Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 165

Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It

When you’re in a sales situation there are times when the stakes seem pretty high. What if you could learn from someone who has been involved in negotiations where the stakes couldn’t be higher? In this case, we aren’t talking about saving money, but saving lives.

Weekly Recap, October 6, 2019

Here are our favorite sales-enhancing tips from this week's Selling Energy Blogs...

Seizing A Networking Moment

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What’s Your Focus?

When you approach a prospect with a new project, you have a very limited amount of time to convince them that your product or service is a worthy investment of their time and money. For this reason, it’s vital that you decide ahead of time what you’re going to focus the conversation on. You can introduce your product or service in terms of its features, benefits, and/or value. Which of these should you focus on? Which of these is most likely to capture the attention of your prospect? Let’s use an energy management system as an example:

Investor Relations Research

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while or have taken any of my sales-focused classes have probably heard me talk about industry research and the importance of becoming an expert in your prospects’ businesses. Reading trade publications, attending conferences, and researching company history are great ways to prep for a first meeting and to deliver the highest value proposition to a new prospect.

Who Really Sells a Multifamily Energy Project?

A casual observer would assume that “vendors” and “contractors” sell energy efficiency projects to multifamily building owners.  In reality, the energy managers and other internal champions connected to those buildings wind up doing most of the “selling.”  They’re the ones who lobby to gain consensus among their peers in property management, facilities and engineering; persuade senior management to prioritize the initiative; and, ultimately convince capital budgeting to approve the needed funds.  And if the tenants’ cooperation is needed to make the proposed initiative a success, those tenants need to be sold on the idea as well.

Deliver What They Want

There are countless reasons someone might be interested in energy efficiency. If you can find out exactly why your prospect is considering an efficiency project, you’ll be better positioned to prevail. I’d like to share a story that one of our Selling Energy Boot Camp graduates (we’ll call her Kelly) shared with me. It exemplifies the value of knowing your prospect’s motives and adapting your sales approach accordingly.

What Makes a Manager?

Regardless of what you do for a living, there are plenty of stories about “good managers” and “bad managers.”  But here’s the question... What exactly does a manager do anyway? Why is it a coveted position on the ladder? What does the job entail?

Weekly Recap, September 29, 2019

Here are our favorite sales-enhancing tips from this week's Selling Energy Blogs...

The Five-Minute Email

Most sales professionals find themselves fighting a never-ending tide of email.  It can eat up your time and take a large bite out of your productivity, so managing the time spent on it can be overwhelming.  How can you keep it from taking over your day-to-day workload?