A Toolkit for the Best Year in the History of Your Company

Regardless of how much education you’ve had, you can always learn more. When your profession is sales communications, and you want to be great at selling, then what you say—and the way you say it—are pretty important.

In today’s selling environment, however, a lot of our competitors’ salespeople are also great at making fantastic presentations. When they also have similar products and favorable prices, we’ve got our hands full just getting our share of the business.

But imagine that you had a simple toolkit that could turn the tables in your favor—a set of tools you could learn to use with such proficiency that you would dramatically improve your game. Imagine further that these tools are “tangible.” That is, you can get your hands on them and work with them. They’re not just some motley collection of tips and tricks that go along with someone’s vague idea of what you ought to do. Instead they provide a step-by-step roadmap that is easy for you and everyone on your team to see and follow. Would that have an impact on your selling potential?

How Action Selling Boosts Your Potential

More than 20 years ago, we produced a toolkit. It was a small plastic box that contained certain Action Selling tools for planning, conducting, and following up on sales calls. Salespeople and sales managers loved it because it was such a handy and portable mechanism for reinforcing newly learned skills and embedding in the field some of the key principles of the Action Selling system.

Since then, we have replaced the plastic Action Selling toolkit with electronic methods that accomplish the same thing.

Yesterday I was talking with one of our newest clients. He used the term “toolkit” when he described how his team was using the concepts of Action Selling to plan and orchestrate sales calls. I immediately recalled that old toolkit that we used to provide. And, I was reminded that even though the plastic box is gone, the tools aren’t.

As I thought about it, I realized that—thanks in part to those online, electronic methods I mentioned—the entire Action Selling system has become a toolkit for managing the sales process. Where we once placed certain tangible components into a box, today the whole of Action Selling is the toolkit. Our training is all about how to use the kit—year by year, step by step, milestone by milestone, sales call by sales call—to improve effectiveness and success.

With the tools provided by Action Selling, salespeople become more resourceful than their competitors at the job of selling. Resourcefulness in selling allows us to cope with difficult situations and solve unusual problems.

The key difference with Action Selling is that it provides the right tools for the job.

Learn how truly outstanding salespeople win and keep more business. Check out my book Action Selling: How to Sell Like a Professional (Even If You Think You Are One).

Action Selling in Action

Tonka Bay Equity Partners, a private-equity firm located in suburban Minneapolis, acquires companies and helps them grow. Shane Slominski is one of four partners in the firm. He describes the climate in which Tonka Bay does business as highly competitive and very challenging. “There is a lot of capital out there chasing the limited number of deals that exist,” he says.

Tonka Bay not only needs to find opportunities that fit its target profile, it also must compete with hundreds of private-equity firms that have plenty of funds available for acquisitions. The power in today’s equation rests with companies that want to be acquired.

In a six-month timeframe following Action Selling training, Slominski and his company closed six times more deals than in any comparable period in the past. “It’s not a coincidence,” he says. “Our recent success is because of how well we are leveraging the sales-communication toolkit that Action Selling provides.

“Instead of going into meetings with a solution in mind,” he continues, “we invest much more time listening first to the needs and desires of our prospective acquisitions. We are better at planning meetings, setting Commitment Objectives, and asking great questions. Consequently, we not only understand the money part of the equation, we are far better at understanding the qualitative aspects of a deal.”

“We are big believers in Action Selling,” Slominski concludes. “We’re having the best year in the history of our company. We are much more confident that we can convince target companies that we are the right partner for them.”

For information about how to make sales training pay huge dividends, contact Action Selling at (800) 232-3485.

Discover how to achieve your true selling potential: “Action Selling: How to Sell Like a Professional (Even If You Think You Are One)”.