In Sales, Timing Really Can Be Everything

Sometimes things just go right. You have big targets to reach and all of a sudden you find customers just when they are looking for or are in need of the product or service you sell. While that is great when it happens, it doesn’t happen that often. So in order to keep the wheels of sales turning, you need to make sure you are getting your sales messages out in a timely manner to take advantage of typical buying cycles. As important as judging the timings of your sales activity is, you will also find that the day-to-day management of time can be crucial to your success as a sales professional. Being punctual and keeping to timings agreed with clients can be the difference between a sale and no sale. A golden rule when meeting clients or prospects is to turn up on time. Never keep your clients waiting. You may find clients turning off very quickly if you are late. Lateness can be taken as an insult. It can appear as if the meeting is not very important to you and it can suggest that you do not value the importance of your client’s time. It also presents a far more professional image to be early, prepared and welcoming of other attendees. It looks unprofessional when you rush in spouting apologies. Timing can be very important when you are presenting information to a buying team. You must always remember that the time they have given up to see you is precious, so you don’t want to waste it. You might also find that your presentation slot must be adhered to strictly. You will need to time your presentations to perfection so that you deliver all your key information in a timely manner to make the most impact. More importantly, you need to stick to your timings so that you don’t have to miss out lots of content because you have run out of time Another time when you don’t want to keep your clients waiting is when you have agreed to follow up on something — maybe gathering some information for them about the product they are interested in or confirming a price offer. Whatever the client is expecting, make sure you get back to them when you say you will. If you are someone who is always late for meetings or appointments, yet fail to see what impact this can have, then simply put yourself in the shoes of those kept waiting. Imagine you are waiting for sales recruitment agencies in Coventry to tell you if you have got that dream job. You’ll be dying to know as soon as possible, so being made to wait is never good. Equally, if you are applying for your dream job, do you think sales recruitment agencies in Coventry would take you seriously as an applicant if you couldn’t get to interviews on time? It might be a hard lesson to learn if you are always late, but it is a lesson worth learning if you want to progress in your career.

Have You Got a Lot to Learn?

The beginning of a new job is a steep learning curve in most professions. Within a sales role, the need to get up to speed to a professional level can be more demanding than most. You will quickly be expected to be an expert about new services and products and be able to communicate about them confidently to your prospects. The marketing materials that your organisation has generated will have been carefully crafted with the customer in mind to highlight the features and benefits of your product or service. These are a great place to start to get an overview of the offer, and they are useful to use as prompts while with a customer if you feel your memory might need a back-up in the early days of your job. If there is a great amount of detail that you need to learn from product manuals or service processes, it can be a good idea to make a set of cue cards — much like those you would use when delivering a presentation. You can use the cards to provide easy access to key information whenever you have spare time for a bit of reading. Or they can be a useful knowledge refresher to flick through before an important client meeting. Quite often the benefits of your product or service will have facts and figures as evidence of the claims made. If there are quite a few numbers to remember, then try putting them together and memorising them as if they were a phone number. Devising acronyms to go with them can also be a handy way to remember what each figure relates to. One of the best ways to become familiar with a product or service is to use it or experience it for yourself. If it is a service you are selling, you may get the chance to test it as a member of the public before you start your job or afterwards as a mystery shopper. Whichever approach you take, it is better if service delivery remain unaware of your role so that you experience the service as it is with no special treatment. Equally, it can pay to test the services of competitors to be able to highlight any superior elements that your organisation may provide. Often sales recruitment agencies in Warwickshire will be looking for candidates who have great learning skills. So if you always enjoyed revising, this might be a good career for you if you can match it with the right communication skills. Visit sales recruitment agencies in Warwickshire for the latest opportunities.

Gift of the Gab or Power of the Pen?

If you are thinking of entering the sales profession, either as the start of a career or as a change in career path, you should thoroughly research the industry first. Find out what types of sales roles there are, which you feel you would be most suited to and if there is an identifiable career path that you could follow. Much is made of the importance of communication skills in the sales profession, and for good reason. But what is often overlooked is the extent to which written communications will contribute to your success. The profession is often stereotyped by the ‘gift of the gab’ image and individuals who could talk non-stop if you let them. The reality is that if you want to progress in your career, you will need very strong written communication skills too. At the basic level you need to able to craft emails that are professional and quick and easy to digest when promoting your offer and which can equally be clear, technically correct and unambiguous if you find yourself confirming sales or negotiating through this medium. So you feel that you are good at public speaking and presenting, don’t forget that you have to write your presentations first before you can deliver them. However better you think you can make the content of your presentation with your unique style of delivery, remember that presentations often need to be supplied in a printed or electronic format to be read after the event itself. This requires a different set of writing skills as you do not get the opportunity to present information in normal prose and have to cram lots of information into concise yet meaningful bullets. The content will need to make sense on its own without you being there to talk the reader through it. Probably one of the biggest areas where your writing skills will be called in is in the submission of bid documents and proposals in response to tendering opportunities. Bid writing is a skill which it can take time to develop when you are new to it. The simplest comparison to make is that it can be like writing essays when you were at school or college with an added exercise in comprehension thrown in. The key to writing good bid responses is to make sure that you are clearly answering the question asked (not just writing all you know about a subject, which is a common mistake), and bringing into play all the associated requirements the client is looking for which have been expressed throughout the bid documentation. You will find that the ability to read and digest and retain a lot of information is another useful skill to have here. If you are looking for professionals with strong writing skills to join your sales force, then contact sales recruitment agencies in the West Midlands for help in securing the best talent. If you are a sales professional looking for your next career move and you have great written communications amongst your skills, then get in touch with sales recruitment agencies in the West Midlands and let them help you find the ideal employer.

One-Trick Ponies?

If you thought that sales professionals were only capable of bringing in new business largely through their skills in communicating and negotiating with customers and prospects, then it is worth thinking again. When you hire expensive resource to generate your next revenue boost by securing new business, and then let them go when the goals have been achieved, you could be throwing money away on recruitment costs. You could find you have to approach sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham to hire again when it is time for your business to move up to the next level in its growth plan. Good sales professionals and business development managers will have a wide range of skills which enable them to seek out opportunities, plan marketing approaches and bid processes and mobilise teams of people to get them working together towards the same goal — often to exacting timescales. They will be excellent communicators and assessors of business potential and well equipped to represent your business on many and varied platforms. So when your BDM has achieved the targets set and your business needs to then focus on implementation and delivery before it can approach any new business opportunities, look at what else they can do for your business rather than simply letting them go. Look at what was involved in the process of winning the new business they secured. There are sure to be skills and competencies that can transfer to other parts of the business. If your BDM needed to set up a team of people to design the winning solution and prepare bid documentation, liaise with the tendering organisation and represent your business at presentations, then you have a varied and valuable skill set that could potentially be put to good use both in internal services or your operations. If you have always thought that sales professionals just do sales, then it might be worth speaking to sales recruitment agencies in Birmingham to get an idea of the broader skills and potential of sales professionals currently looking for their next career move. If you prefer to hire on the basis of exactly matching experience requirements, then you may find that sales professionals who have worked in smaller businesses have had to juggle more than one role to help run the business. The can show direct evidence of having deployed their skills in other areas. If this is the case, you could then determine role profiles which have an emphasis on the sales or business development work required while mapping out additional responsibilities for down time.

Learn from Your Competitors

It might sound like an odd proposition, but if you are smart in your approach and your research, you could find that the work of your competitors can contribute towards your success. It makes sense to learn about what has gone before you to see what has worked or not worked for businesses before you plough ahead and make the same mistakes unnecessarily. Undertaking competitor analysis isn’t simply a case of checking what’s happening in the market — who is offering what and what is selling and what is not. It is an ideal way to learn about what to do (and what not to do) to make a success of your business. Keep an eye on marketing campaigns and any follow-ups they receive in the trade press, which can be a sure sign that they made an impact. Networking has long been a great way to boost your business knowledge and learn from the experience of others. Businesses are generally open to sharing ideas and best practice as they often have to work together to improve the conditions in which they trade. They need to present a united front when, for example, petitioning the government or challenging legislation which makes their trading difficult. However, it is not all one-way traffic. If you want to become a trusted name and a leader in your field, you will inevitably find yourself sharing some of your knowledge and expertise, and so in turn other companies will learn from the hard work you have put in. But that is how best practice grows and strengthens the offers of entire sectors, not just one business alone. That’s got to be good for business as a whole. So as long as you’ve got something to contribute, make good use of networking opportunities to boost your business. Another way to learn from your competitors is to locate your offices near to them. Benefit from the time, effort and marketing resource that has gone into making an area known for the type of business which is located there. This is common practice and you will find areas in most cities where types of businesses have already clustered. Over time, the sector lends its name to the area and you end up with readily recognised financial districts or creative hubs. The advantage of being in the same location as your competitors is that it cuts down on your marketing costs. Established businesses will have already generated their customer traffic, so the types of customers you want will be on your door step. It will take little marketing effort to get yourself noticed. If you are a new business and haven’t yet started growing your marketing team, then maybe the place to start is with a professional marketer with good experience of competitor analysis. Ask marketing recruitment agencies in Wolverhampton for information on any suitable candidates and how to go about hiring the best talent. If you are looking for marketing recruitment agencies in Wolverhampton, you will find several in close proximity to each other in the city centre.

The Importance of Social Media

While the fast-changing nature of technology and marketing trends seemed to be non-stop, new research suggests that changes to the technology we use, such as social media, are slowing down. However, increased and smarter use of these channels will become more important for your marketing success than your search-engine rankings alone will. With the release of the Hummingbird algorithm by Google, the extent to which your business is being discussed on social media sites will directly boost your search-engine rankings. So you can stop using resources to look out for the next big thing in order to get ahead, and redirect that effort to the channels you have in place and make much better use of them. If you don’t have the right social media management resource in your marketing team, it’s time to review your resourcing strategy and marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire can help you get this under way. If you are wondering about the ability of marketing recruitment agencies in Shropshire to supply the best talent, check out how they are managing their social media. There are lots of social media tools available, and it is not enough simply to be using one of them. Each can serve a different and complementary purpose to the other, and a mixture of them together can yield great results for your presence online. So make sure you are investigating the best ways to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and the many other platforms that may be appropriate for your business. When trawling through the minefield of social sites, it can pay to go with your natural reactions about how they work and how easy or difficult you find them to get to grips with. If you find it easy to engage with a site and its content, purpose and how to use it, then the chances are that so will your customers. So keep it simple. Also look for sites which are most responsive to different viewing formats and how they render on the various handheld devices in everyday use. What all these social platforms have in common is the speed by which information, praise or condemnation can be posted live and viewed by many. So as a business engaged in this form of communication with customers, you need to be ready to respond and be vigilant about the types of content or comments being posted and shared about your company, products or services. While this can sound daunting, if managed effectively and efficiently, it can provide an excellent showcase of your customer satisfaction credentials.