Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 241
June 21, 2017
Getting to Know Your Prospects
What methods do you use to get to know your prospects before you meet with them? I’m here to tell you that you really need to do a lot more research and planning than you might imagine. The following are four categories that you should explore in depth before meeting with your prospect:
Industry
Research your prospect’s industry
Research their competitors
Company
Obtain their literature
Get to know their vendors
Talk to their customers
Talk to other employees at the company
Talk to their sales department
Team
Find out how your prospect fits into the team
Find out who else on their team is going to be part of the decision
Individual
Talk to people in your network who know them
Look them up on LinkedIn
Check out other sources like Facebook and Twitter
Read articles or papers they have written
The post Getting to Know Your Prospects appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 20, 2017
Make it Easy for Your Internal Champion to Help You Sell
Many of my blog readers sell efficiency products and services to large organizations. Those of you who do sell to large organizations know how complex the decision-making chain can be. In most cases, you’re not even in the room when your prospect’s organization decides whether or not to approve the project. So how do you ensure that your project will get the attention it deserves? You have to find an internal champion to be the project’s advocate, and you have to equip that internal champion with the right information and materials so that they can step up to bat for you. Your internal champion will not likely know as much as you do about your product or service. Ultimately, if you equip them with the right message, they don’t actually need to be the expert that you are. Once you know that they want to help you get the project approved, you simply need to provide them with three key ingredients:
A meaningful and memorable elevator pitch worthy of repeating
A clear and concise one-page narrative summary of the project
A one-page financial summary, using proper metrics
Why these three ingredients? If your prospect doesn’t get a chance to take the floor and speak during the decision-making process, he or she can simply present the two written documents (which speak for themselves). If your prospect only has a short amount of time to speak during the meeting, the elevator pitch – which is quick, meaningful, and memorable – will capture the audience’s attention, and they’ll want to know more about the project.
Bottom line, if you make it easy for your internal champion to help you sell, you’ll have a much better chance of sealing the deal.
The post Make it Easy for Your Internal Champion to Help You Sell appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 19, 2017
What You Need for High Stakes Problem Solving
Very often professionals find themselves in high-pressure situations that need tailored solutions. The challenge is thinking outside the box (and quickly!) without compromising relationships or the health of your business. When you’re facing an unforeseen obstacle or something entirely new, what is the best way to handle it? What’s more, how can you be the most effective in a quickly paced and competitive environment?
In Pulitzer Prize-winning Charles Cuhigg’s Smarter Faster Better there are anecdotal stories about people faced with these issues in a variety of different situations, from a world-class poker player and an intelligence agent to the creators of Google and writers for Pixar’s Frozen. Duhigg groups these compelling stories into packaged examples of teamwork, innovation, motivation and creating goals with appendices on how they can be applied to your personal or professional life. If you’re looking for an entertaining read about high-stakes problem-solving with a dose of self-help, then this is the book for you.
Here is a summary from Amazon:
“At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.”
The post What You Need for High Stakes Problem Solving appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 18, 2017
Weekly Recap, June 18, 2017
Monday: Read Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, by Tim Harform, if you find that fear of failure holds you back.
Tuesday: Learn to create value using a property’s capitalization (or “cap”) rate.
Wednesday: Make an effort to discover your customers unforeseen benefits.
Thursday: Explore how to recognize genuine rapport.
Friday: Discover how to resurrect a prospect who has gone dark.
Saturday: Check out a few tips for conquering the fears that may be standing between you and high performance.
Selling Energy Blog
The post Weekly Recap, June 18, 2017 appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 17, 2017
Tips for Conquering Fear of Failure
Fear of failure can prevent us from pursuing what we really want in life. It can prevent us from starting our own business, making those cold calls to hot prospects, or asking for referrals even though we know in our hearts that we really deserve them.
The good news is that there are plenty of examples in our culture where overcoming the fear of failure has yielded great rewards. You hear stories all of the time about how the most successful have experienced the most failure. How Steve Jobs made huge mistakes and failed; how the greatest inventors of all time had the largest flops. When is the last time you heard about a truly great dream materializing without someone taking a few well-calculated risks along the way?
Here are a few tips for conquering the fears that may be standing between you and high performance:
Have a plan – You’ll be more confident and more likely to succeed if you have a carefully considered plan. If you’re thinking about making the leap to running your own business, make sure you have a solid business plan that’s been well vetted by people who aren’t afraid to give you “tough love” feedback on its merits. Before you pick up the phone to call the big fish, make sure you’ve run through what you’ll say, and that you’ve planned your responses to questions or objections they may have. Before you ask for a referral, take the time to plan the best opportunity for doing so.
Visualize Success – Taking the time to visualize a successful outcome is imperative. In fact, if you can’t visualize success, you need to take a step back and ask yourself why. The first person you need to convince is yourself. We teach our students to visualize all five senses of the successful outcome: what will it look like, feel like, sound like, taste like and even smell like! A richly visualized outcome can fool your brain into thinking that the positive outcome has already happened! Did you ever close your eyes and visualize biting into a lemon, only to find your mouth salivating as if you had already done so? As powerful as it is, the human brain often has difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imagined… and that’s a good thing when you’re visualizing success outcomes.
Remember that your action will not determine the rest of your life. Woody Allen used to have such performance anxiety that before he’d walk out on stage to do his stand-up act, he’d close his eyes and repeat to himself, “Nothing I do tonight will influence my career in any way.” A mentor of mine once told me that if you just do the right thing all the time, sooner or later you’ll do it at the right time and you’ll finally enjoy the success you deserve. Another mentor once highlighted the difference between eustress and distress, emphasizing that a little anxiety can be empowering to high performance, while too much can lead to a suboptimal outcome.
I keep a small metal plaque on my desk that says, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” Can you imagine how much happier and more impactful you would be if you adopted this attitude in your own life? Just do it. You’ll wonder why you didn’t start living by this motto years ago.
The post Tips for Conquering Fear of Failure appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 16, 2017
How to Resurrect a Prospect Who Has Gone Silent, or Better Yet, How to Minimize a Prospect from Ever Going Dark
Sales in any industry can be challenging, but there are ways you can make the process easier on yourself and the prospect.
Simple Proposal and Quick Follow-Up
The absolute best way to keep a prospect from ever going dark is to send them a one-page proposal and follow up immediately! Keeping it simple allows the prospect to give your proposal the attention it requires without putting a lot of stress on them by requiring them to read a long document and/or lots of attachments.
Make it easy for them to do business with you. Provide pricing, benefits and work details all in one, small, easy-to-digest PDF so they can open it on any device. Keep in mind that the “work details” probably belong in a “Technical Appendix” so that the one-page narrative can remain squarely focused on the “why” rather than the “how,” “when,” or “how much.”
Once you have crafted your one-page proposal and sent it, immediately call. If you have a texting relationship with your prospect, you might send them a quick text confirming that you sent the proposal and that you will follow-up within two days. You might mention that the proposal you just sent is only a single page, making it easy to review, and that you will follow up soon. Now they know exactly what to expect.
Be sure to call them back in two days, so they are not left hanging. Many prospects will not call you if they figure you’re already planning to call them in a day or two.
Are You Ok?
So, you have a great relationship with a prospect and you’ve sent over your one-page proposal, but now you cannot reach them. You start to wonder if they are avoiding you or if something else is going on.
If you have already done your two-day follow-up and maybe even sent an additional email to confirm that they received your proposal, consider calling the receptionist and asking if your prospect is in the office, on business travel, etc.
Keep in mind that the purpose of your follow-up is not to hassle them with calls or emails asking if they “made their decision yet.” That can be annoying. Instead, open the conversation with something more natural about another client that reminded you of them, or something similar. Starting off with something neutral disarms the prospect, especially if they have been avoiding you because they have not yet had time to review your proposal.
If you do get them on the phone and they admit they have not yet read it, give them time to do so and promise another follow-up. Don’t just stay on the phone while they read it. This can make the prospect feel pressured.
After you have exhausted all of these tactics and you still have a prospect you cannot reach or have not heard from, send them an email with “Are you ok?” in the subject line. Express your genuine concern for their wellbeing, since you have not heard from them in a while.
In most cases, the prospect will feel guilty that they made you worry and you will hear back from them quickly. Communication will recommence and allow them to move forward with your proposal.
The best rule of thumb is to do everything you can to keep the conversation going so a prospect never goes dark. However, if they do, you can always rely on the “Are you OK?” approach to resurrect a relationship that may have temporarily faltered.
The post How to Resurrect a Prospect Who Has Gone Silent, or Better Yet, How to Minimize a Prospect from Ever Going Dark appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 15, 2017
How to Recognize Genuine Rapport?
I frequently write about rapport-building on this blog because without good rapport, your chances of closing a sale are slim to none. Assuming you understand the basic techniques of rapport-building, how do you recognize when you have achieved genuine rapport with your prospects?
When your prospect trusts you and feels comfortable around you, he or she will likely talk about topics that are unrelated to work. Maybe your prospect will ask you about your family, or volunteer information about theirs. Maybe they’ll share vulnerabilities that a new prospect normally wouldn’t share. Or maybe they’ll even ask for advice on something unrelated to the project you’re currently working on.
Be cognizant of the relationship you have with your prospects at all times, reflect on your successes and failures, and you’ll soon learn what helps you most successfully achieve genuine rapport.
The post How to Recognize Genuine Rapport? appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 14, 2017
Uncovering the Non-Energy Benefits
You may recall a blog I wrote about the importance of following up with your customers after project completion (see “After Project Completion: Why You Should Follow up Immediately”). Following up with your past customers allows you to not only confirm they received the benefits that you promised them originally, but also discover if they experienced any unexpected benefits.
I was privileged to do a training session for a group of home performance contractors in New England and I asked the audience, “How many of you go back and talk to every customer to make sure that they received the benefits you promised them when you sold the job?” Less than half the audience raised their hands, which is not surprising. I then asked, “How many of you ask your customers if there were any benefits that they realized in the wake of the improvement that you had not promised them when selling the job?” Even fewer hands went up.
One of the few people who raised his hand said that he had presented this exact question to a woman who had hired him to do a whole-home insulation project. As expected, the insulation reduced her heating bill in the New England winter… but what she said next really caught this contractor’s attention. She said, “You know, I’m all about the energy savings, and seeing that come true was great. Everything worked out just as you said it would, but what’s really interesting is that after you put that insulation in my wall, I could no longer hear the street noise… I can now watch my TV shows with the volume set three notches lower!”
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have an abundance of non-energy benefits for each of your products or services that you could use to convince new prospects to buy? Make an effort to discover what unforeseen benefits your customers are appreciating, and use that information to strengthen your value proposition for your next prospect.
The post Uncovering the Non-Energy Benefits appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 13, 2017
Create Value Using a Property’s Cap Rate
When you’re selling an efficiency project in a commercial landlord/tenant setting, one of the most valuable (and frequently omitted) pieces of data that you should consider in your financial analysis is the property’s capitalization (or “cap”) rate. Why is cap rate so important? Let’s use a hypothetical scenario with a cap rate of 10% to demonstrate:
Let’s say you invest one dollar per square foot on an efficiency project that yields roughly 35 cents a square foot in savings per year. What’s the payback? Some people would say three years. A three-year payback is decidedly unsexy; many people wouldn’t even think of approving a project with anything over a two-year payback. (Such myopic focus on simple payback is silly; however, that’s a topic for another blog.)
If you add 35 cents per square foot per year to the net operating income of an income-producing building (e.g., through higher base rents, increased tenant attraction/retention, or decreased landlord share of operating expenses), a cap rate of 10% would help you support $3.50 more per square foot in asset value. Using the “Direct Capitalization Approach to Appraisal,” you would divide that incremental NOI by the 10% cap rate. How much did you invest to do this? One dollar. How much did you increase the value of the building? Three dollars and fifty cents. Now that’s a sexy investment.
The minute you make these connections with a commercial real estate player, it becomes a whole different conversation. Remember, it’s not just about the simple payback period. You should always be looking for ways to create value for your customers, and this is one of the many ways you can accomplish that goal.
The post Create Value Using a Property’s Cap Rate appeared first on Selling Energy.
June 11, 2017
Why Success Always Starts with Failure
“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” – John Wooden
It’s a simple fact of life that things don’t always go according to plan. Of course, if you fear failure to the point that you never take risks, you will neither grow nor progress. In the complex and ever-changing landscape of the efficiency industry, you must take risks and be flexible to succeed.
In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford argues that survival in business requires a willingness to adapt. He emphasizes the fact that all levels of an organization must respond to change in order for change to take place, and that trust among colleagues helps reduce the risk of failure in the wake of change. If you find that fear of failure holds you back, I highly recommend reading this insightful book.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“In this groundbreaking book, Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist, shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. When faced with complex situations, we have all become accustomed to looking to our leaders to set out a plan of action and blaze a path to success. Harford argues that today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinion; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt.
“Deftly weaving together psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, physics, and economics, along with the compelling story of hard-won lessons learned in the field, Harford makes a passionate case for the importance of adaptive trial and error in tackling issues such as climate change, poverty, and financial crises – as well as in fostering innovation and creativity in our business and personal lives.
“Taking us from corporate boardrooms to the deserts of Iraq, Adapt clearly explains the necessary ingredients for turning failure into success. It is a breakthrough handbook for surviving – and prospering – in our complex and ever-shifting world.”
The post Why Success Always Starts with Failure appeared first on Selling Energy.
Selling Energy
- Mark Jewell's profile
- 7 followers
