What we know about the ability of sales people to absorb and then deliver on a sales process is regulated by the capacity of each individual to consciously recall the steps of the process during a discussion with a prospective customer.
What is significant is the number of pieces of information the sales person is expected to retain and recall. Chunking into sections, along the lines of the 4 or 5 steps described above, is a good starting point. George Miller identified that most people can consciously absorb and retain between 5 and 9 pieces of information at any given time; hence the description ‘7, plus or minus 2’. The safe bet is to go no more than 5. A sales process that contains more than 5 component parts is asking for trouble!
Most big-ticket retailers have a sales process of some kind. It will vary from sector to sector, and from company to company, but the truth is, there are only so many ways of skinning the sales process cat.
The 5-Step Selling Model™ is fairly standard in big- ticket retail. The language used in each step may differ, and there will sometimes be an internally devised acronym somewhere in the mix, but essentially this is the most common framework of behaviours forming the sales process…
© adapted from Meerkat Selling™, Nick Drake-Knight
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