Table of Contents

Sales and Negotiation Skills

It starts with understanding the simple question, “What is sales?”. Then shall discuss what are the no-compromise essential Sales Skills one should have or develop.

Skill building starts with proper planning which is most important for a salesperson. In many cases, you may find a salesperson decides in the morning only where to visit, take his/her kit and start visiting.  Most of the time firefighting or follow-up the hot leads only.  However, a salesperson should plan his visit a week before in general (unless something requires much-advanced planning, as well as outstation visits).

Let me explain the sales planning and various components of it which contribute to sales skills in detail.

What is selling?

Selling is the way that you help customers to buy products and services from your business.

You need to be able to meet the needs of your customers and provide value-for-money solutions.

At times you need to create needs.

Transactional and Consultative selling

Here I just want to mention about the great barrier. In one side, ‘Transactional Selling’ and in other side ‘Consultative selling’. As this itself is a major subject I shall write a separate article on it. However from the below picture you can get a fair idea about it. Also you can decide in which stage you are and that will help you to fit yourself with subsequent discussion here and other articles in this blog.

Two major parts of the complete selling process.

Selling -> Negotiation

Ask yourself that is the first part is completing the selling process? It is complete when a salesperson and customer agreed on all points or have an agreement on several points but not all. If agreed for all points, then no need to negotiate and directly go for order. If there is disagreement on some of the important aspects, then the second part comes into action which is Negotiation. Read the Part-2 of this article to understand what negotiation is, how it needs to be tackled and what are the challenges may come.

Selling Preparation-Essential Sales Skills

As I wrote above that it is not to decide in the morning and jump into it. It has several steps and need preparation for this like below.

Meeting Plan

• Fix an appointment with the customer. Especially if the customer is a KOL, decision taker or senior
• Understand customers in detail. Like the area of work, the need of the customer, and the nature of the customer, before visiting him/her. It can be done through web browsing, talking to peers who worked with the same customer. It is important for a first-time meeting for a project. As well as for cold calls.
• Prepare yourself for the meeting. May need to arrange brochures, presentations, publications etc.
• Define the goal of the meeting. Needless to say, the goal is not necessarily to get his agreement or the order. The goal can be as small as to fix a detailed meeting subsequent to this or get his agreement on certain points etc. Accordingly, you can set the next goal.

Cold Calls

A very useful tool or practice to think beyond what you have in hand. You can not have running leads with all customers. However, your experience, knowledge and intellect should guide you where you can explore opportunities. Need to visit those customers even if you never visited them. Need some planning as well as following the below process –

• Know customers from other sources.
• Visit with an appointment or just step in based on the type of customer.
• Introduce yourself.
• Explore the customer need by probing / cold call can be to generate leads.
• Discuss the products as per the customer’s need or you may feel that the customer may require a product.
• Discuss benefits.
• Close the call with some commitment from both side if you find that it is a quailed suspect or prospect.

Meeting action

During the meeting, the discussion flow should be controlled by you in the following manner.

• Define the timeline, ask for an agreement
• Define agenda
• Communicate your deliverables..do not sprawl
• Involve the customer in the discussion
• Provoke customer to speak

Probing 

• Ask close and open questions
• Listen patiently…Read between the lines
• Ask for an agreement.
• Define next meeting.

What is open and close probing?

Close probing is those questions where you expect the reply with YES or NO. Not to give much option to speak beyond it. It helps to bring the customer in your desire path. For example – ‘Are you ok with a MII (Make in India) product?’. ‘Are you planning to buy within this financial year?’, ‘Do you have the budget of 50 Lakh or more for the system you are looking for?’. The open form of the same question is, ‘what is your budget?’.

Some more examples of Open and Close probing

Example of Close and Open probing

Close Q – Do small pack size is fine with you?

Open Q – What kind of pack size you are looking for?

Close Q – Will you place the order by March?

Open Q– When you will place the order?

Close Q – Can I meet you again next Monday?

Open Q – When can I meet you again?

Close Q – Is your experiment on apoptosis?

Open Q – What is your experiment?

Open Probing is to allow a customer to talk a lot, give detail and extract maximum information from a customer.

You know what is your strength and weakness. Based on this the open and close probing not only help to get more information but incline the customer to your side.

However, you may notice some customers are talkative and some are the opposite in nature. Even for your close question customer shall keep on talking more than you want and many unimportant matters also. And some customers talk very less, even against your open question they will give the answer in one or two words. So based on the nature of the customer, you need to balance your open and close probing.

Review

Is your selling process over?

Check

1. Could you satisfy customer’s needs with your features and benefits?
2. Could you resolve the customer’s concern?
3. Did the customer give commitment to accept certain deliverables, terms & conditions and Prices?

If your answer is yes to all these questions then you completed the sales part. And you can go for the negotiation for the 3^rd point where some terms and deliverables can be negotiated as well as the price (not price only).

If your answer is NO for the first two then you need to work more with the customer to get a reply YES for these two.

Poor salespersons think negotiation is price only and they try to overcome their short learning by throwing price and the company lose the price.

When one can satisfy the customer’s need then he/she can get his desirable prices.

Here often one question comes that how a salesman can satisfy all needs if the specification is not matching with the product one wants to sell? It is a vital point. Sales person can not do it. The reason being someone developed the case and the salesperson jumped on it. A salesperson should not play the role of a box mover but a real salesperson with appropriate training and knowledge. That is the purpose of this post I wrote and you reading.

Also, be careful the customer can sometimes fool you by showing interest in your product as in the government environment he/she needs three quotations, or competitive analysis to buy the product he desires. It sometimes happens even if you are a good salesman. However, if you are a good salesman, understand sales and have learned selling, then such cases will be minimal for you as well as the other way around. The customer will help to hailing other parties and close for you.

Now you understand the selling part. Let us discuss the negotiation and closing of the sales in the next post.

Professional Selling and Negotiation

I discussed the selling part in brief here and hope you enjoyed reading it and learnt several essential sales skills which are important when you decided to take sales as a profession. The more important part is negotiation as because your success will depend on it most. As well as the company will get higher benefits or lower benefits based on your negotiation skills. The primary purpose of an organisation that they recruited you so that you contribute higher.

How to Develop Negotiation Skills? I discussed this in part 2 of this article.

PART-2 – Negotiation Skills, click here to read.