Communication in Sales
Course Outline
Whenever and however you meet your customers, you need to ensure you meet and exceed your sales targets. Whether meeting existing contacts, or cold-calling for new ones, the benefits of interacting successfully with your customers are far-reaching. There is often a lot at stake when we communicate, hence the pressure to ‘get it right’.
Course Aims:
- To increase your ability to make sales
- To develop communication approaches suitable to different customers and clients
- To build your customer base through skilful communication based on understanding your customer’s needs
Learning Objectives:
- Developing your awareness of the sales process
- Understanding the role of skilful communication within the sales process
- Increasing confidence in making connections with customers and clients
- Managing ‘difficult’ situations without stress for you or your customers
- Recognising and making the most of opportunities and ‘‘sales breaks’
- Feeling the difference between real and superficial or contrived confidence
- Handling objections and and moving on from ‘failure’
- Understanding the balance between ‘trying for’ and ‘allowing’ a sale
The Sales Process:
Commence – Consolidate – Conclude
The course covers the unfolding sales process, from the point when the sale first opens to its closing deal. To start with, we focus on first impressions: how to approach, meet and connect with customers. The course centres on how to hone a connection and win your customers’ confidence and trust over time.
1. Commence: Express yourself with confidence
This course will teach you how to present yourself, the company and the product (or service) confidently. We look at the message that you send out and how it might be received. Many communication errors stem from an unconscious assumption that we are trying to connect with people exactly like ourselves. For example, we overlook issues of psychological make-up, nationality, language, ethnicity or age.
- Are you getting the right message across?
- Can you appreciate different styles of communication?
- Have you taken your communication media into account?
2. Consolidate: Actively listen for your customer’s needs
The course develops your skills in active listening, so you will be able to listen attentively for the explicit, as well as implicit, needs of your customers. So often we assume that we know what our customers need and we are keen to supply it immediately, only to find out later that they are not as interested as we thought. As we bring more skills to our listening, our customers quickly trust that we are focused on their issues and needs — and not on the outcome of the sale.
3. Conclude: Take appropriate action
Once we know our customers’ needs, and they know that we know, results quickly follow. Our aim is to ensure that everyone is satisfied — whatever the outcome. Only then can we truly realise the proverbial adage for sales and marketing — to ‘meet customer needs profitably’ (from Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management).
The course will increase your ability to:
- Connect with your customers’ needs, and draw out implicit needs skilfully
- Let customers know you know their needs — and that you want to meet them
- Make sure your own needs support the sale, and don’t impede it
- Know what not to do in communication with customers and clients!
- Explore different styles and media of communication
- Recognise when you ‘try hard’ and how may that come across
- Know the advantages and disadvantages of short — and — long term approaches in customer care
- See the difference between charm and genuine warmth
- Keep positive, and be genuinely helpful and friendly
- Meet your sales objectives with assurance
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Communication in Sales