The 5-Step sales process EVERYONE should know about

I often hear from my clients that they feel stuck they do a whole bunch of things to bring their business to a thriving fiasco but results don’t come in the way they planned and imagined they will. It turns out that quite often there is either lack of marketing activities (only sales) or (which is the majority of cases) there is a lot of marketing going on and somehow the sales activities are not there. Good marketing leads to a sale but a sale happens after the sales cycle is finished. Here’s what to do if you’re doing lots of marketing but the register don’t ring much for you:

1. Create a pull of interested people
This is your number one goal with your marketing efforts : facebook, twitter, networking events, speaking engagements. Here’s where your s ales pitch or elevator speech kicks in, not to help the sale but to create awareness and interest in what you have to offer and how you help others make a difference in their lives.

2. Help prospects qualify themselvesr
The next step is, not surprisingly the step that hurts business owners the most because it looks like they loose business. But is it so? Realistically, not everyone who shows interest in the products or services you offer is actually going to continue being interested and that’s okay. Not only that, it is a great way for you to involve yourself into helping the interested people pre-qualify themselves to be your client or not. That really saves a lot of marketing effort you would otherwise spend on interested people who are not going to be interested for long.

3. Play the trust game
When you want the qualified prospects to become clients of yours, realistically what you are offering is expectations. Good packaging, solutions which your prospects want to have but don’t yet and being prepared to answer all the questions your prospects might have but didn’t think about asking them to you yet is all part of the game. Think about it, we buy something (a car, a laptop, a house, etc) because we know that it works, we’ve been educated what exactly we are buying (or there is a web page that explains all that for us) and because there is a warranty – a guarantee that even after the purchase things are going to be just fine for us as buyers. Same thing when you sell your products or services.

4. Create a win-win situationr
When you sit down with the client or chat on the phone, it is a world of possibilities conversation where the real sale happens. This is where you listen to what your prospect is looking for and tweak a proposal that meets both your needs and wants and their needs and wants. This includes not only the actual work but also the expected results, and what are the steps to be taken for those results to happen. Here you needs to discuss the pricing, the details, the conditions you offer or expect, standards you abide by, what the commitments are going to be like and look like for both parties. And again, it’s best to be well prepared for that negotiation journey.

5. Close a sale
Ok, the two of you click and it seems that you can be of great help to them and they like your personality and would enjoy working with you. Now, there is still work to be done here. This is where the prospect can give up on the product or service not because you didn’t do a good job the previous steps but because you did not help the client to work out the buyers’ remorse or buyers’ excuses. Here’s where the sales lessons need to be applied – to soft pedal the sale, to close the sale, and why not even upsale. The magic wand is in your hands. Just wave it and help your pool of interested people go though the whole sales cycle.