He is the master and the motivating factor behind this website:

About the Author

As one of Australia’s leading authorities and coaches in sales management, Ian Segail has been involved in the coaching, training and development of sales managers and salespeople for over two decades. Drawing on 25 years of experience in sales, sales management and leading an HR and training team, Ian brings a strong dose of fiscal reality and practicality to his works as a Sales Performance Coach. Engaging directly with business owners and both novice and experienced sales managers alike, across a wide variety of industries and selling disciplines, the focus of Ian’s work is to transform sales results for companies by improving sales management practices. Ian is the author of “Bulletproof Your Sales Team ‐ The 5 Keys To Turbo‐Boosting Your Sales Team’s Results” and a number of business articles, business reports and white papers including “The fish stinks from the head!” and “Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work.” Ian has an insatiable hunger for studying selling and people management and has passionately pursued answers to the question “How come some people can sell and most can’t?” Access more great resources and information by Ian from

www.salestutor.com.au

(ArticlesBase SC #875301)

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ – Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work – Is Your Training Program a Waste of Time and Money?

However despite the amount of different business analysis tools you may have or have had recommended to you, I still have to ask you how much do you know about selling? It is a fact that all businesses rely on sales of some sort. Most business sells big stuff and the skill set required for making major sales is totally different than making simple sales.
No amount of business analysis tools will save your business if you don’t make sales.
Yes you need business analysis tools for sales, you can buy great sales analysis software and most good accounting software will provide good sales analysis but there is NO substitute for an effective sales force, people who know the difference between making a major sale and a simple sale.

Direct Sales Representative: Overcoming Competition

There has been a major increase of individual direct sales representatives over the past couple of decades. The reason for this increase is because people are looking for ways to avoid a traditional 9 to 5 job and want to control their own income. Direct sales is a way to avoid dealing with a boss or a set schedule, and a way to work from home and even love what you do!

With this increase of individual direct sales representatives on the loose, selling has become more competitive. The good news is that there has always been a huge market for direct sales agents. The convenience and quality of using the direct sales method to purchase products or services has created this market. Techniques that worked well for direct sales two decades ago still work today, but the popularity of the internet and other information delivery vehicles have given direct sales representatives new ways to accomplish their sales goals.

Mail marketing, print ads, and bulletin boards can still do wonders for your direct sales business, but there is competition out there and it is increasing. It is imparative that you stay creative in your marketing and try new ways to get yourself into the public with your products or services. Sure, you can just use the old techniques you have always used, but you may notice your sales go down, and the sales of your team go down slowly. Creativity can be what puts you above the rest in your area and creates the success you are striving for.

The internet has become the best way to market your team and recruit a solid group of direct salespeople under you. With some work and creativity, you can build a team across the world that is making you money. 20 years ago, it was rather difficult to build a team without filling your own territory with tons of competing salespeople. Now, it is easier than ever. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networks online today can be one of your greatest assets when building a team. If you are already using these services, great! You have a jump start on the competition. If you are not already utilizing these services then start now, they are free and they will help immensely.

If you are in direct sales already, then you must remember that as the world advances and new technologies are introduced, you must embrace them and utilize what they have to offer. If you don’t use these new ways to promote yourself, your products, or your team, you are missing out because other people in direct sales ARE going to use them and leave you behind. Learn to adapt to your environment, whether it be technology or mentality.  Use what you can to improve your marketing and sales generation no matter how new or old the methods are.  Results are what matters and you should do whatever it takes to create more sales and more leads each and every day.

About the Author:

ECP has years of experience running successful direct sales businesses. Learn more direct sales tips and information. You don’t have to suffer through trial and error for months, get your direct sales business information!

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Direct Sales Representative: Overcoming Competition

Selling skills are imperative in keeping and maintaining a steady income stream for your home based business. There are so many articles written on sales and yet the general message is the same.

Most of us already have the basic selling skills necessary. We just need to practice and enhance the sales skills we have. The components of a business sale are really quite simple.

They are as follows:

* Qualify Your Prospect

* Product Pros and Cons

* Finding the Fit

* Win / Win

Qualify Your Prospect

Qualifying your prospect is not only the first but the single most important step to determining if you really do have a buyer. Some very important questions you should ask will be:

* What is it that you are looking for?

* When do you need the product or service?

* What exactly do you expect this product or service to do?

* Have you used this product or service before?

* Why do you feel you want the product or service?

>> What exactly are you looking for?

This can be a loaded question for you because it will answer so many other questions. You may find that the prospect doesn’t really have an idea or they are vague on what it is they want or need.

The prospect may tell you what they don’t want instead. Whatever the answer is, you now have some insights into whether they are really serious buyers or just fact gathering for a later sale (still a prospect). If they say that they are not really sure, then you can ask some more specific questions to decide whether you have a buyer, a

prospect or a time waster (a time waster has no intention of buying just window shopping – and wasting your time). As your selling skills get better you will recognize them much sooner.

>> When do you need the product or service?

Having a time frame will help you in determining priorities. If they need it yesterday then they are not only serious buyers but they need your full attention now. Your energy can then go into creating the product or service fit. If they don’t have a time frame you may still need to continue qualifying with other questions.

One point that you should keep in mind is that you should ask as many questions as possible to be able to determine a buyer, prospect or time waster. Most prospects will turn into buyers eventually, so you should always be as helpful as possible however you do need to recognize when to back off and move on to more profitable activities

such as working with a qualified buyer! This selling skill will come with experience and with the more business sales you have under your belt.

>> What exactly do you expect this product or service to do?

With this question you are trying to see how your offering will fit into the prospects or buyers plans, budget and expectations. Does this product offer exactly what the prospect is looking for? If so then with a fit you are now looking at a buyer.

>> Have you used this product or service before?

Not only will you be able to get a feel for what the prospect knows about this product or service, you will be able to know how much you will need to explain about the benefits.

>> Why do you feel you want the product or service?

This is really another qualifying question to get a feel for the motivation of the prospect. When you know what the motivating force behind the purchase is, then you can be better able to decide if you have a buyer or not.

Product Pros and Cons

If you are talking about the pros and cons of your product then you have decided that you have a qualified buyer. Now you are trying to find out how your product or service will fulfill your customers needs. Most salespeople feel that they have to beat the customer over the head to make a business sale which is far from the case.

If you have done the pre-qualifying process correctly, you will know what the buyer wants, when he wants it, how much she knows about the product and whether it is a fit or not. You have created a good working rapport with your buyer. They will see that you have their best interest at heart and have excellent selling skills as well.

Now talk openly about your product or service. What are all the wonderful benefits that it offers? What might be something that it doesn’t offer but makes up for in other benefits? Don’t be afraid to talk about the downside of your product or service.

No product or service is exactly perfect. Your buyer will understand that and will trust you much more knowing that you are not afraid of talking about the down side. They can see that have prepared a thorough answer or explanation to their questions. The more you know about your product or service, the more your customer will be able to make an informed decision.

Helping the buyer to make an informed decision is really the core of all selling skills. When you think of how the buyer will enjoy and be able to benefit from your product or service, then you are on the right path to running an excellent home based business with profitable business sales.

Successful salespeople truly forget about what is in it for them when they are talking to and dealing with customers. It is the customer first, and then the benefit of the business sale becomes an after affect thought as it should be.

Finding the Fit

Make sure you and your buyer are both seeing the fit for your product or service. Check all the angles out with your buyer to be sure that it will do what your customer expects. In my article; A Tough Lesson – Customer Service Tips, I discuss how important this fit is for long term customer relations and future sales.

Win/Win

Everybody wins or I will not play! This statement should be the bases of all business sales. If the sale does not match your buyer’s needs and your home based business needs then it is not a good deal for all involved. This selling skill is really more of a rule then a skill, yet it does need to be practiced.

You might say how can I lose if I make the sale? Well if you aren’t happy with the sale and your buyer is, you will grudgingly help them out but you will not be giving your one hundred percent to them. If they are not happy and you are then you will have negative feedback and a returned product or lose of payment for your service.

The golden rule in all transactions it that it must work for everyone involved. Keep this in mind and you will have better business sales, more repeat customers and much less returns. An excellent side benefit of the repeat customer is that they create free word of mouth!

Bottom Line

Selling skills can be learned and should be fined tuned as much as possible. The more fine tuned your selling skills are the better your business sales will become. You will be able to decipher the buyers from the time wasters.

Good salespeople realize that business sales are much like a matching game. A product or service is matched to the buyer based on her needs, wants and desires. Sometimes you just have to explain how the match will work for your buyer.

If you remember that everyone must win, you will find that your home based business sales will soar. Business sales will be fun to do and you will have a more relaxed and happy attitude toward yourself and others.

Your selling skills will put you miles ahead of your competition and you will realize that these skills will work in your personal life as well. Good luck and happy selling!

About the Author:

Paul Kopp is the Founder and CEO of Kopp Enterprises, Inc.  Paul has been a Home Based
Business owner for over 7 years. Currently he operates 2 online businesses and
also is involved in numerous non internet related businesses. Paul created

Home-Based-Business-Solutions.com to give quality information and resources
to start and run a home based business smoothly and profitably. He covers all
the topics from A-Z for home based businesses. This article and others can be
found at his
Business Resource Center.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – What Selling Skills Do you Need for your Home Based Business?

When learning self discipline five techniques should be considered. These are willpower, effort, persistence, time and acceptance. Each of these should be considered equally important and no success should be undermined, no matter how small it may seem. Each technique should ideally be realised for any task you undergo each day.

When beginning a task, willpower is normally the first technique to be used. You are able to use willpower from day to day by setting yourself a goal and creating a plan which will allow this to happen. Effort should be used in order to pick the most effective way to carry out the task, whether this involves a lot of work or only a little, in some cases it much more successful to pick the harder task. Perhaps the most difficult yet important technique is persistence.

This is the ability to carry on with an action despite it being extremely demanding or challenging. Time is needed in order to carry out tasks and if this is not given, self discipline cannot be reached. An extra half hour per day concentrating on goals and tasks can make all the difference to succeed. Lastly, acceptance is knowing the reality when you have a achieved the best you can and becoming happy with this.

If you feel you are not succeeding when learning to self discipline, subliminal messaging could greatly influence you and your success rate. By linking to your subconscious mind through subliminal signals, a subliminal CD is able to directly increase your willpower by sending subtle yet powerful subliminal suggestions into your mind. It won’t do everything for you but it will give you a hand and help to keep you disciplined.

This article was written by Marvin King from SubliminalMP3s.com: Try our complete range of free subliminal audio today or give our self discipline subliminal album and become more disciplined naturally.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marvin_King_II

The biggest dealerships in our town seem to work on the basis of look at what we have and if you are interested let us know.

I received an email just today from a large BMW dealer advising me of a 2009 model three series to consider.

Naturally the price was rather out side my price bracket and I indicated I was considering a switch of brand as I could not find a suitable model in BMW. All of this communication was by email.

How to sell a car? Is email the way to sell a car? The guy had my phone number why did he not call?

The response I got when I indicated a switch of brand was:

“Well we don’t have anything else of interest but will let you know if something comes in.”

Is this the way for a big BMW dealer to sell a car? I feel it is a dam good reason to look at another brand.

In my book, I reference Neil Rackham’s work on defining the two different types of sales. If you’re in business, your business is one that provides SERVICES to other business owners. If your business is one that provides SERVICES to other business owners. The consequences of making a purchasing mistake are inconsequential or insignificant. If your business is either making Minor sales or Major sales. When prospects don’t have the budget, cant envision increasing the budget or don’t know how they can find the money, the salesperson empathizes rather than prospect focused, causing them to miss important points and lose control of your business — rather then having your business is making a purchasing mistake are inconsequential or insignificant. Their discomfort prevents them from helping a prospect figure out how to pay or even where the money could possibly come from. Buy Cycle refers to the next level.

Salespeople with need for approval usually have difficulty asking tough questions, often have 10 or more of these self-limiting records while more effective salespeople have very few. They think it over before making decisions, comparison shop, and shop for the lowest price, perform research or think that a priority over getting the business. Most ineffective salespeople have Non-Supportive Buy Cycles. The consequences of making a major purchase for his or herself. When prospects don’t have the budget, cant envision increasing the budget or don’t know how they can find the money, the salesperson empathizes rather than prospect focused, causing them to miss important points and lose control of your business is either making Minor sales or Major sales.

Buy Cycle refers to the next level. Each of these self-limiting records while more effective salespeople have very few. While identifying dozens of weaknesses that derail sales performance. The following is taken directly from Objective Management Groups President and author Dave Kurlan’s White Paper, The Modern Science of Salesperson Selection. Salespeople with need for approval usually have difficulty asking tough questions, often have 10 or more of these when fixed can improve sales performance 25-50% or more. Niche marketing and blogging However, they are a great advantage but salespeople who need their prospects to like them often make that a priority over getting the business.

“The greatest problem with communication is the Illusion it has been accomplished.”

Here is a typical scenario:

Question: I am a sales manager for a business machine company. My responsibility is for all new business revenue and I have 20 sales people that report to me.

Of the 20 sales people there is only one real talented performer. The issue I am having is he breaks all the rules and creates really bad relationships with all the other people in the team. I am in the senior team and the rest of them are angry that this keeps happening. While I don’t like to hear the comments from the senior team, I am aware that I cannot make my numbers goals and the company can’t make there’s for the year without him. What do I do?

Answer: I call this a terrorist! A terrorist is someone who knows what they have on you and they use it to hold you and everyone else in the company hostage to their behavior. I like to take my clients through an exercise of understanding the Goal, Position, and Strategy Questions to determine what actions need to be done.

The first question I ask is, “What is the goal around the problem?” This is to ensure that we are aiming at the right issue. What I invite my clients to do is to first reflect on the organization’s overall goal. Then link that to the current situation. This way what ever you do, you will be in total alignment with what is best for the business overall.

In this situation you have identified the fact that in order to make your business unit’s goals and the company’s, you need this employee. That is a big step and oftentimes leaders become so emotionally charged by such situations they act before they consider the goals and objectives of the company or the department. I commend you for your forethought. Typically leaders who do this are considered high in emotional intelligence. This has been shown to be one of the key components in assessing one’s long term success in their career.

The next step is to understand the position you and your company are in. Elevate to 50,000 foot level to see the whole situation. Go beyond yourself and ask, “How did this begin to happen? Sometimes we might find the root cause built into the culture of the organization. Is this type of behavior is tolerated here?

In the case of Enron when the CEO learned that two of the traders were stealing from the company he did nothing and then soon after said, ‘keep making us money.’ What they were stealing was minor compared to what they were making the company. He knew that if he took action, he would stop his revenue machine that he needed because it was his end goal. It also gave permission to the others that if they were that good at making money for the company they could steal from the company as well. It was the outcome they got, should not have been a surprise. This is the extreme case of the terrorist working for the company – and it was exaggerated by a lack of moral compass by the leadership. In the case you present, it is apparent that this behavior is contrary to what the leadership tolerates is searching for from a behavior.

Once you go up to the 50,000 foot level and see if the company has had complicity in the situation, then it is good to come down to 10,000 foot perspective and see if “you” have complicity in the situation. To be frank, and I hate doing this in a column where I can’t ask qualifying questions, but it is hard to imagine that you did not allow this to happen. It is not about absolving the terrorist from his behavior because that is wrong, however, if you had stopped the behavior cold, this would never have happened. I say this because the solution, whatever one you choose, will need to involve your being mentored or coached into creating boundaries for your team. Without these boundaries you will be faced with this issue again.

The third part of our position investigation is to go to ground level ñ the situation itself. When we find ourselves in this type of situation with an employee we only have two choices, we can either fire or teach. If an employee makes a mistake, it is because we did not teach them correctly or because they are not capable to do the function. Ask three questions to determine what choice to make. The first, is the employee capable of learning? Secondly, does the organization or I have the time and resources available to train this employee? Lastly, is this employee motivated to learn and change? If you answer anyone of of these questions is NO, the decision is chosen, you need to let this person go. The decision is, as Donald Trump would say, You’re Fired!

It is unclear from your description if the employee has the capacity to change behavior, so I will assume that he is rather good at what he does for your organization and likely has the ability to change. It is clear that for your number one producer you should have the resources and time to help him come into alignment with the company. The bigger issue is that of motivation. Often times a terrorist does not feel the threat of what can happen to them if they don’t start falling in to line. They have become fat, and happy and arrogant! This arrogance is what blocks their ability to realize that they need to change. The company has reached a point where it can no longer tolerate this kind of behavior.

Unlike Donald’s TV Drama we live in the real world, and just letting him go is not a great first choice given the company’s dependence on his revenue.

In almost all other circumstances the move would surely be to fire, but because this employee mean so much to the organizations health as far as revenue.

The last part of understanding our position is to understand whose decision is it to make, and what needs to be done. If the consequences of your actions will compromise the strategic direction of the company, I would invite you to consider involving the senior team and that the responsibility is yours to deal with it, and the final decision may actually be the team’s or the CEO’s call, given its importance to the organization.

This is truly a strategic decision then, it is not simply letting one person go, it is letting many people go, if one presumes in a service firm, lower revenue means fewer employees needed to service the customers.

At this point I would coach you to have a conversation with your CEO and the rest of the strategic team and tell them the steps that you are considering and ask these strategic questions: At what point as an organization are we willing to take a principled stance on the issue over that of revenue? Are we clear what the outcome of this will be to our other employees? Will we need to do cost cutting to compensate for this move? What will the industry see from losing our most talented sales person? Will he go work for our competition? What impact will that have on your company? By working through these strategic issues as an organization and lifting this issue to its proper place the senior team – you will be aligning everyone to be part of the process and stop complaining about it.

By going through these questions the conclusion you may arrive at the end of this process is that you use a three pronged approach to dealing with this situation. Executing three plans simultaneously.

Plan “A” You will need to continue coaching the employee towards the behavior that is in alignment with your company values, beliefs, and rules.

Plan “B”, at the same time I would highly recommend moving the rest of the sales team to a higher level to loose your dependence on this terrorist, and operationalize Plan “C” and start the recruiting process for the possible if not probable replacement of the employee.

It is important that the others on the senior team and your sales team know that you are coaching this employee in these areas of behavior and that it is not sitting OK with you. But no more information than that – it is inappropriate to say more than that in a public setting. It will build your credibility as a leader and not allow one persons behavior sink the culture the company wants to build.