Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 253
February 20, 2017
Rethinking Corporate Education in a World of Unrelenting Change
As a reader of this blog, you fall into the category of “learner” – someone who values education and the expansion of knowledge. In a competitive industry that is constantly shifting and evolving, “learners” are vital to the continuing success of their organizations.
According to Jason Wingard in his book, Learning to Succeed: Rethinking Corporate Education in a World of Unrelenting Change, every organization should place a high value on learning and knowledge. The most successful companies are the ones that foster a culture of learning – and that support employees in their professional development. He argues that while education can be expensive, it is a wise investment because it makes employees more talented – and their collective talent boosts the success of the entire organization. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend picking up a copy of the book.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“Frequent market shifts… The rapid pace of technological change… We’re all familiar with the old saying, “the only constant is change,” but this has never been as true for business as it is today – nor have the penalties for companies who fail to learn and adapt been as high. Learning to Succeed insists that an integrated model for corporate education – one that links development programs with strategic goals – is critical to building agile and resilient learning organizations that will survive in our fast-evolving business landscape. Companies need to continually assess where they need to go in relation to where they are now – and use training to bridge the gap. As these new education initiatives are designed to advance concrete corporate goals, participants become active learners. Instead of merely listening to lectures – they work on strategic plans and action projects tied to key objectives. Learning is reinforced and ROI is optimized. For companies ready to embrace what it means to be a learning organization, to welcome the CLO to the C-Suite, to tightly and continuously weave strategy and learning into the fabric of their businesses, the opportunities are limitless. Complete with practical guidelines and illuminating case studies, this pioneering book puts them on the path to long-term success.”
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February 19, 2017
Weekly Recap, February 19, 2017
Monday: Read Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, by Shane Snow, if you’re interested in learning how to accelerate your success strategically.
Tuesday: Learn how to capture your prospect’s attention in 3 sentences.
Wednesday: Check out 7 tips for active listening.
Thursday: Explore how to make sure you’re closing more sales with existing customers.
Friday: Discover what to do when dealing with “low-balling” prospects.
Saturday: Check out an article published last week in FastCompany on “The 5 Things That Are Causing Employees to Burn Out.”
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February 18, 2017
5 Causes of Employee Burnout
Achieving success requires a lot of hard work, and as efficiency sales professionals, we often push ourselves to the limit (or past it!). While it may seem that working around the clock is the only way to get everything done, it’s a recipe for burnout. According to a January 2017 survey by Harris Poll and Kronos, almost half of Human Resources leaders say “employee burnout is responsible for up to half (20 to 50%, specifically) of their annual workforce turnover.” While helping employees to boost productivity may seem like the best way to enhance employee engagement, avoiding or eliminating employee burnout is also of vital importance.
An article published last week on FastCompany suggests that “understanding the root causes of burnout are essential first steps to staving it off.” In other words, before we reach the point of frustration and exhaustion, we should stop what we’re doing and try to understand what is causing it. For more on this topic, read the full article.
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February 17, 2017
Dealing with “Low-baller” Prospects
Most people in the efficiency sales world have probably dealt with at least one or two “low-balling” prospects. What do you do when a prospect says that they’re only willing to buy if you significantly reduce the price?
First of all, (if you haven’t already done so) you must demonstrate the value and benefits of your product or service using yardsticks your prospect already uses to measure his or her success. Lacking a clear picture of the value, why would the prospect be quick to pay full price?
Second, make sure your prospect is comparing apples to apples. Your competitors may be providing a lesser-quality offering at a cut-rate price just to win the business, hoping to make it up in change orders, etc. later.
Third, assuming that your product or service is fairly priced despite the fact that it is not the least expensive option on the market, explain to your prospect the rationale behind your pricing. You can acknowledge the fact that other vendors or services providers may offer lower pricing, but that your superior benefits outweigh the cost difference.
You might also suggest reducing the scope of work in return for granting a lower price. More often than not, the prospect will be unwilling to reduce the scope – and the mere threat of doing so may put an end to the prospect’s price nibbling.
Don’t forget that people always want to avoid risk. Maybe your competitors are cheaper because they cut corners, use lower-quality materials, or pose other risks that could end up damaging the prospect’s reputation or costing them more than the price difference in maintenance or legal fees.
Now, if the prospect is still insisting on a significant discount, you must be willing to walk away. If you don’t, you risk being perceived as weak, and that would be a problem for future transactions, not only with this prospect but elsewhere in the marketplace. You must have the confidence to sell your product at the price it is worth and your services at the price you are worth. Never cheapen yourself.
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February 16, 2017
How to Make Sure You’re Closing More Sales with Existing Customers
Have you maximized the profitability of your customer base? Do you have old customers that could use new products or services from you? It’s important that you set aside some time to think about how you might close new sales with existing customers.
For the sake of analogy, imagine that your customers are olives. You want to make sure that for every olive that you touch, you don’t just press it once to get the extra virgin olive oil. You press it again to get the next grade of oil, and then again to get the next grade of oil. Only after it’s been reduced to a dry pulp do you toss that olive in the compost heap (but don’t do this with your customers, of course!). The moral of the story? Too many salespeople in the efficiency business just go for the first press and then move on. It’s a tremendous waste of potential revenue.
How do you make sure that you’re not doing what I just described? Well, you measure account performance quantitatively: perhaps the number of transactions or total revenues generated per customer over the last fiscal year.
Let’s make it personal. What were your average number of transactions and average revenues per customer in the past year?
If you work at a company with multiple salespeople, here’s a great agenda item for your next sales meeting: challenge each of your colleagues to research and calculate the highest number of transactions and the highest amount of revenues he or she has done with a single customer in the last 12 months. In a group of ten salespeople, you’ll likely see a range: “One sale.” “Seven sales.” “Three sales.” The spread on revenues per customer will likely be even more pronounced.
Once you hear the figures, you’ll find yourself asking, “Wait a second. What did you do to get seven sales out of the same customer in a single fiscal year?”
“Well, I did this and this… and oh, I did that as well.”
What’s the next sentence out of your mouth? If you’re the sales manager, it had better be:
“Mr. One Sale, your job is to take Mr. Seven Sales to lunch this week so he can explain to you what he does to nurture relationships through account development. And how about this: I’ll pick up the tab for your lunch, and you can pick up the tab for all of the incremental income tax you’re going to be paying this coming year once you start applying what Mr. Seven Sales is going to tell you he’s already doing to turbocharge his own commissions!”
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February 15, 2017
7 Tips for Active Listening
Selling efficiency is a two-way street: You can’t just bombard your prospect with a sales pitch or a speech about all the benefits of your product or service without listening… and listening well. A smart sales professional prepares responses to all possible objections and listens carefully to his or her prospect. Here are seven things to keep in mind:
Always allow speakers to complete sentences. If you want someone’s respect, don’t interrupt them.
Listen to understand, not to know when it’s your turn to talk. Your prospect will know if you’re passively listening, and that doesn’t make for a trusting relationship.
Acknowledge what the speaker said and incorporate it into your response. This proves that you’re listening and comprehending. Also, use listening noises such as “I see” to affirm that you’re actively engaged in what they are saying.
Look at the person who is speaking and don’t get distracted. It’s disrespectful to take your focus off the prospect and it gives the impression that you have more important things to do.
Be patient and calm while listening. You’re not going to close a sale if you overwhelm or stress out your prospect.
Take notes while someone else is speaking (but be sure to look up at the speaker from time to time). This shows that you value what they are saying.
And finally, always listen with an open mind.
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February 14, 2017
How to Capture Your Prospect’s Attention in 3 Sentences
You have about 15 seconds to capture your prospects’ attention, whether they are listening to your “elevator pitch” or reading your short letter or email. The following three-sentence formula is both time-efficient and effective in making the most of that first, precious quarter-minute.
First, you need what I call the “Big Dog” sentence.
“In the last three years or so, we’ve helped 8 hospitals within a dozen miles of yours reduce their utility bills, with an average savings of more than 15%.”
Note that the sentence is numerically specific on several levels: the time period, the number of successful reference cases, their proximity to your prospect’s facility, and the average savings percentage you’ve actually witnessed. Note also that the numbers are softened by the addition of “or so” and “a dozen miles,” which makes them sound more credible. The savings percentage is also low enough to be believable.
“It occurred to me as I was driving by your facility last night that your patient room lighting is the same technology we removed from five of those hospitals, at an average lighting energy savings of more than 20%.”
This second sentence conveys an honest sense of “forehead slapping” surprise that your prospect’s facility is nothing less than the “Before” photo of your other projects, and that if they’d let you work your magic for them, they could quickly become the “After” photo you’ve delivered for others!
“If you’d be interested in exploring how we might extend the success we’ve had with those other hospitals to your facility, I’d be open to a discussion.”
Note the soft sell. It starts by reiterating the impact of the first sentence – you need only extend your previous successes to deliver genuine value to your current prospect. And using terms like “exploring” and “open to a discussion” emphasizes the fact that you’re not looking to give a sales pitch. Rather, it will be a peer-to-peer sharing of ideas. All insight and discovery, no pressure.
This three-sentence opener is extraordinarily effective. However, to use it effectively, you need three things.
First, you need to take the time to gather the data points that make the first sentence pop.
Second, you need to focus on finding prospects that could easily become clones of those prior successes.
Finally, you need to focus on creating value, rather than selling. One of the best ways to drive demand for your energy solutions is to hold out examples of prior successes that your prospects will be anxious to replicate in their own facilities.
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February 13, 2017
How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
Whether we’re aware of it or not, societal conventions and norms often dictate how we approach success and career development. Are you climbing the ladder the way society “expects” you to, or are you carving your own path to success? Convention says you have to start from the bottom of the totem pole and work your way up, right? Not necessarily.
According to Shane Snow in his book Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, the most successful innovators and entrepreneurs take “smartcuts” (shortcuts with integrity). They use lateral thinking to come up with unique solutions to problems that would otherwise stand as roadblocks to success. They train with mentors and get feedback on a regular basis to accelerate their development. They leverage tools and technology to achieve goals with less effort. The list goes on…
If you’re interested in learning how to accelerate your success strategically, I recommend picking up a copy of this book.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“Entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow (Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, and cofounder of Contently) analyzes the lives of people and companies that do incredible things in implausibly short time.
“How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm?
“One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call ‘lateral thinking’ to rethink convention and break ‘rules’ that aren’t rules.
“In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like ‘paying dues’ prevent progress, why kids shouldn’t learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it’s easier to build a huge business than a small one.
“From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter – and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.”
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February 12, 2017
Weekly Recap, February 12, 2017
Monday: Read Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines, by Adam Toporek, for actionable advice to turn any customer-facing professional into a customer service “hero.”
Tuesday: Check out these tips on how to build rapport with your prospect.
Wednesday: Read 6 bad habits of communication to break.
Thursday: Charge up your “passion battery” before you step into a meeting with a prospect.
Friday: Explore how to sell with emotional appeal.
Saturday: Check out an article published on the Inc. blog for an in depth explanation of how modifications to diet and sleep, as well as external factors, can boost your mental performance.
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February 11, 2017
7 Tips to Make Your Brain Perform at its Best
As humans, we have limited control over our mental energy. For the most part, we’re at the mercy of our body clocks. If you’ve monitored your own performance, you may have determined the approximate time of day that you reach your peak. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to prolong that period of focus and mental acuity?
According to an article published on the Inc. blog, there are a handful of things we can do to extend this “window” of peak performance. These include modifications to diet and sleep, as well as external factors such as workplace cleanliness, lighting, and noise levels. For in depth explanation of how these elements might boost your mental performance, read the full article.
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