Based on what you’ve learned in your sales training courses I’ll bet you think I’m talking about product or service knowledge. Wrong. You only need enough knowledge about your product or service to sell yourself on it. You need to know enough about it to be passionate about the product or service. That’s not the real knowledge, the important knowledge that you should focus on each day.
This may have been overlooked or even left out entirely in your previous sales training course, but selling isn’t about selling at all. Selling is all about understanding. The learning you want to focus on each day is learning enough about your customers so you understand them. You want to understand what it’s like to walk a day in their shoes. You want to understand what your customers want. You need to know the conversation that is going on in their head. They need to be convinced that you understand them better than anyone they’ve ever met.
How do you develop the kind of understanding you need to obtain unbelievable over the top sales success? You get that understanding from being one of them. You get that level of understanding from reading the things they read, from participating in their conversations, and from spending time with them. You should know your customers well enough that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt their top three problems, concerns, and wants. You should be able to speak to them using their language. You should know their stories and experiences.
Does that sound like more work than your sales training course led you to believe you need to do for sales? Well you’ve heard the expression “pay me now or pay me later”. If you want true
sales success, at some point you will need to develop this knowledge. The sooner you begin to work at getting this knowledge one bite at a time each day the more prepared you’ll be when making phone calls to set-up appointments and to have the appointments you hold go really well. By really well I mean that the people you’re meeting with will either immediately choose to do business with you or they will commit to advancing the sales process with you.
Why is understanding so critical? When you understand exactly what your customers want and how they want it, you can give them exactly what they want how they want it when they want it. This removes you from the realm of the horrible sales person to be avoided at all costs, to the realm of the trusted advisor and friend.
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