Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 225

Learning to Succeed

As a reader of this blog, you fall into the category of “learner” – someone who values education and the expansion of knowledge. In a competitive industry that is constantly shifting and evolving, “learners” are vital to the continuing success of their organizations.

According to Jason Wingard in his book, Learning to Succeed: Rethinking Corporate Education in a World of Unrelenting Change, every organization should place a high value on learning and knowledge. The most successful companies are the ones that foster a culture of learning – and that support employees in their professional development. He argues that while education can be expensive, it is a wise investment because it makes employees more talented – and their collective talent boosts the success of the entire organization. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend picking up a copy of the book.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Frequent market shifts… The rapid pace of technological change… We’re all familiar with the old saying, “the only constant is change,” but this has never been as true for business as it is today – nor have the penalties for companies who fail to learn and adapt been as high. Learning to Succeed insists that an integrated model for corporate education – one that links development programs with strategic goals – is critical to building agile and resilient learning organizations that will survive in our fast-evolving business landscape. Companies need to continually assess where they need to go in relation to where they are now – and use training to bridge the gap. As these new education initiatives are designed to advance concrete corporate goals, participants become active learners. Instead of merely listening to lectures – they work on strategic plans and action projects tied to key objectives. Learning is reinforced and ROI is optimized. For companies, ready to embrace what it means to be a learning organization, to welcome the CLO to the C-Suite, to tightly and continuously weave strategy and learning into the fabric of their businesses, the opportunities are limitless. Complete with practical guidelines and illuminating case studies, this pioneering book puts them on the path to long-term success.”

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Weekly Recap, November 26, 2017

Monday: Read Winning the Professional Services Sale, by Michael W. McLaughlin, for a holistic approach to selling professional services.


Tuesday: Check out why business acument is a very important concept.


Wednesday: Discover the secret to selling efficiency.


Thursday: A Thanksgiving note from Selling Energy.


Friday: Check out a three-step process of informed selling.


Saturday: Read this article on “7 Tips to Increase Employee Happiness and Productivity.”

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Keep Your Employees Smiling

There is a strong correlation between happiness and productivity. Your business doesn’t necessarily need to utilize the latest and greatest productivity solutions in order to foster a productive workplace environment. While it can be beneficial to implement the many tips and tricks we discuss every Saturday on this blog, you should also work hard to keep your employees as happy as possible.

An article published in Entrepreneur suggests “7 Tips to Increase Employee Happiness and Productivity.” Some of these strategies may require you to rework your HR plan; however, given the positive impact that a happy employee can have on a business, these strategies are worth exploring. Read the full article here.

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Three-Step Process of Informed Selling

 

When you approach an organization with a proposed efficiency project, you have to be prepared to knock out the competition. You’re competing against not only other efficiency product/service providers, but also non-efficiency-related projects that the organization might choose to invest in. Here’s a three-step process that will help you succeed:

Read: I’m always shocked at how few people subscribe to the trade magazines and journals of their target customers’ industries. If you’re selling to supermarkets, you need to know everything that’s going on in the grocery industry. What are the latest trends? What types of investments are they making? What new technologies are groceries using? Keep yourself in the loop by reading the industry news so you can better predict what your prospects are likely to care about.

Research: In order to know how your products and services will benefit your prospect’s organization, you need to find out everything you can about how that particular organization is structured and what they value. Maybe you’ll discover that they frequently donate to charity – perhaps to publicize their commitment to the community. If so, you could emphasize the positive environmental impact of your efficiency project and suggest that you showcase that in a post-project press release.

Reframe:  Industry- and prospect-specific insights allow you to reframe your offering to resonate with the values and needs you’ve identified. So, what are the most important things to talk about? What should you avoid discussing altogether? Write down any relevant information that you gather in the first two stages and come up with an informed sales strategy using that information.

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Gratitude Leads to Happiness

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” – Zig Ziglar

Regardless of how hectic and stressful our lives may be, we all have things to be thankful for. What I love about this holiday (even more than the food) is that it encourages all of us to reflect on the most positive aspects of our lives.

A few months ago, I shared a TED talk by Shawn Achor that is regularly featured in our weeklong Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp™ and shorter Learning to S.E.E.: Sell Efficiency Effectively™ programs (here).  Shawn’s talk contains several valuable messages, including his observations that gratitude leads to happiness, and that happiness is the key to creativity, productivity, and success. Those of you who read my earlier blogs will remember the gratitude exercise that Achor suggests – at the end of each day, write down three things for which you’re grateful. My wife and I have made a habit of sharing our gratitude with each other on a daily basis.  We can tell you from experience that it works.

How about a happy medium between a daily gratitude exercise and the annual Thanksgiving Day gratitude fest?  Consider the weekly ritual that one of our Boot Camp graduates recently shared with us:

Every Friday, he and his two siblings email each other. In the email, they share everything that happened over the past week that they’re thankful for. This approach has two wonderful attributes.  First, the exercise yields a documented record of gratitude that can be referenced any time they need an emotional lift.  Second, the system has a built-in fail-safe mechanism – one of the three siblings always remembers to send the email even if the others forget.

You don’t have to have siblings to use this exercise – find friends, coworkers, or family members to join you in forming a weekly gratitude email group. The results can be life-changing.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Selling Energy team!

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The Secret to Selling Efficiency: Don’t Talk Tech

The following is a story I tell frequently in the context of our efficiency-focused professional sales trainings. If you’ve never heard the story, enjoy. And if you have, feel free to pass it along to any staff or colleagues who might benefit from being reminded that “CFO” does not stand for “Chief Fluorescent Officer.”

When I was a very young man selling efficiency solutions for the first time, I got very lucky and managed to land an appointment with the CFO of a Fortune 500 company. I knew that if I convinced this CFO to let us do lighting retrofits for his national portfolio of properties, it would be a game changer for my company.

So I get an appointment with this guy. His assistant asks me to “make myself comfortable” in the biggest boardroom I had ever seen – complete with a fifty-foot-long endangered tropical hardwood table and three dozen overstuffed leather swivel chairs to boot, each with a leather blotter and crystal water goblet placed neatly in front of it… oh, and with plenty of oil portraits of presumably deceased corporate founders covering the walls.

The CFO finally arrives, about thirty minutes late for our meeting. He is a caricature of a Fortune 500 accounting head: razor-cut hair… a heavily starched, white button-down Oxford shirt and Ivy League rep tie… wing tips so highly polished that they could be used as mirrors to signal passing planes… yellow legal pad, HP12C calculator and 0.5mm mechanical pencil clenched firmly in hand. He strides confidently into the room and in true New York City rapport-building fashion, slaps his legal pad on the table, tosses his calculator and mechanical pencil down onto it, and says simply, “Hit me.”

So I launch right into it… all the technical specifications of lighting increases I could imagine giving his buildings, the color rendering index and chromaticity of my proposed retrofits, the whole nine yards. About ten minutes into the pitch he stops me. He picks up his mechanical pencil for the first time, puts its point to paper, and says, “What was that last term you just used?”

I said, “Chromaticity”?  He said, “Yeah, that’s it. How do you spell it?” So, I spell it, and he writes it down. “Now what exactly does it mean?” I recite the textbook definition of “chromaticity,” practically verbatim out of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America’s Lighting Handbook. He studiously copies my description word for word, then sets his pencil back down on his legal pad and says, “Thank you. Go on.”

I said, “Excuse me, but of everything I’ve told you so far today, ‘chromaticity’ seems to be the only term that caught your fascination. Why is that?” He looks down, seemingly a little bit embarrassed, and then confesses, “My 11-year-old daughter and I have a little word game we play at dinner every night, and I’m fairly confident I’m going to get her with ‘chromaticity’ tonight, so for that I thank you. Now go on.”

That’s about as much as any non-lighting-industry CFO cares about chromaticity. Would “chromaticity” ultimately convince this particular CFO to invest in a portfolio-wide lighting retrofit? Absolutely not. After that meeting I was so miffed… I wanted to look up his home telephone number, call his daughter after I figured she’d be home from school, and say something like, “Listen smarty pants… You don’t know me, and don’t ask me how I know this, but your father is going to hit you with ‘chromaticity’ tonight at dinner. This is exactly how you spell it, and this is exactly what it means, and don’t tell him that anyone called!” But alas, I didn’t do it. I had learned my lesson, and that was enough satisfaction.

Why am I sharing this story? Because far too many people who actually land the coveted C-level meeting wind up squandering it by focusing on the technical aspects of what they sell. Why do they take this approach? Because most people in sales receive less than three days of professional sales training in their entire career and most of that is product knowledge training. They actually think that the way to sell stuff is to tell people everything they know about their products and that doing so will make it obvious to their prospects that they should buy. Guess what? That approach accomplishes exactly the opposite result.

The more information you shower on a prospect, the worse your chances are of closing a sale. As you blather on about all of the technical details, the prospect gets into deeper and deeper and deeper water. At some point they realize that their toes are no longer touching the bottom of the pool. Their inner voice starts saying, “I’m in way over my head. This is turning out to be a much more complicated conversation than I thought we would be having. I’d better call in some technical experts who can tell me whether or not this salesperson really knows what he (or she) is talking about.”

The moral of the story? Unless you’re interested in giving your prospects some fodder for dinnertime word games with the kids, forget the technical jargon and focus on your prospect’s story, not yours.

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The Importance of Business Acumen

One of the fastest growing segments of the sales training industry is business acumen training for salespeople. Why is that? I believe the reason is twofold.

First, you need to understand what is driving your prospects to make decisions. What are the business drivers? What are they looking for and how are they going to evaluate any financial investment you place in front of them?

Second, you have to understand how price discounts affect your own company’s bottom line. What impact do they have on gross margin? What is the relationship between that contemplated lower price and the fixed and variable costs of your product or service offering?

Speaking of profitability, I often hear the question “Does efficiency enhance profitability?”  The answer, of course, depends on many factors. You cannot answer this question without asking an even more basic one: “What percentage of your overhead is energy?” In my business, energy is less than a quarter of one percent of revenues. However, if my company were in the business of smelting and molding aluminum, energy would be a very significant portion of our overhead. There’s a very big difference in cost structure. You can look at a company’s profit and loss statement to see how big of a line item energy really is and what impact it might have on the bottom line.

There’s a second question that I think is even more important – particularly if energy is not a large percentage of your prospect’s overhead: “Are there other non-utility-cost financial benefits of embracing energy efficiency in your operations – perhaps from a marketing or productivity perspective?  Alternatively, does enhanced efficiency hold the potential to move the needle on another gauge that you’re watching closely, such as embedded energy cost per widget produced?”

Bottom line, business acumen is a very important concept, whether you aim to increase the profitability of your prospect’s business or your own!

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Winning the Professional Services Sale

Successful sales professionals build strong relationships with their clients, custom-tailor their offerings to fit the needs of those clients, and make a concerted effort to be as helpful as possible throughout the buying process (and beyond). Clients want to know that the person they’re buying from is knowledgeable, trustworthy, helpful, and capable of solving their particular problem(s).

 

One of the books that I often recommend to Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp attendees is Winning the Professional Services Sale: Unconventional Strategies to Reach More Clients, Land Profitable Work, and Maintain Your Sanity, by Michael W. McLaughlin. McLaughlin provides a holistic approach to selling professional services and offers a wealth of strategies for how to give your client exactly what he or she wants.

 

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“In recent years, professional services providers have had to rethink their sales methods and adapt to profound changes in the way clients buy services. In response, Winning the Professional Services Sale argues for fundamental changes in the seller’s mindset and sales strategies. Rather than pressing the sale, salespeople must help clients buy – the way that works best for each client. This new approach gives buyers what they now want in a services seller: a consultative problem solver, change agent, and solution integrator, all rolled into one. Author Michael McLaughlin presents a strategy for winning new business with a holistic approach to each client relationship. Only by fully understanding a sale from every angle, including its impact on the client’s business and career, can salespeople thrive in the new era of the service economy.”

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Weekly Recap, November 19, 2017

Monday: Read Dealstorming, by Tim Sanders, and learn how to utilize teamwork as a way to bolster business-to-business interactions, and in many cases the more challenging the better.
Tuesday: Check out the metric that you should focus on when presenting an expense-reducing capital project to a landlord.
Wednesday: Learn how to prepare a presentation that will win over your audience.
Thursday: Explore how to gain access to the influencers and decision-makers when you are approaching a new organization with an efficiency project.
Friday: Discover if a landlord could use a “capital expense cost recovery” clause and have the tenants repurpose wasted utility dollars to help improve the building.
Saturday: Check out “These Emotionally Intelligent Habits Can Make You a Better Listener” published in FastCompany for ways to use your feelings to listen better.

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Listen with Feeling

I’ve written about the importance of listening and the positive effect it has on building rapport. Listening (or the perceived act of listening) requires more than an open ear. In order to reinforce in your prospect’s mind that you’re interested in what they have to say, you need to make visual contact.

Today, I’d like to share an article in FastCompany that emphasizes taking another route for becoming a good listener… emotional intelligence. Read the article and try to use your feelings to listen better.

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