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Which steps must you take or face business failure? This post includes the four selling tips small business owners need to follow so they can rock their success. Skip these at the risk of your own peril.

Starting and running a business is challenging! Business owners wear so many hats and have so much to do every day. While it’s essential for entrepreneurs to do many things well, I’ll give you the bullet points for the sales essentials you need to use to ensure success.

The selling tips small business owners are smartest to use are efficient and useful.

Have a selling plan

The importance of having a plan cannot be understated. And the good news is, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Without a plan, all the other selling tips for small business owners are wasted. Author Katherin Peterson famously said, “a dream wihout a plan is just a wish”.

SMB owners can keep the sales plan simple, for a start. Have one place where all leads and customer information is kept. This can be a CRM or an Excel spreadsheet. Create sales goals, even if you’re guestimating.

Also, have an idea of how many opportunities you’ll need to close to reach this goal. Start with a specific target number of phone calls or in-person appointments. As you close sales, track how many prospects you contact for each sale. It’s also helpful for seeing how much follow up is required to close the sale. This is highly valuable data you can use to continue refining your selling plan.

Know your unique selling propostion

Most likely, you’re famliar with this term. But unique selling proposition (USP) is still too YOU-centric. Like it or not, humans are ME-centric, which means the best way to make your product appeal to your prospect is to make the USP about THEM. This comes down to what does your product or service do for your client? A “value proposition” is the customer-centric version of the USP.

Don’t even pick up the phone until you have a clear understanding of what your service or product does FOR your customer. What pain does is alleviate? Which problem does it solve? How does it remove fear? Understanding the value your offering delivers to prospects is essential to grabbing and keeping attention. No one has any interest in hearing descriptions of a product when they see nothing in it for them.

Sales techniques that focus on the prospect

Listen to customer’s needs

Asking questions and listening is powerful for building rapport and for discovering your customer’s needs. More about how much about the prospect your selling process must be. And guess what? People love talking about themselves, so getting your customers talking is easier than you might think.

Listening to customer needs also serves to further qualify what’s important to them and how they want to communicate. Which provides invaluable insight for tailoring your offer specifically to what your potential client wants. Thus increasing your likelihood of closing this sale.

Ask for the sale

Sound ridiculous? You’d be surprised how often this doesn’t happen. A common challenge facing small business owners is fear of rejection. Actually, this is a common problem for even the most seasoned salespeople.  Toss that fear of rejection out the door. If you’ve done a good job of qualifying your prospect, then you know if they have a problem you can solve. Simply ask if they want you to help solve it for them.

These are the top 4 selling tips small business owners need to use to ensure success. The list of others sales and customer retention techniques and  is endless, but these are the most important ones, in my opinion. What do you think? Share your comments below. Free Ebook download