Andy Paul's Blog, page 102

Are You Worth Your Prospects’ Time?

Are You Delivering Value On The Very First Call?

Very early in my sales career I made a cold call on the CEO of a large homebuilder in my territory. I was selling accounting systems for one of the larger computer companies. I was freshly trained in sales and computers, a newly minted sales rep ready to go out and conquer. Dark suit, white shirt, red power tie straightened and shoes shined, I marched into the lobby and asked the receptionist to see the CEO. I fully expected that I was going to be rebuffed so I was completely taken aback when the CEO, Bill, came into the lobby, shook my hand and escorted me back to his office.

Bill was very polite, courtly in his manners. In other words, he seemed completely old-school. Silver hair, nice tan, expensive 3-piece suit. He took me into his office, which was empty except for his massive wooden desk with a phone on it. He motioned for me to sit down opposite him. Bill asked for my business card. I reached over the aircraft carrier-sized surface of the desk and handed him my card. He took it, slowly turning it in his hands, examining it back and front, and laid it on the desk in front of him. “So, young man, what can I do for you?”

I took a deep breath and launched into my elevator pitch. Just as I had been trained to do. Bill let me talk for about a minute and then raised his hand for me to stop. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a stack of business cards bound with a rubber band that was literally two inches high. “These are all the computer salespeople that have been by my office in the last year.” He spread the cards across the top of his desk. There were dozens of cards from nearly every sales rep from my office as well as those of every competitor I could think of. “Tell me, how are you different or better than any of those folks?”

The answer was that I wasn’t. Yet.

Give Your Prospect A Reason To Talk With You

I learned later that Bill talked to nearly 50 salespeople just like me every year. Fifty salespeople were given an opportunity to speak right to the CEO on their first calls. He had simplified the task for every salesperson. There were no layers to go through, no BANT qualification to process because they were talking to the ultimate decision maker. And, yet, no seller had ever gotten past the first call with Bill.

Why? Because Bill was simply waiting for someone to give him a reason to buy. That reason was not going to be a new feature or its associated benefits. He was patiently waiting for a salesperson to deliver some value for him by providing a simple, cogent reason for him to invest his time and money in a new system. In short, he was waiting for a salesperson to step up and through the questions they ask or the insights they provide become the point of differentiation between similar products.

The lesson Bill taught me continues to grow in relevance for salespeople, both new and experienced. Today more than ever how you sell is as important as what you sell to create value, build trust and differentiate yourself from your competition. Bill had looked at the universe of product offerings that addressed his needs and yet he had never gone past the first call with a seller. It isn’t enough to show up at a prospect’s office or on a sales call and expect them to fall in love with your product or service solely based on its features and benefits. It also isn’t just about playing the numbers game. You could make a million cold calls but if you don’t give the prospect something of value that provides them with a return on the time they invested in you, then you are never going to get past the first call, let alone earn their business.

Ask Yourself The Question

Ask yourself a simple question before every prospecting call, sales call or existing account review. What value are you going to deliver to the buyer, what information are you going to provide in the form of challenging questions or business insights that will enable them to move at least one step forward in their buying process and allow the prospect to perceive that the time they invested in you was time well spent?

In the formative years of my career there weren’t as many resources available as there are today for salespeople to research industries, companies, individuals and to develop a better understanding of a prospect’s requirements for the products and services you sell. We didn’t have access to an Internet full of information to serve as a rich source of content and context to enable prospects to make more informed purchase decisions in a shorter time.

The approach I learned to create value on a first call was to become skilled at using stories to illustrate how my customers were using our products to manage and grow their businesses and the unique value our products provided in meeting their requirements. Through simple stories my prospects gained value by quickly being able to envision how they too would benefit by using our products. I had used their time wisely and earned the right to more of their time.

A little over a year and more than 50 salespeople later, I went to see Bill again. We started all over again. But this time with a different conclusion.

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Whose Job Is It To Care About You?

Who cares about you?

One of the frustrations I hear most frequently expressed by salespeople has to do with prospecting for new business and the challenge of finding the right person to talk to. One problem is that most organizations are opaque to outsiders. Even using social media and other sales enablement tools, it can be a challenge to identify the right person to talk to.

After all, who is the right person your should talk to?

I remember running into this issue early in my career when I was selling infrastructure networks to large Wall St firms. Our product touched many different departments within a company and while there was an executive with ultimate approval authority, what I needed to do was identify who I call the actual decision maker, who would also be the chief internal advocate for my product, was not always easy.

Simple Advice To Follow

My boss at the time gave me some simple advice: Find the person at a buyer that has the biggest vested interest in the value that your product or service provides. In other words, find the person who cares the most about the value that your product or service will provide.

This could be the person who has operational responsibility for your product. Or it could be a manager who is accountable for the P&L line item that encompasses your product or service. Or it could be a person who just cares the most, or is most passionate about the value your product or service provides.

Focus your value-based selling on this person and he or she will become your most passionate and effective internal advocate. For me, it wasn’t the same person in the same role from company to company. Sometimes it was someone in finance, sometimes it was someone in marketing, other times it was someone in network operations.

It requires some thought and extra effort to locate that person. If you’re operating on autopilot you’ll focus your efforts on the person with the same title or responsibility in every company you’re selling to. And, you’ll miss out on a lot of sales.

Who’s Accountable For Outcomes?

Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for the person who nominally makes the decision. Instead, you need to find the person who’s accountable for the outcomes provided by your product and service and the value it can create.

For example, I have one client that sells a low-priced service to large companies. Their average order size is roughly $150. But, one of their bigger customers orders about $250,000 a month from them. In this case they have more than 30 buyers on given day within this single customer. The decisions to purchase their service are at made multiple locations, in multiple divisions and multiple departments, at pretty low levels throughout the customer. In their case, they found that the person who cared the most about the value their service provided was Joanne, an executive assistant in the CEO’s office. (If they didn’t do a good job it was quickly visible at senior levels in the company.) Now if anyone in the customer organization wants to buy a service like my client’s they need to clear it with Joanne.

As a seller you have to learn how to accurately identify the Joanne within your customer’s hierarchy. Start by asking two questions of your initial contacts at a new prospect. What are the outcomes they expect from their investment in your product or service? And, who owns those outcomes? Whose job is it to care about the value created by your product or service?

At some level it is always someone’s job to care. As a seller, if you want to determine where to most effectively invest your sales time, you need to find out who that is.

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Sales Tip Video: Be the Solution to your Prospects’ Information Overload

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear a salesperson complain about how “noisy” the sales environment is. They bemoan the difficulty of breaking through the avalanche of information that fills the inboxes of their potential buyers. Their emails go unread. Their voice mails unheard and unreturned.

At the same time, I hear customers complain about the mass of undifferentiated sales messages that flood their inboxes, voice mail boxes, LinkedIn inboxes and Twitter streams. I’m the owner of a small business and my experience is no different than that of any other business person. Not including true spam that is filtered out, everyday, on average, I receive roughly four sales emails for every business email that requires my attention.

And, yet, despite this gloom and doom scenario, everyday salespeople are successfully getting through and starting productive conversations with new prospects. In fact, as I explain in today’s video, I believe that this “information overload” represents a great opportunity for the salespeople who are prepared to seize it.

Customers need your help to filter out the noise and find the value. Sellers who posses the skills, knowledge, expertise to ask the right questions, carefully listen to the answers and deliver information of value to the prospect, will differentiate themselves from their competition and command the attention of prospects. Being a dependable source of value provides a great service to the buyer by enabling them to more quickly navigate through their buying process to the point of making a decision.

Click below to learn how you can be part of the solution to your customers information overload.

 

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How to Avoid Becoming a Sales Commodity

Have you become a commodity?

By this, I don’t mean the products or services you sell. I mean you. Have you become a sales commodity?

There is an economic theory being advanced by an increasing number of analysts, which says that technology and science, unlike in the past, are no longer reliable drivers of economic advantage. Technological advances are so rapidly copied and widely adopted that their power to differentiate is on the wane.

The unabated pace of technological innovation, combined with the globalization of the economy and widespread and relatively inexpensive access to information and information technology, has lowered the barrier to entry to so many markets. New competitors rapidly flood markets and confront customers with an unprecedented array of choices.

This results in a hyper-competitive sales environment in which your buyers’ perceptions of the differences between your products/services and those of your competitors inevitably narrow. In the view of your prospects, virtually all vendors in a given market segment increasingly look alike.

This means that your products and services will rapidly be reduced to commodities that primarily compete on the basis of price. Unless…

Unless there is value delivered to the customer by the salesperson.

Neil Rackham, in his 1999 book Rethinking the Sales Force, discussed this challenge facing sellers today. Rackham suggested that a seller’s ability to control their pricing will depend in large part on their ability to deliver value to the buyer through their sales channel (i.e., how the product is sold.) The less value the customer perceives that they receive from the sales channel, the more they will focus on price as the primary differentiator between vendors.

In other words, if a salesperson can’t deliver value to the customer during their buying process, then he or she will also become an interchangeable commodity, just like the products and services they sell.

What will happen to your career if you become a commodity too? Nothing good.

Markets change. Business models change. Sales processes change. And so do the required knowledge, expertise and skills that salespeople need to possess to deliver differentiating value to their prospects. The challenge for salespeople is to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of becoming commodities as well; one seller indistinguishable from the next.

How do you prevent becoming a sales commodity? By investing your time, and money, in an effort to continually enhance your knowledge and skills in four areas that will empower you to deliver value to your prospects. This means transitioning yourself from a sales generalist to a sales specialist with differentiated knowledge and skills that can help buyers gather the information they need to quickly move from their initial interest to making an informed purchase decision.

1. Increase your domain expertise: Even as business and sales models change, industry knowledge is an increasingly valuable asset for salespeople. Research shows that buyers want to make faster decisions. This means that they need sellers to have a deep familiarity with their business, the problems that they face and the best solutions to these issues to help them more quickly navigate their buying process.

2. Elevate your product knowledge: To avoid becoming a commodity you have to move beyond a general understanding of your products and how they work to a specialized, detailed understanding of how they are used and create value for your customers.

3. Develop your sales skills: Invest your time and money to acquire the coaching, knowledge and training that will help you develop your sales skills. You can’t rely on your employer to provide all of this for you. Maintain a focus on mastering the fundamental sales skills (delivering value, being responsive, active listening, asking insightful questions) that will separate you from the herd of competitors.

4. Enhance your business acumen: This is the sum of all of the above. Combine your product knowledge, domain expertise and sales skills to provide the insights and value that will a) help your prospects gain a better understanding of the problems they are trying to solve, and b) shape their vision of a solution that creates greater value than they were able to conceptualize on their own.

Don’t settle for being a commodity. Set aside some time everyday to build the specialized knowledge and skills you need to ensure that you are always a source of value to your prospects.

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Sales Manager’s Video: 5 Simple Strategies To Reduce Your Sales Hiring Risk

Hiring new salespeople can be a risky proposition.

This is especially true for hiring managers in small and medium sized companies where hiring salespeople is often seen as a distraction or a necessary evil, rather than an opportunity to identify and bring on board the best possible candidates. As a result, they may not have in place the necessary structure and disciplined sales hiring processes to weed out unqualified candidates early and ensure that only the best candidates reach the interview stage.

In this video I provide five easy-to-use strategies that any manager, in any size company, should use to reliably screen, qualify, interview and verify the fit of candidates for their open sales positions. Incorporate these steps into your hiring process and you’ll reduce the risk of a bad sales hire (and the loss of cash, time and productivity that accompany it) and increase the chances of hiring salespeople who are more likely to have success selling your product or service.

Click below to watch!

 

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Sales Thought Leader Interview: Why Business Owners Need to Learn How to Sell

In this excerpt from my extended conversation with Jill Konrath, Jill tells why is is so important for small business owners to learn how to sell their own products and services. They can’t count on customers to mysteriously appear once they open their doors for business. They have to go out and proactively develop customers.

Jill talks about why it is normal for small business owners to feel trepidation and fear about the prospect of selling their product. Especially if they don’t have a background in sales. She tell the story about her own reluctance to tackle the task of selling when she first started her own company (ironic, no?)

But, there’s a reason why entrepreneurs start their own companies. It’s often to follow a passion for a particular product, service or lifestyle. And, they aren’t going to be able to see their dreams come true, if they can’t sell their product.

This is typical straight talk and great advice from Jill. Click on our pictures below to watch.

(And click here to learn where you can watch my entire conversation with Jill.)

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Three Everyday Sales Questions That Spur Action

“So, what’s happening with XYZ, Inc.? What’s the next step with this prospect?”

This is the question that many salespeople dread to hear from their managers.

What’s even worse is when your manager knows the answer and you don’t.

To avoid being caught in that situation you have continually think about the opportunities that you’re pursuing.

The most successful salespeople I know are always, at some level, ruminating about the deals they have in the works. They have a command of all the details of every sales opportunity and subconsciously let them tumble around in the back of their mind, searching for the winning strategy and tactics. They don’t have an “off” switch.

Three Everyday Sales Questions

Here are three sales questions that you should be answering every day about every qualified prospect you have in your pipeline. They will help eliminate any uncertainty you have about the next steps you should be taking:

What can I do for the customer right now, this minute, today, that will have the maximum sales value?
What can I do today that will create value for the customer and differentiate my company and product from the competition?
What information does the customer still require from me in order to make an informed purchase decision in the least time possible?

What makes selling so much fun is that it can be a challenging intellectual pursuit. It requires creativity and flexibility of thought to adapt sales strategies and tactics to real-time changing conditions.

Why is this important? Start with the fact that buying isn’t a linear process. You can create a detailed account plan for a sales opportunity, but your prospect’s buying process will necessarily change with each step they complete. You can have a plan, consisting of steps 1 through 6, that you believe will take you through the customer’s buying process. But then, as soon as the customer has completed step 1, the situation will probably change and make your plans moot.

Be Prepared for Changes

I wrote a while back about the need to think of the customer’s buying process in terms of Heisenberg’s famous principle of uncertainty. Heisenberg was able to prove through experimentation that the act of observing a process necessarily changes the outcome. I believe that the same is true in sales. The completion of each step in a customer’s buying process influences the customer’s requirements and decision criteria moving forward.

Salespeople who mentally lock away their customers at the end of the day probably won’t notice these changes. They will operate as if their sales cycle and their prospects’ buying cycles are static processes that proceed in a linear fashion from Point A to Point B. They’ll lose out to the salesperson who recognizes the vagaries and flexibility of those cycles and is keeping his or her sales process aligned with the buyer’s buying process by continually asking and answering the three questions above.

Sales is Not An Open-Book Test

A client of mine once had a salesperson named Ty. Ty was always operating in a reactive mode with his prospects. It seemed like he was always chasing his active opportunities instead of anticipating and leading them. The problem was that he didn’t store any details of his sales opportunities in his head. He was an avid user of the company’s CRM system, and every bit of information about his prospects disappeared from his mind the moment he updated their contact records. He couldn’t recall details about his accounts without referring to the CRM system, and he wondered why he was always playing catch-up with his prospects and customers. Ty thought sales was an open-book test. For top performers, it doesn’t work that way.

It takes just three thoughts to paint a clear picture of what you need to do next to help your customers move closer to making a decision.

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Salespeople Have to Invest Their Own Money in Their Own Sales Success

How much are you investing in your own sales success?

Take a second and add up how much of your own money that you invested in 2014 in your own sales education. How many dollars (or Euros or whatever currency you use) of your own money did you spend to learn something new about sales that could improve your performance and enhance your sales skills? How many sales books did you purchase (and actually read?) Did you hire a sales coach? Attend a sales conference? Or take an online class to learn more about how to sell to your customers?

If the total amount that you invested in your own sales success doesn’t equal 1% of your total compensation in 2014, then you have to ask yourself a single, difficult question: ‘Am I really serious about my sales career?’

How Much Are You Prepared to Invest?

In working with thousands of salespeople over the course of my work, what I’ve witnessed is that the most successful salespeople are continually challenging themselves by expanding the boundaries of their knowledge about sales, sales skills and their customers. Through my own informal research what I have found is that the most consistently successful sales reps are those who invest their own money in their continuing sales education, with top performers routinely investing 1% or more of their total pay in self-improvement

Too many salespeople seem content to wait for their employers to provide some sales training a few times a year. They think that it is solely their employer’s responsibility to train them to master their craft. Unfortunately, that is a losing strategy. By its very nature, sales is an entrepreneurial profession. It rewards those who take risks and those who have the discipline to constantly work on self-improvement.

For example, would you invest $17.95 per month for the chance to boost your commissions by 20%? Or, to earn an additional $1,000 in 2015? Of course, you would. $17.95 to earn $1,000? It’s a no-brainer. $17.95 is nothing. It’s the price of three fancy coffees from your favorite coffee house. It’s about $.60 per day.

What is significant about $17.95? $17.95 is roughly the average price of a sales book purchased on Amazon. There are dozens of extremely useful books on sales published every year that offer new insights and strategies for becoming a better salesperson. Would you set aside one hour per week to read one sales book per month if you could learn new strategies and techniques that you could put to use in your selling to help you win more orders and earn more money? Of course you would. Which raises the question: why aren’t you?

Would You Sacrifice One Hour of TV Watching?

Which leads us to another important question about investing in your future: What are you prepared to sacrifice in order to succeed? Would you be willing to forego watching The Bachelor, or any other completely forgettable TV show for that matter, to give yourself an additional 60 minutes of free time each week to read a sales book (if it would increase your chances of earning more money?)

Take the first step. Turn off your TV and invest some time to explore the universe of free sales resources available for sales people that can help boost your career. Read a few sales blogs everyday, attend free sales skills webinars once per month, watch YouTube videos about sales, listen to a weekly sales podcast (there are hundreds) or download and read an eBook, about sales. I belong a group of roughly 40 sales experts and sales authors. We openly share all of the free content from these incredible sales leaders with our own audiences. Just follow me on Twitter (@zerotimeselling) and you’ll get access to all of the great content that these sales thought leaders and experts provide.

Through your research identify two or three sales experts who you feel will challenge you to look at your selling from a different perspective and who will challenge you to break out of your mold and try something new. Investigate their available paid resources like sales books, online classes, mastermind groups and sales coaches.

Then commit your time and money to put some skin in the game. Start small. Buy a sales book and read it. Or download the audio version and listen to it in your car. Put your own time and money at risk and I guarantee that you’ll instantly be more committed to wringing the maximum value out of that investment.

Because, if you won’t invest $17.95 every month to boost your sales, and your commissions, then you’re not really serious about succeeding in sales.

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Sales Thought Leader Interview: The Importance of Being a Specialist vs. a Generalist

Are you a specialist or a generalist?

Here’s another video from my series of Sales Thought Leader Interviews. Click below to watch an excerpt from my in-depth conversation with author and speaker, Mark Hunter (also known as The Sales Hunter.)

In this video we talk about the importance of salespeople acquiring more in-depth knowledge about the products they sell and the customers they serve if they want to consistently amp up their sales. Here are some key points raised by Mark:

1. With so much information available online, Mark rightly notes that a salesperson has to be “better than the Internet.” In other words, salespeople have to meet the challenge of being able to deliver more value to the prospect, more insights and wisdom, than they can find online.

2. Salespeople need the knowledge to be able ask probing questions that cause the prospect to stop and think.

3. In the spirit of the recent Super Bowl, Mark draws a great analogy of top salespeople to professional football players. It’s near the end. Be sure to check it out.

It’s all great advice that you need to hear. Click on our smiling faces below to watch and learn now!

(To learn how to view my entire conversation with Mark, click here.)

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Hire a Sales Team. Not Individuals.

When you have an opening in sales, do you hire a sales person or a member of a sales team?

Are you still hiring to a specific “type,” each one a clone of the other? Is your sales organization just a collection of sales free agents each pursuing their individual goals?

Or, do you have a sales “team?”

A Sales Team Shortens The Learning Curve of New Reps

As a manager you have to look at the challenge of building a sales team like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. A successful sales team is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a collection of individuals who possess complementary skill sets and who view themselves, first and foremost, as members of a team.

This is especially important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that typically have fewer resources, less formal sales structures and often don’t have in place consistent processes for the on-boarding and training of new salespeople. How are your new salespeople going to get up to speed and productive as quickly as possible?

You could invest in a formal training program. It can be a valuable resource to have available for your reps. But studies show that much of structured training is quickly forgotten. It is estimated that people forget as much as 90% of what they learned in a classroom training environment within 30 days.

So, how do new sales people learn the ropes, and how do they learn to successfully sell your product or service? They could read a book. Or attend a webinar. But the most effective way for new reps to learn is by watching others on your sales team and patterning their actions after the successful sales reps. They seeking out mentoring by more experienced members of the team, they participate in calls and go on customer visits with senior reps to see how they sell. But this mentoring and collaboration won’t happen if everyone on your sales team is pre-occupied with looking out for #1.

The Importance of Mentoring

In my first sales job I learned from watching and listening to Gary. Gary was the first really good salesperson I ever met. He had a disciplined prospecting process he followed and was knocking it out of the park. He wasn’t a classic mentor in the sense that he didn’t actively reach out to help newbies like me. But he was more than happy to share his methods and give feedback and advice if you demonstrated the initiative to approach him and ask for his assistance. Which I did. Looking back, I estimated that Gary’s advice shaved at least six months off of my learning curve in this new profession (which was huge because it helped me qualify for President’s Club in my first year.)

Gary didn’t have to spend his time to help me. It certainly took time away from his selling. But, by inclination, he was someone who wanted to help. (He also knew that what went around came around. As I became a competent, trusted sales rep, then Gary was comfortable having me look after his active prospects while he went on vacation.)

Your sales team should be like a family with 10 kids. Ask each one, as an adult, who had the biggest influence on their development as a kid and they are just as likely to mention a sibling as they are a parent. That is what you are striving for with your sales team. Certainly salespeople are influenced by great managers, but much of their sales learning comes from the examples set by their peers and attempts to mimic their behaviors with customers to attain the same results.

What’s Your Hiring Plan?

What does this mean for the hiring sales manager, especially in an SMB?

It means that before you hire, you need to carefully plan for the composition of your sales team. Instead of every rep matching a certain profile in a personality assessment, think strategically about the range of customer types that you sell to. Then, write down a list of the mix of skills, experience, expertise, and personalities that will create the most productive selling environment for your company.

Because the issue is not only about how a team environment accelerates the development of new salespeople, sharing of best practices and people working collaboratively to maximize the productivity of the team. It is also about how you sell and who you sell to. Because, if everyone you hire is the same, who is going to handle the prospects that are different?

I work with a client who had strong opinions about the type of salesperson he wanted to hire. And, it worked. For a while. But then their market started to shift (as markets invariably do) and they didn’t change how, and who, they hired to adapt to this new reality. One day they woke up and realized that they didn’t have the skills, experience or expertise in place on the sales team to effectively develop and sell new prospects. Suddenly, there were gaps in their capabilities that left them vulnerable to competition. (And, that’s when I got their call.)

Before you make that next sales hire, take a step back and create a hiring plan that factors in where your markets are headed and what that will mean about the type of customers that you will sell to and the types of skills and experience you’ll need on your sales team in order to sell to them. Be sure to also factor in your requirements for team players who will willingly share best practices and mentor others on your sales team. Then, instead of hiring an individual, hire a member of the team.

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