If you make changes that are meaningful you can expect to reap some real benefits, and those are benefits which you may lose should you decide to abandon your winning ways.
So assuming you are champing at the bit at the prospect of a rip-roaring year of great sales and even greater commissions, we have put together the first ever SALESGURU New Year Survival Guide for all Sales Performers. Here’s to 12 killer months.

Get organised
Whether you take a break during the holiday period or not, the chances are that business will slow sufficiently for you to be able to take a step back and review your situation. Don’t squander this time. By March you’ll be in full flight once again and if you haven’t developed a strategy for dealing with all the components of your job you’ll find yourself in defensive mode instead of launching a staunch attack.

Tip: Jot down the entire process you must go through to do your job and see if you can work out better ways to manage each part. Is one area traditionally difficult or painful for you? Now is the time to speak to your sales leader and get some advice on how to improve that. Get it all clear in your mind so you don’t have to fret about it later.

Set goals
Once you are confident that you are organised, dangle some carrots for yourself. Your situation is unique and the carrots you are realistically able to dangle are therefore different to anyone else’s. That doesn’t matter. Just don’t be too relaxed about this. Maybe you will decide in January that you want to have all your credit cards paid off by December. Maybe you’ll decide to buy that new Audi in June or go overseas on holiday twice in 2007. Or maybe you’ll decide to be the number one salesperson in your group or company. Either way, your goal has to be both temptingly large and yet realistic.
Tip: Write your goals down and – even better – get some pictures of them if you can. Stick them on your office or cubicle wall. If anyone laughs, screw them. Come June when you take the picture down and wax lyrical about how much better it is to have the real deal rather than just a picture of it, you’ll have the last laugh.

Editor’s Note
It is hard to deal with the matters mentioned above in a couple of paragraphs and expect to give them real meaning. If you practice and pursue discipline and goal setting, you can unleash an enormous amount of power to be successful. You cannot read enough on these subjects and I recommend you visit the Self Help section at your bookstore often. Not all books are created equal, but most have something to tell you and investing in books on these crucial subjects will be of enormous benefit to anyone in sales. You’ll be making a huge investment in your own future success. Trust me, the more you read, the more you’ll be amazed at the clarity good ideas can bring to you.

Now then, onto specifics …
Theory is great, but it only counts if you are able to apply it. In the real world, you are cold calling, looking for appointments, trying to develop a presentation that will give you the best chances of success and looking for opportunities to close deals. Theory can sharpen your wits, but sharp selling skills will ultimately make the difference between winning business and losing it. Try out these tips:

Prospecting
1. Start with a highly targeted prospecting list, consisting of people or companies that are most likely to buy your type of products and services.

2. Schedule prospecting time daily, and stick to it. No prospects means no good ideas, which is fatal in sales.

3. Accept that prospecting is a numbers game. The more calls you make, the more hits you will get. This is pretty much an immutable rule.

4. Call every name on your list every 3-4 weeks. Understand that only a small percentage of your list will be ready to buy the first time that you call.

5. Don’t get carried away with losers. Look at your high-probablility suspects and be willing to regularly axe the others from your list. Your time is too precious to waste.

6. If the prospect tells you they are not interested, don’t press for an appointment. It will make for one of the most pleasant sales calls they have ever had and will ensure that far fewer of them actually tell you not to call them again.

7. Listen to yourself, and constantly re-evaluate your abilities. Do this by taping your conversations. Were you decisive, interesting and exciting even? Or did your boring monotone lose you the sale before you started?

8. Keep records. If you don’t keep tabs on who you called, when you called them and what was discussed, you are going to be in a real mess.

Qualifying
1. Use your resources. Whether internal or external, look for the best sources of information on who your most likely customers are.

2. Understand your product and your service and all of its various aspects. You could find an entirely new set of customers who are obvious fits for what you sell just by doing a little research.

3. Always ask questions. If you aren’t asking, you aren’t finding anything out. Sure, some people will tell you that your questions are none of your business, but you know what those people are not? The are not prospects. Axe them, but do it graciously. The world changes and you might have a second pass at them again one day.

4. Become an authority. Find out about your industry space. Read, online and in magazines. Be informed. If you know what is happening generally, you’ll be much more able to find specific and related hooks to hang sales on.

5. Let your knowledge be known. Take every single opportunity to put yourself forward as an expert in your field, and especially in front of groups of people. This is sort of a reverse qualifying process in which people who are interested have the opportunity to discover you, not vice-versa.

6. Check your databases. Who are the customers who haven’t bought from you for a long time? They already have proven they have a need for your product and are therefore effectively pre-qualified. Is it a matter that nobody else is calling them?

Presenting
1. Remember the goal (which is to get a customer excited about you and what you are selling). Presentations are not an opportunity to show your mastery of software gimmickry. They are an opportunity to get your point across in a clear and uncluttered way.

2. Nobody cares about your stuff. Presentations that start with a long intro about who you are and what you do are mood killers. Who cares? That stuff can come later if you get them interested. Time wasted on non-task specific information is just plain time wasted.

3. Respect their time. It doesn’t matter how interesting you think you are. What is important is how interesting they think you are. And nothing long and drawn out is ever interesting. Never give them reason to wonder if there is anything else they should be doing.

4. Experts in the United States estimate you can increase an audience’s ability to remember information by 189% by eliminating irrelevant words and graphics.

5. Practice. Practice, practice, practice. You’ll never get a hole in one without practice and you will never put on a knock-out presentation either.

6. Barry Hilton isn’t in sales, so don’t go thinking that if he can bring an audience to their feet, you should be able to do the same by cracking jokes throughout. The business presentation is no place for comedy.

7. Keep it light. The other side of the coin is that the business presentation is no place for heavy loads of facts and figures either. Understand that if you can get them exciting, they will ask for all that info after.

8. Tom Peters, the management guru, places an egg timer in plain view when he is presenting, so show how quickly factory expansion is happening in China. Can you do something like this, which is of ancillary interest without detracting from the point?

9. Speak clearly. That doesn’t mean don’t mumble (though of course it means that too), but it means don’t use long words. It isn’t clever to confuse your audience and they will hate you if you make them feel like dunces.

Closing
1. Whatever you do, ask for the business. If the only thing you do before you pack up is to say: “Are you interested and if so, when do you think you might make a purchase,” you have done your job. In that close, you have a picture of their interest and their intentions and that gives you something to go on. Otherwise you are punching in the dark.

2. Close from the beginning. That doesn’t mean go in there with a hard sell from the start, but rather that you explain your agenda. Tell the customer exactly what you're selling and how it can benefit their business. Being up front removes any concerns about hidden agendas.

3. Know when they are ready to buy. A customer might indicate they're ready by asking questions about the product or the buying process: "How long would delivery take?" "What does that button do?" or "Is an upgrade available?" Other signs include complaints about previous vendors and interested comments such as "Really?" or "Good idea." Learn the signs.

4. Ask questions. More importantly perhaps, don't respond to their questions with a yes or no. Answer your customer's queries with questions of your own. Carefully chosen, these return questions can help lead to a sale. For example, instead of answering the question, "Does this come in red?" with "Yes," you could say, "Would you like it in red?"

5. Free trials often lead directly to sales. This is sometimes known as the puppy dog close, because it's reminiscent of the attachment children develop to a puppy after keeping it overnight. This strategy works well for all sorts of businesses, appearing frequently in magazine subscriptions (Get three issues free!), Internet services (Free 30-day membership!) and car sales (Take a test drive today!).

6. Gather both detail and interest from your questions. Rather than asking if someone wants to buy, say something like: “I can get you ten of those by Tuesday for R1000 each. Do you want us to do that?” One point about this however: make sure you know what you’re talking about. If the customer isn’t in the market for more than one, you are just going to sound like you don’t understand his needs after all.

Anton Potgieter, Telepassport
Know your product. There is nothing worse than asking questions and having 90% of the answers being "I'll check it out and get back to you". Especially on a technical product. Then, research the prospect properly. Don't sit in front of the client and say "So what do you guys do?" It makes far more of an impression to say "Congratulations on the tender you signed last week!" Be honest and stick to your commitments – call when you say you will, get back with info when you say you will ...

Russell Crawford, Sony BMG:
Sales continues to evolve, and as we move into 2007 one thing can be guaranteed: You must just be clear about what you need to change in order to succeed on all fronts. In the music industry we are changing the fundamentals as we move from Record Company to Entertainment Partner. The role of the sales professional will play an instrumental part in the process as we re-evaluate our relationship with our customers.

Peter Gilbert, HR Chally, Metamorphose
Perhaps the greatest threat to any salesperson is complacency – taking customers for granted. We recently interviewed 80 000 business executives about why they buy from a particular supplier and discovered that a buyer’s decision is largely based on the salesperson’s ability to take full responsibility for the business relationship between the supplier and the customer. So I would advise any sales professional to re-assess their portfolio of accounts and assess the strength of the relationship, acting swiftly on the findings where necessary.

Claudio Camera, Renault
One fundamental truth about sales is the relationship one holds with a customer. These relationships are not created overnight. They come with time, energy , focus and dedication.
Being in a relationship with your partner, your wife, kids and friends is no different to a customer. They want to know they can trust you. Also confidence that tomorrow you will be there for them. And if you give true value [in terms of service], you should be able to name your price...

Lizette Scholly, Resomed
Everyone is running to reach targets and we rarely take time to assess our successes and failures before we kick off. Review yourself on a quarterly basis to ensure that you are still on the right track. Also, challenge the system (and keep on doing so). Refine the way in which you have done things in the past year. Salespeople easily fall into a comfort zone and resist change. And devote plenty of time to prospecting. Focus energy on the right opportunities.

Clive Price, Peer Group
[Time management] is becoming the bane of busy salespeople’s lives. Since we can’t manage time we had better work within its constraints. For instance, learn to say no without hurting people. We cannot please everyone so be ruthless – not arrogant – when apportioning your time. Then, act on the critical few things that will bring in huge results. Focus on improving your closing ratios – don’t waste time on submissive, warm would-be buyers who talk incessantly and procrastinate about signi

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