Five Top Tips to Grow Your Sales

New workshop:Secrets of Selling for Small Business Owners

Negotiation tips for small businesses
Tonight I was interviewed by Louise Barnes-Johnston of Frontline Results on selling and negotiation. If you missed the interview live you can hear it again here by clicking the play button below.  Let me know what you think….I’d love to hear from you.

Language Patterning: guest post by Nick Hill of Binary Vision
As a business owner or ‘communicator’ you’re in the business of getting results and when you start to think about business situations you come into, contexts in which you communicate and the differing outcomes that can possibly occur you’ll soon realise that your thought processing and communication is geared towards an outcome that is generated by yourself or ’shared’ with another and your key objective is to ‘get agreement.’ There are numerous ways of ‘enhancing’ your personal communication to get agreement and before I share those with you there’s one thing I have to be clear about. In any commun

Opening Doors: Selling without selling
At every networking meeting, large or small, there will be some people who treat it exactly like a sales pitch. These are the people who pounce on any new visitors, stuff a business card in their hand and virtually say, “Well? When are you going to buy from me?” To me, it’s no surprise when I later hear them complain that networking isn’t winning them any sales. Their approach is like going into a bar and grabbing the nearest group of drinkers to saying, “Hi! My name’s X. Here’s my card. Let me place an order for you now.” You just wouldn’t do it, would you? Put it this way: would you buy from somebody who did this to you?

Asking the right selling questions
“I keep six honest serving men – They taught me all I know, Their names are what and why and when — And how and where and who.” Six Honest Serving Men, Rudyard Kipling, 1903 As you and I know the secret to successful selling is to ask the right questions. If we do this skilfully, we become seen as a problem solver and the dynamic or ‘power base’ shifts from a seller/buyer relationship into that of two equal partners. You are then not selling….you are simply helping the customer to buy.  In order to sell effectively we need to know what will make the customer buy from us. In

Buyers buy benefits..fools force features!
When selling it’s often very easy to forget that a feature is what a product is….an intrinsic characteristic of the product or service. Examples of features are: • Priced at £20 • Red/Blue/Black • Transparent • Compact • Lightweight • TV advertised • The market leader • The latest technology • Covered by a three year warranty ………All very interesting (or perhaps not!)