How ready are you for 2019?
Most sales are won and lost based on one key factor: YOU.
You hold the keys to your sales success. Competitors don’t win because their offerings are more impressive, they gain because they deliver a superior sales experience. You can too.
Focus on improving in the following nine areas, and your business will experience a high level of exponential growth.
1. Implement a value-based selling philosophy
Fact: Buyers find only 42% of their meetings with sellers valuable.
While all sellers talk about providing value, few do it well. To drive value, you need to have a plan to create value.
You need to live and breathe value. The companies and sellers that focus on providing value experience wildly better sales results. Those who don’t, struggle!
2. Your prospects don’t care about what you sell
Stop telling prospects what you do. Your prospects don’t care what you do. They don’t care how it works. They’re mostly thinking of themselves and what’s in it for them.
I repeat, your prospects don’t care what you do. They will only care about you if you can solve their problem. Ease their pain. Make their job easier. Protect them. Make them look good.
They don’t care what you do. They care deeply about what you can do for them.
There is only demand for your product or service if there is more demand for the solution that it provides and represents.
Sell that way!
3. Winners educate buyers
Bring insights into your business. Buyers want your ideas and are looking for your insights. The sellers who do this, win more often than the rest.
4. Improve how you present your products and services to the marketplace
The first principle of effective marketing is clear presentation.
Clear, simple, direct language to communicate the known sales benefits of your company’s products or services in all marketing deliverables – advertising, direct mail, online, sales presentations or any other marketing tool, and using bold presentation and layout techniques to make the sales message as visible as possible to the most significant number of readers and viewers in your market.
The critical first impression you make with your marketing message to the prospect means the difference between your company getting the lead, or losing it to a competitor.
Clear presentation is the first essential element required to win in today’s demand pull marketing environment.
5. Make 2019 the year that you build stronger partnerships
The best companies in the world have collaborative relationships with many other people and companies. These relationships can be joint ventures, co-marketing, partnering and so on. You have to find new ways to work with other non-competitive companies because they reach the same market as you, but from a different impact point with a level of credibility.
A few of these types of relationship can double or triple your business.
6. Give a superior level of service to your clients
In an economic downturn or during other times when business is slow, you want to do everything you can to hold onto your existing customers.
The best way to hold onto your clients is to please them. Moreover, the best way to satisfy them is to exceed their expectations. Now is the time to go the extra mile. Give them that little bit extra that can mean the difference between dazzling the client versus merely satisfying them.
Nurture them. Communicate with them. Educate them. Serve them well. Do everything in your power to keep them happy and help them to succeed.
7. Refuse to be a commodity – become PREEMINENT
Strive for greatness in your impact and contribution to the marketplace. You can be profoundly different regarding the way you interact and render value. It all starts with your mindset and attitude. When you care more, do more, serve more and provide a better outcome, you demonstrate yourself to be a better investment than anyone else out there.
From there, it’s only a matter of time before your most coveted prospects will do business with you. Start improving your clients’ lives and they will recognise the different value you offer compared to your generic competitors.
Your goal is to make your prospect understand that you’re the only one who can indeed deliver. Merely adopting a preeminent mindset overrides everything else.
Preeminence is an unbeatable business strategy.
8. You must be 100% committed
Commitment is what transforms promise and potential into reality. They are the powerful words that speak boldly of our intentions, and the massive actions which speak louder than words.
Commitment is the stuff character is made of. There is a distinct difference between interest and commitment. When you are interested in doing something, you do it only when it is convenient.
When you are committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.
Go the extra mile, that road is never crowded.
9. Be one of those rare people who doesn’t know how to quit
You will face challenges in 2019, but always remember to show the world your super-power – GRIT.
It’s time to add PhD to your mental toolkit, PIG-HEADED DISCIPLINE.
The 1st of January is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.
Make 2019 great!
“The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
