|
|
Posted on June 2nd, 2010
Do you differentiate between prospects or do you generalize to try and save time? Each prospect you are targeting has different pain points, and a key to sales is to delve deeper into each prospects precise problems. Don’t generalize these points by just saying they are working to improve the “efficiency” of their solution. What is it specifically that they are trying to improve? Is efficiency the issue because they have to go through a tedious process to enter data? Or is it that their current solution forces the user to do too much grunt work on their own? This is the insider sales information that you need to figure out, according to Doyle Slaton.
The more information you have about each prospect, the better you will meet their needs, and possibly uncover more opportunities for your sale. A good salesperson understands that each client’s needs are different. Taking the time to understand their unique pain points will allow you to market your product better. Take a step back, look at the problems they have, and then go through the attributes of your solution and try to match them up these pain points. If you focus on remedying the prospect’s problems instead of trying to sell them on something they might not care about, they will be much more likely to take a vested interest in your product.
Don’t just use a general sales pitch. Customize your conversation/pitch for each prospect in order to engage and interest them in what you are selling. If you have taken the time before the call to figure out how your product fits their problems, this should be easy. Show your prospect that your product or solution is the best one to meet their needs instead of telling them how great it is.
While this requires a little extra effort for each call, it will pay off in the form of many more closed deals. Prepare for each call, understand your prospect and their needs, and devise a plan of attack in the form of an outline that fits certain aspects of your product to their needs.
Posted on May 27th, 2010
While there are many schools of thought on how to sell effectively and properly, there are no standards for salesman that are set in stone. Nothing exists to set the bar for salesman because the field is so broad. However as information becomes more free flowing and selling becomes more sophisticated, a core set of principles or standards of selling can be outlined.
Geoffrey James of the bNET Sales Machine writes about such an outline in a recent post. The pyramid of sales standards, as he calls it, outlines selling standards from the ground up. This set of standards works particularly well because of the pyramid structure, where each layer relies on the foundation, or layers, below it. As a sales rep, it is paramount to have a solid foundation of sales activities and skills, such as making the right number of calls, managing prospects in an organized manner, etc. Having a weak foundation, or not handling the basics well, will cause your whole pyramid (your selling strategy and effectiveness as a sales rep) to crumble. In fact, you might not even reach the top of the pyramid (repeat business and ultimately being profitable) if you do not have a sturdy foundation of the essential sales skills.
James calls the second layer of the pyramid ‘Sales Skills’, or your skills in terms of how you handle the call, how you deal with prospects, and how and when you followup. While it is key to be organized and thoughtful in creating a solid foundation of sales activity, a large amount of effort is needed to improve you’re on the call and followup skills. Along with lots of practice, being prepared for the call is essential. If you take the time to do the research on your prospect’s company, you will be much better off when you actually make the call. Research will lead you to a better understanding of your prospect’s needs and how your solution can fill them. You also might find a news alert that gives you an opening: a new executive hire at your prospect’s company, or the company being given a large amount of funding, etc. Finding the right news event cannot only give you an advantage but can sometimes result in an easy sale. News may be hard to come by all the time, but the research will always pay off on some level.
However it is certain that you can better manage prospects and sales calls if you’re getting the latest and greatest updates about them all the time- whether it be from social networks, browsing the web etc. There are in fact platforms out there that can aggregate all this “hot” information for you, eliminating the majority of the time you spend researching so you can have more time to focus on closing the sale and improving the top levels of your “sales pyramid”. You can check out one of these platforms here.
Posted on May 25th, 2010
Is it true that money can only motivate a person so much? It is according to Dan Pink, an accomplished author and ex white house speech writer. Dan recently wrote a book and has given several speeches on motivation, or “Drive” as he calls it. A very cool animation of one of Dan’s speeches on “Drive” is available here.
To illustrate Dan’s thesis, let’s look at one of his examples: An MIT study. The study conducted by MIT used 3 levels of monetary incentive for people doing a variety of tasks. When it came to physical tasks, the results were predictable; the higher the level of incentive for the person, the better the person performed. This was also true for any task which was a basic “if I do this, then I get that” carrot and stick model. However when it came to any tasks that were even rudimentarily conceptual, it was found that the higher the incentive was for the individual, the worse the individual tended to perform.
Why might this be? As counter-intuitive as this may sound, Dan actually gives us a very reasonable answer as to why this is. If you give a person enough of an incentive, say a wad of cash, they will immediately be focused on the task at hand and trying hard to figure out the solution. When the answer to the problem is straightforward and logical, this is great. But when a bit of creativity is required to attain the solution, being extremely focused on the problem and trying to think through it as logically as possible is probably the wrong approach. As Dan puts it, a large incentive like this “is the enemy of creative problem solving… because your not picking up on the lateral signals.” Going back to the carrot and stick analogy, you can completely focus on the carrot but not see the other things around you, be it a pot of gold (other great idea) or an 18-wheeler speeding at you (other pitfalls).
How does this have any application to sales you might ask? Well if you think about it, you can apply this to your sales reps and especially to those mid level performers. The monetary incentive has always been there for them, but they continue to perform around an average level. They are either less motivated or not as adept at selling as the other reps. If it is a question of motivation, obviously money is not working. If it is a question of skill, well then should we not try and motivate them to learn and become better at what they do? Maybe a different method of incentive will allow them to see sales solutions more clearly.
Dan sites three factors that lead to better personal performance and engagement:
- Autonomy, or our desire to be self directed.
- Mastery, or our desire to get better at what we do.
- Purpose, which can be the best motivator of all. We as people are both purpose maximizers as well as profit maximizers. While money is all well and good, if you can provide a person with a sense of purpose, it may motivate them a whole lot more than a bonus or commission ever could.
Applying this to the world of sales, you can try to encourage your reps to master what they do. Challenge them by pointing out that this is what they do all day every day and they should take pride in it. Explain that even though they might not believe it, the job of a salesman is mostly autonomous, as they are on their own the majority of the time selling a product or service to every prospect and lead that they receive. That being said you and the other salesman are always there to assist them, which can lead into the common sense of purpose. The entire team is working together toward one goal (or one number), and it is the manager’s job to convey this sense of camaraderie and purpose. If you can successfully convey this, you might just find that this team environment provides enough encouragement and creative thinking for each rep to go above and beyond.
Posted on May 14th, 2010
As we move through this new era of Web 2.0, we experience changes in how many things in business now work. Beyond the look and feel of business, the free flowing river of information that is the web powers new trends, and even new rules, as to how business works. Chad Levitt recently posted about the new rules of B2B sales in his New Sales Economy blog. Here we see how the rules have changed: the lines between marketing and sales have blurred, so Chad urges salespeople to make themselves visible by publishing relevant content and promoting themselves through virtual channels content.
Chad is onto something here, and a few of his points really stand out to me. He mentions that the cause of this shift to sales 2.0 is web 2.0; meaning the increase in the flow of information that social media and the web has created is allowing for more informed customers. It also allows for more informed sellers; for example it is incredibly easy to look up a prospect on LinkedIn, get a sense for their business personality and then to look up the company they work for through information services or by simply googling it.
Chad also mentions that at the “center of all this change is content and how we interact with it”. If you have interesting blog posts, tweets that speak to your buyer’s needs, or some other sort of intriguing or valuable thought, you will drive a following and in turn drive more sales opportunities. However it is also important to monitor others content; if your buyers can find information about your product and about you, then you can certainly find information about some of your prospects and their companies. In addition, you can find all sorts of valuable tricks of the trade by searching for articles, blogs, etc. Since you are reading this blog I guess you already know that.
Beyond the necessary information on your prospects, monitoring social networking and/or business sites can also keep you up to date with client events and will keep you on top of certain activities that can trigger sales, such as a merger or management change. While it may prove time consuming to do this on your own, there are information tools that can help you do this (iSell for example).
Bottom line: Make yourself visible on the web through effective content and self promotion, and take advantage of existing content by searching social channels or through business information tools.
Posted on May 13th, 2010
It is common sense that letting leads sit for a few days is not a good practice and that the faster you follow up with a lead, the more likely you are to retain the prospect’s interest. If you can catch them within a day or two of opting in, they should probably still remember why they were interested in your product/solution in the first place. But what if you could preserve the enthusiasm that the prospect had when they first filled out your lead form or made an inquiry into your product?
While the practice of not letting leads go cold is widespread, increasing the speed at which the leads are contacted after they first appear may be more crucial than is currently perceived by the majority of sales and marketing individuals. A new study by Leads360 shows that there is a direct correlation between the time it takes to contact a lead and conversion rate. According to the study, 88% of all leads that eventually convert were called within the first 24 hours. Even more astonishing is this figure: “sales leads called within 60 seconds of being first generated online showed a fourfold (391%) advantage over average conversion rates”. While it may be a bit of a pipedream to think that you can always get to your leads within a minute of them popping up, this stat still shows the importance of getting to your leads quickly. The faster you can get to the leads, the more likely they are to still have your product top of mind, and the easier it will be to convert them into an opportunity.
That being said, don’t sacrifice speed for quality here. Don’t call the prospect if you aren’t fully prepared (for instance if you haven’t done any research into the prospects needs and how to position your solution to them appropriately). The fact that you called them within ten minutes of them opting in doesn’t mean squat if you have no idea who they are and why they might need your product. Take a few minutes to figure out who you’re talking to and what their needs are, and then make the call.
Posted on May 12th, 2010
Are you positioning your product or service as well as you can? Even if the answer is yes, read on and discover a facet of positioning that you may have missed. Positioning is loosely defined as “how a sales person presents a product or a service and how they compare it to other similar products [more...]
Posted on May 4th, 2010
We’ve all been in this situation at one time or another: you feel like you have your prospect hooked with your stellar presentation and follow-ups, but for some reason they aren’t responding to you anymore. I recently read a post in the SalesDog blog that addressed this exact problem called “They’re Just Not That in [more...]
Posted on April 29th, 2010
I was awed the other day when a coworker came up to me and started complaining about how he had to attend a seminar on the role of social media in sales prospecting. I told him to consider himself lucky, as most companies don’t go out of their way to keep their sales reps up [more...]
Posted on April 21st, 2010
Geoffrey James recently posted in the bNet Sales Machine blog about some of the qualities a “salesperson of the future” should possess. The post is a compilation of the best answers he received from CEOs and sales experts, some of which are right on track with our thinking.
One particular trait he highlights is the ability [more...]
Posted on April 9th, 2010
Pretend you’re buying a car. Two dealerships have the make and model that you are looking for, and you have gone through the necessary motions of negotiating the price down at both locations. Both salesmen are offering you the same options at relatively the same price. Which dealership are you going to buy from? Naturally [more...]
|
|
