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The Sales Call Introduction Unless you're an inside sales rep who sells primarily over the telephone, you'll find that the term sales call has nothing to do with making a telephone call. The phrase calling on your accounts almost always means going out to a place of business to begin or further the selling process. This chapter will give you a good overview of current sales theory as well as step-by-step advice on how to successfully move through the ad sales process. Some salespeople still believe that a successful approach involves launching into a sales pitch shortly after meeting the prospect, applying pressure, and many repeated "how about now?" visits. This, like anything, works sometimes, but creates bad feelings, raises a tremendous amount of resistance, and the presentations are never all that customized to meet the needs of the prospect. It also makes the ad rep's job stressful. By the late 1950's, a better way of selling was developed. That's when a professor came up with the concept of consultative, needs-based selling. IBM and Xerox first embraced this style of selling and they became huge successes with it. Now, well into the 21st century, almost every sales training program out there, and almost all books written on sales, use the consultative selling approach as the framework of their selling philosophy, simply because it works. Next: Consultative selling
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