Polished Salesmanship
Jacki Hart • July 31, 2018
Part 4 – Top Ten Entrepreneurial Skills
To recap, in the last three columns, I’ve written about the key entrepreneurial skills of Engagement, Resilience and Focus. In addition to these skills, salesmanship is also a crucial skill for the business owner to possess.
The owner of every business is its top brand manager. It is up to the business owner – the driver of the company bus – to ensure that the brand promise (both internally and externally) matches the actions of the team, and the functionality of the products being sold.
It’s the business owner who can best train the team on what ‘script’ to use when speaking with customers, suppliers, potential customers and each other. It’s also the business owner who can best sell to the top accounts and rescue the customer relationship if things have come off the rails.
Three things to consider about your role in salesmanship:
1. Selling your internal brand: It’s important to align the team with your expectations for how they will deliver on the company promises. This important step starts with training, then mentoring your team on what the final result needs to be with respect to your customers experience, and the steps they will take to accomplish it. You need to sell them on how the company culture needs to be deployed in order to deliver on the external brand promise. When your team is focused on your vision of successfully delivering on the company brand promise, that’s when the magic happens. And profit.
2. Selling your external brand: Everything that is communicated about your company to the marketplace (and internet) makes up the sum-total of your brand image. The expectations for the ‘experience’ of doing business with your company stems from your branding image and messaging. It’s up to you to ensure that as the top sales person, you are leading the brand in the direction that fits the strategy and deliverability of your promises.
3. Earning word of mouth referrals and reviews: The single-most relevant and effective sales funnel in your business comes from Word of Mouth and Online Reviews. This is where your company reputation for consistent experience and promises kept is measured and leveraged. As the leader in salesmanship, it’s up to you ensure your top accounts are asked for their referrals, and to ensure that your team understands the huge value referrals bring to the bottom line profit. Good news travels fast and can build an important bank of right-fit aligned clients to whom it’s easy to sell. Bad news travels faster and farther.
Take a few minutes to think about the ways in which you are highly skilled at acquiring top and key accounts with your polished, confident style. How do you train others to walk that talk and learn the thinking behind your ‘script’. While you can’t force staff to say things exactly the way you do, you can use your well articulated core values, purpose and vision to give them the company dictionary to use for creating their own scripts and sell your company brand and customer confidence with their own style.
If you’re looking for ways in which you could improve the effectiveness and consistency of how your company delivers on its brand image – both internally and externally – we can help you.
Thank you for reading! Until next time.
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