Criteria Based Selling - the Future of Sales Training

The age of features and benefits selling is dead. Remember the days when we all watched John Cleese videos on how to close a sale! Oops, maybe just a few of us baby boomers remember those days. But modern day selling is all about understanding the needs of your customer, this is where criteria based selling comes in.

This teaches you or your sales people if you have a team, to identify the criteria that a prospective client places around buying something. Questions used like "what's important to you about xxx?". Understand their criteria and you can sell your product or service. Sounds easy doesn't it, but it works.

If you do have a sales team, in managing that team, it is vital that you have available to you, the hard evidence on the key people in your business, their sales skills and the business development processes you need to put in place. If you are committed to building a strong sales and business development team, you must be committed to their continued training and development.

When looking for a good sales training program, ensure it covers these key objectives:
1. To increase the performance of your sales team!
2. Identify individuals' strong or weak characteristics for selling roles and focus on improving those.
3. Put a plan in place to hold the team accountable and reward them for results.
4. Increase the percentage of sales closes (not wasting valuable marketing dollars on leads that do not get converted).
5. And more importantly - Empower your sales team!

Marketing generates leads, but this investment is totally wasted if you don't have the skills to convert them to a sale.