Selling no matter how well your business is doing selling will always be at the core of your business success. Mastering your sales skills ensures that those hard won potential customers are quickly changed to actual customers. Here are some selling skills to help you.

* Answer the question - "what is in it for me?" People buy to satisfy a need, a worry, because everyone else has it, or because they are curious about the product. Make sure that these questions are answered in your marketing and advertising as well as in any sales presentation.

* Prepare yourself. Get together your presentation as well as any potentional questions you may be asked. Make sure that you have examples, pictures, samples etc.

* Qualify your prospect - make sure that they are the decision maker and can afford the potential purchase. Also ensure that they are in your potential market - selling ice to Eskimos is for the expert of the foolish!

* Develop a relationship with your potential customers. People like to buy from friends and those that they trust.

* Decide on your pricing structure and build in some bonuses or discounts that you can offer during the presentation. Most people expect them.

* Make the purchase process easy. Make sure that you have any forms and contracts available. Don't surround your prospect with red tape or make it difficult to contact your company. Make the second and subsequent purchases even easier. Put a reorder form

* Ask for feedback, directly or indirectly during your presentation and after the sale. AND learn from it.

* Make the whole sales process fun for both your customer and for you.

Good luck with your sales.

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee’s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust – which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.