Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 245
May 12, 2017
Keep a Positive Attitude
There’s a significant correlation between positive attitude and sales performance. If you look at sales performance data, you’ll probably notice that people are most likely to make a new sale immediately after they’ve just made one. Why does this happen? Because a successful sale boosts your general outlook and attitude, and that emotional lift makes you a more effective sales professional.
What’s also interesting is that many salespeople alternate between great sales months and lousy ones. This pattern can also be explained by attitude. After a great sales month with back-to-back sales, one might rejoice, “Woo-hoo! What a great month! Now I can relax a bit.” There’s only one problem… As soon as you relax, you run the danger of falling into a slump. You stop doing the blocking and tackling. You stop making the cold calls. You stop being responsive. And then suddenly, you’re in panic mode: “Oh my gosh, I’m really behind on my numbers. I now have to scratch my way up to the top of the mountain again.” That desperation actually delays your next sale. Prospects can sense it in your voice, which can unnecessarily elongate the trough. Moreover, once you finally do work your way back up to the top, you may very well repeat the cycle unless you’re vigilant about the perils of doing so.
So what’s the moral here? You can make every month a great sales month provided you keep a positive attitude and never rest on your laurels.
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May 11, 2017
People Buy from People They Trust
Successful selling is a creator of relationships; relationships aren’t a creator of successful selling. So, what is a relationship? Many salespeople think that a relationship is a friendship. They think they need to give their clients sports tickets or take them fishing. It’s nice to make friends; however, that’s not going to determine whether you’re going to get the sale.
People don’t necessarily buy from friends – they buy from people they trust to deliver. Especially if risk and hassle are on the table and they need to make sure that the person they just endorsed for their project is not going to let them down or get them fired or cost them political capital in their organization. So how do you build a relationship? By producing results, acting professionally, and demonstrating your value from the get-go. A friendship may form as a result of the sale, but it’s your reliability and performance in the sales setting that are going to win you the next sale.
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May 10, 2017
Use Emphasis to Your Advantage
When you’re giving a presentation, use emphasis to your advantage. There are lots of different ways you can use emphasis. You can be quiet. You can slow down. You can stop. You can use a blank screen. Anything that shakes up the normal flow of your presentation will get the audience’s attention and make them listen carefully to what you’re saying.
Imagine, for example, that you’re giving an important presentation to a bunch of facilities executives. You say, “We’ve taken the time to do a walk-through audit of all ten of your properties and what have we found?” You pause, then softly say, “We found that six of them don’t meet basic code.”
Now the minute you say that, people give you their full attention. It’s ironic that the more softly you speak, the more people listen. So, don’t be afraid of using different intonation, switching up your pace or volume, turning off the slides, etc. When you apply these techniques, it becomes a dramatic production and people really pay attention and remember what you said.
Using a pause is particularly effective in conveying that what you just said (or are about to say) is important. Believe me, people are used to stream of consciousness. If you stop talking, people will look up and say to themselves, “Uh oh, what happened? Did somebody just ask me a question and I didn’t hear it?”
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May 9, 2017
Disadvantages of Simple Payback Period
There are many pitfalls of using Simple Payback Period (SPP) as a measure of a project’s merits. Ask yourself these seven questions:
Am I using the right figures?
How did I calculate my costs?
How did I calculate my savings?
2. What about the time value of money?
3. What about the period after the payback?
4. Must the project’s SPP be less than or equal to the holding period for the property into which the measures are being installed?
5. Can SPP reflect cash flow probabilities?
6. Do SPP “rules of thumb” even make sense?
7. In Landlord/Tenant settings, whose SPP am I calculating?
Just in case you are thinking, “Wait, but I use Return on Investment!” Return on Investment (ROI) is the reciprocal of SPP and suffers from very similar shortcomings. SPP is the first cost divided by Year 1 savings. ROI is Year 1 savings divided by first cost.
EXAMPLE:
$100,000 investment saves $25,000 in YR1
SPP = $100,000 divided by $25,000 = 4 years
ROI = $25,000 divided by $100,000 = 25%
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May 8, 2017
The Biggest Communication Mistakes Professionals Make
Whenever I am training a new group of sales professionals, I always make it a point to emphasize how communication is vital to their success. More than that, being able to communicate thoroughly is their responsibility as efficiency sales professionals. If your prospect misunderstands your point, even after all discussions have been made, then it is important to reflect on how to improve.
If you are hoping to win your next deal, I encourage you to brush up on your communication skills. Kim Zoller and Kerry Preston’s communication guide, You Said What?!: The Biggest Communication Mistakes Professionals Make offers precise and concise advise. Besides discussing the significance of a communication plan, Zoller and Preston also highlight how to correct the 16 most common communication mistakes. Newcomers and seasoned professionals will appreciate the insight from this helpful manual.
Here is a summary from Amazon:
“Communication is a measure of how we are heard. It’s not about us; it is about how the other person perceives our message. If you are not where you should be in your career, the problem may be related to how you communicate.
“You Said What?! is an action-oriented book that gives you solid techniques that can be used right away to achieve effective results, including:
Quick tips and strategies on communication skills.
Real-life stories of how business communication can impact your career.
Tools that help you be understood and heard.
“You Said What?! will help you strengthen your message by planning and sharpening your communication skills.”
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May 7, 2017
Weekly Recap, May 7, 2017
Monday: Read, The 27 Challenges Managers Face: Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems, by Bruce Tulgan, if you’re a new manager or if you hope to better your own management style for your employees.
Tuesday: Are You an Efficiency Sales Professional?
Wednesday: Explore how to connect the dots in creative ways on multiple levels.
Thursday: Learn to reframe your project.
Friday: Check out ten questions to ask your prospect early in the sales process.
Saturday: Read this article published in The New York Times on “monotasking.”
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May 6, 2017
Monotasking
Do you ever feel as if there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that needs doing? This may be the result of an overly ambitious workload; however, more likely than not, it’s simply a consequence of frequent multitasking and a general lack of focus. Let’s face it – there are countless things that can distract us at any given moment: our email inbox, social media, co-workers… the list goes on and on.
So, what action can we do to ensure that we’re focused on the task at hand? An article published in the New York Times suggests that “monotasking is something that needs to be practiced.” Take a read and remind yourself what it feels like to do one thing at a time next week.
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May 5, 2017
10 Questions to Ask Your Prospect Early in the Sales Process
Tony Robbins is fond of saying that the quality of your life is directly related to the quality of the questions you ask. So, I ask you, are you asking the right questions?
When asking questions, ask “Do” and “Consider” questions rather than fact-finding questions. Early on, you will want to ask the prospect why they are interested in your offerings. The more you know about why they’re interested in your offerings, the better job you can do of connecting the dots in a way that allows them to feel good about making an affirmative decision.
Here is a list of some of my favorite questions to ask early in the conversation to make sure you are not wasting your time:
1. Are there particular departments/individuals here that focus on energy efficiency?
2. How many projects have been proposed in the last “X” years?
How many have been approved (and why)?
What has prevented project approvals?
Can you think of any previous efficiency initiatives that were particularly gratifying?
3. What projects or initiatives are on your “wish list”?
4. What percentage of your overhead is energy?
5. How could energy-efficiency boost productivity?
6. What is the equivalent level of sales that would need to be produced to equal $1 in energy cost-reduction?
7. How are upgrade costs and benefits split between the landlord and the tenant?
8. How might the landlord’s share of savings affect the building’s profitability and value?
9. What does the capital budgeting request process look like?
10. What barriers have you faced in getting projects approved in the past?
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May 4, 2017
Reframe Your Project
Whenever I do a national keynote speech or customized coaching session for a sales team, I always ask to speak with a half-dozen or more “rock stars” in their organization who are really knocking the ball out of the park. The highest performers always have offering-specific lessons that the rest of the sales team could learn for increasing their sales.
A few years ago I was asked to do a keynote for a controls manufacturer. As I was preparing my remarks, I had the pleasure of speaking with one of their rock stars. I asked him, “To what do you attribute your success in the laboratory segment?”
He replied that he specialized in controlling previously uncontrolled fume hood fan energy solutions and that by doing so, he could reduce a lab’s chargeable electricity by more than half. In fact, he gave me an example of a lab for which he had reduced the bill by more than $350K/year.
I said, “Wow, that’s impressive!” However, I was still wondering why a lab that was large enough to save that much electricity annually on its fume hoods, a lab that probably did several hundred million dollars of research a year, would take the time away from drug testing or curing cancer to focus on something as obscure as fume hood fan energy savings… particularly when they’d have to interrupt their operations for several days to implement whatever savings maneuver this rock star ultimately proposed.
The rock star set me straight. He said, “You don’t understand. When I propose a project that will save $350K a year, I reframe it as a project that is the equivalent of $350K in grants from the National Institutes of Health that my client now doesn’t have to apply for and win… that’s enough grant money to fund several more researchers. In fact, since my gear will continue producing savings for 20 years, it’s the equivalent of giving that client $7 million in “grants” that they don’t have to apply for and win.” Disregarding for the moment that the $7M calculation didn’t reflect the time value of money, this reasoning was a really compelling way to connect the dots for a busy lab director who had to be convinced to invest the time and money to focus on something that was not his main goal.
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May 3, 2017
Connect the Dots in Creative Ways on Multiple Levels
One of the most important attributes of a true sales professional is the ability to tell the prospect’s story rather than his/her own. Moreover, that true sales professional knows to connect the dots in new and creative ways so that the prospect realizes the link between what is being sold and what that prospect is actually seeking – to move beyond features, and even beyond benefits, into values that the prospect really cares about.
Think about it. Your prospects are consumed with their industries, not yours. They don’t need to understand your technology or even your industry to buy from you. They need to feel comfortable that you understand their situation and what drives value in their world, and that your recommendations will get them closer to where they already know they want to go.
I often say that your sales success is directly related to your ability to connect the dots between the benefits your offering can deliver and the yardsticks your prospects are already using to measure their success.
Your prospects are not waking up in the morning thinking, “Wow, I hope I can save some kilowatt-hours or therms today!” Or, “Boy, if I only had another couple thousand control points in my energy management system!”
What are they thinking about when they put their pants (or dresses!) on in the morning?
Keeping their staffs happy and productive.
Keeping tenant hot/cold calls to a minimum.
Coming up with an “edge” that will allow them to finally fill those last 50,000 square feet of vacancy.
If they’re a retailer, they’re probably thinking about how to boost sales this month.
You get the idea… They’re probably not thinking about static pressure, tip speed, delta T, chromaticity, color rendering index, or any of the other technical mumbo jumbo that salespeople often lapse into.
Finally, remember that you need to connect the dots at many levels:
Segment-specific
Organizational
Professional
Personal
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