Pay-off: no excuses about what to learn
Investment: 2 mins
Learning how to learn fast was the most important sales skill I ever learned.
Why?
Because you’re armed to:
- learn and improve your sales approach rapidly
- quickly learn about your customer’s business and challenges
- keep up to date easily with industry/market changes
- stay on top of your own changing solutions and services
- help customers learn from you more effectively when you talk, present or pitch to them
Unfortunately, many sales improvement programs focus mostly on sales techniques rather than the learning of such techniques and behaviours. Big difference. People need to learn how to turn new techniques and ideas into new habits and behaviours.
It pays to learn how to learn effectively first. And then you can consider what to learn to make the most impact on your sales.
Here’s 33 ideas to start you off:
You could learn…
- about your industry, market, trends, and buyer’s business or life
- your customer’s problems and challenges that you can add value to
- the typical associated emotions your customers have around these challenges and opportunities and how to angle your pitch
- what the triggers to these problems, challenges or opportunities look like
- the questions you could ask to expose those triggers
- your products, services and solutions
- customer success stories, typical benefits and quantitative value to customers
- typical and common perceived risks to your customers and ways to reduce these
- useful language patterns that help people make decisions more effectively (and be able to skillfully use these)
- what your competitors are up to and your own USP
- what your customers buy before and after engaging you (and why)
- different types of questions, what they specifically do for you and your customers (some provide you with information, some just make the customer think, some amplify their emotions…) and which are the most powerful
- the importance of sales coaching, and how high performance sales coaching should work as opposed to standard sales coaching and mentoring
- how to collaborate with your sales coach to help them coach you effectively
- who to refer customers to within your organisation (and external partners or associates)
- your strengths, weaknesses, mindset, limiting beliefs and blindspots that hold you back
- industry language and jargon of your customers
the basics of emotional intelligence and how to improve it - about different personality types and how to adapt to them
- useful technological tools, apps and websites that help you sell more effectively
- how to reach your prospects and engage them in a way that they respond well to
- sales planning skills and management and adherence to your sales process
- time and self-management/self-control
- business/commercial principals and awareness
- relevant terms and measures that impact your customers
- the role of emotions in selling, and the skill of taming your own emotions whilst engaging those of your customer
- how each unique customer likes to make their buying decisions
- how to align and collaborate with internal teams involved with selling (technical/sales/marketing etc)
- basic sales skills (prospecting, questioning, listening, negotiating, qualifying, presenting, closing etc)
- how to develop habits
- different thinking styles
- your top informational resources, mentors and role models for learning all of these things
- accelerated learning skills – how to learn anything fast and effectively
- what the sufficient level of knowledge is for each of the things in this list
For help learning any of these things fast and effectively, contact me
