(By Loyd Ford) When you sell for a living, you hear a significant amount of resistance or negativity and objections regularly. Encouragement, sales team care and attention can make a critical difference in better results inside any business.
You may be doing all of the ideas and strategies below. If so, pass them along to someone else and wait for Encouraging Sellers Part 2 next week right here. If you are a radio seller, we hope you will take something positive away from this article to help you increase your income and stay positive in the face of the challenges you face as a radio seller every day.
Attitude Isn’t Everything, But It’s Very Important To Master
Of course, every philosophy you bring with you, your overall attitude for how you receive and handle the stress, negativity and “flack” that comes with this tough job can impact your success, your enjoyment of selling and even your health. Be purposeful in not allowing those negative feelings to collect around and “on” you. You’ve heard this: Every no is one step closer to a yes.
Most Battles Are Won Before The First Shot Is Fired
As you build your selling week, the more planning you do purposefully, the more you will influence your ability to earn more money from this week. Some people will put more work into avoiding work than preparing to be successful. Better prep = more success.
Who Are Your Sellers?
If you manage sellers, your goal is probably often focusing on understand the gifts, skills and personality of individual sellers (and buyers) and preparing accordingly to encourage, lift up and motivate sellers, focusing their attention on consistent research, prospecting and the important listening skills necessary to make it easier for potential clients to buy advertising.
The Most Powerful Selling Secret
I once read that the most amazing actors of our time often will talk about how acting isn’t about acting at all. It’s about listening and reacting to what is being said to them in scenes. This is what many of us believe is one of the most important traits of high performing sellers and it is worth study by any seller or sales manager in radio today. Modeling the behavior and perfecting what top sellers do with this important skill is a path for sellers who want to make more income in 2021.
Building Trust & Closing = Frequent Contact + Focus On Individual Client Needs
If you’ve been selling for any length of time, you know your best opportunity comes from being in front of enough potential clients often enough to build trust, bring customized and engaging ideas that showcase your product value. You also know you have to show that product has more value than the cost associated with the buy you are pitching.
And this is important: You are encouraged to learn how to share the story of the prospects success with your product in their story.
The Known Ingredients Of Good Selling
Of course, you know these items, so we will make them brief:
- Identify the decision maker and visit often
- Be authentic
- Listen
- Consistently work to create trust with consistent visits
- Use tools (and especially visuals) to show that businesses just like theirs are doing X,Y,Z to secure more customers
- Create a sense of urgency
- Listen
- Overcome objections with fact
- Listen
- Always be closing
Notice A Theme Above?
There is a solid reason your mom probably told you God made you with two ears and one mouth. Who knew it was for more effective selling? Selling is a tough job. Great sellers have the ability to adopt fresh ideas or even new twists on old ways of uncovering new opportunities, networking, sharing value and being valuable to every potential client, always encouraging referrals and – of course – listening for closing opportunities. We’re so excited about your selling opportunities this week we can hardly wait to share Encouraging Sellers Part II next week. Go have a great week and bring your listening A game!
Loyd Ford consults radio stations, coaches personalities, and provides behavioral and strategic programming to radio that propel ratings (and revenue) with RPC. Reach him anytime. 864.448.4169, RainmakerPathway.com or [email protected].
