Lance Tyson is an author and speaker who runs his own training company. Tyson Group has been ranked by Selling Powers as one of the Top 20 sales organizations in the world. It has been operating for 15 years and invested in Dale Carnegie Training in 2010. They work in the sports entertainment industry and one of their biggest customers is the football team, the Raiders. They coordinate with the sales team to sell premium tickets, sponsorships, suites, and others. His team also works with Michael Jordan’s company and several tech companies where they coach, train, and consult with sales teams.
Lance isn’t just teaching; he is also out there grinding and doing all the sales work that his salespeople are doing.
Six steps to developing a successful sales strategy
Attitude, perseverance, and grit aren’t part of the steps. These things must always be present but let’s think of outcome first. In some cultures, the word relations isn’t great and it’s often overused. We prefer the term rapport.
This is one of the three outcomes you need to go after. Partner rapport with credibility. While rapport gives you influence, credibility gives you people’s trust. The third one is showing a level of understanding. These three are the beginning of the steps to developing a successful sales strategy which is the following:
- Connect
- Evaluate
- Diagnose
- Prescribe
- Dialogue
- Close
The six critical steps to developing a successful sales strategy
Connect
We talk about connecting with others all the time but the conversation of connecting is different today. You may be trying to deal with a level of preoccupation by the buyer. You have to connect with people via text, email, or voicemail and talk to people to build rapport. The fragmented conversations can be broken down and taken to connect step to overcoming preoccupation. This will lead to building rapport, credibility, and a level of understanding.
Evaluate
When you go to your doctor’s appointment, one of the first things they do is to evaluate you. The same is true in sales. We evaluate our prospects to determine whether they’re interested or not.
Other businesses call this assessment while some refer to it as an opportunity. Whatever you call it, it’s the step where salespeople deal with the inherent objection of disinterest.
Diagnose and Prescribe
This is where salespeople make an educated guess. Ask yourself what they need most and do not forget about creating a level of comfort. A lot of salespeople walk in the door and make assumptions based on their grand experience, they then ask a few questions.
You need to talk to the clients through their feelings and their thoughts. You need to look at their past, their present, and the future to make a good diagnosis. After the evaluation and diagnosis, you make a prescription.
Dialogue and Close
After getting your prescription, your next step would probably be talking with your doctor and asking questions so as to get a clear understanding of your health problem.
In the same manner, after giving your prescription as a salesperson, your next step is to have a dialogue to overcome any form of objection. Ultimately, having every question answered, your next step is to close.
Researcher or salesperson
The biggest challenge right now is the confusion that most salespeople are stuck in which happens in the connect step. Inside sales reps are responsible for prospecting. You can’t trust everything that’s written on LinkedIn and you can’t just get somebody without fact-checking what their bio says.
This creates a problem for sales reps because they often feel like they don’t have enough information to move forward. Thus, the confusion of whether to spend more time on researching about the prospects or looking for prospects to pitch.
It gets harder because it takes at least six touches to get in contact with a target and another six to get an appointment. Salespeople are now trying to cheat the process and just connect because they’re exhausted.
Many sales reps these days just sell their whole service in one move. They’d say it’s free and without obligation. This is a mistake that many salespeople make. Instead of getting on the phone and pouring it out in one go, sales reps must be patient and sell one piece at a time.
If you can’t sell time, you can’t sell your products or services and that’s what people in sales lack: time.
Getting better in evaluation
We do a lot of sales assessment and we do predictive index studies on people to see where they’re weak and to know where to start on their training. We’ve seen that salespeople are often not good facilitators. What most salespeople do is spray and pray. They start asking questions right away without getting into the introduction stage of presenting what’s going to happen in this meeting.
Salespeople can evaluate better if they learn how to facilitate and set things up better. Sales isn’t just about asking questions, it’s also about facilitating the meeting well and making good set-up. Evaluation is a back-and-forth process. You ask questions and they answer, all the while maintaining a good grip on where the conversation is going.
On prescribing
There has to be a level of dramatization in prescribing. Salespeople need to make prospects understand that reason why they want what they want. Dramatize your pitch the way they want it.
You are trying to overcome doubt in the prescribed step. So, describe your products and your services in a way that answers a few questions. Don’t just state facts. Learn to become a storyteller because that’s how you make them listen.
Remember the six critical steps to developing a successful sales: you connect, then evaluate, then diagnose. After these, you make the prescription, have the dialogue, and close. Take your sales per process and see where you are and where you’re potential customers are. Make sure that both of you are on the same spot, if not, take a stop and go back or move forward.
“Steps To Developing a Successful Sales Strategy” episode resources
Connect with Lance Tyson on Twitter, LinkedIn, and his website, Tyson Group.
Don’t hesitate to connect with Donald via LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
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