Every sales presentation or conversation is a missed or captured opportunity. If you sound the same as everyone else, you have no advantage. When you learn how to use the right language, in a more effective way, you enjoy a competitive edge and get results. Enjoy this video sample from FrippVT on improving your sales presentations:
To be powerful and persuasive, keep your sales conversations focused on your clients’ concerns – not on the product or service you provide. Ask the right questions to understand your clients’ concerns. Don Hutson explains how here – plus, enjoy this FrippVT Sales Series video of the two of us discussing how to get amazing results when you sell value.
Shep Hyken and Patricia Fripp join forces for How Customer Service Drives Sales.
Would you believe attitude?
By Shep Hyken, CSP, CPAE, Best Selling Author
I was recently invited to meet with a group of 12 executives to talk about customer service. I decided that for this more intimate group setting I would take an interactive approach, a dialogue with the audience rather than a speech or presentation. For one exercise, I divided the executives into two groups. One group was to discuss the best customer service experiences they had ever had, and the other group was to discuss the worst. The two groups were instructed to choose one experience to share – the best of the best and the worst of the worst – when we came back together after 10 minutes.
As it happens, both of the examples they shared came from restaurant experiences. The best customer service story was about a server who went above and beyond when a diner requested a specific beverage, but the restaurant didn’t serve that brand. The server called his wife and asked her to go purchase the drink at the grocery store and bring it to the restaurant. The guest was surprised and delighted, not only to get her drink of choice, but also with the server’s extra effort to take care of her.
Executive Speech Coach & Creator of FrippVT, Patricia Fripp in helping a client add value to his message.
Some presenters are silly enough to think that if they talk longer, they are giving more value or getting their point across more effectively. Actually, audiences of any size, from 5 to 500, are eager for content to be presented as efficiently and as memorably as possible.
Here are eight ways to make your message memorable:
Employers want to hire people who can communicate effectively and work well with others.
Being a competent, confident communicator is key to career success. Unfortunately, many begin their careers without adequate communication skills, even the college educated.Do you have the training, practice, and tools you need to communicate and lead effectively? As an in-demand speech coach and the creator of FrippVT, I know that even if you aren’t a natural communicator, you can transform your speaking skills and equip yourself to reach your career goals. I share this from Toastmasters International:
Improving Communication a Key to Closing Millennials’ Workplace Skills Gap
Employers seek applicants with strong speaking and writing abilities.
Your speeches will be more effective when you tell better stories. In-demand speech coach and creator of FrippVT, Patricia Fripp explains how.
If you are a leader, manager, executive, sales professional, or keynote speaker, you are more effective when you tell great stories and use good examples.
These three techniques will help you turn simple stories into examples that will be remembered and repeated:
Think chronologically.
Use shorter sentences or phrases.
Consider each visual scene.
In January, Mark, a district sales manager from a biotech company, was preparing to moderate a panel at the Las Vegas National Sales Meeting. He was nervous with his new role in front of the 100-person audience.
High trust selling begins with a mindset of a commitment to the long-term.
The world of business has changed and continues to change dramatically and rapidly. Markets have grown from local to national to global. Technology no longer offers a competitive advantage, and customers have become much savvier. All of these changes and more have created an environment in which salespeople must adopt new attitudes, learn new skills, and gain a new understanding of how to approach their markets and work with customers.
Tony Alessandra is an expert in behavioral styles and sales. Patricia Fripp is an expert in sales presentations. Together they are an unbeatable combination at how to drive sales and be more persuasive.
No doubt, you have seen this quantum shift and its consequences in your industry: your competitors have increased in number and become more aggressive. Your products or services are more difficult to sell than in the past. It has become a challenge just to differentiate your company from your competitors, and price issues are a constant problem.
This advice is given by one of my good friends and colleagues Dr. Tony Alessandra is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and author of 20 books.
There are six steps, or phases, to any successful selling process.
1. The “Target” Stage
This step helps you understand exactly what you have to offer that’s unique and exactly which target audiences can best use what you have to sell. It takes some time, but your success ratios will be much higher because you’ll be focusing your efforts only on those prospects who have a high probability of buying. Then you’ll work to see that these prospects have a positive image of you before you call on them.
On Tuesday, April 12 at 10:00am Pacific and 1:00pm Eastern
2. The “Contact” Stage
Making contact with your prospect is the first critical test. Apart from product knowledge, no other facet of the sales process makes a greater impression on the customer. In the first few minutes, you often make, or break, the sale. In that time, your prospect sizes you up and decides if you’re the type of person he’d like to do business with.
This contact may be in person, over the phone, or by letter/email. Each makes a different impression and has its advantages and disadvantages. But the key, regardless of which approach you use, is for you to build credibility and trust. When prospects sense you have their best interests in mind, the rest of the sales process should follow more easily.
3. The “Explore” Stage
The purpose of the Explore stage is to get enough information to know the customer’s needs and what it’ll take to fulfill them. To do that, you need to listen to what the prospect says, but you also need to know how to ask questions.
What you want to look for are the prospect’s problems and opportunities. The problem, or need, is the gap between what a customer wants and what he or she now has. This gap already exists.
An opportunity, on the other hand, is something extra that can be added. For example, a new market, or a better avenue of distribution, or an untapped promotional vehicle. A resourceful salesperson can create an opportunity.
The first and last 30 seconds of your speech have the most impact, so give your opening and closing words careful consideration. If you open your presentation with an obvious and dull greeting, such as, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here today,” you waste your precious first seconds. In this brief video sample from FrippVT, I share several examples of effective opening phrases. You are welcome to borrow or adapt any of these for your own presentations!
Isn’t it frustrating? Often it appears your prospects are almost completely walled off from you.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. But for all practical purposes, it may as well be. Your prospects are busy with multiple priorities and they are definitely not waiting around for a mass email message from your marketing department or a cold call from you.
Reaching prospects that way is about as easy as winning the Powerball – only with worse odds.
The Harvard Business Review tells us, “90% of decision makers never reply to a cold call.”Kurt
They’ve walled themselves off with caller ID, spam filters, voicemail and something else they’re going to invent next Thursday.
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How to Present and Teach in the Virtual World…and More
Receive free, on-going Fripp webinar invitations, sales and presentation skills information, and special discounts from Executive Speech Coach, Sales Presentation Trainer, and Professional Keynote Speaker, Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE. As an added bonus, sign up now and receive a free copy of Patricia Fripp’s How to Present and Teach in the Virtual World.
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