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Building a Winning Sales Strategy

Generating sales and building long term, profitable customer relationships is common purpose most businesspeople share.

Bea Bohm-Meyer is an Edmonton based success coach. Bea helps businesses achieve their performance goals through "remarkable purpose". I’ve appreciated Bea’s three stage approach to an effective sales process: Building relationships, increasing your sales team's curiosity, and presenting a unique selling proposition.

Here's how Bea's principles are put into practice at the Select Group.

Relationship Building

We start from the premise that people don't want to be 'sold'. No one leaves the house on a Saturday morning saying "Honey, I'm off to be sold our new refrigerator." Buyers want to make their own purchase decisions, and that means buyers need the good information—in other words—education. We build relationships through education: providing the best information we have tailored to each prospective client. In time, a potential buyer will decide to make a purchase when they have sufficient information and when they are ready to proceed with a purchase.

Increasing Curiosity

A good sales person has an innate sense of curiosity about their customers. In business-to-business sales the professional sales person needs to be curious about how their prospective client's businesses work: Every business we meet with is unique, and each prospective client has their own business story, based on their unique experience. Curiosity is an expression of true interest, and complements clients because we are expressing interest in their unique business.

Creating a Unique Selling Proposition

The final step builds on the foundation of relationship and interest. Now that we understand more about our client and their goals and challenges we can effectively present our own unique business characteristics and solution which will contribute to helping our client achieve their goals.

It's important to understand that not every prospect will become a customer. Sometimes after establishing a relationship and learning about the business we know that there just isn't the right "fit". That's OK because each relationship we create will open more doors in the future - perhaps because business needs change, or through referrals.

For more ideas go to beabohm-meyer.com.