Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 240
July 1, 2017
10 Tips for Creating a Stellar LinkedIn Profile
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which can be a chaotic blend of personal and business content, LinkedIn is the perfect social media channel for business professionals.
Someone new creates a LinkedIn account every two seconds, so it is critical to have a top-notch, highly competitive profile showcasing your best work.
LinkedIn has some great built-in tools to help you customize your profile. Don’t overlook these helpful tips on how to make your profile stellar.
1. Profile Image: A LinkedIn account is eleven times more searchable with a profile image. Steer clear of using homegrown selfies and use only a professional business headshot for your profile picture.
2. Contact Information: It may seem obvious; however, frequently check your contact information to make sure it is up to date. The last thing you want is to have this great profile with a phone number that has a typo in it, and no one can contact you. Make it easy for your prospects to contact you quickly.
3. Headline: You may think this one is not that important either; however, it’s an excellent opportunity to summarize what you can provide to a potential client. Craft a compelling headline; be succinct and use a few keywords for what you do or sell.
4. First Person: Always write your LinkedIn content in the first person; however, remember that it should be about what you can offer to your audience and who your audience is, rather than being all about you.
5. Keywords: Throughout your profile use a short list of specific, searchable keywords that represent your business offering, regardless of whether you sell products or services. Use these keywords naturally within the text; don’t force it or use too many.
6. Connect: Connect your other social media accounts to your profile so an interested business colleague can check out other aspects of your online exposure and get a larger picture of the real you.
7. Experience: Don’t overlook the experience section. Use this area to talk about what you do and emphasize your extraordinary achievements. Talk about particularly successful projects and avoid buzzwords at all costs. Do not think of this as just an online resume. This is your professional business-to-business brochure.
8. Update Your Status: Make posting regular targeted updates part of your weekly routine. Be sure to use keywords in your posts and share video or other valuable resources with your connected business contacts. Share links in your updates to make your profile stand out from the crowd.
9. Groups, Groups, and More Groups: List information about any awards, special skills, licenses, endorsements or groups you are a member of; however, be sure to remember to join member groups within LinkedIn. LinkedIn Groups is an often overlooked, valuable asset helping you become even more connected to your target audience.
10. Video: In this fast-paced, time-is-king world, video makes a bigger impression than any amount of words. Use video to make your LinkedIn profile distinctive, and share interesting information that your prospects will appreciate and remember.
By using all the features of the LinkedIn profile system, you can create a robust, well-rounded picture of you, your business and what you bring to the table. Each feature offers an opportunity to highlight different elements of your business history, experience, and the complete package that is you.
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June 30, 2017
Imagine Success
One of the best ways to achieve success is to imagine yourself achieving it. It’s one thing to say to yourself, “I’m going to close this sale.” It’s another thing altogether to immerse all of your senses that are stimulated in the wake of a successful sale. Before you meet with a new prospect, take some time to think about what you will see, taste, hear, smell, and feel once you seal the deal.
What does a big sale look like? Perhaps it’s a cash deposit, a check, a purchase order, or an award for being a top sales producer.
What does a big sale taste like? Perhaps it’s a fabulous meal at your favorite “special occasion” restaurant to celebrate your victory.
What does a big sale sound like? Perhaps it’s your boss saying, “Wow, that’s the biggest sale this company’s ever made. You’re awesome! Fantastic job.”
What does a big sale smell like? Perhaps you’re going to take your husband or wife on a special vacation where you smell the ocean surf, evergreen trees, or the freshly cut fairway at a famous golf resort.
What does a big sale feel like? Perhaps it’s your sales manager slapping you on the back for a job well done. Or perhaps it’s the feel of your new customer shaking your hand when he or she says, “You know what, you’re the first vendor who actually understands what I do for a living. I know we’re going to have a long and mutually prosperous relationship together.”
If my own experience using this technique is a reliable predictor of how well it will work for you, I can assure you that taking the time to richly imagine what your success is going to look like, taste like, sound like, smell like, and feel like will give your mind a holographic image of success. Do that, and you’ll have many more successes come true than if you had not taken the time to do such an exercise.
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June 29, 2017
Selling Efficiency in the Healthcare Industry
Today, we’re going to discuss how to reframe the benefits of efficiency when selling to prospects in the healthcare industry.
Non-profit healthcare: How much revenue do you think a non-profit healthcare organization would have to capture to equal $1 in energy savings? I think you’ll be surprised to learn that it’s $40, given an estimated net margin of 2.5%.
A Budget Director at a non-profit healthcare organization is probably not going to get up in the morning and say, “I wish I could save some therms today” or “I sure hope I can save some kilowatt-hours when I get to the office.” Rather, he or she is far more likely to say, “How are we doing with revenue growth and profitability? Do we have positive figures to report to our backers? What do we need to do to remain financially viable?”
Bottom line, if you say to your prospect, “Every dollar that you save in energy has an equivalent bottom-line impact as generating $40 in revenues,” you’re telegraphing something that they care about and using a yardstick that they use regularly to measure their own success.
For-profit healthcare: In the for-profit healthcare industry, $1 in energy savings would deliver an equivalent bottom-line impact as generating $20 in revenue given an estimated net margin of 4%.
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June 28, 2017
Selling to Homeowners, Part Two
Today, we’ll continue with some more strategies for reframing the value of efficiency when selling to homeowners.
Safety / maintaining a healthy home
Fire/carbon monoxide warnings
Motion-activated lighting to protect against intruders
Removing toxic substances from the air
Using utility bill savings to afford more leisure
People don’t make decisions – they make comparisons
Compare the utility cost savings to the cost of leisure activities (concert tickets, vacations, etc.)
Hedging against utility price spikes
Spending less on utility bills reduces the impact of utility price spikes
If you’re selling solar, you should definitely emphasize this fact
Supporting an easier sale and/or higher price
Prospective buyers who value efficiency will be more likely to buy your home than other less-efficient homes on the market (easier sale)
Homes with demonstrably exceptional energy efficiency sell for a higher price than standard homes (in the District of Columbia, high performance houses [HPHs] had a median sales price that was 23% higher than that of non-HPHs.
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June 27, 2017
Selling to Homeowners, Part One
We talk a lot about commercial and industrial efficiency sales strategies on this blog. While larger projects yield larger returns for the end user, residential efficiency upgrades can have significant benefits for the homeowner as well, particularly if you reframe the savings and benefits in the right way. Over the course of the next two days, we’ll discuss some strategies for reframing the value of efficiency when selling to homeowners.
Comfort
Improved indoor air quality
Better temperature control
Reduced glare
Improved lighting quality
Pride of ownership
Bragging rights about reduced carbon footprint
Green / high-performance “badge value”
Saving money to fund educational expenses
Energy cost savings as they relate to educational expenses (savings for college fund, student loan payments, etc.)
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June 26, 2017
The Power of Grit
If you care about what you’re doing, it’s harder to let your goals fall by the wayside. If you deeply love how it makes you feel, you’ll find yourself pursuing that feeling over and over again. Nevertheless, it isn’t just passion and devotion that foster success. It takes hard work, determination and a persistent tenacity. In short: you’ve got to have grit.
This is explored in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth, who is well versed in facilitating success. She is not only the founder of The Character Lab and a non-profit summer school, but a professor of psychology, a renowned consultant and a recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. In Grit she illustrates the relationship between talent and effort, positing that in order for someone to reach their goals they have to push themselves and push hard, never resting on their laurels or shying away from challenges and innovation. A particularly interesting part of the book is self-evaluation on what Duckworth calls the “Grit Scale,” which was developed to predict a subject’s success in the military. However, can the scale be applied to your business efforts? What about life goals? Your home life? The answer to all of these queries: definitely.
Here is a summary from Amazon:
“In this instant New York Times bestseller, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed—be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls ‘grit.’
Among Grit’s most valuable insights:
*Why any effort you make ultimately counts twice toward your goal
*How grit can be learned, regardless of I.Q. or circumstances
*How lifelong interest is triggered
*How much of optimal practice is suffering and how much ecstasy
*Which is better for your child—a warm embrace or high standards
*The magic of the Hard Thing Rule
Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that—not talent or luck—makes all the difference.”
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June 25, 2017
Weekly Recap, June 25, 2017
Monday: Read Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, if you’re looking for an entertaining read about high-stakes problem-solving with a dose of self-help.
Tuesday: Make it easy for your internal champion to help you sell.
Wednesday: Explore four categories that you should explore in depth before meeting with a prospect.
Thursday: Do your research before a meeting and come to the table with answers, not questions.
Friday: Discover how to capture a decision-maker’s attention in 9 minutes or less.
Saturday: Check out an article published in Entrepreneur magazine that examines ten horrible habits to break to increase true happiness.
Selling Energy Blog
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June 24, 2017
10 Habits That Are Hindering Your Happiness
Happy people tend to be more productive and successful than unhappy people. But what can you do to become happier? An article published in Entrepreneur Magazine examines ten habits to break to increase true happiness (and as a byproduct, improve your health and productivity). Take a read and see if any of the negative habits in this article resonate with you.
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June 23, 2017
9 Minutes or Less
In Sheena Iyengar’s TED Talk, “The Art of Choosing”, she cites a study that claims that CEOs make “50 percent of their decisions in 9 minutes or less.” This statistic reinforces the concept that we have to convey our core message clearly and succinctly if we want to capture the decision-maker’s attention. There’s simply no time for extraneous details and explanations.
So how can this statistic guide the choices we make as efficiency sales professionals? Let’s break nine minutes down into pieces:
You want to allow the CEO at least five minutes to think about the decision after he or she has the necessary facts to understand the project. This leaves us with only four minutes to get our message across. If the average person can read a couple hundred words per minute, you should budget no more than about 400 words – or two minutes reading time – in your written proposal for the CEO to review. Your remaining “budget” of two minutes will go toward a review of your one-page financial summary in which you have crunched the numbers for the project.
If you can get your message across in this short amount of time, you put yourself head and shoulders above all of your competitors who are trying to sell with crazy 100-page proposals, overly complex executive summaries, and even more opaque financial analyses with multi-spreadsheet workbooks.
Interested in watching Sheena Iyengar’s TED talk? Watch it here.
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June 22, 2017
Do Your Research Before the Meeting
Yesterday, we discussed some strategies for getting to know your prospects before you meet with them. Assuming you take these tips to heart and perform due diligence before the first meeting, how do you use the newfound knowledge of your prospect and his or her industry, company, and team to increase the likelihood of getting your project approved?
One of the many benefits of coming to the table with a healthy dose of background knowledge is that you can limit your questions to only the most important ones. In this day and age, people don’t even have the patience to wait two or three seconds for a website to load before they get frustrated and click on another webpage. Needless to say, you can’t afford to lose your prospect to unnecessary questions. People want vendors and service providers to come to them with answers, not questions. By finding the answers to as many questions as possible before the meeting, you save your prospect the time and frustration of having to spoon-feed you the basics.
Moreover, don’t confuse the wisdom of asking questions during the meeting with the foolishness of not having done your research well in advance of the meeting. Never ask a question that could have (and should have!) been answered with a little research ahead of time.
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