Sales Techniques

Sales are simple, and that's why I'm going to keep this post very simple. 4 Key points to help you on your way with sales are:

• Control the conversation
• Listen to the customer
• Give them a reason to buy
• Ask for their custom
  

That's it! (but I'll expand a little on each point)

Control the conversation
Lose control of the conversation and you'll lost the customer. Sales is a journey. You know the beginning and the end so you just need to ensure you keep the customer on the same journey.

If the conversation starts to stray pick up on what they are saying, emphasise, relate, and bring it back to your journey. It can be the most unrelated simily, it doesn't matter, your back in control. Dumb sales people are often the best, they don't care if it doesn't make sense as long as they keep control.

Listen to the customer
On your journey your customer will talk and give you clues. Pick up on these and make a mental bullet point list. It will arm you to help them make the best choices. Drip feed these points back to them, use it to qualify your customer and remove potential obstacles when you come to close.

Give them a reason to buy
That's great, thanks for that I'll be in touch... SALE LOST. If the customer has no reason to buy now, generally they wont'. Incentivise them. Greed & fear are common tools of the salesman.
Reasons to buy now can include:

• limited stock
• waiting lists
• opportunity from a "cancellation"
• Special offers
• etc etc

Ask for their custom
You've done everything right so far, you've given your pitch they've listened and you've come to an agreed service offering and price, now what? Sign them up. That's it again, very simple.

You'll be surprised that once customers start to give you details they open up and become much more open to closing. Start asking their details, fill in an order form and ask them to sign. Don't be shy about asking for money, don't ask for money, ask how you'd like to pay and they will do the rest.


Lastly, an extra tip, customers who start by telling you "they are not ready to buy now" are telling you the exact opposite, don't get disheartened you will be able to convert them.

Good luck, now go get some sales!
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Twitter Experiment

I've noted lots of people have started to add me to the list of followers just after a post. I'm assuming these are happening from keywords in my posts, which begs the questions:

a) why
b) how

One can only assume that the why is because if I follow you there is a good chance you will follow me. This can lead to an inflated ammount of followers but are they really useful? I guess if you have enough followers (aka listners) it could be deemed a powerfull tool and not just an ego nursing exercise. So I think I'll test this with a new twitter account on a subject which is more of a hobby to me than anthing else right now, poker. Rightly or wrongly I'm probabley just going to leave this as an automatic update system for now but I think it will be interesting to see how many followers I can get from using a service such as twollo (the how).

Twollo was supposedly developed in a day for $150 but appears to be a paid for service after a free trial, so this may be a pretty short test, but none the less I think its with a twirl.

ps. next I'll be testing out OutTwit Retweet this button on every post blogger

Handy Google keyword analysis tools

Handy Google keyword analysis tools

1. Google Insight
2. Search based keyword tools
3. Google trends

Not looking good for CF, but this could be misleading with all the other CFML providers out there now. Retweet this button on every post blogger

Stink'ernet

Smells trigger memories but can memories trigger smell.

I've known that distinctive odours can trigure distant memories for a long time, but recently while working on the internet it happened to me again, which got me thinking, if you could brand your site or provide a sales message with an image i.e. an orange, would that sales message be triggered each time oranges were smelt?

Just a musing right now, and not even sure how to sensibly test it but one I may like to revisit at some point. Retweet this button on every post blogger

Thesis Word Press

There's a lot to be said for research but a lot of the time you can go with your gut and impulse buys can come up trumps.

On this occasion I've earmarked Thesis for future blogs. I'll test this on a couple of projects I've got lined up and may or may not convert this blog too. Retweet this button on every post blogger

Yahoo Query Language YQL

This is new to me but sounds pretty sweet. I've read that Yahoo is now providing an SQL interface into their data services. There's already a handy coldfusion package over at riaforge.

Off the top of my head, obvious opportunities are:

• built in natural language searches on sites
• SEO reporting tools
• News feeds
• Auto image displays

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Adapting software start up

This can easily be done by editing the properties of a desktop short cut icon. Simply edit the target value to pass in parameters as you would do in command prompt.

i.e. shortcut > target > C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe ColdFusion Builder>cfbuilder.exe -data c:\workspace\cfbuilder Retweet this button on every post blogger