How to Improve your Sales Result

If you could identify one word to improve your sales results, what would that one word be? Before you immediately begin to think and even say out loud that word, let me ask you several questions:

Are you currently satisfied with your sales results?
Do you wish to improve any aspect of selling skills?
Do you know what is keeping you from reaching your goal to increase sales?


If you're a professional service provider one of the things you've been told you should do to get clients is offer a free consultation, review, or session of some sort. Once upon a time when this was a new idea it was very effective. It no longer works. I'm going to help you understand why that's true as well as what you can do to make it work in your business.

The free consultation concept is common place at this point. It's so common that your prospects recognize it for what it really is... a sales appointment. Just like people don't volunteer for a free insurance review they don't eagerly volunteer for a free consultation.

Here's why. To start with no one wants to volunteer for a sales appointment. Plus when you offer a free consultation early in your sales prospecting process you are making your offer at the point your prospects are most skeptical. Early on you are complete strangers. It's only natural to treat strangers with a high degree of skepticism.

When you offer the free consultation up front rather than creating good will and strengthening your tentative relationship you trigger the defenses of your potential buyer. Once you trigger a prospect's defenses it's very hard to overcome those defenses and earn their trust.

Plus unless you know how to get the greatest return from your investment when you get together for the free consultation you don't get what you want. You give away an hour of work and get nothing in return. Bottom line you invest a great deal of time and effort to get a tiny number of clients from those free sessions.

I'm not saying you shouldn't offer your potential buyers an opportunity to have an experience with you at no cost. What I am saying is you need to rethink when you make that offer and how you make it.

There's a natural process involved in developing relationships. You will dramatically improve your results if you respect that process.

Rather than offering the free session right away only offer it to people who already perceive your value. Then think about the best way to present that offer.
If a sales person is doing many other things other than selling, you can say that the sales person is not doing his job. However, if many sales people are doing so, then perhaps you need more investigation.

While it is true that sales people should commit their time and effort generating sales revenue, that may not be how customers perceive things. Customers want sales people to be "accountable for results".