Selling Strategically – 5 x Tips To Sell Smarter
Selling strategically is a smarter way to sell, because when done correctly – it’ll single you out from your competition in a good way.
In this article, you’ll learn what selling strategically means, as well as our five tips to help you close more sales and make a bigger impact.
Selling Strategically – 5 x Tips To Sell Smarter
Selling Strategically Tip #1 – Do Your Research
Our first tip to help you when selling strategically, is that you should always do your research on your potential clients before you meet and engage with them.
Many Sales Professionals and Business Owners meet with their potential clients without doing any prior research or their due diligence, practically leaving them in the dark regarding what they may be walking into.
Prior to meeting with a potential client or a business prospect, always do some quick research and see what’s trending within their company, what their potential pain points may be, and what seems to be their current objectives.
Try and learn a little about their company culture by visiting their social media pages, seeing what people may have said about them by looking it up on Google, and furthermore – check their website for a blog.
A blog will give you some good insight into their recent activities, as well as their thought process.
Tools like LinkedIn and Hunter will also help you learn more about various individuals and team members you may be meeting with.
Decision Makers
Additional to doing your research, another important part of selling strategically is meeting with your potential decision makers up front.
It’s important when qualifying your potential clients, that you find out who the decision makers are, and who needs to be involved prior to a buying decision is made.
What this will do, is eliminate two common objections from coming up later – the “I need to think about” objection, and the “I need to speak to” objection.
Selling Strategically Tip #2 – Position Yourself Correctly
One of the most important parts of the sales process, is your positioning – or how you appear to your potential clients.
When selling strategically, you want to position yourself as a person who isn’t desperate for the sale and isn’t just another sales person or commodity.
The way you do this – is something we call a pre-frame.
In The 5% Sales Blueprint, we teach that you should be selling strategically by following a step by step sales process.
One of the early parts of the process, is to pre-frame the conversation in a way that:
- You’ll be asking lots of questions to ascertain a need
- Set expectations – you’ll expect them to be 100% open with you
- You won’t sell if they’re not the right fit – you need to learn whether you can help them or not
- Ensure decision makers are present, and that they’re comfortable to say NO
By ticking each of these boxes, not only will you eliminate potential sales objections; but your potential client will feel a lot more comfortable opening up to you, because you’ll eliminate sales resistance.
To learn more about positioning to assist you when selling strategically, check out the related article below.
Related article: Positioning In Sales – How To Sell Effectively
Tip #3 – Get To The Core Of Their Pain
Another important tip when selling strategically, is to get to the core of the pain points and find the underlying reasons as to why they want to buy.
People buy for two reasons – to move towards pleasure, and to make away from pain.
Many Sales Professionals and Business Owners keep their sales conversations very ‘surface level’ – meaning they get very logical responses to their answers.
The issue with this, is most sales come from an emotional place; a deeper underlying reason and want for change.
Instead, we recommend going another two layers deeper when finding pain, so that you can find their personal reason as to why they want to buy.
It goes like this:
- Technical issues (their surface level pain)
- An impact on their business (what it means for the business)
- Personal impact (the real meaning of why they want to change)
It’s important when digging for pain, that we go to the third later deep, to that we can not only find out their real reason for wanting to buy – but also so that we can ensure we’re actually there to help serve their needs.
To learn more about finding pain, read the linked article below for more detail.
Further reading: Pain Points & Sales – Your Ultimate Guide
Selling Strategically Tip #4 – Don’t Present Too Soon
A very common and widespread mistake made by Sales Professionals and Business Owners, is that they do something we call ‘premature presentation’.
As per our article in Entrepreneur, many salespeople do the following:
- Meet with prospects
- Pitch their idea, product or service
- Ask for feedback
- Handle objections
- Ask for the sale
This ‘spray and pray’ model is an outdated sales model, and one we don’t recommend if you’re interested in selling strategically.
Instead, you should only present a solution to their pain points, after you clearly know and have identified that you can in fact help solve their pain points.
This approach is similar to that of a Medical Specialist.
They don’t try to sell you on every product or service available to them.
Instead, they ask excellent probing questions, to learn about your issues, symptoms and pain points.
Once they’ve done this, they then prescribe a solution to help serve you and your needs.
We recommend that your approach is the same.
Related article: 20 x Sales Probing Questions To Use Daily
Selling Strategically Tip #5 – Help Them Sell Themselves
The difference between Sales Professionals who are selling strategically, and average salespeople – is that the Sales Professionals know how to help their potential clients sell themselves.
When I make a statement or comment – there’s a 50/50 chance you may believe me.
The reason being, is because when I make a comment or statement, it’s my belief.
My beliefs are exactly that – mine.
Although they’re true to me, they may not 100% be true to you.
However, when you make a comment or statement, those are your beliefs – and they are 100% true to you.
Great Sales Professionals know how to ask excellent questions, that help the potential client makes statements or comments that they need to move them closer towards the sale.
These questions are called tie down sales techniques.
They are questions at the end of a statement, that illicit agreement from your potential client.
To learn how to use tie down sales techniques, we recommend reading the linked article below.
Related article: Tie Down Sales Techniques – Your Ultimate Guide
Final Thoughts
Selling strategically is not only a nice to have; but rather – something you should incorporate as a part of your sales process and sales strategy.
Not only will it make you different to your competition, but selling strategically will help you win more clients, and close more consistently too.
If you’d like to learn more about selling strategically and improving your sales process, you can register for our free 7 day sales challenge by clicking the link 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.
