7 Steps To #SellLikeYou
Growing your business does not have to be complicated.
With the right structures in place, the path to growth lights up in front of you.
These 7 steps will help you understand what needs to be done in your business to help it grow, and they're what every top-performing seller gets right.
Know Yourself
You need to find alignment among/between:
What you do
Who you do it for
How you do it
Why
Without this alignment, it’s impossible to do your best work. You can sell something you don’t care much about, but if you really want to make an impact, you need to be very passionate about the outcomes you create.
Know Your Best Customers
If you don’t know them, you can’t replicate them. You don’t really understand your best customers until you’re willing to get vulnerable with them:
"Why did you choose to do business with us?"
"Can you please be more specific?"
"Why do you continue to do business with us?"
"Do you know anybody else who might appreciate that kind of value?"
"Would you be willing to introduce us?"
The first three questions will deepen your relationships and give you the language to find others like them. The last two will allow them to help you find more like them.
Know Your Sales Process- What Are You Trying to Accomplish and Why?
The sales process is the science of selling. These are the things that have to happen, and there are only 4 main components:
Identify who you can help
Get their attention
Communicate your value
Ask for next steps
Know what you and your company must do within each stage to be successful, and commit to making those things happen.
Decide On Your Methods
Know what will work best for you to accomplish each step in the process. This will likely be different for everyone on the team, but as long as everything is aimed at the same goal, it shouldn’t matter. Believe why your tactics will work and be able to reasonably defend them. We'll get to defending them in a minute.
Know the Rules
Selling is not an instruction manual to be followed; it’s a series of problems to be solved. Here are the rules and constraints for solving those problems:
Be someone worth talking to
Have something worth talking about
If you cannot differentiate, you cannot sell
Speak in terms of problems, not solutions
Questions start conversations, and statements end them
No tension, no sale
As long as you're playing by these rules, you can sell any way you want and be effective.
Be Accountable to Someone Else
There’s no human being anywhere that doesn’t perform better when they know someone else is there to support and guide them. This element is vital to the team's success because it will ensure that everybody's individual methods are still contributing to the overall goal. Without this check in place, efforts get wasted.
Ideally, your team leader will be meeting with you regularly to help you progress and give you the support you need to do so. If that's not the leader you have, then find someone else you can partner with. They might be inside your organization or outside of it, but you need someone who will provide some kind of support, and chances are they need someone too.
Trust Yourself and Keep Your Swagger
The sale begins and ends with belief. You believe you can make it the first time, and then you believe you can make it again. This mindset is not easy to maintain, so make it a point to work on it daily.
This is the only framework you need. All the elements are there to enable you to do your best work. You can drill down into each section and refine if you'd like, but in broad strokes, most organizations are missing a few of these.
Like nutrition, if you get the big chunks right, most of the little stuff also falls into place. If you spend too much time on the minutiae while something glaringly obvious is missing, you're not really helping yourself.
If you work on a team that really nails this, let me know. I want to know more about how you got there.
