Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 291

The Income-Producing Property

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One of the prime targets for efficiency retrofits is income-producing property. You can give yourself a leg up on the competition if you demonstrate for your prospect the many different ways in which your project will make their building more competitive, profitable, and valuable. Here are some of the many benefits you may choose to work into the discussion:

1. More competitive:

Lower occupancy cost positions the building as more cost-effective for tenants
Enhanced comfort and productivity improve tenant retention and building reputation
Sustainability provides marketing advantage

2. More profitable:

Better tenant retention and attraction increase revenue while reducing cost of tenant churn
Lower vacancy rates yield higher rental revenue
Lower tenant utility bills provide opportunity for higher base rents

3. More valuable:

Rental revenue (from above) increases cash flow
Lower operating costs increase cash flow
Higher Net Operating Income (NOI) supports higher appraisal

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Deliver What They Want

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There are countless reasons someone might be interested in energy efficiency. If you can find out exactly why your prospect is considering an efficiency project, you’ll be better positioned to prevail. I’d like to share a story that one of our Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp graduates (we’ll call her Jackie) shared with me. It exemplifies the value of knowing your prospect’s motives and adapting your sales approach accordingly.

Jackie’s company was proposing a variable frequency drive and boiler upgrade for a retailer that prided itself on its socially conscious agenda.  In fact, her principal contact there was lamenting that the company had just approved funding for an expensive solar project, even though less glamorous investments would have offset much more energy than the solar project was slated to produce, and do so at a smaller upfront cost.  He continued that the board had been motivated by the solar installation’s case study and ribbon-cutting that demonstrated the company’s commitment to the environment.

It became apparent that what the organization was really looking for was some outsider to say – in a very public way – that they were doing a great job in reducing the company’s carbon footprint. It wasn’t about the energy or cost savings.  In retrospect, it wouldn’t have mattered if the project had been solar panels or a boiler replacement as long as management could count on being lauded for investing its greenbacks in something “green.”

Equipped with this knowledge, Jackie casually asked, “What if we were to include a case study as part of this project?” And what do you think happened next?  Armed with the prospect of a post-retrofit case study, her internal champion was able to secure funding for the “boring” VFDs and boiler retrofit!

Moral of the story is, don’t assume everyone has the same purchasing motives. Find out what they really want and be sure to feature it prominently in your proposal.

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Talk Less, Say More

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Effective communication is vital to success in selling. All too often, salespeople clutter the core message with extraneous information. When given the opportunity to present a project to a decision-maker – particularly a high-level exec – you can’t afford the time to beat around the bush.

If you are interested in improving your communication skills, I highly recommend reading Talk Less, Say More: Three Habits to Influence Others and Make Things Happen, by Connie Dieken. This book will equip you with the skills you need to get your message across when it really counts. 

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Talk Less, Say More is a revolutionary guide to 21st century communication skills to help you be more influential and make things happen in our distracted, attention-deficit world. It's loaded with specific tips and takeaways to ensure that you're fully heard, clearly understood, and trigger positive responses in any business or social situation.

“It's the first book to deliver a proven method to master the core leadership skill of influence. Talk Less, Say More lays out a powerful 3-step method called Connect, Convey, Convince (R) and guides you in how to use these habits to be more influential. This succinct book solves your modern communication issues in today's demanding, distracted world at a time when interaction skills are plummeting.

“Communication is the single greatest challenge in business today. It takes just 3 habits to conquer it. Talk Less, Say More will help you achieve more with less. Less wordiness. Less tune-out. Less frustration. You'll gain more time. More positive outcomes. More rewarding relationships.”

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Weekly Recap, November 29, 2015

Monday: Read People Buy You by Jeb Blount to find a wealth of strategies on building rapport, connecting with your prospects and clients, and much more. 




Tuesday: Create a map of influencers to know who and how to reach out to the main stakeholders.




Wednesday: Don't miss this article by the Harvard Business Review regarding who really does the buying in major sales.




Thursday: A Thanksgiving note from Selling Energy.
 

Friday: Getting comfortable with silence during your next meeting. 




Saturday: Read this article fromEntrepreneur about how to stay productive on a budget. 

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Stay Productive on a Budget

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As efficiency sales professionals, we all understand the concept of investing capital in products and services that can take time to recoup their first cost.  I believe that productivity tools, like energy efficiency, can be a very worthy investment. Their first cost is repaid many, many times over as they are applied and save your valuable time. Fortunately, Entrepreneur published an article that has some great productivity-boosting tips and tools for people on a budget. If you’re looking to increase productivity without breaking the bank, give this article a read:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238077

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Grab Your Glass of Water

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One of the questions that you probably ask yourself when you're trying to understand what it will take to get an organization to say "yes" is, “How do I know I’m talking to the real decision-maker?” There are lots of ways to ask that question; however, I think many of them are fraught with peril. You don't ask a blatant question like, “So, who is the decision-maker around here?” because you would likely insult the person with whom you’re speaking by suggesting that other people have to be involved in the decision. Maybe this person actually is the lone wolf that makes the decisions and has all the power in the world.

By far, the most elegant way that I've seen to ferret out who is actually going to make the decision is one that was suggested by Jeffrey Gitomer in his Little Red Book of Selling. It goes like this: "Bill, how will this decision be made?" After you ask the question, just zip it. This approach really falls flat if you don't give enough silence after the question to allow the other person to formulate and share an accurate answer. Learn to be comfortable with silence.

If you have a trouble being comfortable with silence, never go into a meeting without a glass of water in front of you. When you ask a question, especially a tough question, just stop. Breathe for one or two seconds, pick up the water, take a sip, and put the glass down. You will buy yourself between seven and ten seconds of silence, and you won't find it to be uncomfortable at all because you were just drinking from a glass of water. (I joke that if the water bit doesn’t buy you enough time, always make sure that you have a tube of lip balm in your pocket. You can take out the lip balm, lubricate your lips with it, put the cap back on, and voila! You just bought yourself another six or seven seconds of silence!) 

Bottom line though, ask your prospect, “How will this decision be made?” Take notes while they speak. After they give a response, simply ask, "And then what?" Stop. Take notes. "And then what?” “And then what?" Continue to gently prod your prospect until he or she gets down to the point of saying, "And then we give you a purchase order, and as soon as you can do the job, we'll accept an invoice from you which we will pay within 'x' days."

Until you get down that whole cavalcade of steps, you will not know how many players will need to be involved in the decision, and you will go back to the office with an overly sanguine view of how easy it is going to be to close the sale with this organization.

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Gratitude Every Day

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Regardless of how hectic and stressful our lives may be, we all have things to be thankful for. What I love about this holiday (even more than the food) is that it encourages all of us to reflect on the most positive aspects of our lives.

A few months ago, I shared a TED talk by Shawn Achor that is regularly featured in our weeklong Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camp and shorter Learning to S.E.E.: Sell Efficiency Effectively programs (watch here).  Shawn’s talk contains several valuable messages, including his observations that gratitude leads to happiness, and that happiness is the key to creativity, productivity, and success. Those of you who read my earlier blogs will remember the gratitude exercise that Achor suggests – at the end of each day, write down three things for which you’re grateful. My wife and I have made a habit of sharing our gratitude with each other on a daily basis.  We can tell you from experience that it works.

How about a happy medium between a daily gratitude exercise and the annual Thanksgiving Day gratitude fest?  Consider the weekly ritual that one of our Boot Camp graduates recently shared with us:

Every Friday, he and his two siblings email each other. In the email, they share everything that happened over the past week that they’re thankful for. This approach has two wonderful attributes.  First, the exercise yields a documented record of gratitude that can be referenced any time they need an emotional lift.  Second, the system has a built-in fail-safe mechanism – one of the three siblings always remembers to send the email even if the others forget.

You don’t have to have siblings to use this exercise – find friends, coworkers, or family members to join you in forming a weekly gratitude email group. The results can be life-changing. 

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Who Really Does the Buying

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Yesterday, I wrote about how to create “influencer maps” to determine which key players you should approach during a new sale. When you are working on connecting the dots on your map, you may find it challenging to evaluate the various stakeholders and their purchasing motives.

When I’m speaking on the topic of influencer mapping, I often recommend my students read “Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying?” This 13-page article, written by Thomas Bonoma in the Harvard Business Review, discusses how the benefits vary by stakeholder role and how you can use six behavioral clues to identify which stakeholders are likely responsible for the ultimate “Yes” or “No.”

Here’s an abstract of the article, which is available for purchase on the HBR website. I highly recommend downloading a copy – it’s worth every penny:

“When is a buyer not really a buyer? How can the best product at the lowest price turn off buyers? Are there anonymous leaders who make the actual buying decisions? As these questions suggest, the reality of buying and selling is often not what it seems. What's more, salespeople often overlook the psychological and emotional factors that figure strongly in buying and selling. By failing to observe these less tangible aspects of selling, a vendor can lose sales without understanding why. In this article, first published in 1982, Thomas V. Bonoma sets up a procedure for analyzing buying decisions and tells sellers how to apply the resulting framework to specific situations. Steps in the procedure include the following. First, identify the actual decision makers. Though it may come as a surprise, power does not correlate perfectly with organizational rank. The author outlines five bases of power and offers six behavioral clues for identifying the real decision makers. Second, determine how buyers view their self-interest. All buyers act selfishly, but they sometimes miscalculate. As a result, diagnosing motivation is one of the most difficult management tasks to do accurately. The author suggests several techniques to determine how buyers choose their own self-interest. Third, gather and apply psychological intelligence. There is no formula for placing sound psychological analyses magically in the sales staff's hands. However, the author offers three guidelines--make sure that sales calls are highly productive and informative, listen to the sales force, and reward rigorous fact gathering, analysis, and execution--to help managers increase sales effectiveness.

“This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading.”

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A Map to Guide the Way

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One of the most valuable things you can do before approaching a new organization with a proposal is to determine exactly what you should say to each stakeholder and in what order you should approach them, including who should be approached first. This is particularly important when you’re working with large organizations and complex sales. So how do you determine which players are going to help your project get approved? You create what I call an “influencer map.”

I was doing a training session for a large client last year, and I did the influencer map exercise with a group of salespeople who specialized in selling energy efficiency in the local government sector. I split the twenty-person audience into four groups of five.  I gave each group a blank flip pad and a Sharpie along with the following directions: "Choose an energy-saving project that you’ve successfully completed. Now draw a bubble for each influencer in that project’s decision-making chain.  I want you to draw every person who had something to do with whether or not energy efficiency should happen in their jurisdiction and what their respective role was (e.g., technical director, budget director, finance director, mayor, and so forth).  Next to each name, write what their core values and concerns were. Then connect these people on the chart with solid or dotted lines based upon how influential you think they were on others in the chain."

Three things impressed me about that flip chart exercise. First, no one wrote anything on the flip charts for at least 15 minutes, which suggested to me that they had never done this exercise before.  Second, once they had completed the exercise, the drawings were totally convoluted, which I guess is not surprising given that they were diagramming complicated municipal environments where you have plenty of different stakeholders weighing in – everybody from the public interest advocates to the city council to the mayor to the sustainability director. Third, this exercise made it obvious to everyone present that if people wanted to be more successful in selling efficiency in these settings, they would have to be more strategic. They had to create a map that would show that if you were to hit this domino, the rest of the dominoes down the line would likely fall; or, that if you were to hit this other domino, nothing would likely happen, so you would be wasting your time.

It also reinforces the idea that multiple one-page proposals are sometimes necessary. You might actually send one one-page proposal to the budget director, a different one-page proposal to the sustainability director, and a different one-page proposal to the labor union to get everybody on board for his or her own reasons. Then when you delivered the final one-page proposal that describes the project that you would like to see funded, that proposal would consider acupressure points identified during all those other interactions you have had. This approach would ensure that by the time the final proposal is soft-circled for approval, you would have already done your homework and “checked all the players off” in your mind. When asked by the highest-ranking decision-maker whether they agree with the proposed course of action, each and every influencer would say “yes.”

If you haven’t already experimented with influencer maps, I highly recommend doing so. You’ll be surprised at how effective such a simple exercise can be in turbocharging your sales.

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People Buy You

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Before a prospect can be sold on an efficiency product or service, they need to be sold on the person selling it. I’ve written many blogs about how crucial it is to build good rapport with your prospects and clients. In many cases, you may not even need to pull out all the stops in your sales pitch to get a “Yes” if you’ve established a good connection with the buyer beforehand.

So how do you put your best foot forward as a sales professional on a personal level? Learn how to sell yourself. One of my favorite books on this topic is called People Buy You, by Jeb Blount. In it you’ll find a wealth of strategies for building rapport, connecting with your prospects and clients on an emotional level, building customer loyalty, and more.

Here’s an excerpt of the book summary from Amazon Books:
“This break-through book pushes past the typical focus on mechanics and stale processes found in so many of today's sales and business books, and goes right to the heart of what matters most in 21stcentury business. Offering a straightforward, actionable formula for creating instant connections with prospects and customers, People Buy You will enable you to achieve a whole new level of success in your sales and business career. You'll discover:

Three relationship myths that are holding you back
Five levers that open the door to stronger relationships that quickly increase sales, improve retention, increase profits and advance your career
The real secret to making instant emotional connections that eliminate objections and move buyers to reveal their real problems and needs
How to anchor your business relationships and create loyal customers who will never leave you for a competitor
How to build your personal brand to improve your professional presence and stand-out in the market place

“People Buy You is the new standard in the art of influence and persuasion. Few books have tackled the subject of interpersonal relationships in the business world in such a practical and down-to-earth manner, breaking what many perceive as a complex and frustrating process into easy, actionable steps that anyone can follow.”

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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