Are you tired of using the same old sales techniques that fail to close deals and bring in new clients?
As a sales professional, it can be soul-destroying to feel stuck. Day in and day out you’re hustling, but you get ghosted, your opportunities stall, and your goals just keep getting higher and higher. You want to step up your game, but you don’t know how. .
The sales landscape is shifting. It’s crucial to continuously evolve and master new sales techniques to stay ahead of the competition.
I have great news for you.
In this article, I’ll share eight advanced selling techniques you should focus on mastering this year.
From guiding the process to creating paradigm shifts, each technique is designed to help you up your sales game, overcome objections, and tackle complex negotiations confidently.
But that's not all. With my insights, you can implement each technique easily and avoid common mistakes. By the end of this article, you'll feel inspired, empowered, and ready to start closing bigger deals and navigating complex sales like a pro.
Why You Need to Master Advanced Selling Techniques
Before we get into the details of my top eight advanced selling techniques you need to master, let’s discuss the advantages of learning advanced sales techniques. While it is vital to get your foundational skills set, you must go beyond the basics of prospecting and handling objections if you want to crush your targets.
Advanced sales training builds on those critical fundamentals by adding additional B2B sales strategies and techniques. But, it's important to note that many of these advanced selling techniques require you to look inward. You’ll need to master empathy, active listening, and a willingness to provide massive value before selling. These skills are essential for modern B2B sales success and will help you build stronger relationships with your clients.
Related Read: 5 Advanced Sales Training Programs for Next-Level Sales Pros
So why have I chosen these specific techniques to help you level up? Simply put, they are what you need to succeed in sales today. With a competitive market and more informed buyers, it's crucial to have a deep understanding of your prospects' needs and to build trust with them. By mastering the advanced sales skills we’ll discuss in this post, you'll be able to differentiate yourself from the competition and close more deals.
1. Guide the Process
My first advanced selling technique is all about taking control of the process. You need to guide your client's buyer's journey. Because you sell every day and your client buys on rare occasions, you are the expert here. Leverage that fact.
If you find that your opportunities consistently stall after the first one or two meetings, it’s because you are allowing the client to lead the sales process. When you do this, it signals two things.
- You aren’t confident enough in your solution to take initiative. Think about it. If you believed that your solution would deliver dramatic results for your client, would you take no for an answer? No. You would call them every single day until they agreed to use your solution so that they could experience those results. People who believe things actively try to convert other people to their cause. If you’re letting weeks go by without trying to move the process forward, you’re signaling that you don’t believe that your solution will get your prospect results.
- That you are in the weaker position (I call this being One-Down). When you let the client lead the sales process, you lose your authority, negotiating power, and ability to provide anything of value in your interactions.
Be assertive without being pushy. You can do this by engaging in advanced discovery processes like establishing clear objectives, developing valuable insights, sharing insights, and more.
Related Read: How to Be Professionally Persistent
When you succeed in guiding the process, you can expect your client to prefer to buy from you.
2. Communicate Your Business Acumen
People want to work with people who understand the business world. You need to communicate your business acumen. Not just about your business, but about your industry as a whole. Demonstrate that you understand the factors affecting their decisions and the emerging trends in their market. After all, you are responsible for ensuring your contacts improve their results. Business acumen, when communicated, creates the confidence that causes buyers to move forward through your sales process.
To communicate your business acumen, you’ll want to listen before you, not simply to react when your prospect is speaking. Manage the conversation here by considering each point your prospect makes, then relaying those points with additional insights demonstrating your knowledge and the value you can provide. This also requires you to do your homework. As much as possible, you should know (and have answers to) all of the questions your prospect will ask. The more readily you can assuage their anxieties, the more clearly you will demonstrate your business acumen.
3. Create a Paradigm Shift
Next, let’s talk about paradigm shifts. What is a paradigm shift? This is what occurs when a client or prospect changes the way they think about a particular subject or problem. Instead of approaching things the way they always have, your prospect will begin to see things in a new and different way after a paradigm shift.
Not a lot of salespeople know what this means, let alone how to help their client recognize the changes since the last time they bought what you sell. When you can help them see the truth of their predicament, you can cause them to change. Instead of letting the question “why us?” or “why my solution?” guide your conversations, instead focus on a more foundational question: “why change?”
Having a strong business acumen will help you immensely here. You can’t change someone’s perspective if you don’t understand why they believe the things they believe. You must know their industry better than they do and be able to confidently tell them “If you don’t do [desired change], [undesirable result] will happen because of [industry trend 1], [industry trend 2], [industry trend 3].”
Your prospects don’t want to change. Change is hard, but you have to show them that the pain of NOT changing is much greater than the pain of change. If you can help your contacts break free from their past and pursue a different and better future, they will be more likely to trust you and seriously consider your solution.
4. Learn to Navigate Gatekeepers
In a time when you are almost certain to need consensus, navigating the gatekeepers and stakeholders will allow you to find the influencers and bring them into the conversation before they fall too far behind to be able to support your initiative.
You’ll want to conduct extensive research to understand the ins and outs of how your prospect's business is faring, the solutions they’re using right now, and the clientele they service. This research process will also help you learn to identify gatekeepers and master the essentials of communicating with them.
Project an executive presence by asking for what you need directly, demonstrating your value, and addressing their primary concerns. Once you’ve proven yourself to be worth their time, you’ll have no trouble getting past the gatekeepers.
5. Practice Consultative Selling
Next, you’ll want to act as an advisor by engaging in consultative selling. What does consultative selling mean? When you are consultative, it means you provice counsel, advice, and recommendations.
Related Read: Relationship Selling vs Consultative Selling
By giving your clients advice and guidance, you ensure they succeed, causing them to believe you are different from the others salespeople you are certain to vanquish.
To build trust with your prospects, you must be an expert in your field and understand your product and, more importantly their industry, inside and out.
6. Master Other-Orientation
If you want to succeed in the modern sales environment, you can’t enter interactions thinking “me, me, me!”
You need to convey interest in your customer’s needs instead. Conduct advanced discovery processes and focus all your language and negotiation tactics around providing the prospect with what they need.
Try this exercise. Next time you have a meeting, you’re not allowed to talk about your company or your product. At all. What would you say to make that meeting worth your prospect’s time? What would you talk about? How would you demonstrate value and knowledgeability?
The truth is, no one cares about your company, or your product, or you. They care about what your company or your product or you can do for them.
If you can demonstrate and communicate the results that you will get for your prospect, you will have unlocked the secret to selling anything to anyone - “what’s in it for me?”
7. Explore Social Selling
This is the first advanced sales tip that I’ll provide with a word of caution. You don’t want to ignore social selling altogether… but you shouldn’t rely on it too heavily, either. Social selling allows you to create value or establish yourself as a thought leader before you make direct contact with your prospects.
When used strategically, social channels are a great way of establishing stronger personal connections with prospective clients.
A word of caution here, the rules of selling person-to-person still apply. Every day, I get copy-paste cold outreach messages on social media trying to sell me on a company or a product. Put the same amount of effort into crafting your social selling messages as you would in preparation for a live meeting.
If you follow the same basic principles for social selling as you would for live selling, social selling can be an excellent tool in your tool belt. However, I would take a phone call over an email any day of the week.
8. Level 4 Value Creation
The best sales reps understand that no one is really looking to buy a drill—they want the hole. The drill is just the means to that end. When you start with the client's strategic outcome, you will find that decision-makers give you their time.
By starting with the results your client needs, your conversation is about the benefits they can see from shifting their approach in general. You should discuss your solution only once the prospect sees the benefits of the insights you’ve provided. A good rule of thumb here is, never pitch to someone who isn’t already sold. If you’re not 100% confident that they will say yes, don’t ask them to. Keep doing your homework and providing value until they are ready.
Use Advanced Selling Techniques to Gain Ground
It's now more crucial than ever to master advanced selling techniques. The tactics discussed in this post can help you navigate complex negotiations and close bigger deals. When you begin to apply these techniques in your day-to-day work, you’ll be able to crush the competition and close more deals.
However, these techniques are just the beginning of your sales growth journey. If you're ready to take your sales performance to the next level, you need consistent, guided sales training led by a seasoned expert.
In my Sales Accelerator, you'll have the opportunity to learn new skills and get hands-on experience with the latest sales techniques. This program is designed to help you master the skills you need to succeed in today's competitive sales landscape. So, whether you're a seasoned sales professional or just starting, our program can help you achieve your goals and take your career to the next level.
Check out the Sales Accelerator today.
