Key Takeaways
- The preapproach is a critical step that helps you earn your customer’s trust and sell adaptively; this is true whether you are meeting with a new customer—a target account—or an existing customer—one of your key accounts.
- Before you make your sales call, you should know the objectives of the meeting. You should record these objectives, along with basic company information, on a precall planning worksheet.
- Preapproach research includes information on:
- company demographics, company news, and financial performance to help you discover sales opportunities and go deeper in your qualifying process.
- company’s customers, the current buying situation, and your contact person at the company to help you tailor your sales approach.
- existing customers to find opportunities for expanding the relationship and creating moresales.
- Good salespeople don’t sell products; they sell solutions to their customers’ problems or challenges.
- It’s important to know exactly what you want to accomplish when you go into a sales meeting.
- The goals for your sales call should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound: SMART.
- Once you have identified your customers’ problems and goals, brainstorm solutions and opportunities that will meet their needs.
- Knowing the best solution for your customer will help you craft a general benefits statement and a specific benefits statement that will help the customer envision the way your solution or opportunity meets their needs.
- As you plan your sales presentation, keep four things in mind:
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- Prioritize and organize your agenda.
- Personalize the presentation to match your customer’s needs and preferences.
- Prepare visual aids and product demonstrations to illustrate your point and engage your audience.
- Practice your delivery.
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