frame.

Think of a sales conversation as a frame – you’ll ask a set of conversations and frame the conversation in a way by asking the right questions to learn their situation and pain and position your offer as a solution of you can in fact help them.

When you go into handling sales objections mode – that is your re-frame.

You’ll be re-framing their mindset from having areas of concern, to working with you understand your positioning as to why they should buy or invest.

A pre-frame is the conversation you have prior to the deep dive sales conversation.

The pre-frame helps position you as a trusted authority, specialist in your field, as well as gives you permission to have a more authentic conversation with your potential client.

In The 5% Sales Blueprint, we teach Sales Professionals to ensure they cover three key areas in their pre-frame, prior to starting their deep dive sales conversation.

To learn how to position yourself as the go to person and improve your sales conversations and Sales IQ in more detail, read the linked article below.

Further reading: Positioning In Sales – How To Sell Effectively

Improve Your Sales Conversations By Finding Pain

Finding your potential clients pain points is a crucial part of the sales process and your sales conversations, because if you can’t find what their pain points are; it’ll be hard to close the sale.

Many Sales Professionals and Business Owners go about their sales conversations the wrong way.

They generally present or pitch their idea, answer a few questions, and hope they said something to their potential client that’ll make them buy.

This old school methodology doesn’t work anymore, and a more consultative approach will gain you far better results.

The main reason this approach doesn’t work anymore either – is because you’re not speaking directly to the reason as to why they’re buying – being a current presence of pain.

Pain points; in a sales context, are the things that cause discomfort to your potential clients in their business, day to day activities, and their everyday lives.

Everyone has different pain points, and they come in different levels of pain.

Pain points are generally based on different levels of pain; and the measurement for the level of pain will be based on your potential client’s perceptions, and what they categorise their pain points as.

There are three levels of pain; in which you need to discover during your sales conversations. These are:

• Technical issues
• An impact on their business
• Personal impact

Although all three are important, generally people buy to eliminate personal impact.

Read the article here in regard to finding pain, to learn how to do add it to your sales conversation.

Asking Questions

Sales probing questions are a crucial part of your sales conversations, and can be the difference winning the sale, or getting another “I need to think about it” objection.

There are various kinds of sales probing questions; from learning how they buy, to handling sales objections early and finding pain points and desire.

Examples to include in your sales conversation are:

• Learning how they buy
• Qualifying questions
• Finding pain
• Handling objections
• Asking for the sale

By learning how they buy, you’ll learn their thinking process as well as how their company does business.

Qualifying questions are critical in your sales conversations, because it’ll let you know whether or not you’re talking with the right person.

Finally, you’ll need to know how to ask questions that uncover areas of concern and asking for the sale.

Further reading: Sales Probing Questions – 20 x To Ask Daily

Don’t Present Too Early

Many Sales Professionals make the mistake in their sales conversations, by presenting too early.

If you start your sales conversation by talking about you and your product, you’re not giving ample respect to your ideal client, their pain points, and their needs.

As per our article in Entrepreneur; we call this old school mistake ‘Premature Presentation’.

This is when you talk about yourself too soon; which robs you of the opportunity to learn about your clients and their needs – and a chance to demonstrate how to bridge the gap from where they are, to where they want to be with your product or service.

Instead, we recommend following our well detailed seven step sales process, so that you can avoid this mistake, and enhance your sales conversations.

Further reading: The 7 Step Sales Process – Learn To Close Easier

Enhance Your Sales Conversations – Final Thoughts

Although there are various ways to enhance your sales conversations, these five tips will make the biggest difference.

If you’re interested in levelling up your sales and closing more consistently, register for our free 7 day sales challenge here.

Want To Close Sales Easier?

Are you committed to closing sales a lot easier, and consistently?

If so, you should check out our self-paced and affordable online sales training program; The 5% Sales Blueprint.

It’ll give you everything you need to close sales consistently.

To learn more, simply click on the link below for more information.

Our Online Sales Training Program – The 5% Sales Blueprint.