Thinking and Questioning Your Way to Sales Success – Part 2

by Dave Kahle

Excerpted from Chapter Seventeen, Question Your Way to Sales Success,  by Dave Kahle

In part one of this series, I made the point that thinking better is the ultimate success skill for a sales person, and that good thinking always came from asking yourself the right questions and writing down the answers.Sounds so simple.  Yet, only a handful of true professionals adhere to that discipline.

     I listed some times to ask yourself questions, and some good questions to ask yourself, as they related to improving your personal sales effectiveness.  In this installment, I’m going to focus on questions to ask to drive your overall  improvement as a professional sales person.

          Personal Improvement Questions

The personal effectiveness questions that we reviewed in part one are based on the premise that you can choose to do things that are more effective than others.  You have a choice of how to invest your sales time, and you make those decisions about that investment by following certain thinking disciplines.  The focus is on the decision you make about what to do.

     The questions in this section focus on you having the ability to do what you say you want to do.  In other words, before you can do something, you have to be able to do it.  If for example, you say, I’m going to play in a basketball game tomorrow, that is a decision that proceeds out of the first section – what to do.  It assumes, however, that you have the ability to play the game – that you can pass, dribble, shoot and defend.  It has to do with how well you can do that which you said you were going to do.  The focus is on the quality of what you do.

     It is one thing to say, “I’m going to call on this huge potential account.”  It is quite another to say, “And I’m going to be very competent in that sales call.”

In this section, we are going to examine those questions that lead to your improvement in quality – in the core sales competencies that are used throughout the sales process and which, in conjunction with your decisions as to what to do, ultimately impact your performance as a sales person.  Superstar sales people do the right things, and then do them with quality – in the right way.

Winning the Impenetrable Account

           Every B2B salesperson comes up against large, high potential accounts that seem like they are impenetrable.          

           It’s frustrating and makes you doubt yourself.

           But it doesn’t have to be that way.  In this webinar, Dave Kahle will share with you a proven four-step process for winning the impenetrable account.  You ‘ll learn:

• The four key steps to winning the impenetrable account.
• The five most common reasons why they seem impenetrable.
•  Seven potential strategies to open the door.        
•  How to create an “enticer” – a powerful offer that is too good for them to   refuse.
• Your fallback position – if all else fails, do this.

           Join Dave Kahle as he shares with you the lessons he’s learned over 30 years of working with tens of thousands of B2B salespeople.

           Some of these accounts have the potential to double your sales.  Invest $47 to learn the strategies that will save you years of trial and error.

May 17^th, at 12:30 Eastern time.

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     You’ll notice the questions we asked ourselves in the previous installment proceeded from the top down – from the general to the specific.  In other words, we determined, from an annual perspective, what we wanted to do, and then broke those down into ever more specific increments.

     The questions we are going to consider in this section are best created in exactly the opposite method – from the specific to the general.  Let’s begin at the bottom, the most specific application we can think of, and then gradually compile our responses to move to the more general.

          Daily questions

Start with a sales call.  After every sales call, stop for a moment or two and ask yourself the two questions with which we ended the previous section:

What went well?  What could I have done better the next time?

     Remember, good thinking is asking yourself the right questions, in the right sequence, and writing down the answers.  This is a great habit to develop –taking a moment after every sales call and asking and answering those two questions.  As you do so, you’ll uncover trends and patterns in your behavior that need to be addressed and improved.  You’ll also come to a more complete understanding of your strengths and how to parley them into greater results.

     The act of asking and answering those questions also helps build a basic mind-set that is essential for the success of a field sales person.  Notice that the focus of the questions is on your behavior – “What could I have done…”

     Sooner or later, every sales person must take responsibility for their own results.  Sales is a proactive profession – we act, and our actions get reactions.  If we act well, having made... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE