Digital Sales Training Blog

Salespeople tend to be independent by nature. They tend to be self-driven and are inclined to take total control of their professional responsibilities. Those are laudable traits that are critical for success in the marketplace.

Making the presentation is only the beginning of the process! There are plenty of great presenters who also have serious difficulty actually closing the deal. Why? Because their feedback loop with the buyer needs a lot of improvement.

Great customer service goes far beyond the obvious. CRM software, which you may be using or are at least familiar with, supposedly checks all of the boxes. But does it really? Assuming that your competitors are also using comparable CRM resources, then what makes your brand of customer service any different from theirs? Let’s look at what it takes to be best in class with all of your customers. Customers should feel that their respective business is more important to you than anyone else’s. Yes, that does sound a bit selfish, but have you ever met a customer who says, "Get around to helping me after you’ve helped everybody else…”? And hopefully, you’ve never made the faux pas of telling a customer or a client that you’re busy taking care of someone else at the moment. Cookie cutter service doesn’t make anyone feel special or unique. It’s up to you the salesperson to figure out what you can do to make each and every of your customers and clients feel that they’re #1! 1. Learn Spend some serious time learning as much as you can about all of your various customers’ businesses. No one is expecting you to become an expert, but being less than well informed will be clearly obvious any time you’re communicating with your respective clients and customers. And that obvious lack of interest or understanding translates to “My salesperson really doesn’t care that much about me or my business.” The kiss of death. Furthermore, trying to fake it on this one just adds more insult to the injury. Either you know what’s going on or you don’t! 2. Ask Periodically ask your customers how they feel about the quality of the service that you’re providing. In most cases, they will be more than happy to give you constructive feedback and maybe even a compliment or two! This is a “meta” maneuver that both probes for valuable service insights and also shows that you care about your customers. Why else would you be asking on a consistent basis? When Ed Koch served as Mayor of New York City, he made it a point of asking ordinary citizens, “How am I doing?” He got some great info and endeared himself to the voters at the same time. You can easily do the same with your customers! 3. Offer

In today’s consumer-driven world, people flock to their mobile phones, or other electronic devices such as tablets or laptops to communicate with people, search for the latest products or services, and then purchase them with a click of a button in merely seconds. Shopping online isn’t just a phase; it’s a development that has gotten the world to depend on technology for basic necessities like checking the balance of their bank account, to grocery shopping. Yet what is most surprising when it comes to this technological advancement is the fact that people aren’t necessarily going to the store website to purchase these products or services. Rather, they are viewing and buying these products/services through advertisements promoted on social media networks. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Vine are all social media networks you’ve probably already heard about and you may even be using these sites for your own purposes. But have you heard of the recently emerging social media marketing sites and services that companies are using to gain greater visibility into their target audience and make their marketing efforts seamless?

By Buff Parham, President of Parham & Associates, LLC Great value propositions need to be transmitted as clearly as possible. How many times have our best pitches gotten lost in the process of being conveyed to the customer? To understand why that happens, we need to understand the difference between "signal" and "noise." Everything that we convey is either one or the other--a zero sum game. Therefore, we can also establish "ratios" on signal to noise for every message that we send. Achieving a consistently high “signal to noise” ratio is the name of the game…