7 Techniques Sales Trainers Taught Your Rural Business That Are Very Wrong
Always Be Closing, open-ended questions and sleazy sales tactics went out in the 1980s.
The traditional sales training model is broken yet they still peddle out-dated models of selling.
These generic cookie cutter sales training companies have a lot to answer for.
Instead of helping rural companies and reps sell more by building their confidence through new competencies, it hurts them.
Instead teaching them the wrong way of selling rather than the right way.
It’s because of their shallow, self-serving focus is always on the seller, rather than buyer.
Everyone hates to be sold to but everyone loves to buy right?
No one comes home and proudly announces “Hey look what I just got sold!”.
Instead, they come home and proudly share what they’ve just bought.
That’s because they had a great sales experience that was focussed on them the buyer, not the seller selling.
And remember you can forget any customer experience until your team nail the sales experience, or what I’d prefer to call a great buying experience.
Sales and the experience for your rural or farmer/grower buyer comes down to some simple principles:
- sell like you want to be sold to
- sell like a human using human-based selling techniques, not hard core closing techniques
- sell un-assumptively by never assuming the sale so your buyer feels safe
- never try to control the sale, let your buyer lead
- be planned and prepared with brilliant questions that clearly communicate your sincerity to serve their needs not yours
- support them to make the most accurate and informed decision regardless whether it is you or another provider
- reassure them of your value using the proof and truth of other client’s success stories
DO NOT do these things:
- use high pressure close techniques (like “would Tuesday or Wednesday work best for delivery?”)
- use predictable, buyer-boring questions (like “what keeps you up at night?”)
- use fake rapport building techniques like mirroring and pacing
- argue and arm wrestle with your customer’s objections
- think of your prospect as a monetary unit
- turn up unprepared and unplanned as a unprofessional sales person (you are winging and wasting your
- opportunity and giving other sales professional a bad name due to your incompetence)
- sell instead of serve
Sales isn’t about selling.
It’s about helping your buyer make the most accurate and informed decision.
When you signal that intent – your behaviours, actions and questions do all this – you stand a much higher chance of securing a sale.
Instead of thinking about yourself and your own needs, get obsessed about serving the specific needs of your ideal client.
That’s the way you’ll make many more rural sales.
