General

Learn to manage your sales opportunities and don't let foreign trade orders slip away! Some foreign trade salesmen are keen on developing customers, but they cannot pay enough attention to follow-up tracking. The result is that the development is very difficult, but in the later stage, due to poor tracking, foreign trade order opportunities often sneak away inexplicably.

As the saying goes, "one bird in the hand is better than two birds in the forest." Foreign trade salesmen also need to learn to manage sales opportunities, learn to allocate energy, and focus their energy on those foreign trade orders that are almost in hand.

I often say that if you compare emails in customer communication to football, it's not difficult for a salesperson to constantly kick back the balls that customers have kicked in. Just empty your inbox every day and don't create a backlog. The difficulty is kicking the ball to the client, but also getting him to kick it back, especially if you are busy and the client has a lot of balls on their feet. Can you still get the ball back at this time?

Enthusiastic about development, but not good at tracking. "I used to make such mistakes because I knew how to handle the ball when it was under my feet, but it was easy to 'forget' when it wasn't under my feet.".

Covey divides tasks into four segments using the two dimensions of urgency and importance. We often pay sufficient attention to urgent matters, even if some may not be so important. For our customers, why are we not like this? It's common to spend time emptying your inbox, even if some emails aren't that important. Some particularly important opportunity clues are easy to "forget" because our email was sent and the customer didn't respond.

Learn to manage your sales opportunities and don't let foreign trade orders slip away! According to the different stages of customers, we can divide them into: potential customers (cold prospects), inquiry customers, opportunity customers, PI customers, and transaction customers.

"We used an Excel table to manage these opportunities, and at first the salesperson was very uncomfortable and felt troublesome.". Later, I explained clearly to them that once these target customers enter your sight, they cannot escape. This is often a golden pyramid structure. Think about how many potential customers need to develop an inquiry customer, and then how many inquiry customers tell you, "I want to order"? Then how many of these customers can finally negotiate with each other, signing the PI, and even if the PI is signed, will 100% of the payment be executed?

So I told the salesperson that the customer value at the top of the pyramid is higher, and the probability of success is higher. Therefore, our work should be done from top to bottom. First, take a look at the maintenance of customers who have orders in hand and old customers, then customers who have signed a PI but have not yet paid, then customers who have recently ordered, then customers who have recently inquired, and finally, develop new customers.

From the salesperson's Excel table management and the structure of the Golden Tower, I can find many problems.

For example, some people send a lot of cold prospects, make a lot of inquiries, but have few PIs, indicating that this salesperson has invested a lot of energy in development, but seems to have some deficiencies in follow-up tracking.

On the contrary, some people have many PIs and opportunities, but their inquiries are few, presenting an inverted triangle shape. At this time, salespeople need to be vigilant and increase their development efforts, otherwise the opportunities above the Golden Tower will be converted and the old capital will be exhausted, resulting in insufficient stamina. At this time, salespeople need to increase their development efforts and maintain stamina.

From the slope of this golden tower, the conversion rate of the salesperson can also be quickly analyzed.

For example, some salespeople have a very good conversion rate of inquiries, but when it comes to the opportunity stage, conversion to PI is relatively low. It may indicate that the salesperson has done a good job in the early stage of development, lacks the ability to negotiate, or needs to strengthen their transaction ability in a competitive environment, so targeted guidance can be provided.

Even for customers who have signed a PI, the final payment rate for different business representatives is different. Some salespeople may even reach 100%, while others may only have 50%. After analysis, it was found that these salesmen had some bad habits of overselling, or were not confident. After the customer signed the PI, they also promoted the customer, saying things they shouldn't have said, or saying negative hints, which caused the customer to lose confidence or trust.

Learn to manage your sales opportunities and don't let foreign trade orders slip away! Sales with a good turnover rate tend to be salespeople who are positive, optimistic, enthusiastic, and always think about things in the right direction, even if their English proficiency is average. This is very consistent with what I often say: The best transaction technique is "default transaction", which means that you always think that the customer wants to order, so you are always giving positive hints.