136 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
Sales skills and tips
Selling is the art of using conversational questions in order to help a buyer
get what they need or want at a price that is protable for you and makes
them feel good enough to want to come back for more.
Selling is not:
telling prospects how great you or your products are;
hard persuasion or pressure;
putting a stupidly cheap price on something;
using manipulative tricks, telling lies or massaging the truth to get
someone to buy.
Understand the sales staircase
Be patient, you don’t always have to open and close the deal during the
rst contact with the customer. The best sales people understand that
patience is a virtue. See the process as a staircase with each contact leading
you upwards towards the next step and, of course, your goal. Indeed it is
not uncommon in B2B sales to have seven or more interactions or contacts
before a sale is actually made. Inexperienced or impatient sales people often
give up after the rst two or three.
Use questions to identify problems and concerns
Instead of merely ‘tell selling’, where you simply tell the prospect how great
you or your products are, the best sales people have a different strategy.
They use conversational and rapport-building questions to get the prospect
talking about why they are potentially interested in making a purchase.
Skill area Score
Sales skills ______
Writing skills ______
Conversational business networking skills ______
Presentation/public speaking skills ______
Negotiation skills ______
Time management skills ______
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Personal performance business development skills 137
With the right questions a prospect will usually share the problems and
concerns they have, that have brought them to you. Skilful sales people
know it is important to go through this process so that the prospect will
eventually take ownership of the solution that you offer.
Ask the magic ‘Would it be helpful?’ question
Would it be helpful to learn a killer sales question? I’m always hesitant
about giving particular phrases or scripts to people in sales situations but
this one works more often than not.
Once you have your potential customer or client at the stage where they
are sharing their problems and concerns, you could consider this ‘magic’
question. So for example:
Would it be helpful to x up an appointment?
Would it be helpful if I show you a bigger model?
Would it be helpful if we can work out a special deal for you?
Would it be helpful if we can deliver that within your timescale?
Would it be helpful if we can come up with something to solve that
problem for you at a sensible price?
Providing you don’t ask this too early, you will get a ‘yes’ most of the time.
How did you mentally answer the opening question at the beginning of
this tip?
Ask for what you want outright
I have witnessed and experienced this thousands of times. One of the
biggest sales traps of all, when people conclude the sales conversation or
contact, is not asking outright for what they really want. For example,
don’t ‘if’ the prospect away. Whatever you do, don’t end your conversation
with, ‘So if you’d like to go ahead, please don’t hesitate to get back in touch with
us.’ The moment you use the word ‘if’, you are implicitly pushing the pros-
pect away, sowing seeds of doubt in their mind and losing control of the
situation. So without hesitancy or being over-pushy, ask something like:
‘May I take it you’d like to go ahead?’
‘When is it convenient to get together to take this further?’
138 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
Ask choice questions
Sometimes when asking for what you want you can get a better result by
asking the question and then offering two choices with specic positive
alternative answers. So for example instead of saying, ‘Would you like to
make an appointment?’, you might ask instead, ‘Based on what you have just
told me, it strikes me the best way of taking this forward is for us to get together.
When is most convenient for you? How about either the 12th or 15th of October?’
This takes the prospect into what I call diary mode, where they are now
focusing on which date is best for them, rather than on both the positives
and negatives of going ahead at all.
Share your condence in your products or services and
your desire to have them
Customers want to feel good about the purchase they are making. If you
have built appropriate rapport with them, identied the problems and con-
cerns and shown there is a ‘t’ between what you have to offer and their
requirement, then telling them, ‘I am absolutely 100percent condent that
we can really help you sort those problems out and we would love to have you as
a customer’, or words to that effect, will really oil the wheels of the potential
sale. Make sure, however, you really mean it and are able to say it sincerely.
Learn to overcome objections
There are whole books and expensive courses on this issue alone. Many
sales people actually fear asking for the business or seeking feedback
because they are worried that the prospect will have an objection. Here are
a few commonsense tips on dealing with objections.
Don’t argue
I have come across many sales people who think that the way to overcome
the objection is to argue and be confrontational with the prospect. If a
potential customer or client says, ‘I’m sorry, you’re just too expensive’, don’t
respond with, ‘No we’re not, we like to think we’re pretty competitive, we know of
many others who are much more expensive than us.’ As a basic rule you’re not
going to get a great result by taking an opposing argumentative position.
Don’t panic and start ‘tell selling’
Some sales people deal with objections by being panicked into an out-
pouring of breathless benets about their products or services. This will, in
most cases, not help.
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Personal performance business development skills 139
Don’t justify on the grounds that it is good for you
Believe it or not I have heard sales people say, ‘Oh come on, I need to meet
my sales targets this month.’
Plan for specic objections in advance
Some people deal with objections as if they are surprised by them and have
never heard them before. I guarantee that if I ask you to make a list of all
the possible objections that might be raised, you will be hard pushed to
raise more than ve or six. What this means is that you can identify them
in advance and then plan and discuss the best way of dealing with each
of them.
Use questions to overcome objections
There are several techniques that really work. Let me give you a few
examples.
Ask SSOD IT™ questions. This is an acronym device of mine and stands for:
S = Sow
S = Seeds
O = Of
D = Doubt
SSOD IT is basically the technique of rst aligning with your prospect and
then asking a couple of questions that sow seeds of doubt in their mind.
When you then ask them to reconsider the proposition, they do so with
these doubts rmly in their mind. For example, suppose you have a price
objection . . . you could say:
‘You know what, I can totally understand you being hesitant given that we are a
little more expensive than some (aligning) . . . but let me ask you a couple of ques-
tions to help you decide once and for all. Will the other company you mentioned
be able to deliver as quickly as ours within a specic time? Have you any idea
who will actually be doing the job at the other rm and their level of experience,
specialisation and track record? Let me reassure you by . . . etc.’
What’s happened here is that by saying you understand their position, you
will align with them, which means you haven’t threatened the rapport you
should have built up, and by asking the various questions you get them to
reconsider for themselves whether they are actually comparing like with
like.
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