Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 281

Getting Your Prospect Interested

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In last week’s blog, we discussed some of the yardsticks that key decision-makers use to measure their success. In that blog, we used the hypothetical example of an HVAC sales professional selling “smart valves.” Using the same scenario (and some fun alliteration), let’s discuss some reasons that a prospect might become interested in installing smart valves in their building:

Credibility: Let's say you're a controls contractor or a retro-commissioning expert. When you're competing for work, you demonstrate your credibility when you say to your prospect, “Not only can we take care of your existing mechanical system, but we recommend that you install some of these smart valves to make sure that the amount of chilled water your physical plant is generating and distributing through the building is the sensible amount of chilled water that is needed.”

Capital Cost Avoidance: As I mentioned in last week’s blog, the Chief Financial Officer or one of her colleagues might consider the smart valves to be a less expensive approach to improving comfort or satisfying new load without adding chiller capacity.

Control: The chief engineer would likely appreciate knowing that his finite operations and maintenance effort is allocated optimally. It gives him a level of confidence about how well the building is being run.

Case Studies: If you include a case study with the installation, you satisfy the prospect’s desire to be publicly lauded for their environmental initiatives. The case study shows, in a very public way, that they are doing a great job in reducing their carbon footprint and making better use of their utility dollars. Utilities, universities, and even building engineering firms may actually be more interested in the case study than the savings.

Credentials: Your prospect may say, “If we put these smart valves in, we'll be able to have better control over the amount of kWh and therms we use in this building. That would help us get us a higher number of LEED® points, and may even make us eligible for an ENERGY STAR® label. Ultimately these credentials would give us more brownie points in the environmental press and would maybe even qualify us for an award for which we would not have otherwise been qualified.”

Confidence: If you can provide visible evidence that savings are actually occurring, you’ll instill a sense of confidence in your prospect. There are lots of energy service companies out there doing “pay for performance” scenarios that depend on a verification of system operations. To the extent that these smart valves actually give you data to tell you what's happening in the building's chilled water plant, it might be visible evidence that savings are actually occurring, enabling someone to write a check to reward the realization of those savings.

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Practical Tips to Develop Your Business

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Finding high-quality leads for your product or service is vital for successful business development. Here are some practical lead generation tips to keep in mind: 

Embrace and cultivate all of the empowering qualities of a sales professional.
Commit to being proactive rather than reactive.
Learn to leverage those who sell your typical prospects before and after you do.

Property managers who need to field and address all of those “hot/cold” calls from disgruntled occupants.
Building engineering firms that have to operate the aging equipment you should be replacing.
Mechanical contractors who have to service equipment long past its estimated lifetime.
Other suppliers who provide parts for aging equipment.
Air balancing firms, duct cleaning firms, etc.
Real estate brokers with knowledge of thermal comfort, noise, and other building shortcomings in the buildings they know well.

Think carefully about your ideal prospects and build a profile to begin pursuing today.
Take the time to build the tools you’ll need to open doors and keep them open.
Get organized and automated so that you can keep up with the surge of sales activity you’re about to experience.

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Visualize the Outcome

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I’ve written a number of blogs about how to deliver a great elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch is the icebreaker that allows you to have a productive conversation with virtually anyone you meet. After you’ve delivered your elevator pitch and started a conversation, do yourself a favor by taking a moment to visualize the outcome of where you want the conversation to end up.

Why is visualization important? Because if you simply go where the conversation leads you without any forethought about the end goal, you wind up in a meandering conversation that wastes both your time and that of the person with whom you’re speaking.

Based on the information you know about the person you’re talking to, you should be able to determine the ideal outcome of the conversation. You can help navigate the conversation toward that end goal by preparing some conversation “building blocks” ahead of time. Here are some examples of building blocks that you can use to steer the conversation:

-Something about your company
-Something about a landmark client that you’ve worked with in their space
-Something about one of your experts who just helped execute a project for a client

Use these building blocks – and any others that you come up with – based upon both what you see the person becoming most interested in and the ideal outcome that you’ve visualized in your mind.

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Be a Storyteller

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Many of you have probably heard of the “6 x 6 rule” of PowerPoint presentations. In case this is a new concept to you, the rule states that a PowerPoint slide should have no more than six bullet points, each one containing a maximum of six words.

If you know my philosophy on presentations, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why is Mark writing about this rule? Isn’t '36 words per slide' too much text for an effective presentation?” Here’s my answer for you: I’m writing about this rule because I don’t want you to follow it! A truly effective PowerPoint presentation contains little – perhaps even no – text.

If you create a sixty-minute presentation with sixty slides and you’re following the 6 x 6 rule, your presentation will contain more than 2,000 words. That’s more words than the average college term paper, and that’s at a good school! 

 Do you really expect an audience to read the equivalent of an entire college term paper… over your shoulder… while you’re talking… during the course of a single hour-long presentation… that starts late… and is interrupted by questions? Now we know why PowerPoint calls them “bullets.” They kill audiences.  

What do I recommend doing instead? Use a compelling and captivating image for each slide. If you’re going to include text, use only a few words per slide. If you feel you need to write a complete sentence, make sure you read the sentence aloud exactly as it appears on the slide. If you don’t feel that text is going to add anything to your presentation, simply forgo text altogether.

I recently read of a gentleman who is a leading TED Talk presenter. In one of his presentations, he used 52 slides, all of which were images without text. When they asked him, “Why don't you have any words in your slides?” he simply replied, “I'm much more of a storyteller than a narrator.” Ultimately, no doubt, he got a standing ovation because people were so sick and tired of seeing bullets.

Try it yourself. Be a storyteller, not a narrator. You’ll be amazed. And so will your audience.

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Awaken the Giant Within

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If you’ve taken one of my efficiency sales workshops, you’ve probably heard me talk about Tony Robbins’ best-selling book, Awaken the Giant Within. This is one of my all-time favorite self-help books. When I graduated from The Wharton School in the early Nineties, the first thing that I did was purchase a copy of Awaken the Giant Within. I sat in a cafe in Philadelphia drinking very strong coffee and spent about a hundred hours on my laptop doing every one of the exercises in that book. It fundamentally changed my life.

Without stealing too much thunder from the book (since I want you all to read it), one of key exercises that I found particularly valuable is writing my “moving-toward” and “moving-away-from” values. In this exercise, you write a list of all of your values, and break it down into two categories (“moving-toward” and “moving-away-from”). Moving-toward values are things like “power,” “success,” “adventure,” and “love.” Moving-away-from values are things like “anger,” “failure,” “loneliness,” and “humiliation.” Knowing what you value AND what you actively want to avoid can help you create an even clearer picture of how your goals might align with your values.

This is just one of the many great exercises in the book. If you do every one of the exercises and take them to heart, I am confident that doing so will have a profound effect on your life.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Anthony Robbins, the nation's leader in the science of peak performance, shows you his most effective strategies and techniques for mastering your emotions, your body, your relationships, your finances, and your life. The acknowledged expert in the psychology of change, Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life and harness the forces that shape your destiny.”

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Weekly Recap, March 6, 2016

 
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Monday: Read Tim Harford's book Adapt:Why Success Always Starts with Failure to gain perspective on how failing can spur necessary change. 




Tuesday: How appealing to the emotional aspects of your service or product will help you close more sales. 




Wednesday: Wondering where to include your product's specs? Keep it in the technical appendix.




Thursday: Why updating your efficiency service's user interface will help you win over more prospects.
 

Friday: How to customize your value proposition to appeal to the C-Suite. 




Saturday: Take a page from improv actors to improve your sales performance.  

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Improve with Improv

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You may have heard me refer to graduates of the Efficiency Sales Professional™ Certificate Boot Camp as “Sales Ninjas.” Like ninjas, efficiency sales professionals are fearless, quick on their feet, and highly tuned into their prospect’s every move. They can adapt to any situation in which they find themselves and come out triumphant. Regardless of whether or not these skills come naturally to you, they can (and should) be developed and honed.

While training to become an actual “ninja” is not the most effective way to develop these skills, according to an article published on the Inc blog, improv acting classes may be just the ticket. The article draws a parallel between successful sales and leadership professionals and improv actors. To summarize the article’s argument… 

Both groups handle themselves with confidence outside of their comfort zone
Both groups understand how to avoid negativity
Both groups are adept at seeing the world through their partner’s shoes
Both groups are sensitive to the body language and emotional state of their partner

If you’re interested in developing your “ninja” skills in a practical way, I highly recommend you read this article (and perhaps even sign up for an improv class!):
http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/4-leadership-lessons-improv-actors-know.html

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Customize the Value Proposition

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Approaching your prospect with a strong value proposition is vital to your sales success. While many salespeople simply reuse the value proposition they’ve developed for each product or service (regardless of their prospect’s situation or role in the company), a sales professional customizes his or her value proposition based upon the person with whom he or she is speaking. Why is this an essential part of the sales process? Because each prospect measures his or her own success using a different yardstick, and therefore you need to come to the table with a value proposition that makes the most sense when viewed through each of their lenses.

Today, we’ll explore the yardsticks that some of the key decision-makers use to measure their success. For the sake of example in this hypothetical sales situation, suppose we are an HVAC sales professional selling “smart valves” (e.g., Belimo’s “Energy Valves”) that help the building utilize its chilled water more effectively:

The Chief Executive Officer: Your job is to sell smart valves. The chief executive's job – at least as determined by the Board of Directors that hired him – is to manage the organization and to make the enterprise more valuable. It shouldn't come as any surprise that when the CEO listens to this spiel on putting smart valves in his building, the first two questions he wants to have asked and answered are: 

Would this installation make my organization easier to manage?
Would this make my enterprise more valuable? 

The Chief Sustainability Officer: The CSO is not responsible for managing the organization; however, he or she is responsible for making sure that the company adopts any and all viable “green” practices. The first two questions that the Chief Sustainability Officer will likely want to have asked and answered are:

Would installing this technology entitle us to additional LEED® points?
Could this technology help us attain an ENERGY STAR® label?

The Chief Financial Officer: As you might imagine, the CFO is primarily concerned with the return on investment of any purchase he or she makes. The first two questions that the CFO wants to have asked and answered are: 

Would installing these smart valves be a viable alternative to purchasing another chiller to address increased cooling demand?
Can this product meet our cooling demand without putting us in “the red” financially?

The Chief Engineer: Unlike the previous three players, the chief engineer may actually have the technical knowledge to evaluate your smart valve solution from an engineering standpoint. In this situation, it is appropriate to delve into the technical details that you otherwise would leave for the “Technical Appendix” of your proposal (as mentioned in Wednesday’s blog). The first two questions that the chief engineer wants to have asked and answered are: 

How much more visibility would these smart valves provide regarding the operation of our chillers/pumps/etc.?
Will this solution allow me to monitor the flow and the difference in temperature, and help maximize Delta T in my loop so I am making sure that I am not wasting energy pumping chilled water around the building without actually transferring heat from one location to another?

How you decide to address the questions and concerns of each of these players will determine your success at capturing and retaining their attention.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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The User Interface

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Continuing with the idea that technical specs don’t make the sale, one of the best ways to grab your prospect’s attention is to upgrade the user interface of your efficiency solution so that it’s intuitive to use and features only elements that are likely to be understood and appreciated. If the interface is too technical, your prospects will have a tough time understanding what they are looking at, which will ultimately deter them from buying.

In the course of preparing to deliver an annual conference keynote for a large controls company, I was privileged to interview six of their sales "rock stars." One of them, who we’ll call John, told me a story that I’d like to share:

John told me that his "propeller heads" (his term, not mine) were used to spending a lot of time talking to customers about things that only engineers would find interesting... like the number of relays and actuators, the total number of miles of control wires in the building, and so forth. He told me, “Our customers wouldn't know an actuator if it hit them in the head.” He thought this was crazy, so he made a new rule for his engineers: “From now on, you can't talk about anything that the customer cannot personally experience after he or she buys our system.” That edict limited the scope of what could be discussed to about $75,000 of a $4 million control system.

He said, “My engineers hated me for it, but as soon as I made that improvement in the way we interacted with our prospects, sales skyrocketed.” 

He also told me that he hired a videogame designer to take a look at their dashboards and evaluate how user-friendly and intuitive they were. He confessed, "The results were totally humbling. I was totally demoralized. I learned we were displaying too much data, it was moving too quickly, the colors were wrong, the fonts were wrong... Basically, the whole design was a disaster.”

So what did John do? He hired the videogame designer to redo the dashboards and remedy all the problems that had been identified. After the dashboard make-over, customer satisfaction soared and a bump in sales quickly followed.

Bottom line, the user interface is a key driver of decision-making. The less technical you can make it and the more user-friendly it is, the more likely your prospects are going to fall in love with your product.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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The Technical Appendix

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Yesterday, I wrote about why you should avoid discussing the technical aspects of your efficiency projects and instead consider how your prospect might be emotionally drawn to your project. While the technical specs of your project should not be the focus of any sales conversation, there is a time and a place for those details: in the technical appendix of your proposal.

Why should your proposal have a technical appendix? Because it provides all of the information that an engineer might be interested in vetting without cluttering the core message that the real decision-maker will read. If you muddle the first page of your proposal with anything that a CEO or CFO would not understand, you’ll instantly lose their attention and they’ll end up skimming through your otherwise well-crafted message.

I also recommend centering the title "Technical Appendix" on a colored sheet of paper at the beginning of that more detailed section of the proposal. Why? Because colored paper suggests, “This is a different chapter.” CEOs don’t read technical appendices – they delegate those. The change of color scheme will quickly indicate to the CEO that he doesn’t need to trouble his eyes with the information that follows that colored page.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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