sales experiments Archives - The Sales Experiment

February 19, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

Sales Requires Boldness

While sales doesn’t require that we be obnoxious, sales does require boldness.

We must gain commitments regularly. We have to stand firm in our convictions about our product or service and not always compromise on price because we get caught up in the emotions of the buying process.

We have to be confident that selling is, in and of itself, a service. We are helping people find solutions to problems they have, even problems they might not realize they have.

Here are a few ways that we can increase our winsome boldness:

Continual improvement: We must grow as salespersons and experts in our product. The more we know and understand, the more we realize we have something of value people need to know about.
Understanding our customers: In order to be bolder, we must learn about our clients. Niche out and go deep into understanding the needs of your clients and their day-to-day problems. If we can contextualize our offerings into our clients goals, then we can be more confident.
Practice gaining commitments: Gaining understanding at the end of each interaction as to next steps is imperative. Guiding our clients along a sales process until they either realize they don’t need what we offer or can make a confident decision to purchase is a huge help. Learning how to help them clarify their next decision is huge. Learning to ask for those next decisions will grow our boldness.

Salespeople get a bad rap for being too pushy and smarmy and sleazy. My experience is that many salespeople have gone the other direction. They’re too scared to ask for the next ‘yes’ or ‘no’. They’re too worried to put clients on the spot.

While we don’t need to pressure, we do need to make decisions clear for our clients. Offering prospects clear choices requires boldness. They want clarity. We need to confidently give them that clarity.

January 8, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

Starting New Habits by Creating Deadlines

I sat down with a colleague today and worked on setting up a personal sales and marketing plan for the next few months.

He had engaged me to assist him in creating a plan that he could implement to kick his sales efforts up a notch.

I’m not technically a sales trainer, but consuming content and attempting to implement said content has helped me to recognize patterns in me and in others.

I see that while many of us want change, we fail to create deadlines to reinforce and establish new habits.

Therefore, when I sat down with my colleague, I attempted to focus on developing a clear system.

The Importance of Committing to New Habits

My suggestion was to be systematic and habit-focused:

Decide on an ideal client profile.
Create a list of at least 100 potential prospects that fit said profile.
Commit to weekly prospecting appointments with self that are every bit as important to commit to as client appointments. Be violently committed to that time.
Use that time in a systematic way: make calls, intentionally research client organizations, write content.
Make note of ALL questions that current clients and prospects ask and have that running list handy.
Use those questions to create consistent emails, blog posts, mailers.
Reach out to that list of 100 as close to a monthly basis as possible as the relationships open up.

And I suggested that he commit to having the list of 100 list in a week and to have the first email scheduled to go out on a specific day, even if only one person is on his list on that day.

We settled on a specific date to send out that initial email, but I felt some hesitation. No list yet. Who is he going to email?

I said that it doesn’t matter. Put a couple current clients on your list and send something out.

Give yourself a deadline. Go ahead and write the email for that matter. Why not?

Change Is Simply The Accumulation of New Habits

This whole program will require developing new habits. The habit to schedule a weekly appointment or two solely dedicated to prospecting. The habit to make note of common questions for content fodder. The habit of sending regular emails out. The habit of taking time to map out potential clients’ organizations and finding connections.

All of these habits require intentionality. They require doing more than just popping on LinkedIn to send a connection request when the idea hits. They require more than just allowing client call-ins to determine who goes into the funnel.

To be better than average requires quality habits.

[Tweet “Quality habits don’t happen by accident. Crappy, useless habits happen by accident.”]

Quality habits happen by creating deadlines, taking a bit of time to plan, and scheduling them in the calendar. There really is no other way to build a new habit.

It’s consistent, daily action.

I hope that my colleague (and I, for that matter) will find some traction. I hope that there’ll be enough reward from forging ahead that the new habits will be reinforced.

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Recent Reading and Listening

Social Media Marketing Happy Hour 163: Fight Your Border Bullies

Dawn Marrs Ortiz and Traci Reuter are two of my new podcast best friends. I love short podcasts with big nuggets of info and experience-gained knowledge. This particular podcast discussed the idea of ‘border bullies’ – those folks who stand around the edge of your safe life and encourage you strongly NOT to push the envelope and slay your dragons and forge new territory and pursue passions (and all the other metaphors that indicate moving outside of your comfort zone).

3 Questions That Matter Most This Year – Jeb Blount, Sales Gravy Podcast

Jeb’s is another wonderfully short, power-packed podcast. This episode encourages you to answer these questions this year:

What do you want?
How do you plan to get it?
How bad do you want it?

It’s stuff you know, but more than likely you need to listen to it again. I, for one, have learned that it matters not how much I know. It matters what I do with what I know. As soon as ‘I’ve heard that before’ comes out of my mouth, the very next statement better be, ‘And I did something about it.’

Pinterest Smart Feed Is It Bad for Business? – Oh So Pinteresting Podcast with Cynthia Sanchez

I love Pinterest. I’m not all that consistent with it, but thanks to Ms. Sanchez, I’m getting better and better at it. I highly recommend her podcast and other content. She’s the go-to girl on the topic (in my humble opinion).

January 7, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

Be Genuinely Interested in Others

Today I had an appointment with a new client.

This client is doing some pretty amazing things for children and families across the country, so it was a perfect opportunity to practice this principle from Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People (affiliate link): Be Genuinely Interested in Others.

Truthfully, I struggle more with getting to the business point of things than I do with being genuinely interested in others.

Before I know it, I’m finding out about a prospect’s first jobs and what led them to start their current businesses or how they met their spouses and where the kids go to college.

That said, I don’t think you can go wrong by showing genuine interest… not that junk where you suggest that perhaps the prospective client likes to fish when you see four mounted large mouth bass around the office. That’s cheap sales tactics.

Being genuinely interested in someone and her story is completely different. It’s not really even about rapport-building or finding common ground. It’s about getting to the heart of things. Being interested helps you understand what is important to that person and how you can best serve her or him. More importantly, genuine interest is an amazing learning tool.

Practice genuine interest. It’s a skill. Once you start hearing the stories, you’ll be hooked. Most people have a huge treasure trove of experience or an interesting, unique perspective on things. We’d do well to learn to listen with some interest.

I admitted that it might actually get in the way of effective selling, but over time, I think it’ll pan out.

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