The selling process has six key steps. Virtually every sales interaction will follow these steps, whether it lasts several minutes or several months:

1. Prospecting – Find Customers
2. Attract – Making Initial Contact
3. Inform – The Sales Presentation
4. Engage – Overcoming Objections
5. Close – Closing The Sale
6. Follow-Up – Service and Support After The Sale

As you develop a sales process that is right for you and your business, here are some other pointers to keep in mind:

• Always be selling. Every time anyone – family, friend, or associate – asks about your business, make a sale. Tell them, briefly and to-the-point, specifically what you offer and what benefits it provides them. DO NOT underestimate the importance of selling as a key part of your daily activity.
• Continuously improve and refine your sales skills. Learn from others, read about sales and selling, and be open to new ideas and approaches that may better meet your customers requirements and serve their needs.
• DO NOT FOCUS ON THE SALE. Focus on what your prospect or customer wants and needs. Be sincere in your desire to help and serve the prospect or customer. The sale is your ultimate objective, but not what comes first. This customer centric attitude will come through in every encounter. And it will help you establish and maintain mutually profitable long-term relationships.
• Contribute more than just your product or service to the relationship. Look for other value you can offer. Provide industry news updates, creative tips and ideas, and advice that can benefit your customers and educate them as part of the service you offer.
• Be direct when you communicate. Don’t beat around the bush, it frustrates people. Answer all questions, except when you don’t know or have an answer. When that happens (and it will) simply state that you “don’t know” or have an answer. Never patronize. And don’t make things up.
• Include a business card with every written letter or note. And give them out generously whenever you interact with someone personally.
• Thank people who refer prospective customers to you. Send a note or an email. If business results from a referral, send a small, business-related thank-you gift also.
• Never lie. Don’t say anything negative about the competition or their clients. Don’t gossip.
• Always respond. Never react. Reactions are the automatic emotional responses that appear when a question or situation arises. A response occurs when we allow that initial impulse to pass, and formulate our response in keeping with our values, objectives, and those of the other party.
• Don’t overbook yourself. Be sure to have time to listen and be available to your customers and respond to their questions and comments.

Finding friendly, engaging, and intuitive people who will leave customers with favorable impressions is challenging at best. You cannot teach friendliness and intuition. And intuition (defined as the ability to make sound decisions with incomplete information) is a gift some people possess and others simply do not. So its imperative that businesses hone their ability to spot this “soft skill” during the interview process.

Delivering a superior experience, or the ability to consistently provide exceptional service, is a key competitive advantage and effective differentiator. Time magazine recently reported, “The No. 1 marketing strategy for businesses and organizations now and in the future will be directly related to the quality of that organization’s customer service.” 68 % of customers leave because of an attitude of indifference displayed toward the customer, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey.

Service is a critical success factor. It establishes and helps to build relationships and referrals. When customers and prospects are deciding weather to patronize your business they are judging you by three things:

1. Are you trustworthy?
2. Do you care about me?
3. Are you committed to my satisfaction?

And you have a really simple and surefire way of knowing the truth of this claim: just ask yourself if these are the things you care about when you’re buying.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a growing practice with many new technologies that enable businesses to effectively implement strategic relationship development programs. What gets lost are basic underlying values that ensure substantive connections and successful relationship building. Below are some guidelines to successful customer relationship building:

1. You do not sell to consumers. You sell to people. Develop and maintain a view of your customers as individual people with individual needs and wants.
2. Setup your service interactions to ensure you treat every customer the way you would want to be treated.
3. Develop ways to identify and address the unique and specific wants of your customers.
4. Listen to your customers. Invite them to tell you what they think. Make it easy for them to do so. And pay attention to what they say.

Ultimately people do business with people they like. The quality of every personal interaction and the tone, character, and content of other non-human communications are all part of your customer service system. They should all work together to create an exceptional experience. Price is never a sole decision-making factor. When your customers feel respected, cared for, and have a favorable experience they will buy from you for qualitative rather than quantitative reasons.

Remember this about the importance of service to the success of a business – when a customer has a good experience they tell someone; when they have a bad experience they tell everyone they can.

Here are a few tips for delivering superior service:

• Before you sell or tell, ask.
• Listen carefully before talking.
• After listening, relate.
• Respond to what is said. Answer a question or offer a solution. Demonstrate you care.

Too many of the strategies and trends asserted and supported in marketing media are effective and relevant only for large enterprises. As an example the Forbes 2009 Ad Effectiveness Survey found that Forty-eight percent of marketers said that search engine optimization (SEO) was the best method for generating conversions online. E-mail and e-newsletters was next with forty-six percent. For smaller marketers the leaders get flipped with e-mail being most effective. Published information and recommendations are generally skewed to favor strategy for large enterprises because they pay for most of the research and publications.

The bottom line is marketing is essentially a highly customized function. Customization is expensive, and a key factor that explains the difficulty small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) have implementing effective marketing initiatives that deliver measurable ROI.

Seventy-nine percent of marketers confirmed “the need to measure, analyze, and report marketing effectiveness” was greater in 2009 than in previous years according to a study by Lenskold Group and MarketSphere. SMB’s are wanting more than read and click rates to measure their marketing effectiveness by. Like any business, they want to know:
⁃    How successfully and efficiently am I reaching my customers?
⁃    Is my marketing converting sales?
⁃    Who are my Most Valuable Customers (MVC’s)?

There are a few basic tactics SMB’s can use to measure marketing ROI:
⁃    Use some form of database driven CRM system to track customer communications activity.
⁃    Consistently use email and web conversion pages.
⁃    Integrate and consistently implement conversion tracking processes into sales and service processes.

The careful integration and consistent implementation of online marketing with offline sales, service and support processes is what leads to happy customers. This must also include a healthy dose of “personalization” to be most effective. I’m not referring to some tactic here when I use the term personalization. I’m referring to a deeper more value based approach that begins by viewing each customer as a thoughtful, caring, and concerned real person. Don’t think of customers as simply consumers or markets. Thinking of people as consumers implies they have needs that you satisfy with your products and services, and that exchange represents the sum total of any satisfying experience they will have patronizing your business.

What I’m referring to when I use the term personalization is a focus on the qualitative and emotive qualities of your customers. I’m talking about things like sending a personalized “Thank You” note when someone visits or buys from you. Starting each customer interaction with a warm smile and a sincere greeting. These are the often overlooked things that make all the difference. And some of them can be automated with e-marketing systems to help you deliver that uber personal experience every time.

It’s good to pay attention to the trends and keep abreast of what’s happening in the marketing world. But it’s most important to focus on and invest in the solutions and services that can help you do what you do better. chances are those will be different from the tactics you read about – and that’s just fine.