Sales overview

Sales can be broken down into two main aspects: approach and process. Approach refers to how salespeople interact with prospects and customers, while process involves the steps they take, such as prospecting, cold calling, objection handling, closing, and negotiating. When focusing on a specific area, like prospecting, it's important to consider knowledge, skill, and behavior. For example, when dealing with gatekeepers, salespeople should know how to handle them, have practiced it, and be confident in their abilities. Without the necessary knowledge, it's difficult to practice effectively. It's important to define what salespeople should do and say in different situations, such as handling objections, in order to guide their actions. Now, when it comes to this section, sales is really a pretty big topic, and so when you think about the overview of sales, I'm going to bring it down to two things, approach and process. So some people have a sales approach, certain things they have to accomplish when they're interacting with prospects and customers, and then we also have something called a process where we start out with prospecting and then maybe cold calling and objection handling and closing and negotiating, whatever it might be in terms of the order of what your process operates. I go back to this, go back to the area that you want to focus on with your team or individual, and think about three main components. Let's take prospecting, and there could be a lot of attributes, much like our defining code strategy, there could be a lot of attributes that you want within the prospecting stage. So let's say dealing with a gatekeeper, an administrative assistant or secretary that guards a decision maker's ability to get on the phone, and that's why they call them gatekeepers. So if somebody is in a gatekeeper role, knowledge, what do you want your people to do, skill, have they practiced it, and then the B, the behavioral, can they do it with confidence and conviction. Much like objections, if you don't have the knowledge required, how do you practice something that you don't know how to do? So keep in mind as we go through this and we talk about the questions and the activities, I'm going to bring it back to, let's say, a competitor price objection. So if you don't have the definition of knowledge of what they need to do and say, not just high level, but exactly what you would like them to do and say, and it doesn't have to be a script, but a framework of response, that will serve as our catalyst for this section.