Basic sales and marketing knowledge are needed to develop cutting edge skills that will improve your potentials as a world class marketing professional.If you are a salesman or you're just looking to develop basic selling and marketing skills and knowledge then this report is the right one for you. Even if you are well versed in selling this report will help ensure that you keep your basic marketing skills well polished.
Good selling involves providing the right product and services to your customers thereby creating customer satisfaction. Your ability to provide and fulfill your customers need will determine your level of success in selling.
First and foremost, you need to develop your personal standards. The word standard means a level of excellence required or specified the drive to always achieve excellence should form a part of your character. To maintain high personal standards, you need to make quality decisions based on moral strength and principles. These areas of standards include growth, honesty, integrity, relationship, energy and action. Of all these standards I would like to talk a little bit about integrity for the purpose of this report. This is because integrity is arguably one of the most important personal, professional or ethical standard a professional should have. The word integrity in itself stands for moral excellence, wholeness and in many ways honesty, customers trust you when they know you maintain a high sense of integrity. This means that you will always treat customer transactions transparently, exclude moral excellence in all deals, keep to commitment and accept full responsibility for your actions. A salesman of integrity gains customers must over time and when you develop trust you gain loyalty and respect.
Then you will have to ensure your customer communication skills are excellent. This involves listening, asking questions, being courteous, communicating clearly and accurately, minding your customers feelings, proper use of non verbal language, handling problem customers, use of technical knowledge and concepts, handling customer objections and questions and keeping your customers informed at all times. I like to talk about listening a lot because this most times forms the bedrock for proper communication. As a great salesman, you should know when to stop talking and listen to your customers. Listening involves hearing and should be demonstrated even in your body language. You wont be able to serve your customers needs, if you do not stop talking long enough to understand what they are saying. Ask questions to clarify points and take important notes to ensure you remember all the important points of the conversation.
Having developed your customer communication skills, you will then need to work on your marketing strategies. Having an effective strategy helps you to logically identify how to identify, create and manage the whole sales process. Your strategy will involve how to develop multiple outreach sources, identifying and creating product need, handling the actual sales process and handling customer objections during the sales process as well as closing your sales in a grand style. As a general rule, You should try to create interest first in what you intend to sell. Your clients should be able to understand how you can create benefit or value for them. What you intend to offer should fulfill a desired need and ultimately create satisfaction. Customers buy satisfaction. If you do not provide satisfaction in the Lon run then you have not made a great sale. Creating customer satisfaction in key to customer retention. Provide evidence to back your claims and avoid overwhelming the client with too much information. Researching the market is key to business development. This will enable you identify your target clients before hand. This means that you will need to identify where and who your primary market really is. You need to identify your nitch market and strategies to win your nitch market. You will also need to have some basic knowledge on business development. Business development is the process by which new business is introduced. A good salesman should be skilled in the act of developing new business as well as expanding already existing ones. In order to develop new business effectively, you must understand that it involves researching the market, identifying key targets, constructing an outreach plan which was earlier discussed, securing meetings, creating proposals and follow up with leads.