ADVANCED PROFESSIONAL SELLING SKILLS 

   

Professional Selling Skills (PSS) Class Description

An advanced professional selling skills class tailored to the needs of client firms based on pre-workshop interviews and sales skills assessments.  The program is a hands-on, interactive sales class that focuses on building customer trust and loyalty, team selling, presentation skills and optional video feedback.

NOTE: For basic and intermediate level PSS programs see our sales training class outlines for Field Sales and Phone Sales Techniques

  

Key Professional Selling Skills Developed

• Enhance your success in developing customer relationships
• Develop your own professional selling skills call methodology
• Heighten prospect interest in your product or service
• Turn objections into benefits
• Learn to recognize conflicting, non-verbal behaviors
• Make presentations an effective closing tool
• Learn successful sales techniques for group and committee presentations
• Professionalize your proposals
• Develop strategies for team selling
• Shorten sales cycles with effective questioning techniques
• Learn how to zero in on your best prospects to increase sales
• Raise the profitability of each sales hour
• Learn how to put “punch” into your correspondence
• Counter customer stalling tactics to boost closing rates
• Quickly build your territory by discovering “hidden” sources of prospects
• Create winning proposals that knock out the competition
• Use new negotiating tactics to avoid concessions and boost profit margins
• Discover the power of integrating marketing and sales
• Learn how to turn objections into commitments

 

Additional Professional Selling Skills Taught

• Sales process steps
• Balancing sales quantity with quality
• Time and territory management
• Negotiating commitments and orders
• Social networking
• Appointments and needs assessments
• Body language and sales cues
• Advanced questioning
• Objection prevention
• Sales correspondence
• Financial justification
• Presentation skills
• Group selling strategies

 

Advanced Professional Selling Skills Class Outline

 

Re-creating Your Sales Plan and Approach

• Assess and select target markets most likely to buy your products and services
• Use strategic mapping to find competitor “holes” and successfully fill them
• Understand the risks of 4 distinct company growth options

 

Boosting Your Sales Efficiency and Effectiveness

• Discover the trade-offs between sales efficiency and effectiveness
• Assess the professional selling skills required for each new business strategy
• Understand how to manage your sales activity levels and how these levels impact your overall sales success

 

Time and Territory Management

• Discover new ways to manage your time effectively
• Develop a personal time and territory plan
• Learn the 4 sales styles and how to vary your approach

 

Closing Using Negotiation Techniques and Tactics

• Practice the 6 most effective closing techniques
• Understand why people negotiate and their negotiation style
• Obtain negotiation tactics used by the experts
• Plan and rehearse your closing strategies

 

Networking Your Way To the Top

• Design your sales networking strategy
• Develop your winning “elevator speech”
• Feel confident approaching strangers at events
• Qualify contacts and set up the next step
• Use professional selling skills to enhance networking effectiveness

 

Social Networking

• Develop an ongoing social networking strategy
• Create a compelling profile with descriptive title
• Build and maintain a virtual network
• Using hand-selected groups to demonstrate your expertise
• Understand guidelines for posting and selling on LinkedIn, Plaxo and other sites
• Learn how to improve your professional selling skills via your social network
• Capitalize on your network to connect with prospective clients and referral sources
• Learn the benefits of frequent updates and news-message “tweets”
• Boost the value of your network via e-mail marketing

 

Conducting Initial Appointments and Reading Body Language

• Enhance the effectiveness of your initial sales call and discover how to set and control the agenda
• Customize the seven sales call steps to match your own style
• Develop a “how we work” statement
• Learn how to obtain commitments and provide for smooth follow up
• Learn how to interpret and respond to physical and visual cues
• Learn to recognize conflicting behaviors and enhance your “gut feel”
• Discover how your posture and mannerisms affect your image
• Understand how personal space affects the sales relationship
• Explore the effects of personal dress and grooming on client perceptions
• Learn to read and respond to “red” “yellow” and “green” non-verbal cues

 

Advanced Questioning Techniques = Higher Closing Rates

• Learn 4 types of questions that enhance sales success
• Develop questions to cover 6 key areas of questioning
• Understand how analogies can help justify a purchase
• Discover why questioning is the core professional selling skill for accomplished salespeople

 

The New Way of Handling Objections and Stalls: Prevent Them

• Discover why objections often result in lost sales
• Review successful objection handling techniques
• Learn proven professional selling skills for preventing objections
• Obtain strategies for dealing with price sensitivity
• Understand why customers don’t make decisions, stalling the sale
• Obtain proven strategies for handling stalls

 

The Lost Art of Sales Correspondence

• Discover what sales pros know about sales letters
• Learn to reinforce key selling points via post-call follow up letters
• Create a “benefits proposal” to boost your closing rate

 

Financial Justification

• Analyze your proposal from the customer’s standpoint
• Learn to predetermine likely benefits via prospect/client business position
• Differentiate your proposal format from your competitors’
• Selling against competition
• Devise a method to collect competitor intelligence
• Create counter strategies to beat competitors who play rely on a single approach
• Develop questions to obtain customer perceptions of key competitors
• Move from “macro” to “micro” differentiation based on the competitive landscape
• Experience the thrill of beating competitors via “Competitive Combat”

 

Sales Negotiations

• Understand why people negotiate
• Discover your own negotiation style
• Develop strategies to deal with price negotiations
• Create low-cost, high-value concessions for your negotiations
• Learn which negotiation techniques are appropriate for various situations
• Experience an actual negotiation and test your negotiating prowess
• Developing winning proposals
• Obtain proven strategies for minimizing lost and unnecessary proposals
• Transform your proposals into customer-centered, benefits proposals
• Use your proposals as an urgency-creation tool
• Boost your closing rate with the pre-proposal review technique

 

Presentation and Group Selling Skills

• Discover methods of ensuring you meet and exceed your audiences’ needs
• Quickly discover who has decision-making power and influence
• Obtain strategies for selling to diverse groups with diverse agendas
• Learn how to effectively structure a presentation
• Further explore the benefits of team selling
• Combat stage fright with 3 easy techniques
• Explore professional selling skills presentation aids such as multimedia, demonstrations and handouts
• Understand the 7 most common presentation mistakes and how to avoid them
• Learn the ideal mix of presentation versus interaction and group discussion
• Apply the six habits of successful presenters
• Use your voice for maximum impact
• Avoid the eight deadly sins that put audiences to sleep
• Obtain proven strategies for minimizing lost and unnecessary bids and proposals
• Quickly discover who has decision-making power and influence
• Obtain strategies for presentations and demonstrations to diverse groups with multiple agendas

     

What’s Included and Additional Options

  

This Professional Selling Skills Training Class Typically Includes

• Pre-workshop interviews, sales skills assessment and customized sales training program design
• Pre-workshop management meeting to solidify workshop agenda and content
• Professional selling skills instruction and facilitation by experienced sales training speakers and program authors
• Workbook/reference manual, prizes and all course materials
• Best sales training materials, strategies, skills and tools
• Small-group role-plays, feedback and coaching
• Highly-interactive format using accelerated learning techniques
• More than a dozen group exercises, skits and case studies
• Six different games and contests
• Five role-plays and three mini-role plays
• Over 30 illustrative stories, jokes and anecdotes
• Post-workshop reinforcement and application plan

   

Sales Tools Developed in this Professional Selling Skills Training Class

• Step-by-step sales process
• Time and territory management plan
• Negotiating give and take list
• Social networking action plan
• Advanced needs assessment questions
• Financial justification model
• Presentation checklist
• Professional selling skills checklist

 

Workshop Modules That Can Be Added

• Phone day program (on-the-phone prospecting class)
• Selling against the competition
• Customer service sales training
• Sales management training class
• Sales team coaching programs

     

Professional Selling Skills Class Options and Upgrades

• Sales process development, testing and implementation
• Corporate sales consulting / sales consultant services
• Salesperson certification and certification process
• Content-related pre and post training exams
• Class completion certificates and reference cards
• Advanced Professional Selling Skills Class instructor manual, course license and train-the-trainer program

 

               

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