It is no surprise that successful entrepreneurs are good salesperson too. In the early stage of business startup, entrepreneurs often need to sell their products/services on their own. The process of selling helps you to gather valuable feedbacks directly from your customers. This is not possible when you hire sales people to handle customers.

Here, we provide some principles any sales person should know:

a) Qualifying your prospects

In a highly competitive business environment, qualifying your prospects and identifying the most potential ones helps to save you valuable time and resources. It is painful for someone who is not interested to sit through a 1 hour sales presentation anyway. Successful salespeople can often identify prospects that are most likely to buy from them.

b) Motivating and discovering needs

Some products/services do not speak for themselves. Often, customers do not realize that they need your products/services unless you explain the full benefits to them, or the technical details of your products/services. There is no use selling to someone who is unwilling to buy. If he/she is not satisfied after the sales is closed, you probably have left a bad impression by hard selling. There is no chance for repeat sales or referral anyway.

c) Matching and Building Rapport

The 1st impression always count. There may be several ways we establish our first contact with the prospects. Whichever way it is, we often spend the 1st 5 seconds to qualify the prospect. If he/she qualifies and that you think there is a possibility of sales generated, we try to match him/her depending on the situation:

d) Presenting yourself

Often, your 1st impression to the prospect speaks everything, and most likely determine whether you can close the sales. You may need to dress formally to show that you take the meeting seriously. When presenting, try selling benefits instead of features. You are NOT going to tell your prospect what your products is about, but letting him/her know HOW your products can help him/her.

e) Getting commitments is life and death

Now that you have presented everything, are you going to ask your prospect: "Are you going to buy now?" If we ask this question, you will be expecting 2 answers: "Either a Yes, or No." This is not rather tactful. An interested party may say "No" directly, in fact most people will. But among these group of potential buyers, a large percentage of them still do not understand your products/services well. They may have questions in mind that they have not clarified. But since you have left them with 2 options >> "Yes or No", They can only choose the safer one to avoid any monetary commitment.

f) Sales are generated from proper follow up

While some customers may decide to buy from you on the first meeting, we can't deny the fact that a large number of sales are generated from proper follow up.

Following up can be:

• Providing more information about your products/services
• Establishing more credibilities about yourself, your company
• Building rapport and understanding more about your prospects

Sometimes, customers may find that you are so persistent and finally decide that they have to buy from you.

We hope this article is useful for you and that it helps to boost your sales volume.

Article by Byon Ong, Singapore Business Resources for Entrepreneurs

March 2006

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