The success of any business depends on the ability to communicate with customers and potential buyers. There is a tool for this - active sales. What is a set of techniques or a system mechanism? How to master the art of active sales and what determines the success of mastering their techniques?
The essence of active sales
Active sales is most often referred to as the complex process associated with the market sale of a product or service: finding a client, identifying his needs, creating an attractive offer, negotiating, a deal and subsequent communication with the client. Their main difference from passive sales is that the latter do not imply access to the buyer - he comes himself.
It is important that an employee of the company involved in the above-mentioned cycle of interaction with the client understands the specifics of his position, knows what active sales are, that this is not just cash settlement work, but a sequence of deliberate actions aimed at business growth. The ability to not impose, namely to sell goods and services, is important - the buyer should first of all feel like a partner. Here, the manager will need a whole set of personal qualities - the ability to negotiate, find compromises, find common interests with the client and maintain a friendly mode of communication.
The subtle art of active sales
Experts believe that the most important qualities of a manager engaged in the sale of goods and services are the development of working methods, the willingness to identify which active sales technique is most effective, and also to build a systematic model of their use. So, for example, having successfully used a technique that allowed you to start a telephone conversation with a client (in which the interlocutor agrees to take a few minutes to communicate with the manager), you need to be able to interest the buyer, turn him from potential to real.
In this case, it is very important, experts say, to avoid one cunning trick of the interlocutor. Sometimes a client pretends that it is very interesting for him to communicate with the manager - this mainly happens when such behavior prescribes the corporate "code" of the employer company, implying a priority of politeness. The ability to identify such a buyer is a whole art, and we can say - a separate technique of active sales, an isolated type of professional managerial tools.
How to sell the service?
A business delivers either goods or services to the market. The specifics of interaction with customers and potential buyers when working with both items of sales is different. Many experts believe that it is much more difficult to sell a service, as you can’t touch, taste, test, or just enjoy it as a product, as a rule. Active sales of services - an activity that requires specific training. First, a manager must have a real idea of the capabilities of his employer and not promise the client what the business cannot do. Secondly, when selling a service, a specialist should take care of the subsequent mechanism of word of mouth - that is, achieve not a one-time result of work, but to feel further prospects for increasing demand. Thirdly, the manager must be able to somehow compensate for the deficiencies noted when dealing with services (the fact that they cannot be "felt").
The best alternative is persuasion, competent and skillful. Another component of success is the ability to tell the truth, the willingness to disclose details about the product or service being sold by a specialist conducting active sales. What is this brand, who produces it, why such a price - the buyer should know about all this.
Personnel sell everything
In the process of business growth, there comes a time when a new division is needed in its structure - the active sales department. For management, it is important to choose a competent path to the formation of this part of the company and, most importantly, to staff with qualified personnel. Much depends on the current tasks set for the business, and the conditions for their solution.
For example, during the analysis of the situation, the management decided - it is necessary to actively attract new customers. Accordingly, it is necessary to select people with extensive experience working with “cold calls” in the state. Another option is that the market has a very low level of brand perception. Hence the task - to focus on repeat sales, so that each client has a constant association with the goods and services of the company. The main problem in the formation of the staff of sales managers is determining the number of specialists, the scope of functions and the level of responsibility. Experts recommend that businessmen, on the one hand, start with small amounts of work with small forces, and on the other, keep a stack of resumes ready so that, if sales go, call new people.
Profession - Manager
Actually, the main character in communicating with the buyer is the manager. Experts identify several qualities of a person that are necessary to match this position. Firstly, the manager must have motivation, which depends on the attitude to work, temperament, ability to set oneself up positively. Secondly, it is a wide range of personal qualities - maturity, self-confidence, emotional stability, flexibility, the ability to find compromises and solutions in non-standard cases, the ability to negotiate. Thirdly, the manager must have the ability to interest the client in a commercial offer, to have techniques for circumventing client attempts to avoid dialogue. Countering objections is the most important professional quality in this regard, since most clients are initially not inclined to start communication with a stranger. The manager must be able to agree on the most important thing - the price of the goods or services being sold.
When the word no is part of the job
An active sales manager is a person who, perhaps more often than people in most other professions, hears objections, denials, and other attempts by an interlocutor to avoid a constructive dialogue. The ability to adequately perceive the word "no" is the most important quality of a sales specialist. Experts recommend that novice managers, first, treat negatives as part of the work, as normal, and secondly, learn to perceive such phenomena is not too literal. The client often says “no” not because he has clear objections to the purchase of goods and services, sometimes it is a psychological phenomenon that reflects a person’s specific emotions. Cases are common when a person who refuses a manager one or several times subsequently becomes a regular customer of the company. It is important, experts say, to avoid automatically tuning in to a positive answer - this will help the sales specialist to avoid psychological discomfort in cases where the client says no.
The best manager is the shy “scout”
An extremely important quality of the active sales manager is the ability to ask questions to the client, “scout” the profile of his needs, and identify psychological and personal characteristics. Experts note that a limited percentage of specialists possess such ability, and therefore this skill can become a good competitive advantage for a novice "salesman". The art of asking the right questions correctly intersects with the ability to avoid voicing unnecessary phrases.
Therefore, if the manager is naturally talkative, this will certainly help him in becoming a “scout,” but it can interfere with building a meaningful, constructive dialogue with the buyer. Communicating with a client, a sales specialist should speak only on business, revealing what the interlocutor really needs, and, what is important, to be able to listen to the client. It is important to make it clear to the buyer that time-consuming questions are being asked for a reason. The buyer should not feel constrained, but rather, should see what benefit lies in the phenomenon of active sales. That this is not just an attempt to sell something, but a method of building mutually beneficial relations.
Learning is light
Mastering the basics of active sales is not only a practice, but also a theory, a diligent study of various copyrighted methods and materials. Among the sources popular among Russian managers are books (including in audio format), the author of which is Nikolai Rysev.
"Active sales" - this is the name of his works. They are issued in several editions, written in a very simple and understandable style. They contain an in-depth analysis of several dozen strategies for successful sales, negotiating, and there are illustrative examples from practice. This book is a real find for experts in the field of trade of various specializations. Read it and learn a lot of useful things can sellers, sales representatives, managers, managers, and even directors of various departments.
Self-development is the key to success
A manager who has managed to implement a systematic approach to his profession does not gain access to just a set of disparate methods - he has in his hands a whole technology of active sales, which can be scaled into many areas. Achieving such a status implies, first of all, self-development. It lies in the ability and, most importantly, the desire to learn, learn something new in sales.
If an active sales manager knows how to put these phenomena in priority, this will allow him not only to improve himself, but also to correctly assess changes in the environment, work with new external factors (for example, if a particular type of product or service has fallen in demand or target a group of customers for some reason has lost solvency). Another important property of a “salesman” is to know their product, its objectively strong and weak points. The client must receive reliable information about the purchased products or services - this is an important condition for a long-term relationship between him and the business.