“Spice up your life in variety in your personal life, but use structure to be consistently successful in sales.” – Paul Owen in today’s Tip 409
How do you ditch variety?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Paul!
Sales Talent UK
Sales Talent UK on LinkedIn
SECRET SKILL. HIDDEN CAREER Podcast: The Truth About Sales
SECRET SKILL. HIDDEN CAREER Book
Submit a Sales Tip
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Paul Owen. Paul is the managing director of Sales Talent UK, and author of the book: SECRET SKILL. HIDDEN CAREER. It’s an Amazon Best Seller and also formed the foundation of Sales Talent’s podcast: SECRET SKILL. HIDDEN CAREER: The Truth about Sales. Here’s Paul:
Paul Owen: Variety is the spice of life. It’s a phrase we hear often and listen, it may well be true but I’m not sure it’s the secret to success. I’m not sure that any athlete, any musician, any business leader who’s had incredible success ever puts it down to variety. I think it’s more like they put it down to the relentless pursuit of excellence and that’s usually achieved through consistent repetition of habits again and again and again.
So what’s the link to sales here? Well, when training salespeople, I often hear them explaining their inconsistencies as something that’s, well, I’m mixing it up. I like to try new things, and I think they’re fully themselves in that.
Now if trying new things is more important to you than being the best you can be, then you carry on enjoy the variety and mix it up, but if your aim is to be the best in your role, I’d recommend that you ditch variety and focus on structured sales processes, structured sales conversations.
Let’s take outbound sales calls as an example. The phone is answered by a potential client. You have 10, 15 maybe 20 seconds to give them a reason to speak to you. Once you’ve done that and one that their belief that it’s worth their time, you want to understand them and their needs and you do that through asking questions. Within those questions over were certain key points that you want to find out. Certain key pieces of information and that may take you into deeper questions, but there are certain key things are going to be asked every single time.
Once you’ve understood their needs, you then move into the next phase which is selling the through explaining about your company and how you can help them your matching their needs. You’re fulfilling their need by offering your products and services in a compelling way. And then by the end, you’re going to agree some next steps to move things forward. They similar structure applies to sales meetings and presentations can differ, but they still should have a structure.
By focusing on structure, you’ll be more consistently successful. Contrary to what some people think about structure having, it doesn’t inhibit you. It actually gives you freedom to do the most important thing in sales and that’s to listen to your clients. So my recommendation, my daily sales tip for you is to spice up your life in variety in your personal life, but use structure to be consistently successful in sales.
Scott Ingram: For more about Paul, Sales Talent UK, his book and his podcast, you’ll find links to everything at DailySales.Tips/409 and Paul have been generous enough to offer 3 copies of his book to listeners of this podcast. All you have to do is reply to one of my weekly emails and mention Paul Owen, and if you’re not yet on the listener list and getting those emails, just click over to DailySales.Tips, join the list and you can just reply to the welcome email. I’ll pick the winners at the end of March.
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!