The ATS Essential Sales Skills program covers the fundamental steps to sales success. It is focussed on the communication skills and understanding that sales people need to have if they are to build meaningful 'business to business' relationships with their customers.

Essential Sales Skills for:

The program is conducted over 2 days and is highly interactive with participants participating in role-plays, some will be videoed, on just about all topics. This stretches them a little, gets them out of their comfort zone and helps them learn to perform under pressure.

So what do we cover?

Sales Psychology

In this topic participants gain an understanding of the Feelings, Needs and Motives, that drive people to make decisions. They will learn to understand that while products and services are important, customers often make their decisions based on emotional rather than logical reasons. Sales performance can be improved by understanding the people you are selling to.

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Sales Fundamentals

A quick discussion of the fundamentals of the importance of first impressions, planning your sales call, the importance of listening and developing a sales discussion with customers.

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Opening Skills

Improving cold calling success rates and getting to the right the people is one of the major aspects of this topic. Participants are reminded of the importance of prospecting and developing strategies to ensure prospecting becomes an essential ingredient of their weekly schedule.

In this section participants also learn to develop an effective opening to a sales call, not just in terms of breaking the ice, but also to set up the meeting/discussion so that the customer learns that there is a purpose to the call that might actually benefit them - not just the sales person.

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Needs Analysis

As the basis of the ATS program is about building relationships and solution selling it's important that participants understand the need to get to know their clients and understand their business, before they start providing solutions. i.e. before they start selling. This area tends to stretch the sales people who believe that having 'the gift of the gab' is what it is all about. They quickly see that long term success is built on understanding how you can best help your customers.

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Questioning Skills

Participants will learn that to understand customers they need to have a range of questioning skills. They will be introduced to open questions, closed questions, rephrasing questions, and directive questions. They will also learn the importance of probing, developing issues and working to understand its implications.

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Benefit Selling

How well do sales people truly understand the benefits of their products, the people they work with or the business they represent? Often they understand and can communicate some of the features but the real benefits are generally over looked.

In this topic participants will learn to think more deeply about the benefits they have to offer and learn to express them in a way that helps lead them to a sale. Importantly they will learn that they only need to focus on the benefits that meet the client's needs. Taking a rifle shot rather than machine gun approach to benefit selling!

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Closing Skills

Most sales people don't close. There are a variety of reasons for this but perhaps one of the most common, yet least understood, is that they don't know what they are closing on! The sales person that follows the ATS approach to Needs Analysis and Benefit Selling is well positioned to 'get that order'. To help in this endeavour participants are introduced to a variety of closing techniques that are all designed to take the pressure out of the situation for both the customer and the sales person.

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Addressing Objections and Dealing with Difficult Customers.

Realities in life are objections and occasional difficult customer service issues. To deal with them successfully sales people need to be able to remain calm, act professionally, and develop empathy with the customer while dealing with the issue. ATS have developed a strategy for dealing with these situations and a range of techniques that sales people can employ to have customers accept their answers in a meaningful way. When customers are handled successfully in these difficult situations they are more likely to buy.

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Buying Signals

Many sales people are unaware of the many positive actions that customers take such as their body language, the questions they ask, even some of the comments they make. In this topic participants learn to recognise buying signals and also learn how to capitalise on them.

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Action Plans

Generally sales aren't concluded after one initial call. Sales people often have a variety of tasks to undertake and so too do customers at times. Participants are introduced to the idea of creating action plans after each meeting to keep the customer involved and to ensure that they deal with the customer in a timely manner.

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Follow Up Visits

Participants come to understand that each follow up visit needs to planned, to think about regaining the level of enthusiasm and involvement was present at the previous meeting.

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