Unlock Your Potential

Great selling skill and motivation are invaluable assets to any salesperson, but it still takes knowledge to get the sale and serve the customer well afterward. What’s more, your level of knowledge and willingness to learn reflect your competence and professionalism. To improve your odds of success, give yourself every advantage knowledge has to offer. Assess your level of knowledge in these four critical areas to find out how much you know or how much you need to learn:

Know Yourself

To improve your selling skills and motivation you have to know your strengths and weaknesses. You need to recognize that you’re a weak closer so you can seek training to improve your closing skills, or notice that Monday mornings deflate your positive attitude so you can take steps to prevent it. Knowing your strong and weak points will also allow you to take advantage of your strengths and camouflage your weaknesses more effectively. As you become more self-aware, you’ll learn to tune in to unproductive thoughts or patterns of behavior quickly so you can correct them before they cost you a sale.

Part of knowing yourself also means knowing where you’ve been and where you’re going in your selling career. Set short- and long-range goals with specific action steps to give you a sense of direction and accomplishment. Be sure to give yourself a time frame in which to achieve each goal to help you predict your position one, five or 10 years from now.

Know Your Products and Services

Salespeople who truly want to serve their customers’ needs must know their products and services and everything they can do for the customer. What differentiates your company from the competition? Assess your products and services carefully not just to find out more about them but to find out how you can improve or enhance them and how to present them to your customers in the most appealing way. Find out what your company’s most popular products are and why – the information may give you some insight into what makes your customers buy. How do your customers feel about the quality of your service department? If you haven’t already implemented a system for gathering customer feedback, don’t wait any longer. Your customers are the best people to ask about how you can improve the quality of your service and increase sales. Only when you know your products and services inside out can you make the changes and improvements that make more sales.

Know Your Market

A great salesperson’s No. 1 priority is to help the customer. But to help your customers, you have to know which ones stand to benefit from your product or service most. Ask yourself what companies and industries buy your product and why. Design a typical user profile that provides you with information on businesses or individuals that buy your product most, then find out where you can find more of them. Ask your customers about their needs and buying motives, and what they look for in a salesperson and a supplier. If you sell to several different markets, identify what differentiates them and how those differences affect your sales to each market. Are there markets with sales potential that you haven’t tapped yet? Any salesperson can be a vendor, but it takes a thorough knowledge of your market and industry to help make yourself indispensable to your customers.

Know Your Competition

You can’t stay a step ahead of your competition unless you know where they are. To prevent your prospects and customers from turning to your competitors, find out what advantages your competitors offer. If you were presented with your product or service and your competitor’s, which would you choose and why? Knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses also gives you a strategic advantage by helping you learn how to present your own product. Send for product information from your competition and make sure you read and analyze it thoroughly. How does the literature present the company and its products? How do they approach their customers? Know your competition’s products and selling practices as well as you know your own to help give you the winning edge.

When it comes to sales, what you don’t know can hurt you, and what you do know can help you find customers, outsell the competition and form lifelong business partnerships. Make a commitment to ongoing learning and information gathering. The success you enjoy as a result will prove to you that knowing really is half the battle.