Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 229
October 18, 2017
Reasons That Will Get Prospects Interested in You
Two weeks ago, we discussed some of the yardsticks that key decision-makers use to measure their success (see here). In that blog, we used the hypothetical example of an HVAC sales professional selling “smart valves.” Using the same scenario (and some fun alliteration), let’s discuss some reasons that a prospect might become interested in installing smart valves in their building:
Credibility: Let’s say you’re a controls contractor or a retro-commissioning expert. When you’re competing for work, you demonstrate your credibility when you say to your prospect, “Not only can we take care of your existing mechanical system, but we recommend that you install some of these smart valves to make sure that the amount of chilled water your physical plant is generating and distributing through the building is the sensible amount of chilled water that is needed.”
Capital Cost Avoidance: As I mentioned in the blog a few weeks ago, the Chief Financial Officer or one of her colleagues might consider the smart valves to be a less expensive approach to improving comfort or satisfying new load than adding chiller capacity.
Control: The chief engineer would likely appreciate knowing that his finite operations and maintenance effort is allocated optimally. It gives him a level of confidence about how well the building is being run.
Case Studies: If you include a case study with the installation, you would satisfy the prospect’s desire to be publicly lauded for their environmental initiatives. The case study would show, in a very public way, that they are doing a great job in reducing their carbon footprint and making better use of their utility dollars. Utilities, universities, and even building engineering firms may actually be more interested in the case study than the savings.
Credentials: Your prospect may say, “If we put these smart valves in, we’ll be able to have better control over the amount of kWh and therms we use in this building. That might make us eligible for an ENERGY STAR® label. Ultimately these credentials would give us more brownie points in the environmental press and might even qualify us for an award for which we wouldn’t have otherwise qualified.”
Confidence: If you can provide visible evidence that savings are actually occurring, you would instill a sense of confidence in your prospect. There are lots of energy service companies out there doing “pay for performance” scenarios that depend on a verification of system operations. To the extent that these smart valves actually give you data to tell you what’s happening in the building’s chilled water plant, it might yield visible evidence that savings are actually occurring, enabling someone to write a check to reward the realization of those savings.
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October 17, 2017
Lead Generation Tips
Finding high-quality leads for your product or service is vital for successful business development. Here are some practical lead generation tips to keep in mind:
Embrace and cultivate all of the empowering qualities of a sales professional.
Commit to being proactive rather than reactive.
Learn to leverage those who sell your typical prospects before and after you do.
Property managers who need to field and address all of those “hot/cold” calls from disgruntled occupants.
Building engineering firms that have to operate the aging equipment you should be replacing.
Mechanical contractors who have to service equipment long past its estimated lifetime.
Other suppliers who provide parts for aging equipment.
Air balancing firms, duct cleaning firms, etc.
Real estate brokers with knowledge of thermal comfort, noise, and other building shortcomings in the buildings they know well.
Think carefully about your ideal prospects and build a profile to begin pursuing today.
Take the time to build the tools you’ll need to open doors and keep them open.
Get organized and automated so that you can keep up with the surge of sales activity you’re about to experience.
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October 16, 2017
Work Backwards, Double Your Revenue
When you haven’t reached the level of success you’re aiming for, you’d be wise to turn your attention to obtaining answers to some basic questions: What else can be done to attain your goals? How can you increase your output and revenues? More importantly, who should be on your team, helping you to accomplish this?
Cameron Herold’s Double Double poses a solution that’s out of the box but quite simple. You visualize your goals then work backwards from them in order to create a plan. If you do this right, you could double your revenue in three years or less.
As strange as this might sound, this is a plan worth considering. Herold is the former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, a business that flourished, growing from $2 million in revenues to $105 million in six years. His strategies and business philosophy center on reverse engineering, building stamina and keeping a sharp focus on productivity, meetings, communication, marketing and hiring practices. This book will give you a full plate and plenty to think about, but if you’re looking for an exponential improvement on the job, look no further.
Here is the summary from Amazon:
“A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth – while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers – from creating a vision for the company’s future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company – is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur’s company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold’s experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: how to design meetings for maximum efficiency; how to hire top-quality talent; how to grow in particularly tough markets; how to put together a board of advisors – even for a smaller company; how even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.”
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October 15, 2017
Weekly Recap, October 15, 2017
Tuesday: Explore how to sway your prospect with emotional appeal of your product or service, not the technical specs.
Wednesday: Discover how there is a time and place for technical specs of your project: in the technical appendix of your proposal.
Thursday: The less technical and more user-friendly you can make your user interface, the more likely your prospects will love your product.
Friday: Check out this simple three-word email for when your prospect all of the sudden dropped off the radar.
Saturday: Check out this article in Success magazine on “5 Ways to Speak More Powerfully.”
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October 14, 2017
5 Ways to Speak with Confidence
I’ve written blogs about how one of the best ways to capture a prospect’s attention is to emphasize specific experience working on similar projects. It can instill a sense of trust and confidence in your ability to accomplish what you are proposing. So how exactly does one build confidence?
An article published by Success Magazine online suggests using “out of power” language. If you are looking to improve your ability to get more of what you want, check out the article here and tap into your personal power.
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October 13, 2017
Are You Ok?
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve had several volleys of good conversation (emails, voicemails, or both) with a prospect, and then all of the sudden, they drop off the radar? This phenomenon can be particularly disconcerting if it occurs right before the sale is supposed to be consummated.
If a prospect suddenly becomes non-communicative, give it a couple more tries. Using multiple communication channels often shakes things loose – don’t be afraid to mix it up a bit with emails and voicemails, for example. However, if after several outreach attempts fail to reconnect you with your prospect, don’t be afraid to use that nuclear option of, “Are you okay?”
Doing this is simple. Just send them an email with the subject line, “Are you okay?” Or perhaps send an email with a blank subject and that same single question in the body of the email. You won’t have to wait long. If they have any conscience whatsoever, they won’t want you to worry about them. You’ll often get a response like, “I’m all right, thanks! Sorry for being out of contact but we have a lot of other issues we’re dealing with. We’ll get back to you.”
I’ve seen students of mine use this “Are you okay?” nuclear option within hours of first learning this technique, and their prospect gets back to them in less than five minutes and says some variation of, “I’m sorry I’ve been non-responsive.” Case in point, a student at one of my Boot Camps in California was having trouble with a particular prospect who had dropped off her radar several weeks prior to the training. After I told her the “Are you okay?” trick, she used it immediately. Her incommunicado prospect responded in less than an hour: “I’m so embarrassed. I’ve been keeping you on the hook. I’ve gotten six emails and three phone calls from you. I’ve just been buried. I apologize. I’m going to send you the two purchase orders you’ve been asking for. By the way, there’s another building I’ve been meaning to add to this project, so I’ll actually be sending you three POs rather than two when I email you tonight before I leave the office.”
So, she wound up making three sales before lunch because she sent a three-word email! If all else fails, don’t be afraid to use this option. It definitely works.
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October 12, 2017
Upgrade Your User Interface
Continuing with the idea that technical specs don’t make the sale, one of the best ways to grab your prospect’s attention is to upgrade the user interface of your efficiency solution so that it’s intuitive to use and features only elements that are likely to be understood and appreciated. If the interface is too technical, your prospects will have a tough time understanding what they are looking at, which will ultimately deter them from investing in your solution.
In the course of preparing to deliver an annual conference keynote for a large controls company, I was privileged to interview six of their sales “rock stars.” One of them, who we’ll call Jacob, told me a story that I’d like to share:
Jacob told me that his “propeller heads” (his term, not mine) were used to spending a lot of time talking to customers about things that only engineers would find interesting… like the number of relays and actuators, the total number of miles of control wires in the building, and so forth. He told me, “Our customers wouldn’t know an actuator if it hit them in the head.” He thought this was crazy, so he made a new rule for his engineers: “From now on, you can’t talk about anything that the customer cannot personally experience after he or she buys our system.” That edict limited the scope of what could be discussed to about $75,000 of a $4 million control system.
He said, “My engineers hated me for it, but as soon as I made that improvement in the way we interacted with our prospects, sales skyrocketed.”
He also told me that he hired a videogame designer to take a look at their dashboards and evaluate how user-friendly and intuitive they really were. He confessed, “The results were totally humbling. To tell you the truth, I was totally demoralized. I learned we were displaying too much data, it was moving too quickly, the colors were wrong, the fonts were wrong… Basically, the whole design was a disaster.”
So what did Jacob do? He hired the videogame designer to redo the dashboards and remedy all the problems that had been identified. After the dashboard make-over, customer satisfaction soared and a bump in sales quickly followed.
Bottom line, the user interface is a key driver of decision-making. The less technical you can make it and the more user-friendly it is, the more likely your prospects are going to fall in love with your product.
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October 11, 2017
Technical Appendix of Your Proposal
Yesterday, I wrote about why you should avoid discussing the technical aspects of your efficiency projects and instead consider how your prospect might be emotionally drawn to your project. While the technical specs of your project should not be the focus of any sales conversation, there is a time and a place for those details: in the technical appendix of your proposal.
Why should your proposal have a technical appendix? Because it provides all of the information that an engineer might be interested in vetting without cluttering the core message that the real decision-maker will read. If you muddle the first page of your proposal with anything that a CEO, CFO or similar senior manager would not understand, you’ll instantly lose their attention and they’ll end up skimming through your otherwise well-crafted message.
I also recommend centering the title “Technical Appendix” on a colored sheet of paper at the beginning of that more detailed section of the proposal. Why? Because colored paper suggests, “This is a different chapter.” CEOs don’t read technical appendices – they delegate those. The change of color scheme will quickly indicate to the CEO that he doesn’t need to trouble his eyes with the information that follows that colored page. I’ve often quipped that a colored piece of paper with the words “Technical Appendix” boldly emblazoned on it effectively serves as the “invisible pet fence” for a senior executive. As soon as they encounter that page, they turn right around and revisit the one-page narrative or one-page financial proposal, both of which are designed to capture and retain senior management’s interest.
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October 10, 2017
The Emotional Appeal
If you’ve taken any of my efficiency sales workshops, you’ve probably heard me say, “Most decisions are made emotionally and then justified financially.” Unless your prospect is an efficiency professional and knows everything about the technology you’re selling, he or she is probably not going to be interested in kilowatts, kilowatt-hours, and therms. What’s going to sway your prospect is the emotional appeal of your product or service, not the technical specs.
In Simon Sinek’s TED Talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” Sinek notes that the limbic brain controls both decision-making and emotions. Once we’ve made a decision emotionally, we fill in details about the “how,” “why,” and “what” later. So, put aside the technical aspects of your efficiency projects and think about how your prospect might be drawn to your project emotionally.
Click here to watch the TED Talk.
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October 9, 2017
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t
Creating a company that will continue to be successful and profitable many years down the road requires strategic long-term planning. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the present and focus only on that which will provide immediate gain; however, a great company always keeps one eye on the future and plans for sustainable growth and success in the long run.
So, what factors allow a company to experience continuous, enduring success? Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t, studied this question in depth. He examined twenty-eight companies that exhibited exceptional long-term success and crunched the data to extract the commonalities between the companies. The results are truly compelling. If you are responsible for the long-term success of your organization, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book, which is a true classic among modern management books.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
“But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
“The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
“The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
“The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
“Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
“The Findings:
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.
Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“‘Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,’ comments Jim Collins, ‘fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.’
“Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?”
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