How To Become The Perfect Salesperson...9 Easy Steps!

By Author: Lori Feldman
Total Articles: 6
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The perfect salesperson makes selling look effortless. Sales close even when the salesperson is on vacation! It's impossible to achieve this when your sales system is limited to one-to-one face time. Here's a 9-step, 90-Day Success Plan to automating your sales process.

1. Invest in contact management software, like ACT! You have to have your "whole world" in one place.

2. Open your Week-at-a-glance calendar, and see what's happening. Which days and times do you still have open for more calls and meetings?

3. Because it's 10 times easier to sell a current customer than to recruit a new one, do this lookup in your ACT! database: CONTACT ACTIVITY = NOT MODIFIED > 6 months ago or more. Narrow this lookup to RECORD MANAGER = YOU. Spend 1 hour calling existing customers who havent' heard from you in awhile to get more business.

4. Email every lapsed customer you don't reach.
a. Repeat lookup
b. narrow lookup: EMAIL = NON EMPTY FIELD
c. WRITE/MAIL MERGE/CURRENT LOOKUP/EMAIL

5. Send a letter for lapsed customers without email addresses. (Repeat steps above, but EMAIL = EMPTY ...
... FIELD).

6. Time to work your pipeline of oustanding proposals! Run REPORT > SALES REPORTS > SALES PIPELINE REPORT to see which sales opportunities can be nudged to the next stage. Follow up with these prospective customers to close some business.

7. Let's add new prospects to the pipeline. Pick a niche market you want to sell to, one you've had success with most recently (good prospects resemble good customers). Open Contact Capture Software, an ACT! add-on that copies and imports new prospects from online directories into your marketing database. Type "member of" into your browser to find lists of directories. Download prospects into ACT!

8. Use ACT!'s ACTIVITY SERIES to schedule 10 new contacts per day for a mail—call-mail timed-release follow-up campaign.

9. Subscribe to an Email Service Provider, like SwiftpageEmail, and send a customer survey of 5 key questions to your top customers. Ask them what they like most about doing business with you and what you can do to improve. Use the answers to the first to build a portfolio of testimonials you can use to sell new customers. Modify your product and service offerings to meet customer demand.

After 90 days of working this plan, selling is easier. Customers start calling you, and prospects take your calls. Congratulations, you just became the perfect salesperson...with a little help from new technology and an automated selling process.