People buy from people they trust, so building trust with new and existing customers is crucial. Building trust is as much about what you do as it is what you don’t do. This workout explores how customers think, how they buy and what they care about. Understanding these elements allows you to build trust by being 100% focused on the customer and the customer’s needs.

There’s a view that sales people should Always Be Closing. We don’t agree, as this can damage any rapport and trust you have worked hard to create. Instead, we promote effective closing as leaving every sales call or meeting with clear commitment and timeframes, agreed to by the customer. This workout helps sales people overcome their fear of closing, defines successful versus unsuccessful outcomes, explores different closing techniques and provides sales people with a simple 4-step model for closing.

If your team is out having face to face meetings with customers, this is a MUST DO workout. This workout provides the structure and discipline to use for every customer meeting thereby enhancing the consistency across sales people and generating an improved outcome. Your sales teams are taught how to effectively prepare for every meeting, how to build rapport quickly, how to open the meeting, how to effectively question and listen and finally how to close the meeting.

Are objections good or bad? Can they be avoided? If you get objections, how should you deal with them? These are some of the questions this workout addresses, and we train your sales people to understand the different types of customer objections, why they occur and how best to handle them. Using role plays / scenarios to practice typical objections YOUR COMPANY gets, sales people walk away feeling better prepared for objections and better equipped for dealing with them.

For any sales person managing a client list or a territory, this workout is essential. The art to being successful is PRIORITISATION. It’s a bit like the 80/20 rule. Establishing which customers to put sales effort into is a critical success factor. This workout provides sales people / organisations with an effective model for segmenting a customer base and prioritising accordingly. During the workout your teams will develop a sales strategy for each customer segment and then build account plans for their larger, key accounts.

Customers are negotiating more than ever before. Yet many sales people are inexperienced or under-skilled to negotiate effectively and deals are being lost or margins / profitability is being eroded. Those sales people who are negotiating often take a too hard and direct position, meaning that even if the deal gets done, the experience was so unpleasant for the customer that repeat business is damaged.

Networking is a fundamental part of business development. It doesn’t matter what profession you are in, we all have to network. Yet many people struggle to network effectively, choosing to either avoid it completely or to stay within their comfort zone by talking to people they already know. Unfortunately these people never capitalise on the opportunities available to them. So how you make people better networkers? The first thing our workout covers is CONFIDENCE.

If your sales people have to make presentations to customers, this is a great workout. All the fundamentals of making effective presentations are here – such as knowing your audience, defining your key messages, learning personal presentation techniques, understanding how to present as a team, how to manage the Question and Answer part etc. Your sales people will leave feeling much more confident in their presentation style but also with the quality of their presentations.

Presenting to groups or large audiences can be terrifying. We should not under estimate the nerves and pressure our sales people face in this environment. However, with practice and with the knowledge you have a good presentation, people will become more confident and deliver much better presentations. Our workout focuses on giving your sales people the necessary skills and the confidence boost required.

Sales Managers are being asked to coach their sales people more and more. Yet many fail. Why? Mainly because they don’t know how to coach their people – they have never had training; they lack the confidence to coach; they don’t know who to coach; and lastly they don’t know when they should coach versus when they should help sell. Participating in our workout will prove sales managers with everything they need to coach their people.

“I sent them an email. I’m just waiting to hear back”. We often see sales people replacing sales calls with emails…and wondering why it’s not working. Learning the art of selling on the phone is one of the most important sales skills. Yet people avoid it where possible – mainly because they fear the rejection, lack the confidence or simply don’t know how to structure a great sales call.

To succeed today, sales people need to take more of a customer centric approach. Telling your customers about your products and services is no longer compelling. Instead, customers want the people that sell to them to better understand their business, both the internal aspects (such as vision, strategy and objectives) as well as the external aspects (such as political, economic and technological). This requires an increased level of investment by the sales person. However, it pays off.