The best sales force knows the secret to plan a successful sale. We are not talking about oratory, technical skills or power of persuasion, but about defining our sales strategies before meeting our potential customer.

What do we mean by sales techniques? Something as simple as planning the steps involved in a sale before executing them. It’s about learning to control all the events that we’ll find; to put our available resources in order so that we can deal with the meeting successfully.

It is true that the most of the sales force know that they must plan the sales strategies before executing the actions involved, but it is also true that the same sales force tend to improvise on the go ousting -without being aware of it- the potential customer from the final purchase. If you also were those who struggle to plan a sale, the advices we have prepared for you would be very useful.

1. Knowledge

To know in depth all your business’ areas –both external and internal ones– is essential to face sales situations with solid arguments. The more you know about your business, the easier will be to close a sale. Furthermore, you must control the following points:

Know your product or service

This is a key point: you must know in depth your entire product or service’s characteristics, benefits and advantages. Make yourself the following question: what does your product offer as an extra that no other product does? If you know how to answer it with solid arguments, the half of the sale is already done.

Know your target

First of all, you must know to whom is your product or service directed. A very common mistake is that it is believed that a product or service is suitable for everybody. This is wrong, and that’s why segmentation exists; it details different groups of people with similar characteristics and potential customers for our product or service.

Once the groups of customers are segmented, you must know them in depth. Know their age, where do they work, which are their characteristics, what surrounds them, what is interesting for them, how are their families, their level of influence… all this makes us closer to them. To know the target is key to offer the customers a product or service with proper solutions for their needs

Know your competition

First of all, make sure you know who your competition is: any person, company or organization that obtains money from your potential customer. To know who your competition is, what does it offer and what prices does it have gives you the opportunity to plan some competitive sales strategies and develop a purchasing advantage. If you know whom your competition is, you’ll be able to answer this question: Why to make a purchase with you and not with the competition? Obtaining with the answer good arguments for a solid sales speech that will make you reach more customers and increase your sales.

2. Collection of information

The next step to plan a successful sale is to collect all the useful information you can. To do so, you must obtain data about previous sales that help you understand what is functioning and what is not. All this will help you to develop sales techniques and lay out correctly the following points.

3. Fixing objectives and goals

To close a successful sale, you must make clear the objectives and particular goals that you want to achieve with your sales actions. The objectives are your sales aims or achievements. To define properly an objective, this must contain the following characteristics: to be specific, understandable, realistic, measurable and viable to obtain in a determined period of time with determined resources.

“Planning what you want to obtain will help you reach it”

4. Strategies and tactics

As a seller, you must develop different sales strategies to reach your goals. That is to say, to plan what are you going to say in a meeting with your customer, how are you going to say it and when are you going to say it. Means are the support elements available for a seller during a sales visit in order to obtain the expected objective. Means cover a wide range: from a price strategy to the documents used during the sales speech to reinforce the sales arguments.

“Selling is usually a matter of having a better strategy than your competition”

5. Practice and actions

Although the most of sales force know that preparation is essential in a sales interview in order to succeed, the most of them tend to rely on their ability to improvise and their know-how. And the certain is that the sales techniques cannot be improvised: you must have trained before about what are you going to say and how are you going to say it. Practicing gives you the opportunity to get a more powerful speech, solid arguments and to be more prepared to give irrefutable answers. Practicing is the basis to obtain an infallible communication with your potential customers.

Actions are the plan’s execution, in other words, the start-up of all the strategies and tactics developed before in order to reach the sales goals.

6. Results’ evaluation and feedback

This point is performed after the actions during a sales visit are done. Evaluation is the verification of our sales strategies’ goals fulfillment. To control the evaluation you must compare the results of a visit with the objectives previously planned.

“What is not measurable, cannot be improved”

The results of a sales visit allow you to learn how to be more effective when you plan the next sales interview, mainly for the point 2 about Collection of information. Learning from the mistakes, you can obtain feedback and be able to reduce them improving this way your sales efficacy.

So, to prepare well for a sales interview will benefit you as a seller, because you will have worked in detail all the points, topics and possible situations giving yourself confidence and certainty during your sales speech. This will help you to make closer the customer and increase the possibilities of closing a sale, because an involved seller is a successful seller.