Sales professionalism 7
Sales professionalism 7
By: Dr. M. Shehab
All rights reserved to the writer
The second step of sales call is planning and preparation. Salesperson or medical rep must study, analyze the prospect and his need according to information he gathered. He may use another sources of information to avoid false assumption about prospect.
The self-confidence of medical rep increased by acquisition of knowledge so you must increase your knowledge .You can prepare yourself to meet prospect in two sub-steps:
- Setting Call’s objective
- Planning the call
In setting the call’s objective medical rep should set call’s objective to qualify the prospect, to gather information or to make immediate sales. Call objective is: What medical rep or sales person wants customer to do as a result of sales call.
Objective must be SMART means Specific, Measurable, Ambitious or Attainable, Realistic, Time bound
Medical rep must put SMART objective for every sales call. For example he needs the physician to write the promoted product in certain indication with a certain quantity during a certain period matching with customer’s potentiality and his sales relation with customer. After sales call we will discuss the sales relationship building in details and how to grow and maintain it.
SMART objective is not only applied in sales it applies in all strategic planning and you can also apply it in your life & career progress.
Look at the basketball player what this man wants to do in every minute of the match. He is concerned in putting the ball inside the basket of the other team, his success measured by the number of goals he will achieve in certain period of time (match time). This is a challenge to him so he tries hard to achieve his objective.
The second sub-steps of planning and preparation is planning the call. Medical rep must detect best approach to meet the prospect that might be: personal visit and this is more common, a phone call or a letter. Salesperson must detect best time to meet the prospect because most of prospects are busy. Salesperson must analyze his product benefit well and select one selling point which match with prospect needs (will solve his problem). Salesperson analyzes the competitor’s product strength and weakness against his product to be able to compete with it during the call.
Sales person also prepares visual aids which he will use in his presentation. He can anticipate possible questions and objections will arise from customer. Salesperson should give thoughts to an overall sales strategy for the account.
Many medical reps visit their customers without aim run the sales call without objective and leave them without commitments. Be careful in this step of the call because if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
Finally; if you don’t know where you want to go how you can get there.
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