Commonly, salespeople believe in order to be successful you need to have persuasive sales skills. Also, there is a common misconception that you somehow have to manipulate prospects to be truly persuasive.  Actually, you don’t have to be manipulative at all to be effective in building interest as well as getting prospects to move forward.

 

Effectively Qualify the Prospect

Some salespeople find themselves being easily frustrated as they try persuading a sales prospect and they make no progress.  When this occurs, the salesperson may think that they’re not persuading the prospect enough.  This just might be the case, but for a large percentage of these cases, it is typically the result of the salesperson not qualifying the prospect and trying to persuade them that causes them to never move forward.  This is why it is important to work on improving your persuasive sales skills.

By qualifying a prospect, we are able to easily separate the suspects from the prospects. When someone is not a good fit and/or doesn’t have the authority to make decisions for what we’re offering, no matter how good our persuasive sales techniques may be, there will be an extremely low probability of them moving forward.

On the other hand, when we use our time and resources to qualify the prospect by asking key questions to ensure we’re speaking with prospects who are a good fit, they’ll have a higher chance of moving forward through the sales cycle.  By improving our ability to qualify prospects, we improve our ability to persuade prospects to move forward in the sales process.

 

Communicate Value

Ensuring you are effectively communicating the value that you have to offer is a way to improve your persuasive sales skills.

Commonly, salespeople get stuck communicating at the product and service level of what we’re offering.  This is understandable because this is typically where we’re most comfortable as well as have the most knowledge.

Realistically, the prospect only really cares about what your product can do for them or what they can achieve with it.  Essentially, this is the value that you’re offering and by communicating this to them, it helps you improve your persuasive sales skills.

 

Communicate How You Differ

The reality is that the prospect might be comparing you with other options already out there.  You should always make this assumption and defuse it even when they don’t tell you they are doing this.  In some cases, the other option you may be competing with is simply the option to do nothing.

Focus specifically on communicating how you differ from your competition in order to effectively persuade the prospect to move forward with you. How is your offering better? How is your competition weaker? What is the impact to them of doing nothing?

 

Focus on the Return on Investment

When it is all said and done, it all comes down to the return the prospect will receive when they purchase and/or invest in your product offerings.  Focus primarily on the ROI for the prospect as well as the ROI that you have been shown to deliver in the past to improve your ability to get prospects to move forward which improves your persuasive sales skills.

SalesScripter provides web-based sales training, helping sales pros increase persuasive sales skills.