Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 218
February 13, 2018
Your Proposal Might Not Be Perfect
My goal as an instructor is to make sure you’re successful. When you write a one-page proposal it might not be perfect; however, it isn’t the end of the world. You’re not obligated to stick to the format I recommend. In fact, my format’s a little different than the one Patrick Reilly shares in the book, The One Page Proposal. Still, it’s pretty close.
When I take a look at a one-page proposal, I think of it as being divided into several sections:
Obviously, you want to put the goals up top. You want to make sure the title sings. It’s got to be the kind of headline that would make somebody pick up a newspaper and buy it.
The subtitle should include 3-4 benefits that would be recognized immediately by someone reading it. For example: “greater tenant security, energy savings, less maintenance, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, etc.”
The rationale for change should be compelling. Your proposal should push for a better situation: less vandalism, improved tenant comfort, better indoor air quality. Whatever it is, make it clear that these problems will be fixed!
The financial analysis is also key. If you were to fix these problems, what return would your prospect see over the lifetime of the investment? Do the financials make sense? How do rebates or incentives affect the numbers?
The status encourages your prospect to pursue the project by telling them how many steps have already been completed. Make it clear that you’re progressing in the right direction. For example, “We did a pilot.” “We analyzed the pricing and found it to be competitive.” “We’ve checked out the specifications and made sure they met the rebate or incentive eligibility requirements.”
The action step is the bottom line, one that is surprisingly missing in so many proposals. The purpose of a one-page proposal is to elicit action; however, it has to be simple. In fact, the Status and Action Step sections are two of the most defining differences between an executive summary and a true one-page proposal.
Writing a successful one-page proposal takes time, care and thorough research. The more you practice writing them the better you become at communicating your value to your prospects. Who doesn’t want to excel at that?
So even if you’re struggling to start or find yourself on the umpteenth draft, don’t despair. All you’re doing is sharpening your skills to become a better sales professional, and once you’ve mastered communicating in this concise and compelling fashion, you’ll be unstoppable.
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February 12, 2018
Being a True Original
Some of the greatest innovations of our time didn’t happen as easily as we remember. They were met with skepticism and resistance just like any other risky idea. When you’ve come up with an original idea or something that goes against the grain, you need to be prepared for pushback. And you’re going to need help.
One of the best guides out there is Adam Grant’s Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. It goes hand-in-hand with some of our teachings at Selling Energy, particularly when it comes to overcoming objections, motivating your prospects, and compiling material to state your case (i.e., a Success Story Archive™ and an Objections Archive™). The last thing a customer wants is to realize they are out of step or have been left behind! It’s up to you to make sure that you’re saying the right things and that they don’t pass up a good opportunity.
Selling efficiency can sometimes feel like you’re swimming upstream, but knowing how to present it will keep you ahead of the curve. If you’re looking for supplemental material to our Learning to S.E.E.: Sell Energy Effectively™ program, then Originals is a book for you.
Here is the summary on Amazon:
“With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
“Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and, how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor. The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo.”
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February 11, 2018
Weekly Recap, February 11, 2018
Tuesday: Learn creative new ways to save your prospects and customers time and effort.
Wednesday: Explore how “the building is the business” for income-producing properties.
Thursday: Discover how your positive attitude can win you sales.
Friday: Learn how “thinking outside the box” can make all the difference when it comes to communicating with a decision-maker.
Saturday: Read this article for better ways to network in 2018.
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February 10, 2018
Better Ways to Network
Networking is a necessary component of building your business and it’s the quickest way to forge relationships within the industry. Why is it important to network?
It’s a great way to build your reputation – you’ll be seen and known as consistent
It’s a great way to reconnect with people you already know and meet people you don’t know
It’s a good place to practice your elevator pitch
Strong relationships start with shared experiences
People are more relaxed and have their guard down
But how do grow your network in terms of quality, not quantity? According to an article published in FastCompany, “Let’s grab coffee” isn’t the most creative networking tactic out there. If you’re looking to deepen and expand your network, we recommend reading “Three Better Ways to Network in 2018.”
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February 9, 2018
Thinking Outside the Box
There are times in this industry when you find yourself having to think outside the box when it comes to getting the attention of a decision maker. You have the prospect in your sights and you know they could use an upgrade, but how can you get the right person to listen to you?
Let’s say you’re trying to change the lighting in a parking garage. One thing you could do is use a three-sentence solicitation to start a conversation. Perhaps something like this:
“As you may be aware, we’ve recently changed out the lighting for X, Y and Z Garages. Your garage is very similar, and the lighting equipment you’re currently using is the same technology we removed from all three of those structures. Those lighting retrofits enabled us to increase the lighting levels by an average of 20% while decreasing the lighting energy by 25%. If you’d be interested in exploring how we might extend this success to your parking garage on 123 Main Street, I’d be happy to have a conversation.”
In the meantime, you have researched which garages are most in need of an upgrade. You have researched the industry, particularly each prospect’s history and their competition. You’ve also looked into what is most important to their business. For example, you know that energy efficiency might not be a top priority for the owner of a garage. On the other hand, safety and protection from liability are high priorities.
However, sometimes getting that opportunity and capturing attention is the hardest part. Here are some examples of how you could get to a decision-maker with a more hands-on approach.
Don’t be afraid to ask for information from associates who are in a position to share. Approach the parking attendant and ask who the chief engineer and property manager are. He has this information in case of an emergency and is less of a gatekeeper than an assistant or receptionist. You can get this information for free.
Don’t shy away from using a prospect’s pain points as motivation. If you’re in a coastal community, you might use a spectral scanner to find out who is in violation of county ordinances that prohibit more than 2% blue frequency in their LED lights. These are the customers who need your help the most and all it takes to get the ball rolling is a little driving up and down to find them. After that, phoning the property manager with your findings should get their attention.
Make your case to someone who can act as an internal champion. You could say, “Look, I’m not going to lie to you. We have not done this installation as much as other companies, but that gives us absolutely unbridled enthusiasm to make sure that your installation is flawlessly implemented. When we do this, we’re going to actually take the time to write up a case study and feature your business as a leader in applying this technology.” Chances are they’ll go back to their manager and say, “Listen, they haven’t done a lot of installations, but they’re going to give us the kid gloves treatment and a discounted price, and there’s no way they’re going to allow this installation to be anything less than stellar. They’re even going to write up a case study on us. Frankly, I think we should go with these guys rather than the industry leader because I think we may get more out of the transaction.”
Going the extra mile can make all the difference when it comes to communicating with a decision-maker. The more you know about their concerns, the easier it will be to craft a message that captures their attention.
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February 8, 2018
Your Positive Attitude Can Win You Sales
While closing a sale is a great way to put yourself in the right mindset for selling, you don’t need to wait for success to experience the benefits of a positive mindset. Before you approach a prospect or client, rid your mind of any negative thoughts. Is the weather terrible? Was the commute excruciating? Did your flight get delayed? Whatever the case may be, think only about the good things in your life and visualize yourself closing the sale. If you ever walk into a meeting and think to yourself, “There’s no way I’m going to make this sale,” you might as well turn around and go home. Even if it seems like everything is going wrong, you can always be grateful that you have the opportunity to meet with a potential customer.
Remember also that your mindset affects not only your emotional state, but also the way you’re perceived by others. If you have negative thoughts, they’ll end up working their way into your conversation with your prospect. You’d be surprised how much of a subconscious effect negativity has on your prospect’s perception of you.
Make a conscious effort to prepare your mindset before you meet with a prospect. It takes time to form a habit; however, with diligence and practice, you’ll soon forget how to be anything but positive!
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February 7, 2018
The Building is the Business
What’s one of the first questions you need to ask yourself before attempting to sell an expense-reducing capital project? “Is the prospect an owner-occupant, a landlord, or a tenant?” Why? Because each of those parties has entirely different values and decision-making drivers.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an efficiency expert returning from the field after having met with an income-producing property owner, totally aghast at the outcome of the interaction. “We did all this work to show him how he could save so much energy in his building, and at the end of the presentation, all he said was that we should show the proposal to his tenants because they were the ones who would benefit!”
Income properties are prime targets for energy efficiency retrofits. Why? To use a phrase that my friend Bob Sauchelli of the US EPA coined when we worked together back in the ‘90s to roll out ENERGY STAR® for Commercial Real Estate: “The building is the business.” In an owner-occupied building, the owner must pay the payroll of everyone who works in that building. In an income property, the landlord is only responsible for a few heads – the engineers, the property manager, the porter, etc. He’s certainly not paying the payroll for everybody who occupies the building. That means that while payroll is likely the largest expense for the typical tenant, it’s likely one of the smallest for the typical landlord.
In fact, if you look at the Building Owners and Managers Association’s Experience Exchange Report, which summarizes operating expenses for a wide variety of building categories across the country each year, you’ll likely find that utilities (which admittedly covers more than just energy) is the typical landlord’s largest controllable operating expense. Notice that I say “controllable,” as opposed to “uncontrollable” (e.g., real estate taxes and insurance).
Keep in mind that just because utilities are the largest controllable operating expense, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the landlord pays that cost without recourse. In fact, in most buildings, some or all of that expense is redistributed to the tenants based on each tenant’s rentable square footage percentage or some other protocol.
It’s vital that you understand exactly how much of the utility cost the landlord is presently responsible for, and how the proposed energy measure would impact that number. That is where the gold nuggets are buried, particularly in cases where a lion’s share of the efficiency savings would inure to the benefit of the landlord, increasing not only his net operating income, but also his property’s appraised value.
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February 6, 2018
Time is Money
One of the biggest roadblocks in getting efficiency projects approved is time. Busy people place a high value on their time, and even the most compelling value proposition can be shot down if the project requires the buyer to invest too much time and effort.
One of our Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp graduates took this idea to heart and developed a business plan that would save his customers time and effort, making the decision to buy a no-brainer. He created a website that makes it easy to be in compliance with the city of San Francisco’s benchmarking ordinance, which requires buildings over a certain size to have their energy performance benchmarked and audited periodically. Businesses that don’t have a director of sustainability or know the first thing about benchmarking can go to the website, watch a short video, swipe their card, and streamline the whole process. On top of it all, he optimized the site so that it is extremely easy to find when searching the web for benchmarking services in San Francisco. As you can imagine, the venture has seen great success.
I encourage you all to think about creative new ways to save your prospects and customers time and effort. Combine that with a compelling value proposition and your prospects will have no reason not to buy.
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February 5, 2018
Exercising Your Influence
As sales professionals, we often see trends on what is deemed “popular” or “unpopular.” Sometimes we know the reasons; other times we’re not so sure. Could it be the trend itself or how we perceive it? What about how others perceive it?
The answers may lie in Jonah Berger’s Invisible Influence, which offers valuable insight on human behavior and marketing. Like many other industries, the energy efficiency industry is affected by trends. However, success ultimately boils down to human interest. Berger’s aim is to investigate how that interest is piqued and sustained.
This starts with ourselves. Most of us believe that we’re autonomous individuals without realizing our lives are affected by everyone else. Berger cites opposing examples concerning product development, media promotion and several case studies, and finally arrives at some pretty interesting conclusions:
We’re social animals and our identities are influenced by others’ preferences.
Our opinions are swayed by other peoples’ opinions, whether we like them or not.
The more attention is paid to something, the more likely we’ll want to see it (or buy it) ourselves.
The more familiar something is, the more we like it.
Making others pay attention to a product or offering is striking a balance between the familiar and the unknown.
So why should sales professionals find this book interesting? You’ll get to know yourself better, and you’ll begin noticing what it takes to influence others. At the end of the day, in Berger’s own words: “Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.”
Here is the summary from Amazon:
“Jonah Berger, the bestselling author of Contagious, explores the subtle, secret influences that affect the decisions we make—from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat—in his latest New York Times bestseller that is a ‘rare business book that’s both informative and enough fun to take to the beach’ (Fortune.com).
“If you’re like most people, you think your individual tastes and opinions drive your choices and behaviors. You wear a certain jacket because you liked how it looked. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong.
“Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous. Even strangers have an impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes toward a welfare policy shift if we’re told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same). But social influence doesn’t just lead us to do the same things as others. In some cases, we imitate others around us. But in other cases, we avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. We stop listening to a band because they go mainstream. We skip buying the minivan because we don’t want to look like a soccer mom.
“By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and learn how we can use this knowledge to exercise more control over our own behavior. In Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger is consistently entertaining, applying science to real life in surprising ways and explaining research through narrative. His book fascinates because it opens up the moving parts of a mysterious machine, allowing readers to watch them in action (Publishers Weekly).”
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February 4, 2018
Weekly Recap, February 4, 2018
Tuesday: Explore why it’s better to send proposals as an unlocked PDF.
Wednesday: Check out why the environmental angle might actually prove to be useful as long as it’s positioned properly.
Thursday: Learn how “connecting a few dots” will help your prospect realize just how urgently they need your proposed solution.
Friday: Discover how savings-to-investment ratio or SIR is one of the most effective metrics to use if you frame it the right way.
Saturday: Check out this article for a trick for writing emails faster.
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