Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 235
August 20, 2017
Weekly Recap, August 20, 2017
Tuesday: Learn how to reframe renewable energy.
Wednesday: Explore three investment scenarios for doing an energy efficiency improvement and how it makes sense to implement the project as soon as possible.
Thursday: Discover ways to reframe the benefits of efficiency in agriculture, particularly farm animals.
Friday: Check out some helpful tips on active listening.
Saturday: Check out 5 things to do this weekend to make Monday the most productive day of the week.
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August 19, 2017
Set Yourself up for a Productive Workweek
The workweek may be done, but you are still hammering away this Saturday. Maybe you’re finishing up that proposal due on Monday? Perhaps it’s your turn to watch the kids?
Fast Company published an article on 5 things to do this weekend to make Monday that most productive day of the week. Of their tips, my favorites include: set goals for the week ahead; think big-picture thoughts; and, do something fun. Read the full list here and consider fitting them into your weekend.
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August 18, 2017
Active Listening, Part One
“A good listener has the ability to better understand and process information. A great listener has the ability to use this information to negotiate, to influence, and avoid misunderstandings and conflicts.” – Christopher Pappas
There is a variety of online content about active listening from experts like Tony Robbins, Christopher Pappas, Julian Treasure and many more. Each of them offer advice on better listening techniques, especially those of us that live in the city. We’re used to being assaulted by a cacophony of noise in traffic, our office environments, our neighborhoods and whenever we go out on the town.
When you’re listening to your prospect, all of that needs to be tuned out. Here are some helpful tips:
You want to be fully in the moment, focusing at least 75% of your time to listening while remaining calm, resourceful, and flexible. You certainly want to maintain a sense of curiosity. Nurture the silence; however, don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Most of the revelations in a meeting come from the pauses between speaking. For example, if you ask a question, make sure there is enough time for a customer to answer. They shouldn’t feel rushed. They need to feel relaxed enough to ponder their answers. I often say that speaking is a lot like music. There would be no music if there were no space between the notes. It would just be one constant sound… not very interesting, for sure!
Don’t compose your response instead of listening. That’s not listening at all, and very often it comes across as rude. Although you aren’t speaking, you’re giving off non-verbal cues that you aren’t giving your full attention.
You certainly shouldn’t multitask when listening.
One of the questions I often get asked is, “How do you tell when someone’s multitasking on the phone?” One of the things you can do is stop talking, because when they hear the unexpected silence they will immediately snap out of it and think “Uh-oh,” or they’ll think you just asked a question and are waiting for an answer. Other ways to deal with multitasking on the phone is to ask a lot of questions, because they’ll eventually have to put their other projects aside and give you their undivided attention. Another solution is straight-up honesty. Say, “You know, I feel as if you’ve got a lot going on there. Would you like to call me back at a more convenient time?” More often than not, the person’s going to say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just a little bit distracted here. I wasn’t paying attention as much as I should’ve been. I promise you, I’m all yours now. Give it to me again.”
There are other aspects of active listening that can help anybody regardless of where they stand in their sales career, neophyte or veteran:
You must be taking notes. When a customer sees this happen, it reassures them that what they’re saying is important and will not be forgotten.
If you don’t understand something, wait until the speaker has finished speaking, then ask a qualifying question. You might ask them to demonstrate what they just said to ensure that you understand the point they’re trying to make in the proper context.
Stay tuned for more on this topic next week…
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August 17, 2017
Efficiency on the Farm
Huge strides are being made when it comes to efficiency in agriculture, particularly regarding farm animals. I recently read a study about chickens becoming more docile when illuminated with red LED light. They were looking at the world through rose-colored glasses! And since everything they saw was red, they would never notice a spot of blood on a fellow chicken’s feathers, which might have triggered an instinct to finish off the blood-spattered hen! No joke. Making everything appear red makes the chickens less likely to attack one another. Believe it or not, before this technological innovation, some farmers actually clipped tiny red sunglasses onto their chickens’ beaks to achieve the same effect!
If you access this article on the impact of color-tuned LED, you’ll read about this effect and others: “The results showed minor effects of green light on explorative behavior, whereas red light reduced aggressiveness compared with white light. The accelerating effect of red light on sexual development of laying hens was confirmed, and the trial demonstrated that this effect was due to the specific wavelength and not the intensity of light.”
There is another study on illuminating chickens’ occupied environments with yellow and white LED lighting: “[They] did not show any behavioral sign of preference for one of the environments. However, birds presented greater feed consumption at 21, 28 and 35 days of age when exposed to white LED lighting. Generally, birds exposed to LED lighting presented better production performance than birds under the CFL [compact fluorescent]. Seven-day-old male chickens presented better feed conversion under LED illumination than did males of the same age under CFL.”
(PLEASE NOTE: This next study isn’t recommended for animal lovers, so be warned.)
There are other researchers experimenting with the effects of LED lighting on farm animals. One of our Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp graduates helps pig farmers leverage their facility’s lighting to achieve not only energy efficiency but also production efficiency. First, they optimize the placement and intensity of the lighting to minimize the shadows. Why? I’m told that pigs, as smart as they are, stop in their tracks when they see a shadow because it confuses them. This causes all sorts of traffic jams at swine houses. Better lighting also allowed the pigs to find the feed troughs better, so they knock less of their food into the manure. That one innovation alone can save the farmer a lot of wasted feed.
Another experiment involved slowly dimming the lights at night to put the pigs to bed, and then gradually raising the light levels in the morning to wake them up. Since they’re experiencing simulated sunset and sunrise in an otherwise windowless factory farm, the pigs were found to grow more effectively within a certain number of calendar days. They’re leaning toward the conclusion that if you use the right kind of lighting in a swine house, you could get a pig to a “six-month” target weight in a period that is five days shorter than the typical cycle. Doing so saves the farmer five days worth of feed for each of thousands of hogs he raises… and that’s a benefit that trumps the energy and maintenance savings by a significant margin.
It’s really fascinating when you think about the science behind these experiments: lighting levels, lighting frequencies, and what can be done to influence animal farming. Stay on top of the research in these fields and you’re likely to have a more interesting conversation with your customers, whether you’re talking to hen and hog farmers or not!
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August 16, 2017
Net Present Value
One of the reasons I print out our financial worksheets and juxtapose them with each other is to demonstrate the outcomes of three scenarios for doing an energy efficiency improvement:
Pay for the entire project upfront
Do half the project now and the rest a year from now when more funds become available
Borrow the money now to fund the project fully and use your savings to repay the loan
A lot of people are laboring under the myth that Scenario 3 is the least attractive option because a significant portion of the project’s return would be consumed by the interest you have to pay to gain access to the capital.
We use a prototypical project in our Learning to S.E.E.: Sell Efficiency Effectively™ workshops to explore these three investment scenarios.
In Scenario 1, you pay for the entire investment today (“Date 0”) using your own cash, and your net present value over a ten-year period is $53,000 and some change.
In Scenario 2, you decide that you only have sufficient capital to fund half the project now (“Date 0”), so you wait to do the second half of the project until a year from now (“Date 1”). In this scenario, you would lose half of the upgrade’s projected savings for the first year. You might also lose half of the rebate or incentive because it might expire before you have a chance to fund the second half of the project. In fact, our Scenario 2 worksheet is configured using those exact assumptions. It proves that delaying half the project by one year reduces your net present value to about $42,000. You’ve lost more than $10,000 of NPV just because you waited a year to do the second half of the project.
In Scenario 3, you finance the entire project today (“Date 0”) by borrowing the necessary capital and paying a reasonable interest rate. For our example, we assume 12%. In this third scenario, the net present value turns out to be only about $1,000 lower than what you would have realized if you had funded the entire project at Date 0 using your own capital. Why? You have the entire project installed immediately, which means you get the entire project’s energy savings within the first year as well as the full amount of the rebate. And it turns out that the interest you’re paying pales in comparison to the return you’re generating by having both halves of the project implemented at Date 0.
The moral of the story is:
Try to pay for a project using your own cash.
If you don’t have the cash, don’t wait. Finance it.
In other words, implement your projects as soon as possible, even if you have to borrow the capital to do it. As the math suggests, you’ll be happy you did.
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August 15, 2017
Reframing Renewable Energy
About a year ago I was walking past an Apple Store while exploring a neighborhood with my family. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about seeing one; however, I did note a sign in the front window: “100% powered by renewable energy.” Time has passed and this trend has only increased, and of course the usual demographic is going to be impressed with that sort of thing. However, we’re not in the business of selling exclusively to clients or market segments interested in renewable energy.
Let’s use a grocery store as an example. They may benefit somewhat from being braggadocios about green energy; however, the bottom line is going to be dollars and cents. You could sell to them by equating how many candy bars, corn flakes or strawberries they would have to sell to match the energy savings. I think it’s a pretty exciting way to start a conversation.
Downstream benefits could also be more of an attraction than saving Mother Earth. For instance you could say, “We have worked with businesses just like yours and researched countless others in the marketplace. We’ve discovered that when they added LED lighting and solar their retail sales increased.”
You could continue by explaining, “The environmentalists will come because they appreciate a building powered by renewable energy. And the LED lighting powered by that solar makes the merchandise look better, so when those environmentalists arrive, they’ll spend more. In fact there are studies proving that retail sales increase when merchandise is illuminated with LEDs.”
In order to use this approach successfully, you need to do your research regarding that particular segment. And when you do, you’ll find studies on how steaks, potatoes, bagged lettuces and cherry tomatoes all have a longer shelf-life when illuminated with LED light. I read one study a while ago that said that putting LED lights in mid- and low-temperature freezer cases increased retail sales by 19%. (All of these facts and many, many more appear in Selling Energy’s Segment Guides™ offering. Click here to learn more.)
In short, salespeople allow their presentations to be dominated by terms like “efficacy” (lumens per watt). Sales professionals equate the projected energy savings to increased foot traffic, higher retail sales, avoided shrinkage supported by meat and produce that have longer shelf-life, etc. And once you determine a segment-specific benefit, be sure to express it in a pithy sound bite or a one-page proposal. Speak your prospect’s language, and make your message easy to assimilate.
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August 14, 2017
Are You a Giver or a Taker?
The world of business is often described as “cutthroat” and competitive, earning the stereotype of attracting people who “are in it for themselves” or “aren’t here to make friends.” But as anyone in the business world knows, the industry is more varied than the bad behavior that dominates headlines. There are people who succeed by taking, giving, or a little bit of both.
In Adam Grant’s Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, this issue is put under a microscope and is found to yield some astonishing results. Takers may be the most notorious figures on the scene, but givers succeed the most… as well as fail the most. Grant offers surprising insights, stories and advice on how to improve yourself and thrive, no matter where you fall on the scale.
Most importantly of all, he makes a case for how giving can be incredibly powerful in a “me first” kind of world.
Here is a summary from Amazon:
“A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the bestselling author of Originals.
“For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.”
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August 13, 2017
Weekly Recap, August 13, 2017
Tuesday: Learn how to effectively sell to a property manager, Part One.
Wednesday: Learn how to effectively sell to a property manager, Part Two.
Thursday: Explore what to do in a situation where an account or an existing project has been transitioned to you.
Friday: Discover what a good sales manager should do to create value for their prospect base.
Saturday: Check out 7 tips to prevent burnout at work.
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August 12, 2017
7 Tips to Prevent Burnout at Work
As efficiency sales professionals, we deal with stress on a regular basis. Sometimes the stress comes from setbacks or lost deals; other times it simply comes from having too much to do and too little time to do it. Whatever the source of your stress may be, it’s important to have some coping mechanisms to help you stay motivated and productive.
An article published on the Forbes blog suggests “7 Ways to Prevent Stress at Work and Regain Productivity.” If you struggle to cope with stress, I highly recommend checking out this article and applying some of these ideas yourself.
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August 11, 2017
What a Good Sales Manager Should Do
A sales manager should always be asking people for stories so their Success Story Archive™ becomes a living document. He should be quizzing his people to make sure that they have read all of them, because when they’re out in the field they’ll need to remember them.
The next thing they need to do is make sure they create and maintain an Objections Archive™. It’s important to catalogue the most common objections as well as the best, most skillfully prepared answers to address each one of those objections. A sales manager would enforce that process by soliciting those objections and making sure that people actually have the answers. For example, she could say, “I am in a restaurant and we sell energy efficient lighting. The pushback is that LED lights are going down in price while getting brighter and smaller. Why should I press on and recommend a retrofit now?” There are at least three or four great answers to that one.
I’ll use the example of a lighting retrofit for a dry-cleaning business. It would help to know how many retrofits for similar businesses you’ve done within a reasonable radius of your prospect base. If you simply walk into a dry cleaner and say, “Hi, I’m here to talk to you about retrofitting your lighting,” the owner might say, “Hit the door, Jack! You’re the 16th person this month that’s walked in here trying to sell me a new lighting system.”
It will go differently if you say, “We’ve installed energy efficient lighting in thirty-seven dry cleaners within 5 miles of yours and here’s a map of them. I’d like to share how we created value for those people and then show you how you could accomplish the same thing here.”
A good sales manager makes sure their staff is informed, trained and drilled to bring this kind of value to a prospect. All it takes is reinforcement and learning, and the result will be a sales team with solutions that stick.
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