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They are in fact ambiverts. An ambivert is someone who has both introvert and extrovert qualities, and bounces between the two without committing to one or the other. For example, an ambivert enjoys being around others, but they also enjoy their alone time. Scientific studies have identified eight main sales approach categories, including storytellers, focusers, narrators, aggressors, and socializers. However, a study of salespeople by researchers Lynette Ryals and Iain Davies found that the remaining three were the most successful — Closers, Consultants and Experts. The study found that experts were naturally gifted in all areas of selling, while consultants tended to focus on listening to their buyers and solving problems, while closers were smooth-talkers in converting the biggest leads.
In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research , Daniel Mochon found that the number of product options had a big influence. Your buyers are ore likely to make a purchase if they feel confident about their decision. The science shows that mirroring the gestures, expressions and posture of someone you are speaking to can significantly increase their perception of you. This technique, known as mirroring, is mostly seen in couples, but it happens in the workplace too — at meetings, conversations with colleagues and networking events. One study in involved a study of 60 people who were tasked with negotiating with each other.
Another study in involved over customers and discovered that they bought more products and had a more positive impression of the company when the retail salespeople were told to mirror the behavior of their customers. Mirroring the verbal and nonverbal behavior of your buyers will significantly boost their willingness to agree with you.
Everyone does it from time to time, no matter how successful they are or whether they are male or female. In fact, doubting yourself and your abilities is such a common issue that psychologists have given it a name: Then, say out loud to yourself that the successes you have earned in the past are evidence of how well you will perform in the future. A phenomenon known as Sunk cost fallacy is what happens when people are unwilling to stop doing something that they have already invested time, energy and resource on — thus making a bad situation potentially much worse, instead of seeing it as an opportunity to learn and refine their sales process.
Salespeople who avoid sunk cost fallacy are able to devote more of their resources to profitable opportunities. Numerous studies by Hoffeld Group have shown that when someone acts confidently, it adds more weight to what they say. By faking the feeling of confidence, you can help kick your mind into gear. Carnegie Mellon researchers found that displaying confidence is even more influential in establishing trust than past performance.
There have been a number of studies that show how smiling is closely linked to our perception of how approachable someone is.
These result in feelings of pleasure and increased confidence. Best of all, when you smile at someone, it activates the brain of the person you are smiling at, And so they are more likely to smile back at you. As humans, we enjoy talking with people that ask insightful questions that help us open up and share details about ourselves.
Researchers at Harvard studied what happens in our brains when we discuss information about our favorite subject — ourselves. The researchers showed that talking about ourselves is linked to pleasure, and that it improved not just our self-perception, but also our perception of the person we are talking to. Salespeople who ask insightful questions to their buyers create a more enjoyable buying experience, which helps increase sales. Competition is strong in the sales industry, so you need every chance to succeed. The good news is that many there are many salespeople still relying on outdated methods and techniques for how to increase sales.
These 21 science-based selling techniques are based on tried-and-tested scientific principles that can help you double your sales. So, the next time you have a sales meeting or speak with a potential new customer, try one of them yourself to see the positive impact it will have on your sales pipeline.
Steven Macdonald is a digital marketer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Steven has been creating blog content writing since and has appeared as a featured writer for Content Marketing Institute, Marketing Profs and Smart Insights. Since working with SuperOffice, he has led the growth from 0 to 2 million visitors per year. You can connect with Steven on LinkedIn and Twitter. View all articles by Steven MacDonald.
In one study, it is stated that sales people who use power body language can increase their sales number by 56 percent. To be an effective sales person, you have to use your nonverbal skill using your body language and that is essential skill to shape your buyer's behavior. Really love this piece on science-based selling! I struggle with 15 most of the times. How many options would you recommend one to have on their sales page for products or services? You're not alone, Muthoni! I recommend testing this as there is no universal best practice.
Let me know it goes. We always try to return phone calls and emails in under an hour-- and customers truly value a speedy response. Once you know your power partners, you can look for them at networking events, and you can ask your existing contacts if they can connect you to others. Another great way to get clients and warm leads is speaking. The key to getting clients through speaking is inviting the audience to work with you during your presentation.
If you find this step as cringe-worthy as cold calling, here are a few tips:. If all else fails, make sure you have a way to collect names, phone numbers and email addresses at your events. Enter them into your CRM system and then call them to follow up. Confidence, in the end, is what makes selling easier.
This article was originally posted here on Entrepreneur. I once worked as a salesman in an insurance company. I noticed however, that certain people in my organisation made more sales than all of us put together. So, I got close to some of them and tried to learn their secrets. Luckily, they were kind enough to let me in. My sales were huge. So I now believe that like me, anybody can learn the art of selling. But it begins by learning the following secrets:. I remember catching a ride with one of my sales managers one day.
Instead, he plugged in an mp3 and played a particular talk. It was a huge lesson and I followed suit immediately. To be a sales superstar, you need to learn every day.
Make learning a top priority. Invest in books, seminars and audio talks related to sales, and watch your sales skyrocket. This fear is the greatest obstacle you must overcome if you intend to have a successful sales career. Like most newbie sales agents, I found it affected my selling, too. Luckily, my supervisor became concerned and taught me that selling was basically a game of numbers. That new knowledge fired me up. To be honest, we are all afraid of something at one point or another. If you must, hire someone to help you generate leads. Most important, make sure you always get referrals after closing each sale.
Lead-generation tools like Bant. Imagine that a salesman knocks on your door looking tired and worn out. I mean, everybody plans their events these days, except celebrities. It will be a cold day in hell before such a salesperson makes a sale. When I started my consumer goods business, I asked myself what I was selling. I then recommended my grocery home delivery service as a way of helping them reduce stress. In the same way, you should present yourself as a consultant. Prepare for every sales meeting or call. Dress the part too, and look important. Buy better clothes; you could even buy a car with a little down payment.
They assume that after their sales pitch, clients will take the initiative to pay. Learn all you can about closing a sale. Just make sure you close the sale. As an entrepreneur, time is your scarcest resource. You should try to spend each minute of your work life in the most effective way possible. This means reducing the time you spend on sales and increasing the time you spend on marketing.
You spend a good amount of time one-on-one with individual clients, explaining to them what your products or services are for and what the benefits are compared to the alternatives. You try to influence leads and prospects in a personal way, hoping to turn them into paying customers. A good demo focuses on benefits.
Value beats price every single time. Rather than focus on cost or features, your pitch needs to focus on the value you're going to create for the person you're pitching. Remember, your customers care about how you'll help them. Don't just tell them how you're better than the competition; show them. Yelp sales manager Jennay Golden is a true people person.
She's outgoing and can strike up a conversation with someone she's never met, walking away minutes later with a new friend. That skill has translated directly to supporting her career growth in inside sales over the years. But not everyone has that ability to build quick camaraderie after getting a prospect on the phone. And for those of us who don't, it can be a natural response to ramble on during a sales call--highlighting more benefits, listing out every product feature, reiterating the same value props in different words over and over again to our own detriment.
To fight this urge, Golden has trained herself to embrace the silence. She explains, "There's endless value in asking a pointed question followed by a deliberate, confident pause. Why does this selling tactic work so well for her? Well, rather than continuing on ad nauseam after asking an important qualifying question in hopes of nudging your prospect's answer in a particular direction, you're letting reality sink in.
Here's an example of what you don't want to do: Is it the contract? Instead of overselling, Golden suggest, "ask a smart question that's relevant to their specific pain point. Ask for the business.
With the proliferation of undoubtedly useful sales automation tools like Prospect. You gain some in productivity and scale from employing these kinds of services that do automated outreach on your behalf, but you also lose some when it comes to the personal touch that can often make all the difference. Vidyard director of sales Adam King has mastered the art of building that initial connection with prospects in a way that virtually nobody else has--through video.
King explains, "We love using video as our first outreach tool, because it shows our prospects that we are human and that we're not automating our emails. Video is personal and different, so it increases our initial response rates and saves our team time as they don't need to go through an entire cadence. Here's a great case study breakdown of how Vidyard customer and inside sales rep Lauren Wadsworth from Dynamic Signal used customized outreach videos to get a massive percent increase in meeting bookings--with an additional lift in conversion rate. Stand out from the crowd. If recording a customized video for each of your prospects won't fit into your sales cycle, fear not.
As long as you take a few minutes to really personalize your outreach, you can experience a major lift in response rate. Most people just want to know they're talking to a real person. Find your prospect on social media and craft a message that highlights a shared interest;. By investing in the upfront creation of guides, video demos, case studies, and walkthroughs that cover the most common questions your prospects have during the selling process, you can deliver much stronger--and time saving--answers to their questions and objections.
King explains, "We also love to record short two- to three-minute 'micro demos' for our most commonly requested feature demonstrations. These micro demos change our game because they free up our solution consultant's time from doing the same demonstration over and over again. The real effectiveness with this video sales strategy lies in your ability to further qualify leads throughout the buying process. At first you're qualifying leads with a personalized video that'd pique the interest of most people. Then, further down the funnel, if your prospect isn't willing to dive into a deeper answer to their questions by watching a micro demo, the purchase intent might not really be there.
In the world of inside sales, cutting to the core of your prospect's deepest motivation is the name of the game. Christian Keroles knows this very well.
If you waste five minutes of your prospect's time droning on about a product feature or service offering that isn't going to positively affect the company's primary business need right now, chances are high that you'll lose the sale. You'll get shot down, ignored, or, even worse, be given the proverbial "maybe later" that leaves you sitting in sales limbo for the coming months. While a clear answer in either direction is better than maybe, it'd be much better to land more yesses in your corner.
How will you do that? Become your prospect's number one priority. No matter the product or service you're selling, there's going to be a pretty long list of benefits that span across different potential needs your prospect could have. Use your early conversations to really probe which of those needs are the highest priority. And don't just take his or her word for it; do your own homework and ask the right questions to cut through the noise. Start with these five killer sales questions:. If you're not able to identify your prospect's biggest pain point, it'll be difficult to get your prospect to care--or treat your solution as a must-have.
We've all seen it. That LinkedIn connection or Facebook friend who's frequently sharing statistics, insights, and thought leadership pieces on the state of their industry. Whether you like it or not, social selling is here to stay and it's working. Thanks in a large part to professional networks like LinkedIn, any inside sales rep can instantly leverage his or her network to find the right prospects, build relationships, and start conversations that could lead to an uptick in closed deals.
This tactic has a focus on the front end--on helping to improve your lead generation and sales prospecting process--with the goal of eliminating time-intensive cold calling. By positioning yourself as an industry expert if you are in fact one , you can bring more qualified leads directly to your inbox by regularly showing up on your social platforms.
Cole Sutliff, sales operations associate at LinkedIn, works to empower more than sales development representatives to put social selling to work in building their pipeline of potential members who could benefit from upgrading to LinkedIn's more advanced selling tools. Based on LinkedIn data, 51 percent of social selling leaders are more likely to reach quota and 78 percent of social sellers outsell their peers who don't use social media for selling.
If you're starting from the ground up with social selling as a sales tactic, prepare for the long haul. While you shouldn't expect to publish a status update and get a flood of qualified leads in your inbox, the payoff can be huge over time. Show up, be present and engage. Rinse, repeat and the payoff will be there. We're all familiar with mirroring. You probably do it too, whether you realize it or not. When you're in a conversation and either you or the person you're talking to begins to subconsciously imitate the gestures, facial expressions, speech pattern, or attitude of the other, that's mirroring.
Essentially, it's a subtle form of mimicry. Mirroring is most common within close groups of friends and family, implying a certain level of understood comfort with each other--which makes it a great potential sales tactic for establishing a closer connection with your prospect if you can pull it off well. In the context of using mirroring in inside sales, your prospect will feel more like he or she can relate to you on a personal level. Carlos Ballesteros, who works in sales at Continu, is no stranger to this tactic.
The first is a more traditional facet in which I literally match the customers nonverbals or tone of voice. But Ballesteros takes his version of mirroring much further than that. He adds, "The other way I apply the concept of mirroring is in understanding where my prospects are coming from.
Selling with Confidence. Finding and Closing Successful Deals Without Breaking the Bank. By: Andrew Holmes Media of Selling with Confidence. See larger. Finding the right way to close a sale is what separates sales hunters from in the classroom and immediately applied to driving real business results. . whether or not I'd actually be a good fit for a given solution, the deal is Let's break this selling tactic down and take a closer look at each component.
I put myself in the prospect's shoes and ask myself what the clear value in my solution is to them. Whether this is done via email, phone, or in person, this sales tactic has been very successful for me. There's actually evidence to support this hypothesis too. In a study conducted by Word, Zanna and Cooper, job interviewers were asked to follow very specific types of body language over the course of several interviews.
In one condition, the interviewers were asked to show a very distant and uninterested body language. They leaned away and avoided direct eye contact with the interviewee. In the other condition, the interviewers were asked to be more welcoming with their body language--smiling, nodding their heads, and making eye contact. In both cases, the individuals being interviewed began to mirror the actions of the interviewer. As a result, the individuals in the condition with less friendly body language performed worse during the interview than the individuals in the friendly condition.
The outcome of this study suggests that the initial attitude an interviewer has about the person being interviewed may strongly affect the performance of the interviewee, largely due to mirroring. Do your best to get started on the right foot and keep the momentum going with mirroring. If you want to be successful in inside sales, realize today that you're selling to people, not to companies. Whenever you pick up the phone to call a prospect, you'll be talking to a real person on the other end of the line--not just an imaginary entity with deep pockets. You have to understand the individual you're pitching, which starts with doing your homework ahead of time.
Learn where they've worked before, what their social media footprint tells you about them, where they fit in the organizational chart at your prospect company, and get a feel for who else will likely be involved in the sales process.
Make sure that every interaction you have with a lead reinforces their belief that you understand who they are and exactly what they need to be successful. That means positioning your solution not just how you see it working for your prospect's business, but in a way that solves the problem they personally care about most too. Your prospect might be most interested in a particular feature that'll help him or her perform better in the eyes of their manager than in, say, a feature that could have the biggest net impact on the company's bottom line.
Use your understanding of the position your individual prospect is in to your advantage as you sell to them. A couple years ago, Steli interviewed Vaynerchuk about what's different in his business now that he's selling his services to Fortune companies instead of mom and pop wine shops. Vaynerchuk explained, "Nothing has changed other than my having to learn what my new customers care about. As soon as I know what the other person needs, I will sell them that as long as I feel good about what we're doing.
And remember what people buy--they don't buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.