Duane Sparks Profile and Articles

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1). The Sales Training Series: Dealing With Sales Objections and Stalls
Most salespeople think of “stalls” and “objections” as synonyms. Wrong. Stalls and objections are both things you may hear after you have asked for commitment, but an objection is a specific reason not to buy. In a stall—“I need to think about it”—the customer offers no particular reason for hesitating.

2). The Sales Training Series: Gaining Commitment
Employers value salespeople based on their ability to Gain a Sales Commitment. Improving this sales skill has never been more important than it is today. So, what are you doing to get better?

3). The Sales Training Series: Selling With A Better Strategy
In prospecting, your objective most often is to persuade a new customer to agree to meet with you face-to-face. To gain that commitment, you must convince the prospect that you are someone worth meeting. Every customer’s first major buying decision is whether to buy you—the salesperson. They’ll never decide to buy your products before they’ve bought you.

4). The Sales Training Series: The Right Way To Sell
Three-quarters of the secret to professional, strategic selling boils down to asking the Best Questions and listening carefully to the answers. Most of the Best Questions have to do with uncovering the crucial, underlying needs your products or services might serve. But you also must know how to sell to a particular account. Using the same strategy for all customers is a big mistake. The issue is: how do you compete for this customer's business?

5). The Sales Training Series: Selling With Leverage Questions
If he had a long enough lever and a place to put the fulcrum, the Greek mathematician Archimedes said, he could move the world. "Leverage questions" offer that kind of power to salespeople. These are open-ended questions designed to uncover the hot-button emotional issues that actually drive a customer's buying decision. What key benefits do buyers want to gain by making the purchase, either for their companies or, more critically, for themselves?

6). The Sales Training Series: Sell By Agreeing On At Least 3 Needs
Salespeople know that they’re supposed to sell to the customer’s needs. Here is the classic—and tragically wrong—way they usually learn to do it: Uncover the first need. Begin a product presentation, covering features and benefits, and then attempt to uncover another need and then give more product talk, etc.

7). The Sales Training Series: Sell Yourself Before You Sell Your Company
Research has proven that customers make five major buying decisions in the course of any major purchase. These decisions are always made in the same order. The first is whether to “buy” the salesperson—you. The second is whether to “buy” your company. Only after those two decisions are made will the customer seriously consider whether to buy your products.

8). The Sales Training Series: Keep Selling Your Company
If you hear words like "I didn't know that!" from an existing customer who likes and trusts you but who just bought something from one of your competitors, you have no one but yourself to blame. It was you who blew the opportunity and left the door wide open to the competition.

9). The Sales Training Series: Asking The Best Questions
Effective questioning is a critical selling skill for several reasons. First, our recent research shows that there is a direct correlation between the success of a sales call and the type of questions that the salesperson uses. On average, failed sales calls include 86% more close-ended questions than open-ended questions.

10). The Sales Training Series: Know What You’re Selling
You know your product, its features and its benefits. You have a well-rounded presentation that explains all of this, complete with visual aids. So why waste a prospect's time with chitchat? Shouldn't you launch straight into your presentation?

11). The Sales Training Series: Listen to the Customer
Blessed with the "gift of gab" are you? That's nice. But true sales professionals know that before they start gabbing to customers about their product features or anything else, they need to listen to what the customer has to say - and demonstrate that they're paying attention.

12). The Sales Training Series: Buying The Salesperson
In any major sale, a prospect makes a predictable series of buying decisions that lead up to the final purchasing decision. The first and most important of these is: "Do I 'buy' the salesperson?" This decision is always made before the prospect will seriously consider other factors such as product features or price.

13). The Sales Training Series: Never Wing It
Research shows that salespeople will never reach their performance potential without a well defined sales call procedure that they can follow and learn from. "Winging it" on sales calls has grim consequences - lost sales, extended sell cycles, margin erosion and no clear path to improvement. Bottom line: Your entire sales career can be mediocre if you "wing it."

14). The Sales Training Series: Five Buying Decisions
Have you ever had a customer that seemed to reject nearly everything that you were presenting? We all have. Research on the customer's buying decisions has revealed that a customer's resistance may not be caused by what you present. It could be the sequence of your presentation.

15). The Sales Training Series: Stopping Objections Before They Start
"Your price is too high." "We're loyal to our current supplier." "I prefer your competitor's product." Classic objections such as those are very hard to overcome when they pop up near the end of your sales call after you have presented your company and your product, and after you have expended most of your sales ammunition. But objections are far easier to handle if you uncover them earlier in the process.

16). The Sales Training Series: Ask For A Commitment Every Time
Salespeople are called upon to perform many duties, from customer training to market analysis. But we must never forget the primary value we bring to our organizations, the real reason we remain on the payroll: We are excellent at gaining commitment from paying customers. Or, at least, we're supposed to be.

Why don't customers commit? Because salespeople don't ask them to!

17). The Sales Training Series: Selling With TFBRs
You have asked great questions and uncovered important customer needs that your offerings can address. Know what you’re going to do now? If you’re like most salespeople, you’re going to lose all of the momentum you’ve built and maybe the sale, by launching a boring, standardized product feature presentation. People don’t buy product features. They buy solutions to their own needs.

18). The Sales Training Series: How To Sell Solutions
Salespeople are commonly told to sell solutions and value rather than just product features. But when the time comes to present their products, they fall back on generic scripts with no direct connection to any specific needs the customer has revealed. The customer winds up in a one-sided conversation, listening to the salesperson present too many low-priority capabilities.