What if making a B2B sale were as easy as pressing a button? Press and suddenly a prospect understands exactly why your product should be her one and only solution. Press and the prospect has an unshakeable belief in everything you say. Press and the prospect likes you -- even if you said something weird.
While we know it’s not that easy, there exist universal triggers, or buttons, which sales pros can identify and “press” to power-up their persuasiveness. We’re not talking about manipulation here. It’s more about catering to buyers’ preferences and tendencies.
Leading this week’s trending sales content is a story about the psychology of selling and how you can transform leads into eager sales prospects by finding a few hidden buttons and pressing them. You’ll also discover 25 questions to qualify leads faster, plus unconventional selling tips inspired by the CEOs of Google and Amazon.
Here’s What Sales Professionals Are Reading and Sharing This Week:
Psychology Says You Can Actually Sell Anything, So Long as You Use These 4 'Hidden' Switches
Understanding a customer’s motivation and pain points is a pivotal aspect of positioning ourselves for success. But assuming the competition has the same understanding, how else can you separate yourself? In this post, Peter Yang suggests that persuasion is about flipping four key switches in the customer’s mindset which he categorizes as: solution, trust, likeability, and evidence. Yang believes that to fully turn customers on to a solution, we need to demonstrate how our solution is the answer to their most pressing problems, inspire trust, befriend them, and provide proof, not just promises. For more tips on how to flip each switch, check out his post.
12 Kinds of Sales Prospects and Why You Need to Create a List for Each One
When it comes to finding qualified sales prospects, there’s no such thing as too many options. In this post, Grant Cardone provides a comprehensive list of the types of prospects most salespeople will encounter. While this list includes the expected -- social media, current or lost customers, competitor’s customers -- there are some hidden gems to mine from the complete list. For example, have you ever thought to sell to companies that you buy from? Are you calling on orphan owners?
25 Sales Questions to Qualify Your Leads Faster
Sometimes the challenge isn’t finding leads, but in quantifying the prospect’s value so we know how much time to invest in netting results. There’s nothing worse than spending months trying to reel in a big fish only to find that your catch was a mere minnow, or nothing at all.
This post from Neil Patel provides 25 questions to help you qualify leads faster throughout the information gathering stage. In addition to the questions, the list includes strategies to streamline the process of establishing a relationship, discovering the problem, finding a solution, discovering a timeline, and establishing future success.
20 Years of Jeff Bezos Shareholder Letters Delivers a Masterclass in Being a Top Performer
It’s weird to think that in 1997, when Jeff Bezos took Amazon public, many investors viewed the company as a joke. Now 20 years and trillions of dollars later, it’s clear that it was anything but funny business. So, how did Bezos transform a company he started in his garage into one of the top performing companies in the world? Julian Hayes II reviews 20 years of Amazon shareholder letters and shares what they can teach us about becoming a top performer. While the article isn’t written specifically for salespeople, the sales takeaways are easy to spot.
Mental Toughness and the Effectiveness of Sales People
Even the best of us hear “no” more than we hear “yes.” So, perhaps it’s no wonder that we outperform our non-sales colleagues in mental toughness, a personality trait which determines how we respond to stress, pressure, opportunities, and challenges. In this post, Doug Strycharczyk shares the results of a study which compared differences in how people across the organization think and act. Salespeople’s scores were higher than other employees on several scales: confidence in abilities, commitment, interpersonal confidence, and control. Check out the write-up to learn the characteristics that help and hurt salespeople most.
How Google's CEO Uses Brain-Friendly Slides to Create Simple, Engaging Presentations
Even if most of our initial interactions within a company are one-to-one, many of us are asked to present to a larger group at some point during the buying cycle. This often means creating and presenting a PowerPoint presentation. While you have probably already heard the mantra that less is more when it comes to PowerPoint, you might be surprised at just how far Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes it. In her recent article, Carmine Gallo shares why Pichai doesn’t use bullet points and neither should you.
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Topics: Sales trends
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