1. Capture leads – Any lead system starts with getting leads for your business. You have a variety of ways to capture leads such as buying leads, advertising, using pay-per-click, setting up a lead generating website, mailing postcards, networking, etc. There are plenty of ways small businesses can promote their products and services on a limited budget. The trick is to figure out what works for you and tweak your campaigns for the best results. Regardless of your method, you need some way to collect leads so you can follow up with them.
2. Lead follow up via phone calls – Ideally one of your lead capture methods involves people telling you they want to talk with you. They might request a free consultation, info session or analysis, for instance. Or they might have questions about making a purchase on your website. Most people want to know that there is a real person running your business before they will buy from or hire you. Before you call someone, take some time to create an agenda with a few simple scripts you can use to start the call, transition to different subjects or if your recipient has objections. You don’t have to read the script word-for-word, but use it as an outline just in case. Then, listen and take careful notes about what your prospect says.
3. Lead follow up via email – No matter what lead capture system you use, you should always get an email address. On the web, you can capture leads through your website with email service providers like Aweber. They give you the subscriber form code that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, when someone signs up, you can follow up with them. Only follow up with people who opt-in to receive correspondence from you. However, once someone opts in, you can set up an autoresponder to automatically email them at regular intervals.
4. Lead follow up via information kits – Direct mail is also an effective tool if you capture your prospect’s mailing list. Consider using direct mail for prospects you speak with over the phone or who have requested an information packet from you through your website or via email. You can put an information packet together pretty quickly with a business card, flyer about your services, a helpful article or two, a case study or list of clients, list of frequently asked questions and other information. After you send your information kit, follow up by phone within a week to see if they have questions.
5. Lead follow up via postcards – If someone doesn’t specifically request an information kit, you may choose to send something less expensive like a postcard. Postcards can be sent quickly and don’t require your prospect to open an envelope to view the contents. By putting together a postcard campaign of several follow ups, you will convert more prospects into sales with repeated exposure.

Keep in mind – it usually takes 7-12 exposures to get someone to do business with you, so having a good lead follow up system is extremely important. Whenever you follow up, always include valuable, educational materials mixed in with your sales literature so prospects read your follow up materials.

If you’ve ever cold called someone, you know the drill. You call someone up, introduce yourself and explain what you do. Perhaps you might offer a benefit of your product or service. When you’ve finished your spiel, you hope the person on the other end will say something like, “We were just talking about hiring someone like you.” In reality, what you usually hear is “Sorry, I’m not interested.” Here are a few small business sales tips for improving your cold calling success.

Warming Up Small Business Leads

If you do decide to add cold calling to your small business marketing strategy, a better approach is to warm up leads before you cold call. If you have several prospects you would like to work with, send each of them a personalized letter explaining how your services could specifically help their business. A few days later, follow up with a call.

Or, provide a valuable incentive such as a free report, access to a members-only section of your website, or physical CD for anyone who will give you their contact information. Then, follow up with a call and ask them if they had any questions or let them know their order is on its way.

In both cases, you are offering something of value first and then following up with a call. The valuable information you offer warms them up to you and your services so they are more likely to be receptive to your call.

3 Cold Calling Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

When you do follow up with a call, here are three small business sales mistakes to avoid.

1. Talking about yourself – Once they get someone on the phone, most cold callers immediately break into a pitch about who they are, what they do, and why their product or service might interest them. Unfortunately, most people aren’t interested in the caller who just interrupted their train of thought. They are too pre-occupied with their own business challenges and daily to-do list to care about who you are and what you do. If you don’t engage them initially, you’ve already lost them. To get a better response, ask them a question about an issue or problem they may need to solve. Focus on uncovering a need rather than pitching your services.
2. Conveying cockiness – It’s one thing to be confident in your product or service. It’s another thing to expect that your product or service is the end-all-be-all solution to everyone’s problems. Yet often, cold callers put immediate sales pressure on prospects to open their wallets. While you should be enthusiastic and confident about your products and services, keep in mind that your prospect on the other end didn’t ask for a sales pitch. They don’t know anything about you, and won’t be receptive to your message until you’ve actively engaged them. Focus on holding a conversation to see if what you offer can help them solve a problem they are currently having.
3. Overcoming objections – When you first call up a prospect, you likely won’t know much about their problems, concerns, budget and time constraints. It’s possible that what you offer isn’t a good fit for this company or that they don’t have the means to hire you at this point. If you go into the call ready to overcome objections and convince this prospect to give you a chance, you will create an adversarial relationship off the bat. It’s better to listen to and validate their concerns rather than trying to counter whatever they say and putting them on the defensive.

Making a successful cold call can be challenging, but by warming up leads first, you can improve the odds that the person you talk with will be more receptive to starting a dialog with you.

The worst part about this failure to communicate is not knowing what happened. Did you do something wrong? Is the sale lost? And what is the best course of action since you don’t want to be perceived as a pushy salesperson who never knows when to give up. Here are a few small business sales tips for handling prospects who stop communicating.

Let Go Of Expectations

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, take heart that there is a pressure-free way to re-establish communication with your prospect. But to do so, you must switch your focus from making the sale to learning what went wrong.

When you are focused on making a sale, it’s easy to fall into the trap of anticipating how your prospect should act and expecting things to go as you hope. In that sense, it’s a lot like the early stages of dating. You might have a few dates with someone and then suddenly, they no longer seem interested. You can feel mislead, frustrated, or confused and can become preoccupied with where you might have gone wrong.

Just like with dating, your prospects may not want to reveal the truth about why they stopped contacting you – but with a business relationship, it’s easier to gain feedback than with a non-committal guy or girl.

The trick to uncovering the mystery is to take a laid back approach to contacting them. If they are avoiding you, it may be because they aren’t yet ready to move forward, they’ve had internal issues that have halted the project, a key decision maker is on vacation, or they have decided not to go with your services. Or it may be something else.

If you really are interested in learning why your prospect is no longer interested, your first step is to let go of the idea that you will get the sale. By approaching your prospect as if a sale might still happen, you unconsciously add sales pressure to your relationship and can destroy any rapport you’ve build so far. Instead, accept that you are ok with their decision not to move forward before you contact them. The truth is, you don’t yet know what the situation is.

Re-Establishing Contact

The next step is to call your prospect with the agenda of learning the truth, not pressuring them to move forward with you. While there is no guarantee that they will talk with you, you are much more likely to learn what happened if you are upfront and honest. No one likes rejection, yet gaining constructive criticism will help you better sell your services in the future.

One way to do this is to call up your prospect and apologize. Try to get them on the phone if you can, as email and voicemail can be impersonal. When you do have the opportunity to speak with them, say something like “I just wanted to call and apologize for us not being able to connect over the last few days/weeks. I feel like somewhere along the way, I may have dropped the ball or not provided you with the right information. Since I haven’t heard from you, I can only assume you’ve gone with someone else, so I’m not calling to pick up where we left off. I just wanted to see if you had any feedback for where I can improve for next time.”

The Benefits of Feedback

If you are genuine and honest, you may be surprised by what your prospect tells you, and perhaps even learn that he has a good reason for not being in touch. While learning the truth can seem frightening at first, you’ll find you are far less frustrated because you now know why things didn’t work out the way you hoped. Asking for constructive feedback has a number of benefits such as:

1. Regaining Confidence – When prospects disappear, it’s easy to blame ourselves. Often, our inner critic gets the better of us and berates us for doing something wrong while holding on to the hope that somehow, this sale might work out.
2. Getting Closure – By learning the truth about your prospect’s situation, you can make a more informed decision about whether to continue your relationship or move on. Even if your prospect tells you they’ve gone with someone else, you no longer have to devote your time, attention, and worry to what will happen in the future.
3. Improving Sales Skills – When you don’t know if you did something wrong or what it might be, your inner critic is often quick to blame and belittle you for losing the sale. You may have done everything right, yet still lost the sale. By gaining constructive feedback, you will learn what you can improve or if the decision was something completely out of your control (such as the competitor they went with was the boss’ son).
4. Build Client Rapport – While your prospect might not have hired you this time, that doesn’t mean they won’t have future projects. By showing them you are willing to accept feedback and are genuinely interested in their opinion, you demonstrate that this process was more than you making the sale. You wanted to build a relationship with them. When you relax and ask for the truth without sales pressure, your prospects will be more straightforward and honest with you.

As with any relationship, don’t jump to conclusions until you have the full story. The truth is often easier to deal with than the endless stream of possibilities your mind can come up with. By following these small business sales tips, you can learn from your mistakes and build confidence for your next prospecting interactions.

Author: Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano
Publisher: Business Plus
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you’ve read Now, Discover Your Strengths and you are in sales, check out The Gallup Organization’s book on how to Discover Your Sales Strengths. Unlike most sales books that are written from a salesman’s perspective, this book is based on Gallup research of sales people who were consistently in the top 25% of their company’s sales forces and sold 4-10 times more than average performers. The research is based on interviews with 250,000 salespeople, over 1 million customers and 80,000 managers.

If you are familiar with Now, Discover Your Strengths (which I highly recommend), you know that The Gallup Organization has put together an online assessment that tells you your top 5 talents. I, personally, thought it was pretty accurate in analyzing myself and a few of my colleagues who took the quiz. What do these talents have to do with sales? Well, interestingly – and despite what you’ve probably read – the authors conclude:

“The idea that anyone can sell is nonsense. Sales simply is not for everyone because consistent success in a sales career requires the presence of certain talents. In the course of our work we have studied sales forces for some of the best companies, companies that have carefully recruited and selected their representatives. Even in the best companies, we found that 35 percent of the sales force did not have the talents necessary to achieve acceptable results predictably. This rather considerable group – one of every three salespeople out there – is consistently in the bottom half of the performance curve.”

Discover Your Sales Strengths is written for the people that do have the potential to be great sales performers to utilize their talents and become great. What sets the best performers apart from those who are merely average? According to the authors

their use of recurring patterns to:

• Build relationships
• Have an impact on others (and get them to say yes),
• Discover and solve customer needs,
• Drive their individual performance by focusing on meaningful goals and rewards, and
• Find the right structure in which to perform at their best

When you purchase the book, you get a code to take the online StrengthsFinder assessment for free. However, knowing your top talents is on the first step. You must also find the right role that matches those strengths. And great performers usually have gifted coaches that stand by and encourage them.

In chapter 2, the authors start debunking myths of sales. Here are some findings:

• You don’t need an advanced degree
• “We only rarely find a strong correlation between experience and results.”
• Few salespeople can sell anything to everyone. Most sell well in specific environments
• There is no one right method of selling.
• Training helps those with inherent talents rather than the poor performers

Much of the first half of this book duplicates the content in Now, Discover Your Strengths, such as the explanation of strengths and talents, what the StrengthsFinder is, and how to understand your talents (“Signature Themes”). By chapter 6, however, the authors get into the meat of the book and delve into how your strengths and talents fit with your ability to sell.

There’s no one “right” combination of strengths that make up the perfect salesperson. Instead, the authors have found that top salespeople have their Signature Themes in the following 5 key areas:

• Motivation
• The way they build relationships
• The way they gain commitments
• The structure they need to get our work done, and
• Their ability to understand and solve customer needs

For each area, the authors provide examples of strengths and talents that match up with those key areas and examples of how people with specific talents utilize them. They also discuss how managers and building relationships with customers play into how well you do. It also describes the talents necessary for becoming a sales manager – and how to know if you that’s a good role for you.

If you are new to a career in sales or are unhappy with your current sales position, read this book – specifically chapters 6-8 which are extremely insightful.

Author: Jeffrey Gitomer
Publisher: FT Press
Year Published: 2006
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

Jeffrey Gitomer is known as a top motivational sales author and trainer. If you’ve ever heard him speak, he’s extremely energetic and tries to make sales fun. In the Little Red Book of Sales Answers, Gitomer sticks to his fun theme, putting together what feels like a sales book for the attention-deficit with large red headlines, blue bolded lettering to draw attention, cartoons, and freebies you can access on his website.

The book, which includes “99.5 real world answers that make sense, make sales, and make money” is broken into 6 parts: personal improvement, prospecting for leads and making appointments, winning the sales battle, sales skill building, building relationships, and building your personal brand.

Gitomer starts off his book by proclaiming that sales is hard, and as much as every sales person wishes a list of everyone ready to buy from them now would be handed to them, no such list exists. In fact, he states

“The one-word meaning of sales is: Work
The two-word meaning of sales is: Work Hard

No surprise there — unless of course you’re working at Disney World, over there in Fantasyland. Wake up, Tinkerbell. There’s no magic wand. There’s no secret formula. There’s no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you — unless your potion is hard work.”

He goes on to explain that people don’t get “lucky,” they prepare for the meeting, they engage customers in the sales process, they get a commitment from the prospect that he is willing to buy, and they practice – and that’s all part of the first “real world answer” Gitomer includes.

As you read the book, you quickly learn that Gitomer has little tolerance for whiners. One of his questions is “My company won’t buy me a laptop. What should I do?” He answers with a firm

“Your success is your responsibility. So are your sales tools. Go down to the computer store and buy one yourself. You have your own money. Go out and invest it in the most important person in the world — YOU!…

How about stop whining, and start winning?”

Gitomer comes across as a no BS guy that tells it like it is. He gives out advice and sales tools freely throughout the book, but he isn’t afraid to tell you that success takes hard work – and if you aren’t willing to put in that work, you probably won’t do very well.

If you are a beginner to sales, this book is a quick, easily digestible read that walks you though the basics of making cold calls, getting appointments, asking the right questions to engage prospects, handling objections, asking for the sale, and building relationships that lead to repeat business, testimonials and referrals.

Sales trainers may find the book helpful in sparking discussion in weekly sales meetings or mentoring sessions. Each answer Gitomer provides spans between 1-3 pages, so it’s easy to read the Q&A to a group for further discussion.

The best thing about this book is that it takes your mental attitude into consideration. If you don’t like sales or the product you are selling. If you don’t like your company or your customers, then perhaps you should consider doing something else because if you don’t put your heart into your work, you will never be happy. He closes with “If you love it, it will be ever so easy for you to put your full heart into it.”

Author: Rick Page
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

If you deal with complex sales – sales that take months to close and often involve multiple decision makers with different motivations – then you know they can be chaotic. Perhaps no one is calling you back, or they’ve introduced new requirements, or you can’t seem to talk with the decision maker, or your prospect just can’t seem to make a decision. You’d like to put on your rose-colored glasses and “hope” everything will be ok, but something seems wrong and your prospect won’t tell you what that might be.

Rick Page has written Hope is Not a Strategy to help you realize when a deal is dead in the water so you can cut your loses or when the time is right to forge ahead. The book is broken into four sections: understanding the complex sale, simplifying the complex sale into something more manageable, strategies for execution, and account management.

The first part of the book is a brief overview of what a complex sale is, how to develop your sales teams and the 7 types of buyer-seller relationships, and how to link your product’s differentiating factors to your prospects’ problems. If you are new to the complex sale or are used to individualized selling, this is a great overview

In Part 2, Page explains his 6 step process for simplifying the complex sale, called RADAR or Reading Accounts and Deploying Appropriate Resources. These six steps include

1. Link solutions to pain (or gain). – Learn what problem the customer is trying to solve, get them to confess their pains, and develop requirements to solve those pains or business problems. Page stresses this should happen before the requirements have been defined. If they are already defined, you’ve missed the first step in the sales cycle. This chapter also explains the types of benefits you can appeal to in order to make the sale.
2. Qualify the prospect. – Pick profitable opportunities you can win rather than on emotion. In this step you should be asking yourself how this opportunity compares with your other opportunities and how many resources are required to pursue the opportunity.
3. Build competitive preference. – Learn what differentiates you from everyone else and build relationships to get key influencers and decision makers’ support.
4. Determine the decision-making process. – Find out all you can about how your prospect will make their decision, including who is involved, who you think they will decide, what part each will play and when they will decide.
5. Sell to power. – Since not everyone has an equal vote in the decision making, you must determine the political situation, learn who the power influencers are, and build relationships with them.
6. Communicate the strategic plan.- Finally, once you understand the factors in play, you must develop a strategic plan for how to win their business. If you don’t have a plan, you’re simply hoping luck will be on your side.

Part 3 focuses on executing your particular strategy so that you defeat your competition and win your prospects’ commitment. Page looks at factors like how to tell where your prospect is in the decision making process, how to change key issues to your favor, how to get each person’s vote, and how to sell at the C-Level. Finally, Part 4 offers a brief overview of account management.

Overall, Hope is Not a Strategy is a great introduction to building high trust relationships that will net repeat business. Each sales principle is clearly explained in a logical manner. Examples, charts, and diagrams complement the chapter text. There are end notes and a bibliography in the back.

Author: Neil Rackham
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year Published: 1988
Rating:
Buy From Amazon.com

Marketing can only get your foot in the door. Selling is what closes the deal. Yet when most people think of selling, they think of pushy ‘used car’ salesmen who are only out to suck more money out of their wallets.

Neil Rackman’s Spin Selling approach is about as far away from that description of selling as possible. Manipulation isn’t involved. Neither are gimmicks or high pressure techniques. His approach, based upon numerous studies and years of working with sales organizations within a number of Fortune companies, outlines that good sales techniques aren’t what you think.

The book is primarily focused on those selling high value, high dollar products and services – those that aren’t impulse buys and can take months to even years for companies to purchase. It is not a marketing book, meaning it doesn’t walk you through the process of choosing a target market, differentiating your firm from others, or the tactics involved in implementing your marketing campaign. It does, however, focus on the second part – once you are in front of someone, how do you get commitment from them to buy your services?

The main theme of the book is to listen and ask questions. To leave your scripts and ego behind and focus solely on the person you are talking to. The more you can get them to talk about their problems, the better you can address their concerns, thus shortening the sales cycle and beginning a relationship built on mutual trust.

The SPIN Selling process describes the four stages of a sales call. These include:

• Preliminaries – the first few minutes of your introduction
• Investigating – uncovering needs and understanding how your prospects make decisions
• Demonstrating capability – showing that you have something worthwhile to offer them
• Obtaining commitment -Sometimes, this is the purchase, though it might also be to speak to someone higher up in the company, to have them attend a seminar you are giving, or agree to a product demonstration.

It then walks you through a process of asking open ended questions to get at the heart of your prospect’s problem and find out what the driving factors are for his problem, how severe it is, and demonstrate how your product or service can drastically help him.

To do so, it focuses on 4 different types of questions that you can use while talking to your prospect:

• Situation Questions – These are basic data-gathering questions about the company.
• Problem Questions – These questions explore some of the dissatisfactions and difficulties your prospect might be having where your product or service might be of value.
• Implication Questions – These questions take the prospect a step further and focus them on what the future will be like if their current problems continue. They are used to get the prospect thinking about how serious or urgent their current problem is and the consequences of not fixing it now.
• Need-Payoff Questions – These questions lead prospects into telling you the benefits your service or product could offer them.

The best salesmen use lots of need-payoff questions and forego the cheesy closing techniques often taught in the innumerable sales technique books out there. In fact, according to Rackham’s research, the emphasis on using many types of closing techniques as often as possible during your conversation with your prospect is actually dead wrong. Those who use less closing techniques actually closed more sales! And this was the repeated result through numerous studies!

Another interesting thing Rackham points out is that the focus on objection handling is incredibly over-hyped. Skilled salesmen actually strive for objection prevention, not objection handling. That means asking enough questions to uncover and address the prospects’ motivations and concerns before you even get to the stage where you describe your services – before they have the opportunity to object.

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for a book to improve your selling effectiveness, this is one of the best books to read. It is research based and professional – focusing on your prospects’ needs and concerns rather than memorizing scripts and handling an onslaught of objections.

I’m certainly not opposed to supporting charities that I believe in. There’s usually a certain amount I give away each year. But that said, I’m not going to support every charity that calls me up asking for money. And I’m far more likely to support a charity that tries to keep me in the loop and make me feel like my donation is appreciated.

For anyone cold calling for money, here are two things to keep in mind:

1 – Why Should I Trust You?

When you call asking for money, I have no way to verify over the phone that that you are who you say. This is particularly so when the number comes up as ‘unlisted’ on my caller id. In an age of rampant fraud and identity theft, I am very hesitant to give anyone my credit card number over the phone.

In fact, in most cases, I actually feel safer donating through your charity’s website because I know I can check out the contact of who owns the domain and where it’s hosted through a simple whois search. That’s all public information. If I’m uncertain about a website, I can do a google search to see if there have been any complaints against the organization. I have none of this available during a phone call. Even if the caller does offer me a website, I have no way of verifying that they are affiliated with the website.

2 – Why Should I Support You?

Yes, I know that you need my support and you appreciate anything I can give. Everyone that calls me asking for donations says that. Yet I never hear where my money goes once I donate and I never hear from you when you’re not asking me for money. There’s no relationship here. There’s just you asking for money.

For instance, yesterday, the caller was clearly not listening to me. He had a mission, and it was for me to fork over some – any – amount. He didn’t care about my past or future relationship with the charity. He wanted that money and he wanted it then and there. When I politely told him that I would not be donating money that day, he turned it around and told me “Well, how about I put you down for $X.” We went through this cycle 4 times, each time X got lower. Each time, I became more annoyed that he was not listening to me. I’m not the type to hang up on someone, so each time, I firmly said no and waited for him to end the call.

Most charities realize that while I might not donate at this time, I may in the future. In this case, ‘no’ really means ‘no.’ But by constantly pushing and not listening to a word I said, he turned me off to ever donating to that charity. The thing is, I have donated to them in the past. It’s a good cause. But there are others out there that aren’t so pushy.

Not Just For Non-Profits

For-Profit business owners should also keep this advice in mind. When you make a cold call, the person on the other end probably doesn’t know anything about who you are and what you do. Why should they trust you and why should they listen to what you have to say? I’m a busy person. What’s in it for me? That’s me. Not you. Me. I don’t care that you have a sales quota to make. I care about my problems and making my life easier. And right now, I have a million emails to answer. Clients to tend to. Reports to write. Mail to go through. Meetings to attend. How can you help me solve a specific problem I’m having now? If you don’t have a good answer, please know that I don’t have time to listen to your sales pitch.

If you’re looking for sales call strategies, I highly recommend Jill Konrath’s new book, Selling to Big Companies.

Anyway, the article points out that sales cycles have gotten increasingly longer as clients have a harder time differentiating one vendor from another. In addition, a recent survey found that

77% of sales leaders find buyers putting higher priorities on ROI

64% of respondents believe buyers are treating their specific industry as a commoditized market

To compete in tomorrow’s super competitive market, the article suggests that sales will have to focus on 4 key areas to survive – segmentation, structure, systems, and support.

It is absolutely essential to segment customers according to who they are and why they buy. You must then match your marketing and selling cycle to their purchasing cycle to maximize ROI. Structure means having the right people in place to focus on building customer relationships at an executive level. Approaching sales as a system is critical. This system must include all the information and diagnostic tools to help you and your customers discover their underlying issues rather than simply tackling symptoms. It also requires quite a bit of educating on your part to give them the decision making tools to move forward and solve the problem. And finally, support means that companies provide the support and intelligence to sales so they are adequately prepared for customer interactions.

It’s a great article, well worth reading, though you will have to register at the 1to1.com website to read it.

1. Listen. 90-percent of your conversation should involve you listening to what your prospect wants or needs. They will tell you what they are looking for if you leave your agenda for “making the sale at all costs” behind. What do they talk about? What problems are they facing? What are their priorities? Are they more logical or emotional?
   
   
2. Determine what they want. Learn as much as you can about them. What are their goals, needs and desires? It’s much easier to sell something your prospects want than trying to persuade them to buy something they don’t want or feel they need.
   
   
3. Be positive. You don’t have to overly flatter prospects, but make sure they see you as a positive resource. Compliment them on something they take pride in or congratulate them on a recent success.
   
   
4. Focus on your prospect, not you. Use terms like “you” and “your” rather than “I” or “me” to keep your conversation focused around your prospect’s interests. No one likes a sales pitch, but most people can talk about themselves for hours.
   
   
5. Have a meeting agenda. You don’t need a formal sales presentation, but create an outline of the key points you would like to address during your interaction. If your prospect loses focus or goes off on a tangent, subtly steer them back on track by asking pointed questions about the key problem you can help them solve.
   
   
6. Stress benefits. What’s in it for them? What emotional benefits will they receive after they use your product or service? Focus on the positive and how their lives will be better as a result.
   
   
7. Results matter. Spell out the bottom line clearly using facts, case studies, and examples. What financial or emotional result will they receive?
   
   
8. Don’t rush. Never try to push your lead into buying if he or she dosn’t yet feel comfortable. You want them to feel positive about hiring you, so if they need time to think it over or discuss it with other people, respect that. Offer to set up a meeting with other key decision makers if they feel that would help.
   
   
9. Be truthful. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver or make excuses if something goes wrong.
   
   
10. Think long-term. Build long-term relationships by being a resource for your client and nurturing their success. Every interaction you have shapes whether your prospect will buy from you or refer you business, so make each one count.

By utilizing these ten sales tips, you not only build trust and rapport with prospects, but you start building a long-term relationship that will net you repeat business and referrals.