The Content Blender

Alternatives to Domestic Adult Merchant Account ProvidersThere are a number of international and offshore agencies that can furnish an adult merchant account at very modest rates (around 4 to 5%). These adult merchant account providers are quite accordant to logic.Once the adult services provider provides the necessary proof with respect to his good faith and profitability, he can have his adult merchant account as quickly as feasible. It has been discovered that these offices furnish the account with an open judgement and without any extensive ordeal. The timings of payments are fast and the arrangement is carefully capable. The greatest thing is that numerous adult merchant account providers worldwide are starting to link up with the international providers and feel them most favorable to deal with.The varieties of features and facilities extended by these agencies establish them the most beneficial alternative for any adult service player. The application procedure for acquiring an adult merchant account from these offshore merchant account providers is smooth, the certification prerequisite is minimum and the time taken for approval is quite swift. What are adult merchant accounts?Each business realizes its individual characteristics, particularly with regards to the risk visibility it presents. In and of itself, each respective business needs to hold a sole merchant account to facilitate taking online payments through credit cards and checks. The risk-proneness of adult service businesses tends to keep the bulk of the merchant account providers (such as banks and credit card processors) away from adult service business enterprises.Payment Methods of Adult BusinessesNormally, there are two types of payment methods on hand in any adult businesses. These are:

• Monthly/periodical membership fees.
• One-off fees.

Both of the cases have their rewards and disadvantages. While the cyclic membership fees insure a guaranteed comfortable income every month, the one-off types assist in building a healthy client-base consisting of loyal customers, thus lending quality and popularity to the business organization. The adult service providers, therefore, incline to allow for both the versions in order to maximize their profits.

Affiliate marketing resembles an auction web site. Your web site pushes assorted good and services and for this, every last lead brings in money. There’s much less work, very low overheads, it works twenty four hours a day, and even better, it is comparatively easy to pick up. To begin with, you must decide just what niche market you want to specialize in. To do this, find out solutions to issues a specific set of individuals are anticipating, and then what solutions are available to help them. One of the best ways to find this is looking for unique sets of highly targeted longtail keywords and phrases; there are fewer searches for these generally, however many more of these convert to a sale. These important keywords can be discovered by using Micro Niche Finder or or a a similar application. The data gathered from Micro Niche Finder or analogous computer programs and software packages makes related terminology in a comprehensive list format providing valuable targets to achieve a good placing in the search engines and bring in tons of traffic. Additional info is available by the application, for example search frequency, the exact number of competing websites, even competitor information. Finally, the information generated can identify appropriate domains, help you put together your website, and reveal the greatest sales opportunities. Putting together a site is next; but you’ll plainly have to do more than just that. You will need to fine tune your website to improve your performance on the search engines. This is where Seo Elite information comes in. Competing sites are analyzed by the program which then provides advice on improving search results.

With software such as SEO Elite, information created by the software indicates where you might look for appropriate links, the most lucrative keywords, and information on where and how to submit articles. In summary, SEO Elite information is the same kind of data you may get from a practised SEO professional.

When you know which target market you want to focus on, have your product advertisements, and your site has been put together, then all you need to do is elevate your search results. Your earnings will roll in regularly and question why you did not try affiliate marketing sooner!

Get Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale at Salehoo wholesale directories and help your business. As well you can check if the distributor has goods that you want to sell in stock. Read on about Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale, Fancy Yellow Diamonds Wholesale and how Salehoo Wholesalers can help. Do you need a dropship guide? It depends. More on Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale and Wholesale Silk Clothing Manufacturers India at Salehoo wholesalers. And also see more about Wholesale Tools Sale

You can find business wholesaler lists for sale online. Ebay has a competitive market place for preparing to break into the sunless tanning market. Read on about Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale and Wholesale Silk Clothing Manufacturers India. Another thing to remember is that it may not be good to go off building a web site and setting up your business until you are fully prepared and have a comprehensive business plan that gives you a definite strategy for surviving against the competition. More on Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale and Fancy Yellow Diamonds Wholesale at our Wholesale Review website. Find out more about Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale and how Salehoo directory can help you start your own business from home. Lightscribe Dvd Media Colors Wholesale, I’ve bought and sold a lot of closeouts in my time and let me tell you they are closeouts for a reason.

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Selling a business and achieving liquidity is likely to be the single most important financial event for a private business owner. Timing is perhaps the most critical factor to securing maximum value in the sale of a business.

Typically there are three different types of timing associated in the sale of a business: seller timing, buyer timing, and market timing. Examples of each are provided below:

Key Factors that Drive Timing

Seller Factors:

Lack of capital

Growth beyond comfort level

Boredom / burnout

Other interests

Market Factors:

Favorable economic climate

Low interest rates

Advantageous tax treatment

Government regulatory changes

Buyer Factors:

Meeting growth expectations

Slow organic growth

Increasing competitive pressures

Diminishing market share

Globalization of industry

While numerous factors may drive a seller to seek immediate liquidity in their business, unfortunately, the needs of the buyer and the conditions of the market ultimately dictate timing and value

Determinants of market timing

• Market timing is critical when evaluating the right time to sell a business. The economic climate, interest rates and the tax and regulatory environment all impact timing.

• Interest rates are at historically low levels, reducing required rates of return on investment (”ROI”) for premium buyers of companies. Lower required ROIs allow premium buyers to pay more for acquisitions than ever before.

• Low long-term capital gains tax rates are allowing sellers to retain more value than ever before. Currently, a seller can enjoy a 15% long-term capital gains tax rate (the lowest in history).

Determinants of buyer timing

• Public company premium buyers are pressured by Wall Street to meet revenue growth and earnings expectations. These buyers therefore actively monitor buying opportunities in order to rapidly improve upon limitations or weaknesses in their businesses. Premium buyers purchase companies to increase market share, expand geographically, acquire new products and gain competitive advantages.

• Favorable accounting treatment for European buyers ending in 2005 has spurred cross-border M&A, driving up values for businesses and forcing U.S. buyers to match European offers in order to compete effectively.

Understanding and taking advantage of timing will ultimately lead to highest possible valuation for your business.

http://www.TotalBusiness.com is a Website that provides business owners with the information they need in order to successfully start, manage, grow, and sell their businesses.

The site features over 3,000 articles and 60 guides on business topics such as starting a business, financing a business, sales and marketing, building a website, setting up an office, hiring employees, and selling a business. The site also contains articles on legal and accounting issues affecting businesses and allows business owners and entrepreneurs to get free expert advice from local lawyers or accountants. The site contains over 1,000 business forms and agreements that are helpful to business owners and provides a business directory with over 1,700 merchants who provide services specifically for small businesses.

Eran Salu, JD,MBA,CPA is the Founder and CEO of TotalBusiness.com

Our recent research shows that nearly 80% of salespeople do not understand what their primary purpose is. Your principle mission is to Gain Commitment. The confusion stems from the variety of tasks we as salespeople are asked to perform. The end result is that 62% of salespeople make calls where there is no attempt at Gaining Commitment.

One of the most important reasons why this occurs is most salespeople do not establish what we call a Commitment Objective for every sales call. This is the number one mistake that all salespeople make. Well, it’s time to change that!

Commitment Objective: A goal we set for ourselves to gain agreement from the customer that moves the sales process forward.

No sales call should ever be made without a Commitment Objective. If you do not have a Commitment Objective firmly planted in your mind, you will wind up being one of those 62% that don’t Ask for Commitment.

In The Field:
Newly hired salespeople at Melody Inc., a Muzak Franchise, are required to make sales calls with veteran salespeople. Toward the end of one recent call, the prospect asked the veteran if he could keep the company brochure and share it with his partner. The veteran was happy to comply and began to pack up his briefcase.

The newly hired salesperson had recently been trained on Action Selling and knew the value of having a Commitment Objective. She decided that it would make sense to capitalize on the prospect’s interest and schedule the next logical step - a proposal meeting. So she said, “As a next step I would recommend that we plan another meeting with yourself and your partner. We will prepare a proposal that documents what we have discussed and the solution we recommend. How does that sound?”

You guessed it. They scheduled a proposal meeting for a week later. During the next meeting they Gained Commitment for the business.

Contact The Sales Board to learn more about Gaining Commitment at 1-800-232-3485.

Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based company that has trained and certified more than 200,000 salespeople in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions.

In a 30-year career as a salesperson and sales manager, Duane has sold products ranging from office equipment to insurance. He was the top salesperson at every company he ever worked for. He developed Action Selling while owner of one of the largest computer marketers in the United States. Even in the roaring computer business of the 1980’s, his company grew six times faster than the industry norm, differentiating itself not by the products offered but by the way it sold them. Duane founded The Sales Board in 1990 to teach the skills of Action Selling to others.

For more sales information or to get sales training that’s been documented and proven to help you make more sales, visit http://www.thesalesboard.com

After falling in love with the Hipster PDA and Levengers Shirt
Pocket Briefcase,I started becoming more and more dependent on
3″ by 5″ index cards. They are great for note taking on the go
and keeping organized at my desk, so I naturally started
thinking of ways to use the cards to automate my sales process.
>From this, the “3X5″ was born. I may not be the first person to
use index cards in this way, but I do think a lot of salespeople
will find the system easy to use and very effective.

You will need the following items to create your own 3X5 sales
tool. I found everything I needed at my local Staples and
everything cost me around $25.00.

* A box to store the index cards * Monthly 3″ by 5″ index tabs
* Daily (1-31) 3″ by 5″ index tabs * Alphabetical 3″ by 5″ index
tabs * A ton of white ruled 3″ by 5″ index cards * A bunch of
colored 3″ by 5″ index cards * A small case to carry cards in
your pocket

Once you have purchased the required supplies, you can organize
your 3X5. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you are
assembling your 3X5 on January 1st. If this is the case you
would first organize your tabs in the order below (front to
back):

* January tab * Daily tabs 1-31 * February - December monthly
tabs * A-Z alphabetical tabs * Blank index cards - white and
your favorite color

All of your cards should now be in the file box and the first
thing you should see is the January tab.

Next, you should start creating cards for your leads. In the
beginning, this is going to take some time (assuming you have a
lot of leads). I use white cards for leads and colored cards for
my customers. You can do whichever you prefer, but I think it is
helpful to break down leads and customers.

The system works like this.

Let’s imagine it is January 1st. and you attend a networking
event where you meet a potential client. You get this lead’s
business card at the event and you want to contact him/her on
the 2nd., so when you get to your office, you staple the leads
business card to a white index card and drop it behind the “2″
tab and then go home for the day. After all, it is new years day
and you have been working hard to create your new sales system
and you attended a networking event.

So, you arrive at work on January 2nd. and open up your 3X5. The
first thing you should do is move the “1″ tab back behind the
February tab. You will always be rolling the system forward like
this, so that the first tab you see in the box represents the
most current month, then the most current day.

Now, you go to the tab for today (Jan 2nd.) and find the card
for the lead that you met at the networking event yesterday. You
call the lead and learn that he/she is out of town until January
6th. so you make a note which says, “1/2/05 - Mr. Lead is on
vacation till 1/6″. Now you drop the card behind the “6″ tab for
the month of January.

You will continue to roll this lead forward in the system,
making notes at each step, until the lead either turns into a
customer or asks you to leave them alone.

When the lead turns into a customer, I staple their business
card to a colored card and place it behind the appropriate
alphabetical tab. If their is another opportunity with this
client, I move the colored card back to the dated section and
move them through the process again.

Of course, as you add more people to your pipeline, you might
not get to contact everyone on the day you have them slotted
for. Just move them to the next day’s slot at the end of the
current day so you contact them tomorrow.

You will not want to carry around a huge metal box full of index
cards, which is why you want to have a small index card wallet
or box, so if you are going to be on the road or out of the
office, you can simply grab your cards for the day and go.

Not just for salespeople.

While the system is great for salespeople, it also is a great
tool for those of us who are focusing on networking. I actually
use three different colored cards and use white for leads, blue
for clients and red for my networking contacts (patriotic, I
know). On the red cards, I write either 7, 14, 30, 45, 60, etc
in the upper right hand corner of the index card to remind
myself how frequently I want to contact the person, so I simply
move the card forward based on the number on the card. If I want
to contact someone every seven days, I move the card ahead a
week after I make contact.

This really ties in well to Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat
Alone, which recommends you regularly ping your network. By the
way, if you have not read the book, you should. You can get book
notes for free from the Never Eat Alone blog.

Options / Enhancements.

I have been considering adding daily tabs to each month so that
I can move people ahead to a any specific date (IE. August
11Th.) in the future.

You could also keep some sticky tabs handy so you can add a tab
to the top of any index card for the contacts birthday. If you
do this, you could just put an August tab on the card for every
contact whose birthday is in August so you could quickly compile
a birthday list each month. Again, this is probably overkill and
you could probably just add the contacts name to a calendar and
keep it separate, but what fun is that?

Many people believe that the main reason for representatives leaving their organisation is that of money in that they leave for a bigger salary. In fact, the biggest reason why people leave organisations is that the role they are doing is no longer offering any challenge or excitement. The second reason is due to the behaviour and capability of the immediate line manager. More often than not, the two are strongly linked with the manager taking little interest in the representative’s development and as such the representative feels under valued and bored due to the lack of attention and challenge.

Often the blame is laid at the manager’s door, but the representative must take a share of the responsibility also. The trouble usually arises when expectations are not laid out “on the table” with both parties unaware of each other’s needs, motivations and expectations. The end result is often a lack of trust and respect between the representative and manager which leads inevitably to conflict. A good manager will ensure that a “contract” is created between the manager and the representative and that this contract is “two-way” but unfortunately this rarely happens and if any contract is put in place it is 2one-way2 with the manager outlining what he or she expects from the representative and not the other way around.

So how can you avoid this conflict and start to work productively with your manager? Act on these five secrets and watch the relationship with your manager grow.

Secret 1: Learn about behavioural styles and find out what your own is and your manager’s. Compare the two and if there are differences then work on these differences by matching your manager’s body language very discreetly. Match their tone and volume of voice, remembering not to mimic only discreetly match. Look at their eye movements and do similar. Again, do similar with body movements. When you start to discreetly match their body language you will be amazed that they start to match yours also. This is the start of the rapport building process and this goes a long way to start the building of trust.

Secret 2: Contract with your manager by getting agreement about how best the two of you are going to work together. Ask questions such as:

“What are your specific expectations of me as your representative?”

“What are my specific objectives and how am I going to be measured?”

“What behaviours annoy you?”

“What motivates and de-motivates you?”

“What reports do you want? When do you want them? What content?”

“How often do you want to visit me in the field?”

Contracting is all about managing expectations. A good manager will always outline his or her expectations and will ask you about yours. Once you both are clear about what each other’s expectations are, then this is another building block in the foundations of trust and respect.

One of the hardest lessons I learned was when I did not contract with a senior sales manager. We had completely opposite behavioural styles, which meant that we didn’t get off to the best start. He thought I was too energetic, flighty and too much of a risk taker and I though he was too detailed with no personality and constantly stuck in front of spreadsheets. We were in constant conflict because he asked me for reports that I could see no reason for and I was frustrated when he ignored my pleas for more training budget. If we had contracted and discussed our similarities and differences and how best to work with them, we may not have had the conflict that we did have. The result of this “personality clash” was that there was little trust and respect between us and very little communication. Meetings between the two of us were, to say the least, fraught!

Secret 3: Ask for regular feedback on your progress. Ask your manager to coach you. Be pro-active and do not wait for your manager to come to you. On the other hand do not always be seen to be reliant on your manager and give them space. Agree this area of support in your contract. A great time to enlist this support is on field visits. Ask your manager if some time can be “protected” during the field visit to discuss your progress and for them to coach you through any ideas and, or, challenges you have.

Secret 4: Be seen to be a support for your manager. Management can be lonely and stressful particularly if the manager isn’t managing their boss particularly well or if the company and/or team results are not doing as well as expected. Be supportive and offer to take on extra tasks. These tasks will not only make space for the manager to work more productively and strategically they will also enable you to develop your own capabilities. Be careful to ensure you manage your team-mates expectations here too. Being seen as supporting the manager can be taken the wrong way by some of your colleagues and on occasion, the less enlightened representatives can see this behaviour as threatening.

Secret 5: Go with your instincts! If you feel that the relationship with your manager is starting to go sour, then immediately call a meeting and openly discuss your feelings. To make this easier than it may sound, again build it into your contract right at the start. Something like, “If I feel our relationship is not what it should be, can I address it immediately as opposed to letting it linger?” Do not where possible discuss your feelings with all of your sales team. You will find some people very supportive and helpful but you may also find that some may go out of their way to reinforce the feelings you have thereby making it more difficult to address with the manager. Always best to tackle these feelings head on without referring to your team mates. If you have a coach, then they are often the best people to enable and support you to handle these situations.

Relationships between managers and representatives usually deteriorate because there was little trust in the first place and as a result openness is not usually achieved. Follow the five secrets and you will go a long way to ensuring a lasting and productive relationship with your manager.

Allan Mackintosh is a professional management coach who after 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry started his own management coaching consultancy, Professional Management Coaching. He is a successful speaker and has recently turned author, having had his first book, “The Successful Coaching Manager” published in August.

Allan can be contacted on 01292 318152, e-mail allan@pmcscotland.com or visit his website at http://www.pmcscotland.com

In sales, you can train your customers by building a relationship that will ultimately yield tremendous rewards. If you don’t train them, your customers may forget you’re out there and go instead to your competition, even if they were happy with you and the service you provided. They simply won’t even think of talking to you about their current needs. That’s why you need to develop a level of familiarity and presence that makes you unforgettable, even indispensable.

Generate more sales by using this plan to train your customers to always think of you first.

First, Build a Relationship

Animal trainers spend two to three hours a day building the relationship with the animal they’re training. This time is essential to building trust. Trainers make contact of some sort that the animal especially loves, from playing fetch with a dog to rubbing the belly of an affection-loving monkey. They determine as the relationship grows how best to give each animal the attention he or she needs.

Though it’s probably best if you don’t rub your customers’ bellies every day, you can rather easily make yourself a more valuable resource to all of your customers by determining what will give added value to each. Find a way to build your relationship with each of them, such as regularly passing along information via e-mail, even on a daily basis, that will benefit the customer. Relationship-building activities keep you in the forefront of customers’ minds, and while these activities won’t necessarily be immediately income-producing, they will have a positive impact down the road when the customer thinks of you and the value you added to routine service.

Second, Impress with Consistency

Animals, like children and many adults, need routine to feel secure and trusting. Trainers behave predictably so as not to frighten, confuse, or upset the animal. From a sales standpoint, you need to be consistent with your customers, so they know what to expect from you and how much they can depend on you. For example, you should always return their calls within an hour or two of their leaving a message, not sometimes call back an hour later and sometimes call back three days later.

If you have this professional approach, and you consistently deliver what your customers want without being asked, you’ll be the first one they think of because you have made yourself indispensable. In other words, they’ll use you consistently if you behave consistently and consistently produce good results for them, even if they’re not officially your customer.

Third, Recognize and Meet Individual Needs

Part of building a relationship with an animal involves knowing what its needs are. For example, one primate may love vegetables and despise fruit, while another won’t touch his veggies but can’t get enough bananas and apples. Customers also have needs, and they do business with you because you can meet, anticipate, and predictably fulfill those needs. The human equivalents of those picky primates might be those customers who insist on being able to place their orders on-line, while others want nothing to do with computers and need to be able to pick up the phone, day or night, to order what they want.

To meet your customers’ needs, you must take the time to get to know each individual. Your familiarity with them will help you discern what their particular needs are, thus allowing you to better meet them.

Don’t limit the lengths to which you’re willing to go to accommodate your customers. If it’s not illegal, immoral, or unethical, do it. If anyone in your organization complains that you’re favoring a client for whom you’re going a bit out of your way, explain that you’re not giving preferential treatment so much as you’re meeting one particular customer’s different needs, and that you’re committed to meeting all needs equally.

Fourth, Learn From Your Lions

Lions are solitary and territorial animals. They don’t want to be around each other, so getting two to lie down side by side in a circus act, for example, can be a huge feat. Trainers have to learn which ones are more likely to remain friendly to another tiger by learning their individual preferences.

As you learn your customers’ needs, learn as much as you can about the intricacies of their business, the individuals on their staff, and their roles and relationships within the organization. Especially if you’re selling to different industries, be willing to go into their businesses and learn the idiosyncrasies of the industrial manufacturer, the habits of the healthcare facility, and the quirks of the cleaning supply company. Pick up every detail you possibly can that will help you build that relationship and show you how to better serve those customers. The payoff is that you begin to look like one of them, and they perceive you as being a part of their internal team, which is what you really want, as opposed to being perceived as a salesperson who just comes in to make a sale.

Fifth, Become a Resource

When trainers have developed a relationship with the animals they train, the animals become completely dependent on them for everything; the trainer is the animal’s sole resource for most primary and secondary needs, such as food, shelter, and even companionship.

To train your customers to think of you first, every time, you must seek to become a full-service resource, as hands-on as you can manage to be. At that point, you’ll achieve the coveted top of the mind status that will bring them to you again and again. If you can demonstrate that you are able to meet all of their needs, you’ll be the first person they think of when they have a new need that you can either meet or give them a referral to someone who can.

If you’re in real estate sales, for example, don’t limit your client contact to just selling them property. Extend yourself to meet all of their real estate needs by sending someone from your office to make a presentation to the planning commission, or to track down permits. A simple rule of thumb is to always go above and beyond what your competition is doing to provide services for the customer. Do more and you’ll find you’ll obtain coveted word-of-mouth advertising, the very best kind, as your happy clients send their friends and colleagues directly to you.

Sixth, Build Your Menagerie With Your Competition’s Clients, Too!

If you train your customers to think of you first, they won’t give a thought to your competitors. Now consider how you could use this training strategy to steal business away from your competition. If the competition isn’t giving this personal level of service, if they’re just filling orders and aren’t familiar with their customers and their needs, they are vulnerable. Use your excellent animal training skills to go in there and make the competitors’ business your own. When you do, you may find yourself turning even tough old lions into happy pussycats!

The Fox Realtor is experienced in commercial real estate in Minnesota. Working with developers, investors, and institutions to realize their investment objectives using real estate. He can be contacted at mo@foxreg.com, and more information is available at www.foxreg.com.

This month I want to share a success from a friend and customer of mine. You’ll find in this story two important sales tactics for beating your competition.

From Chris Chalmers of Quova Inc:

“We sell a commodity product (geographic data) that is available from a variety of competitors and public sources. Recently, we lost a major account to a competitor, and based on our long-standing relationship with them, they consented to debrief us on what went wrong. Obviously we had an account management issue, and there had been a service problem or two. But the clincher was our competitor was perceived as “more helpful” and “more expert” because they were offering all sorts of unsolicited suggestions about how to use the product.

“That was a real surprise - Shouldn’t the customer already know what they were going to do with the product? Otherwise they wouldn’t have bought it, right? How much advice can you give when your product is a simple commodity?

“So we tried our competitor’s approach in our next sales cycle. When the customer was talking about their perceived needs and uses of the product, we used to sit mildly and take notes. This time, we launched into a barrage of questions about the intended use our product, interspersed with short stories about how other customers were using it.

“What about this application? Have you ever considered this alternative? Here’s how someone else in your situation is using it..” and so on. Instead of going into detail about the functionality of our application, which was simple and undifferentiated, we went into detail about the usage of our product, which was highly differentiated.

“Much to my surprise, it worked! Now WE were perceived as ‘experts’ and ‘adding value’ to the product - even though it was still a commodity that our competitor was selling for a lower price. Our coach really wanted to do business with us, and we were able to defend a higher price point and get our deal closed.”

Thanks for sharing your story with my readers and me Chris. You and your sales team were smart to adopt your competition’s tactics to beat them at their own game.

Sales Tactic - Asking questions

Aggressively asking questions is one of the most effective sales techniques you can use. Asking question uncovers the prospect’s pains, wants and desires.

In Chris’s words:

“we launched into a barrage of questions about the intended use our product”

…instead of sitting mildly and taking notes while the prospect spoke about their needs.

Most salespeople don’t go far enough with their questioning. Its not just about open versus closed questions. You need to take it further. Find out how they want to use your product in detail. Find out what excites them. Find out what they are afraid of. Find out the one or two important things that are driving them to make a purchase.

Asking questions offers the potential to increase rapport and build stronger bonds faster with your prospects. When you ask a person what is important to them, they feel more known and understood by you as they answer. This increases their receptivity giving you more opportunities to communicate in a way most effective for your prospect.

Sales Tactic - Telling Stories

Story telling offers the power to transform your product from a nebulous idea into real vision for your prospects. Features certainly have little selling power. Benefits give you a bit more selling power than features do. It is story telling though that packs the big punch because it wraps the what, why, and how of your product all together into an entertaining package that holds their attention.

Stories don’t have to be long. Very effective sales stories need only be a sentence or two. In Chris’s case, the stories were short:

“interspersed with short stories about how other customers were using it”

…because his sales team wanted to stay on their agenda of asking questions and finding all about the prospect’s proposed use of their product. This was a very smart move because when you tell longer stories, you risk losing control of the sales call if you let the prospect ask you a lot of questions.

Stories position you and your company as capable experts. You imbue yourself with the success of your customers. Your prospect sees what is possible and believes that you can help them get what they want because you are discussing a customer who is getting their desired results.

Learn from Chris Chalmers’ example. Incorporate more stories into your selling and improve your questioning techniques to find out what your prospects want, why they want it, and what they will do with it. Work on these skills and closing gets so easy its almost a nonevent.

© 1999-2004 Shamus Brown, All Rights Reserved.

Shamus Brown is a Professional Sales Coach and former high-tech sales pro who began his career selling for IBM. Shamus has written more than 50 articles on selling and is the creator of the popular Persuasive Selling Skills CD Audio Program. You can read more of Shamus Brown’s sales tips at http://Sales-Tips.industrialEGO.com/ and you can learn more about his persuasive sales skills training at http://www.Persuasive-Sales-Skills.com/