1. Selling door to door: If no one stops the dog from barking within 15 seconds, no one will answer the door.
2. Selling door to door: After knocking, stand at least four feet back from the door.
3. Selling a new car: Your customer has decided to buy the car when he or she asks what colors are available. Stop selling and close the deal.
4. The 80-20 rule: Salespeople should talk only 20% of the time during their first visit with a potential customer and listen the other 80%. During later visits, the salespeople should do most of the talking to sell the benefits of their products.
5. Selling appliances: When greeting a customer, make sure your first remark refers directly to the product you hope to sell.
6. The sale is made while the customer is talking.
7. Selling Lingerie: 65% of women (and even more as they age) wear the wrong size bra and the majority wear one too small.
8. Sell Green: People will pay on average a 20-25% premium for products that are eco-friendly.
9. You can't sell it if it doesn't excite you.
10. B2B Sales Fact: Most firms change 20% to 25% of their suppliers every year.
11. Getting new customers: It's five times harder to sell something to new customer than it is to a previous customer as long as you made them happy the first time. If you didn't make them happy, the opposite is true.
12. If you lose money on every deal, you can't make it up in volume.
13. Garage Sales: The first decision is, do you just want to get rid of stuff. . .. If you do, make the prices really good and post a 'prices are negotiable' or 'all prices ½ off tomorrow' sign. Your sale will be a bigger success if you remember this decision, after all, you won’t get rich from your sale.
14. Selling a content-based product: Make sure that flyers feature compelling examples of the actual content, not just hype text or slogans. Not only will it create value for the flyer (decreasing the chances it will be discarded), it weeds out people who are not interested in your specific product.
15. Telephone sales: People should always let the customer hang up first. Jumping the gun can cut off a last minute add-on order.
16. Managing the Sales force: You could fire half of all the salespeople in the country and never notice a drop in sales.
17. Trade show booths: A hard working salesperson working a booth at a trade show should be able to chat briefly with about 100 people per day. Ten% of those people are likely to be good leads.
(Source: Adapted from ‘Rules of Thumb’)
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