Mazen Farah, Founder of HEED with might & main, Sales Management Consultancy helps sales people and leaders in optimizing their sales techniques and allocation of efforts for higher efficiency and growth of sales. Berytech brings you his his top ten tips to making the most out of your sales efforts.
Sales As an Individual
- It’s All In The Mindset: Selling is more than a profession, it is a way of life. Practice it to make it your second nature and develop it to positively affect all your life areas and mindset.
- Misconception of Sales Profession: There are more lies told about sales than the truth told about the real world. Believe in the positive effect of a sales professional in a customer’s life and the value that is added to their life or business and be the ambassador of this perception change.
- No Need to Force a Client to Buy: You cannot force a prospect to buy, but you can help him/her to take the right decision. It is the salespeople who rely on pushing and redundant influencing that fail the perception and result of sales. Be the real consultant and an innovative solution provider.
- Silent but Vital Competitors: Your main competitors are the status quo & your energy: a star salesperson is simply a person who is not happy with the status quo and takes initiative to change it while putting his positive energy to bring the sales process forward.
- Sharpen to Question and Understand: Unlike what we have been raised to do, in sales is not about how well you present your product but how well you understand your customer, ask the right question to clarify their needs and tailor your solution.
- Guide the Customer Through: Most sales reps rely on a customer to coach them through a sale and get proud to merely responding fast to clients’ requests. Whereas star sales people coach the customer and guide them within their decision process.
Sales As part of the Organization
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Ranking Salespeople Performance: while it is necessary to rank to have a visibility of your team levels and progress to set plans and goals, it might not be ultimate to publish it to the entire team in order not to create: discouragement, and less cooperation. Hence the best solution would be to post top performers only, and individually share the needed ranking to create motivation and setting smart personal goals. - Know When and Who to Promote: your best salesperson might not be your best or even good sales manager. It’s ideal to look within your star salespeople who can produce outstanding results, but it’s important to be careful as it might have some critical consequences such as 1) “keep working independently” while you need the manager coaching skills instead, 2) be “self-centered” and “marginalize the salespeople” while you need the manager to focus on developing the team instead of talking about own achievement or have tendency to solve the deal personally in tough times.
- Perceived Value & Perceived Price: People do not buy based on price or value but always the correlation between the perceived value and perceived price. So make sure to position your solution value correctly for its price to be closer or matching to the customer’s perceived price.
- Trust: 74% of customers buy based on trust, so make sure to focus on working on the building blocks of trust with the customer; which are in broad titles: Company, Brand, Product and Sales Skills. But if we zoom on these blocks, we find that 39% is based on sales skills. Hence, efficiently investing in a specific component will have a specific ROI.
About the blogger
Mazen Farah is the Managing Partner and Founder of HEED, operating from its principal hub in Beirut. For more than 7 years, he has worked with clients in various industries helping them improve their sales force effectiveness, go-to-market strategy, sales force design, and talent management. Prior to that, Mazen was a savvy sales and business development executive in the IT and services industries. After he graduated from the Lebanese American University in MIS, he worked as a Network Administrator while he further pursued his MBA within the same university prior to his move to the sales and then to the consulting business.
Now leveraging on his solid background in IT, he has partnered with leaders in Sales and Data Analytic Technology (Alteryx, SalesFit, Iseeit) providers to expand HEED business and deploy the right tools for further sales efficiency and revenue maximization.
