You don’t need to work in sales to find useful some sales training. If you think about it, all of us sell. We sell ourselves for promotion or new job opportunities, the project we work on to attract company funds or for it to be accepted by senior management. We may also sell ourselves to convince our colleagues that you’re the world’s best "mus" player. As a result, we are constantly selling something to someone, even though the objective isn’t to gain a payment.

So, with this in mind, I’m going to briefly go through a seven step guide to selling that I hope will help you in your day-to-day:

STEP 1: Planning. Depending on the importance of the sale, this step should be larger or smaller. Basically, you should be prepared. You should know your product inside out, as well as your buyer needs, this will help you propose solutions to those needs with your products. Know off by heart your presentation and don’t forget to properly test your visual aids if you are going to use these. Think of all possible questions that may be asked and make sure you have answers to all of them. Overall, think carefully about what you expect from your meeting and plan to achieve it.

STEP 2: Opening. Obviously, as in any situation, you should be polite and professional, introduce yourself if your audience doesn’t know you, but above all, use this opening time to build credibility and trust towards yourself and your company or project. Provide an overview oriented towards the needs of your audience and ask questions that show that you are interest in them and that you’re not just there to carryout your presentation just as you would to anyone else.

If you have carried out the first step well, your confidence will help you transmit the right sensations.

STEP 3: Questioning. As I have said before, no-one likes someone who is only interested in themselves, their products, projects or company. People like to feel that you are taking your time to analyse and understand their needs in order to offer solutions. So we must ask open questions that will provoke answers that may bear this information in order to adjust our presentation to the real needs of our audience. Make sure it’s your audience that does the talking in this part of the meeting, listen carefully and when you have all the information use it in your presentation, but never try to solve problems in this part.

To finish summarise the key points before starting your presentation.

STEP 4: The Presentation. You must know your product inside out, but don’t make the mistake of just presenting the wonderful benefits of your product. Use the information gathered previously to put this into perspective and show your audience how these benefits will solve their needs and priorities. Focus on the key benefits. You may have a long list of benefits which need to be mentioned, but don’t deter the attention from the main issues. While presenting, show natural enthusiasm and faith in your product, this will transmit trust.

STEP 5: Objections. The better you carryout the four previous stages, the less objections that will arise, even more so, if the presentation is personalised to the real needs of the audience. But objections will arise and it is your job to make them flourish, understand the real underlying problem and provide a solution so nothing hinders the purchase.

STEP 6: The Close. In modern thinking, and if the previous has been carried out in an exemplary way, it will be the buyer that will close the deal. If you think about it, first you do all your homework, you build up trust and credibility, you discover his real needs and priorities, you show how you can solve these and you overcome all the main objections; in this situation the buyer either purchases or it’s just not going to happen. However, this doesn’t mean that the sale will be immediate.

STEP 7: After-sales Follow-up. This depends heavily on the kind of product, but you always need to check the customer satisfaction and in this way solve any possible misunderstandings or problems that have occurred. Word-of-mouth-marketing is important and it’s normally as a consequence of this last, but important, process.

Here's just a very brief summary of a classical approach to the selling process. In future articles, we may talk about how modern thinking has developed in this area.

In which situations, other than selling, may this process be useful?

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