How To Talk To Get The Sale

Be patient; this is not as pointless as you first may think. If marketing is the communicating of ideas in order to develop opinions, then it is the communication which is the most important ingredient. Therefore, in the business environment, talking is very much part of marketing. If, then, talking is part of your marketing strategy, surely it makes sense to ensure that is equally as polished as the rest of your overall presentation.

It is all in the delivery. Having laboured to put together a well-penned document, agonised over the choice of words and developed a sales ethos to be proud of, you wouldn’t want to hand it over to a sales person who can only manage a series of barely comprehensible grunts and expect them to close the deal. How many times have you taken a cold sales call from an individual who is far too familiar, calls you by your first name or even worse, ‘mate’? We all miss out on business, but we never really know just how close we came to getting it. Therefore, it makes sense to eliminate as many potential causes of failure before embarking on the whole sales process.

Telesales is hard enough; the caller is but a tinny voice in the ear of the recipient, has only a few seconds to engage and get the salient points across before the shutters come up and another prospect is wasted. Face to face is no easier, in fact arguably it is more difficult. Good managers are skilled in reading body-language. The BBC’s series ‘The Bottom Line’ did a straw poll amongst business people who all said that when it came to negotiating, it had to be done face to face as they could all establish the truth pretty quickly when their ‘opponent’ was in front of them.

There is much that can be achieved with a halfway-decent vocabulary, a surety based on truth that what the sales person sells is what it is and therefore can look their prospect in the eye, solid preparation and the ability, metaphorically, to sit on one’s hands. I was trained thoroughly in telesales, and that training is available for those that need it. If not, then I hope these few words were of use.