Unless you have confidence in your sales skills, it can be difficult to sell your product.
How many times have you bought from an unconvincing seller? Not so often.
So how can you build confidence in sales and win clients?
The key to selling with confidence goes way above knowing your product’s features and benefits. Below we explore ten tips to help you become a confident salesperson.
Importance of Confidence in Sales and Selling with Confidence
The importance of confidence in sales ensures you prioritize the customer and not the product. You are okay with hearing a “no”, and you know how to adjust your selling approach to close. Here is how to sell with confidence:
1. Make a great first impression.
Users generate a first impression on what they take in immediately (in the first 15 seconds). Making a good first impression online includes:
- Improving website speed
- Highlighting content with value
- Leveraging white space
- Providing intuitive functionalities
- Making the website easy to use
Engaging intro videos, client testimonials, and clear brand representation are the “looks” of your online business.
Just as it matters to dress and represent yourself as a confident salesperson face to face, the online brand is your chance to increase your sales confidence because you know you have accentuated the best business qualities.
2. Use confident language.
Speak about your brand with passion, conviction, and knowledge. Don’t use negative language. Focus on positivity and talk about product benefits: clients want to know how you will solve their problems and not how great your product is.
3. Build relationships.
Confident salespeople and sales teams solve problems, answer questions, help with advice, and teach and explain in detail. Forget about yourself as a salesperson. As you get to know your customers, focus on them. Reframing the focus takes us to the next tip:
4. Listen to your customers.
Improve your listening skills by remaining patient and humble. When addressing a problem, address the person, too. Listening to customers will boost your confidence in sales because you will base decisions on data, and not on assumptions. Apply feedback without second-guessing to improve your business and make better marketing decisions.
5. Learn everything about your product.
People trust those that are knowledgeable.
How do you feel when you come into a shop and the salesperson can answer all your detailed questions, provide instant answers, and suggest the best alternatives?
You think: “This person really knows their stuff.”
This means truly knowing every nook and cranny of the product. You need to know the product as you are using it yourself and the best way to do that is to actually use the product. Love your product to start selling it with confidence.
Listen to the latest episode of the Virtual Frontier Podcast to discover tips and tricks about selling with confidence:
6. Hire salespeople aligned with your brand.
The sales staff that believes in a strong brand tend to show higher confidence, better performance, job commitment, and job satisfaction. To maximize these benefits, gather a strong sales team that finds your brand relatable and meaningful.
7. Engage with customers.
Use conversational marketing, ad retargeting, and real-time social media presence to strengthen the brand messaging and the emotions behind it. Customers have found your business and interacted with it because you share interests, values, and goals. Talk about common things to spark the conversation and build a community.
8. Educate yourself about your industry in general.
Selling with confidence is impossible if you have a narrow focus on a tiny market share. Sure, you will best speak to a tiny segment of the customer audience but you have to be aware of what keeps the momentum going in the industry overall.
9. Practice rejection.
The average conversion rate for B2B tech sales is 2.4% (The acceptable fluctuates somewhere between 1% and 3%). You better get used to selling to only 2 or 3 people among a hundred! Practice being told “no” whether it is in cold-call sales, email marketing, or web sales.
10. Work with a sales mentor.
A sales mentor or a sales coach is a person with whom you develop a mutually beneficial relationship to hone your sales skills. Usually, such a person is an experienced sales rep or a business owner who has seen the ups and downs of sales practices and understands the importance of confidence in sales. If you are stuck and feel a drop in confidence, a sales mentor can help you recover from failure and become your best cheerleader.
The secret to all types of confidence is taking action with awareness and adjusting the next steps based on feedback received.
Find the golden balance and start selling with confidence.
Infographic: Importance of Confidence in Sales
