Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 222

Challenger Selling

Most people think sales is all about forming strong relationships with prospects. If you do that, they’re going to want to buy from you, right?  Not so fast.  While I wouldn’t disagree that relationship-building is closely related to successful selling, I believe that relationships are the result of, rather than the cause of, successful selling.

When you first meet a prospect, I think that rapport-building is more important than relationship-building.  You’re probably wondering, what the heck is the difference between rapport-building and relationship-building?  Think about it.  You can have good rapport without necessarily having a strong relationship with your prospect, right?  Rapport is simply the conduit for effective communication.  It suggests trust and mutual respect.  It allows you to deliver your message effectively.

For the sake of analogy, consider how an effective personal trainer produces results for his/her client. The client has a fitness-related goal. The personal trainer is responsible for facilitating the achievement of that goal. Unless the client understands and trusts the trainer, that end goal will remain elusive. In such a situation, while “rapport” is necessary, an actual “relationship” is not. Rapport allows the personal trainer to push his or her client beyond the comfort zone. Without a little stress and that extra push, the client would not likely achieve the fitness goal.

So how does this analogy relate to sales? A salesperson can aim to be a relationship-builder – giving his prospect complimentary hockey tickets and the like – yet a lot of business will still go to a competing vendor. Why?  Is the other vendor offering more impressive gifts?

Maybe his prospect actually has more respect for a competitor’s offerings or approach?  Could it be that competitor has the courage to take a “Challenger Selling” approach – laying the foundation for good rapport by listening intently to what the prospect thinks he wants or needs, and then redirecting the conversation to what the sales professional knows will produce superior results for the prospect?

Complimentary hockey tickets or similar “gifts” don’t make your prospect’s business more competitive, profitable or valuable.  Taking the time to translate your offering’s benefits so that they can be measured using yardsticks the prospect is already using to measure his or her success… now THAT’S a great way to motivate your prospect to leave his or her comfort zone and embrace your offering over your competitor’s.

The post Challenger Selling appeared first on Selling Energy.

Successful Communication – It’s Your Responsibility

Communication is so vital to success, whether you’re guiding your prospect through the project or communicating with them regularly to make sure they’re in the loop.

Communication is your responsibility. If you meet with a prospect and he doesn’t seem to understand what you’re trying to convey, is it his fault? No. It’s yours. It’s not helpful to come back to the shop after a meeting and say, “He just didn’t get it,” or “He was so dense,” or “I can’t believe he spent the money on a new marble lobby in his office building instead of investing in a new chiller with me.”

The quality of your communication is your responsibility. If a person misunderstands, that’s your problem. Perhaps you should have slowed it down and asked more questions to check for understanding. Maybe you should have reframed the value proposition so that it made sense from his perspective. Would the outcome have been different if you had given an example that resonated with him? Perhaps you should have learned a little more about his segment, his industry, his organization, and/or his role and used that insight to formulate a more compelling value proposition.

The good news is, if we’re smart, we learn from our mistakes. If we place the blame for a failed opportunity on anyone other than ourselves, we lose the opportunity to learn and grow from that mistake (and we’ll end up making it over and over again). Take responsibility, reflect on your failure, and use it as an opportunity to improve. As Malcolm Forbes famously said, “Failure is success if we learn from it.”

The post Successful Communication – It’s Your Responsibility appeared first on Selling Energy.

Setting Yourself Up for Success in 2018

Hello Friends!

The New Year is right around the corner. If you have not already spent some time reflecting on 2017 and planning for 2018, my advice to you is that you start now. Here are several questions you might ask yourself to help guide your plan for 2018:

Who were my best customers this past year?
What made my best customers the best? Can I identify any patterns among this group?
Who were my least profitable or most difficult-to-deal-with customers? Can I identify any patterns among this group?
Did any industry or segment comprise a particularly noteworthy portion of my deal flow?
Which of these industries or segments did I spend the most/least time researching and/or pursuing?

The goal of this exercise is to take a bird’s eye view of your year, to identify what did and did not work, and to determine what skills you may have developed in the past year that you can leverage in 2018. Let’s say you spent a lot of time in 2017 working with a specific industry, segment, organization, or professional role, and you can now honestly say you know how your solution maps into benefits they care about.  Guess what?  Simply cloning those profiles should give you plenty of prime target(s) for 2018.

To set yourself up for success in 2018, Selling Energy is pleased to offer a special holiday deal. Selling Energy’s three new membership tiers and online trainings are 10% off through January 1st 2018. Use discount code HOLIDAY and give a gift to yourself

The post Setting Yourself Up for Success in 2018 appeared first on Selling Energy.

Weekly Recap, December 24, 2017

Monday: Read Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less, by S.J. Scott, for ways to instantly improve your life.


Tuesday: Save yourself time and ditch the big proposal.


Wednesday: Explore the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit.


Thursday: Explore before-tax and after-tax returns in your financial summary.


Friday: Check out some tips to keep in mind as you prepare your elevator pitches.


Saturday: Check out this article in Forbes for some great ideas for reducing stress and staying productive during the holiday season.

The post Weekly Recap, December 24, 2017 appeared first on Selling Energy.

Ways to Stay Productive Over the Holidays

The holidays can be a hectic time of year, especially for those of us who are “workafrolics.” If your job doesn’t lend itself to a complete holiday break, it’s important to find a healthy balance between relaxing with family and friends and staying on top of your work. Forbes published an article that offers some great ideas for reducing stress and staying productive during the holiday season. Take a read and see what you think.

The post Ways to Stay Productive Over the Holidays appeared first on Selling Energy.

Great Pitching

If you’ve attended one of my sales trainings or are a frequent reader of my blogs, you’ve likely heard me talk about crafting the perfect elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a concise statement that grabs the attention and communicates values, ideally leading to a next step.

Every efficiency sales professional should have a handful of elevator pitches prepared, each one customized for a specific audience type. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you prepare your elevator pitches: 

Your elevator pitch should be:  

-Short and to the point 

-Memorable 

-Interactive (allows you to say something and pause for a response, or say something and ask a question)

-Conversational 

Your elevator pitch should NOT be:  

-A speech

-A soliloquy

-A pitch (in the traditional “sales pitch” sense)

-Longer than 15 seconds

Avoid fluff words that don’t really mean anything:

-“Finest”

-“Established”

-“Foremost”

-“Leading”

-“Pioneering”

-“Original”

The post Great Pitching appeared first on Selling Energy.

Tax Implications, Part 2

Yesterday, we talked about tax deductions, tax credits, marginal tax rates, and effective tax rates. Today, we’re going to continue the discussion with a look at before- and after-tax returns.

You have to be very careful about combining before-tax and after-tax returns in your financial summary. People combine these two concepts all the time – probably unwittingly. Unfortunately, doing so can tarnish an otherwise accurate financial summary. I touched on this topic briefly in the “Calculating Costs” blog last week, and it warrants some further explanation.

Let’s assume you have a situation where a project is going to save your prospect $1,000 a year in utility bills and provide a depreciation deduction of $250. It’s not fair to say, “You’re going to get $1,000 PLUS a tax savings equal to your marginal tax rate times $250.” Why not? Because, assuming your prospect’s business deducts utilities on their tax return, they’re not saving $1,000 on an after-tax basis. They’re actually saving the after-tax value of that $1,000 expense. In other words, in the absence of your project, your prospect would continue to spend $1,000 on utilities, and assuming a 35% marginal tax bracket, they would be saving $350 in federal income tax as a result, which would mean that their after-tax utility expense would be $650.

If you were to take the before-tax savings of $1,000 and add the value of the depreciation tax shield (i.e., the $250 depreciation deduction times the marginal tax rate), you would be mixing before-tax and after-tax effects.

While we’re on the topic, whenever you’re deciding how to work this information into your financial summary, make sure that you don’t assume your prospect has a “tax appetite,” even if the organization is a taxable entity. What if they had a lackluster year and no taxable income? What if they had a bad year last year and have a net operating loss to carry forward? What if they purchased a lot of equipment this year and have a bundle of investment tax credits to use? In any of these scenarios (and many others), there may be little or no taxes owed, in which case there may be little or no incentive to secure additional tax deductions or credits.

The post Tax Implications, Part 2 appeared first on Selling Energy.

Tax Implications, Part 1

Over the course of the next two days, we’ll discuss taxes and tax incentives in the context of efficiency projects. I’ll concede that, of the topics we discuss on this blog, the “tax discussion” is not the most thrilling one; however, it’s important that you have a good understanding of the financial implications of taxes as they can have a significant impact on your ability to demonstrate value for your prospects. Please note that the purpose of this blog is not to give you tax advice; it’s to provide topics to be thinking about so when the time comes, you’ll be prepared to have a productive discussion with your prospects and customers.

First, let’s talk about the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit. A tax deduction is a reduction of the income subject to tax. A tax credit is a sum deducted from the total amount a taxpayer owes to the government. A deduction and a credit are two very different things.

If you qualify for a $10,000 tax deduction as a result of something you did to your property, that’s worth $10,000 times your marginal tax rate. If you qualify for a $10,000 tax credit, it would be the equivalent of a gift certificate for $10,000 of taxes paid.

This brings us to the topic of marginal vs. effective tax rates. If your prospect is a taxable entity, you’ll want to have a clear understanding of the difference between marginal and effective tax rates so that you can properly estimate what the tax benefits of your proposed project might be.

The marginal tax rate is the rate that applies to the last (or next) unit of taxable income or spending. The effective tax rate is the rate that you pay on all of your income after all of your various tax brackets are taken into consideration.

So, if you receive a $10,000 tax deduction and your highest tax bracket is 35% (and you have at least $10,000 in taxable income in that bracket), the deduction would be worth $3,500. You would not multiply the deduction by your effective tax rate – you would multiply it by your marginal tax rate, because that’s the amount of tax the deduction is going to offset at that tax bracket.

Stay tuned for more on this topic tomorrow…

The post Tax Implications, Part 1 appeared first on Selling Energy.

Save Yourself Time and Ditch the Big Proposal

How often do weighty “free audits,” detailed technical studies, or long-winded proposals drive customers to embrace efficiency? How many times in your career have you either offered one of these things to a prospect, or received one yourself with horror realizing that now you have to read the thing or at least pretend you did?

Tom Sant is a nationally respected proposal consultant and author who spends his life coaching people on how to make more effective proposals. I was speaking at a national conference where he was also speaking and overheard him telling his audience, “You could probably put the words ‘Up yours!’ anywhere in a thick proposal like this and never be called out because people simply don’t read them!”

I have to agree with him, particularly in situations where you and several other bidders are responding to a Request for Proposal. The committee (or worse yet, individual) responsible for reviewing submittals might have twenty or more of these boat anchors arrive in the mail with only a week or two to review and comment upon each and every one of them. Do you think those proposals ever get read? Skimmed, perhaps. Read from cover to cover? Not on your life.

What would happen if one respondent took a different tack, submitting a one-page proposal (in keeping with our Selling Energy workshops) explaining his or her approach to the project, and then provided a separate technical appendix containing the necessary details? Whose bid response would be reviewed first? Whose bid response would be the most memorable? Whose bid would be the first to be discussed when the committee met to compare notes on all submittals?

The post Save Yourself Time and Ditch the Big Proposal appeared first on Selling Energy.

Stack Your Habits, Change Your Life

Our routines become us, so they say.  The little things in life amount to a lot.  When it comes to our habits this is all the more noticeable – even overwhelming – but the same could be said about making small changes.  They accumulate and alter things in just the same way.

What I recommend reading this week is S.J. Scott’s Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less.  Scott is a prolific writer, and upon reading this book it’s apparent why.  With a little of his advice on your bookshelf and on the brain, you might find yourself miles away from where you started.

Here is the book summary from Amazon:

“Want to improve your life, but don’t have enough time? Right now you could easily think of a dozen ways to instantly improve your life. Odds are, these ideas will only take a few minutes apiece to complete. The problem? You might feel like there’s not enough time to do all of them. One solution can be found using the power of ‘habit stacking.’

“We all know it’s not easy to add dozens of new habits to your day. But what you might not realize is it’s fairly easy to build a single new routine. The essence of habit stacking is to take a series of small changes (like eating a piece of fruit or sending a loving text message to your significant other) and build a ritual that you follow on a daily basis.

“Habit stacking works because you eliminate the stress of trying to change too many things at once. Your goal is to simply focus on a single routine that only takes about 15 to 30 minutes to complete. Within this routine is a series of actions (or small changes). All you have to do is to create a checklist and follow it every single day. That’s the essence of habit stacking.

“In the book Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes Or Less, you will discover 97 quick habits that can instantly improve your life. Plus you’ll discover how to create a simple routine (managed by a checklist) that you repeat on a daily basis. Even better, you’ll discover a few tools that will keep you motivated and consistent. So even if you’re completely stressed out, you’ll still find the time and energy to complete these actions on a consistent basis.

“By completing dozens of small habits on a daily basis, you’ll be able to make giant leaps forward in your business, strengthen your personal relationships, stay on top of your finances, get organized and improve your health.”

The post Stack Your Habits, Change Your Life appeared first on Selling Energy.