ALL ABOUT YOU

IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU, YOU KNOW!

What are your goals? What are your aims? How many sales do you need to make this month? What is your annual target? What does your product or service do? How much activity do you need to do every month? How many cold calls do you need to make? How many networking meetings do you need to attend? How many client meetings do you need to run? How many presentations do you need to make? What does your conversion ratio need to be? What price do you need to sell at? What do you need to achieve in negotiations? What do you want to achieve in your job? What do you want to achieve in your life? What do you want your legacy to be?

All great questions, but here's a different one... what do they have in common?

Attend any typical sales meeting and you may hear the following questions thrown around...

What are our targets? What activity do we need to undertake?
What are our KPIs? What do we need to do this month to hit our targets? What are we going to sell this month? What new products do we have to take to market?...

All great questions but what do they have in common?

Have you got it yet?

They're all about you and what you want. They're all about your company and what your company needs to achieve and do. Most people live their lives on "Me! Me! Me!" but that's not good when your clients live their lives on "Me! Me! Me!" too. TO be a truly great salesperson you need the "Me! Me! Me!" drive and ambition but when you get in front of prospects and clients you
need to be "You! You! You!". We are, after all, supposed to be servicing our clients.

When did you last ask, "How can I help my clients this week?"

Targets, KPIs, activity reports, conversion ratios, sales skills - they are all very important and they are all things which I help clients with when helping with sales force development but in the midst of this important stuff we must not forget about our clients, their needs and their agendas. To achieve uncommon sales success in today's challenging markets you need to demonstrate to
your clients and your prospects that you really, truly believe and care about them and the only way that you can do this consistently is by genuinely, really, truly caring about them.

My clients often tell me that they cannot get their clients to open up to them fully. Many think that either a) this is not possible much of the time or that b) they are missing some magical technique that will enable them to achieve this in their meetings.

Both thoughts are wrong. Clients do not open up to salespeople because they know that they do not really care about them, because they know that they are not really interested in them, because they do not trust them to enough to share with them fully and because they know that they only want to make a sale. They worry that anything they share with the salesperson will be taken down
and used in evidence to sell against them.

You may think that this is harsh but if you take a deep breath, go inside and get honest with yourself, brutally honest, you know that it is true... at least some of the time! Even if not for you, for some of your peers and colleagues in any case!

Learning to truly care about your clients, to embrace this new paradigm of selling and to make your calls and meetings about your clients and not all about you is something that I cover in my training and development programmes. It's incredibly powerful and effective to use and this non-pressurized and client-centric approach makes selling easy for even the most sales shy. For experienced salespeople, making your calls more client-centric will help you to build stronger relationships with your clients, position value not price, shorten buying cycles and close more deals.

Question of the week: What can you do today to make every call you conduct more about your clients rather than all about yo