SELLING STRATEGIES by Maura Schreier-Fleming
Maura Schreier-Fleming is a professional salesperson, sales trainer, and motivational speaker. An engineer by training, she was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. With over 20 years of sales experience, she teaches the art and science of selling with a unique, hands-on perspective and a great deal of real-life insight. She can be reached at Maura@BestatSelling.com or 972.380.0200.
Want to sell more? You could if you had more time to sell instead of spending so much time on unproductive tasks that don’t contribute to the bottom line. Paperwork is one of those tasks. Here’s how to spend less time on your paperwork.
I Didn’t Know That Most salespeople have to submit proposals to customers. Tim Kormos is a corporate trainer who focuses on teaching individuals and corporations how to better use their Microsoft Office software. He has some ideas on how to make that process faster. He says, “Most people use 10% of the features and functions of their software. It’s because they don’t know about them.”
What’s Your Style? He says styles are one of those unused features. Styles are under the Home tab in Word 2007. In earlier versions, styles are on the formatting toolbar. Any time you are creating long documents, documents that are likely to be heavily edited, and documents that may form the basis for other documents you need to be using styles. Why? Styles can save you a lot of time when you have to make changes.
A style is a set of pre-defined formatting instructions that you can use repeatedly throughout the document. For example, headings have a style that could be centered, uppercase, bold, and a slightly larger font size.
Without styles, each time you need
to apply formatting to headings, you
would have to go through the entire
document to get the text the way you
want it. If you store the formatting
commands in a style, you can apply
that style any time you need it with-
out having to do all of the reformat-
ting. That’s a time saver.
Maintain Your Image Kormos recommends styles for another use. Consistency with customers is critical to maintain company credibility. If your customer correspondence is inconsistent with different font styles or sizes, then you lose credibility. That can hurt sales. Using styles in correspondence ensures that the documents you create are consistent, clean-looking documents. Documents are easy to read, not distractions for customers. Styles should be used for invoices, purchase orders and other company documents.
If you’re creating long proposals, a table of contents is essential. You’re going to have customers wanting to know what’s in the document you’ve created and how to get quickly to the pages they want to read. Your document is difficult to read without a table of contents. If you use styles, you can very quickly and easily create a table of contents.
Document template use is a feature based on styles. Use templates when you have documents that contain a lot of specialized formatting, but don’t always contain the same text. By using Word’s template feature, you can concentrate on the content of the document and leave the formatting up to the template.
Using templates also prevents you from overwriting your work. Templates are perfect for POs, invoices and other customer letters. The Microsoft Office website has many defined templates for work orders, quotes, and other business documents that you can download for free.
Recent versions of Word allow you to use mail merge capability to create letters or send out emails with personalized information. The 2007 Word version has a tab called mailing and a wizard to walk you through its function. Think about using it to make consistent follow-up with prospects much easier for you to do. Macros, creating watermarked documents and tracking features if you’re collaborating with others are some other features to consider using. You can easily Google these items for more information.
You make money when you sell something. Using Word more effectively will give you more time to sell. Those are words you can use to help you sell more
HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc., Houston, appointed Thibaud Hervy and Philippe Vezio as joint CEO’s of HCC Globalinternation-al operations, replacing R. Matthew Fairfield.
Hervy and Vezio joined HCC Global and its predecessor in 1999 and 2000, respectively.
Hervy supervised the international portfolio of business, leading the underwriting team, and Vezio ran the claims. From the Barcelona headquarters, they will oversee all of HCC Global’s international business for HCC Global’s Barcelona, London, and Miami offices.
Headquartered in Houston, HCC Insurance Holdings Inc. is an international specialty insurance group with offices across the United States and in the United Kingdom, Spain and Ireland.
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