Three Ideas for Greater Sales Success
By Barry J. Farber

Successful selling requires more than a desire to make money or rise to the top. Success comes to you only when you combine product knowledge, professional expertise and personal confidence. What are you doing every day to improve your skills?

Your knowledge and commitment to learning provide the enthusiasm to sell with passion. The more you learn, the more clearly you picture what it takes to succeed, and the more excited you become to apply what you've learned. That translates into better service for your customers and more sales for you.

The more excited you are, the more you apply the things you learn, and the better you become at them. The better you become at them, the greater the service you provide your customers. Here are three ways to make that happen:

1. Keep your customers' interests at heart. Selling is always about creating win-win situations. It doesn't matter to your customers how excited you are about a new product or project unless your customers know what it means to them. Describe the situation to make them excited, too.
2. Increase your depth of knowledge. Learn as much as you possibly can about each customer's business and business goals. How can your product—and your knowledge about that product and its applications—help that customer's business grow? When you demonstrate how much you know, in terms of providing the best possible solutions to customers, you will earn greater credibility and increase your sales.
3. Learn to recognize success when it happens. Don't hold out for an amazing event or a once-in-a-lifetime idea that will turn your customer's organization around. The solution that seals the sale could be a small thing that makes one person's job easier, such as how your product can help decrease the customer's workload.

Sure, it's a lot of fun to come up with a “big” solution. That delivers a great boost to the ego that's easy to confuse with success. Remember: The “little” ideas often are more impressive: They're solid and consistent, and those are the things that will keep your customers coming back for more.

Over the years, I've worked with highly successful people with careers that range from sports to science, education to entertainment. One common sentiment I hear from them all is that at the end of their lives, they'd like to look back and ask “How much did I learn, and how much did I serve others?”

Constant learning and constant action. We learn from our actions, and we act from our learning. One without the other suffers. With both, sales soar.

Barry Farber is the author of 12 Cliches of Selling and Why They Work (Workman Publishing). President of Livingston, N.J.-based Farber Training Systems Inc., he's the nation's top-rated speaker on sales and gaining access. Visit him on the Web at www.barryfarber.com.