Commercial

Nothing starts in business until somebody sells something – but how to innovate when training your customer-facing staff? Outcome Selling does away with the old processes and challenges your people to think outcomes. By aligning skills to goals and results you’ll get better buy-in from staff and more buying from customers.

• Learn the successful thinking strategies behind Outcome Selling
• Develop the skills required to achieve the four in-call business goals
• Establish amazing rapport even with challenging customers
• Develop critical questioning skills for in-depth understanding
• Don’t just ‘close the deal’ – gain true customer commitment instead
• Find success face-to-face, on the phone and even in meetings

If there is flexibility then negotiate, if not you influence. This vital programme defines the difference between Negotiating and Influencing and when to use each approach. Critically it challenges sales people to stop giving away cash – long term business relationships must be profitable. The only result worse than losing a contract is winning at the wrong price. 

• Know when to negotiate, when to influence
• Why give away profits, what’s the worst that can happen
• The 5 S’s of negotiating long term, successful relationships
• Influencing when there is no room to negotiate
• Getting to know the real reason your customer is negotiating
• When to walk away from the deal…but leave the door ajar

So much customer facing time is now spent at group meetings. But sales people struggle to sell to groups and so hide behind a presentation – narrating a series of slides instead. Stop wasting everyone’s time and resources. Learn how to sell to groups with confident, engaging and collaborative presentations that lead inevitably to commitment.

• Plan for results, efficiently
• Create a convincing self-image and build confidence
• Engage, interact, collaborate
• Focus your attention on customers not content
• Use slides or visuals for the audience’s benefit
• Handle questions confidently, convincingly and with ease

Compared to presenting, facilitating is about saying less and achieving more. More information, interaction and input from the audience. And this takes a whole new set of skills. So if your sales people are chairing advisory boards, managing procurement meetings or  consulting on strategy then they must be able to facilitate with a purpose.

• Plan the sweet spot, the overlap between their needs and yours
• Create cohesion amongst the competing egos and agendas
• Control communication, your own and everyone else’s
• Use chunking to bring even a disparate group to consensus
• Finish a meeting with genuine commitment to tangible actions
• Handle conflict whenever and why ever it arises

You may have noticed at exhibitions how often staff talk amongst themselves, stare at their phones, just wait for someone to talk to them or occasionally pouncing on a passer-by. It is time to get your sales people engaging with customers, presenting with confidence and generating a return on investment.

• Energise and motivate staff with clear expectations and goals
• Engaging with customers from across the room
• Open questions that open up a conversation
• Concentrate your story into a brief ‘elevator pitch’
• Use and abuse of the stand itself
• Secret shopper with real-time, on-demand feedback and coaching

Even the best sales people struggle in the complex world of Key Account Management; overlooking stakeholders, failing to plan for the long game and challenged by the need to work as a team. This programme dovetails with Outcome Selling to transform thinking and skills.

• Analyse your client sector, the movers and the shakers
• Plan your targets, resources and activities
• Implement plans with skill and versatility
• Flex your approach to different customer roles and seniority
• Keep agile as your customers and plans develop

Everyone works on projects but few people are trained as project managers. That’s a recipe for disaster or at least busted budgets and long-lost deadlines. The challenge with project working is rarely a rogue Gantt chart. It is far more often the other people working on, or affected by, the project. Which is why this unique programme was designed.

• Integrate people management skill with project management process
• Engage key sponsors, team members and stakeholders
• Plan and manage projects with just-enough-admin
• Gain revolutionary insights into the psychology of projects
• Build your own project during the programme!