Sales Training:

 

Sales Training Seminars

Welcome to the Sales Training Center's comprehensive resource site for effective, performance-based sales training and sales development programs. Over the past thirty years, sales professionals and sales managers across the world have benefited from our highly interactive sales training seminars. We provide pubic open enrollment and private seminars at the location of your choice. We conduct in excess of 200 monthly sales training seminars throughout the world.

For free, no obligation information on how we can help you please contact us today.
 

Students of a Sales Training Center seminar will learn to:

  • Communicate more effectively with customers
  • Develop the ability to build positive chemistry and rapport

  • Deal with multi-levels sales structures—users, authorizers, and purchasing agents

  • Use post-sales call measurement to assess their own performance and identify key customer issues by thinking and responding like a business consultant

  • Recognize basic styles of buyer behavior and determine how to adapt to each style to create positive "chemistry"

  • Analyze what sales people say, reducing the potential for misunderstanding

  • Effectively manage and control anger, conflict and difficult situations

  • Develop active listening skills to focus on what customers are saying

  • Be able to facilitate, guide, and close discussions in one-on-one and group settings

  • Build and give appropriate credit for other peoples ideas and avoid putting others on the defensive

  • Make a positive impact on the quality of teamwork and productivity within the work unit by effectively giving and receiving feedback

  • Sell long-term relationships rather than price

  • Incorporate interviewing skills into the sales process in lieu of pitching products

  • Apply the appropriate sales techniques based on the buyer and behavior type

For free, no obligation information on how we can help you please contact us today.

 

Sales Training Seminars Can Enable Your Technical Staff to Become Competent Sales People


The biggest headache for many engineering companies and those that provide technical products and services, is that of finding qualified sales people who understand the solutions they are providing, as well as being able to sell those solutions to customers.


Unfortunately, most technical sales people, esp. (but not uniquely) in China, don't have the necessary technical grounding of their solutions. Worse than that, most technical sales people tend to be product peddlers rather than a professional solution provider. The net result is companies under-achieve their technical sales performance, and yet many companies are at a loss on how to improve their sales results.

On the other hand, technical staff (including project managers and engineers) tend to prefer conversing with machines than with people, and find the idea of "selling" daunting. When asked whether they would consider training and converting some of these technical staff to become sales people, most companies' senior managers gave a definite "NO!” citing that doing so will be more difficult than "reaching the sky".


However, if we were to look at some successful global businesses, we can find out that many successful technical sales people were once upon a time simply good technical staff. The question is: how to make that transition as smoothly and as painlessly.


Start with Understanding Business Issues

According to HR Chally, the biggest complaint from customers in a B2B sales situation is
"You Don't Understand Our Business!"

Hence, if you were to have any success in converting technical staff into technical sales staff, the first thing to get them accustomed to isn't sales. Rather, the first thing that they need a good grounding on is understand your customers' business.


The good news is such "understanding of customers' business" has been quite well-adopted by technical staff. Many technical staff have risen to management positions by either attending MBA programmes, or by simply sitting into business meetings and contributing to their companies' business issues.


The widest ranging of "technical staff who understands business" has to be that of IT programmers. In the past, IT programmers are simply interested in writing "cool" coding for software, databases and the like. There was no need to understand customers' business as such.

Then came the merging of IT and Communications to form the InfoComm industry, which put IT into the forefront of business. No longer can IT programmers hide behind their desks and monitors. They have to meet customers, find out the needs, and then deliver something that works in a more effective way.


This transition from pure "techie" to an "eBusiness Consultant" was a slow, bumpy and sometimes painful ride. However, most IT professionals today have a much better grounding in the business needs of customers, and are able to come up with innovative solutions that solve business problems easily.


If so many IT programmers around the world can understand customers' business effectively, any technical staff can to. The question is how.

Coaching the Techie


If you are really serious about converting your technical staff of today to be the kick-a*s super sales performer of tomorrow, here's some guidelines on what you can do:


1. Identify amongst your technical staff who are those who likes to converse with people, and more importantly, likes to help others solve problems (HR Chally provides one of the most comprehensive predictive assessments in this area);


2. Tell them that you would like to give them more responsibilities that will endear your company with customers by providing better solutions to customers' problems;


3. Start off by chatting with these selected few with regards to those projects they are currently working on. Ask them what business problems are they trying to solve for the customer, and if they can suggest ways to do things better;


4. While these technical staff may not be able to change the project scope at this stage, get them accustomed to the fact that they could have brought a better solution to customers had they been given the chance to share their ideas;


5. Next, have these technical staff to go on sales calls with sales people, NOT to learn how to sell yet, but rather act as technical support too advise customers what course of actions to take. Better still, train your technical staff some simple questioning skills that are non-intrusive but allows the technical staff to know a fair bit of the customers' situation BEFORE going for such sales calls;


6. Ask both technical staff and sales person to work on sales proposals together;


7. Monitor the technical staff's performance along the way, and give active feedback.

In doing the above, you solve 2 problems:


1. You train, through time, some technical staff who may one-day become great solution sales people in their own right; and


2. You also are helping your current bunch of sales people to move away from product peddling, and towards professional solution selling.

While your actual path in transforming your technical staff to competent sales people may involve more than the above 7 steps, this outline should be able to give you a broad direction on how to do so.


Different Approaches to Selling

In China, a lot of technical selling are done through schmoozing with customers. This is one of the few areas that a lot of technical staff hate to, and also an area that gives the sales profession its bad name too.


However, with the competition mounting and the pressure to perform increasing exponentially, companies will want effective solutions that work from a technical product or service, rather than the usual schmooze, booze and under-table cash.


Making such transitions will not be easy (nobody said it will), and it might proven to be darn hard too. However, such transitions are necessary steps to ever-increasing demands from customers.


 

Source: C.J. link

 

For free, no obligation information on how we can help you please contact us today.