Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 295

The Small Retrofit

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Have you ever been in a situation where a prospect doesn’t want to approve an efficiency project because they think it’s too small? Maybe the prospect says they want to wait until they do a major retrofit of the whole building before making any changes? This is a fairly common objection, and it’s one that you should be prepared to dispel at a moment’s notice.

In my experience, it’s best to reframe the situation by talking about tenant turnover. Think about this: The average lease is anywhere from three to seven years depending on the market and the country, and this means that the building is going to completely change occupancy in X number of years.

You could say something like, “If you never focus on energy efficiency in the context of any of the smaller retrofits when you have a change of tenants, when are you going to do it? You’ll never throw all the tenants out of the building, so if you decide to focus on energy efficient retrofits when each tenant rolls over, then by the time five or so years go by, you’ll have a totally renovated and energy efficient building.”

Ideally, you will also come to the meeting prepared with some financials that show the cost of delay. If you can make a case like the one above and back it up with compelling financials, your prospect will have to be crazy to say “no!”

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3 Tips for Great Storytelling

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Those of you who know me (or who read this blog on a regular basis) know that I love to tell stories. Stories are a great way to captivate, motivate, and connect with your audience whether it’s a 500-person keynote presentation or a one-on-one conversation.

Telling a personal story makes your presentation even more interesting, and your audience will feel a natural sense of empathy that subconsciously makes them more comfortable to be around you.

So how do you pick a good personal story? If you’re the kind of person who finds it challenging to choose a story to share, I recommend sitting down and brainstorming some ideas.  What are some funny things that have happened to you or to those around you recently? Can you think of any clients or projects that have particularly benefited from your assistance? Once you have a list of ideas, assemble them into a collection of pithy stories and practice them until they feel very natural to recount.

Here are three starter tips on effective and impactful story-telling:

Make it a short story – ideally one that can be retold in less than 2 minutes.
Make the punchline both relevant to the listener and memorable.
Watch your language (keep it clean) and never share confidential details about anyone or anything.  Storytelling should improve your image in the eyes of your customer, not detract from it.

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12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness

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On Wednesday, I recommended Jeffrey Gitomer’s blog which is packed full of great sales and marketing advice. If you checked out his blog and liked what you read, I highly recommend picking up a copy of his bestselling book, Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness. This is one of the many books I recommend to my students, and there’s a wealth of sales wisdom in it that I think we can all benefit from.

This short book offers advice on how to overcome your fear of rejection, how to avoid arguing about price, how to use your passion to your advantage, and much more.

Here’s a (concise) summary from Amazon Books:

“Salespeople hate to read. That's why Little Red Book of Selling is short, sweet, and to the point. It's packed with answers that people are searching for in order to help them make sales for the moment—and the rest of their lives.”

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, October 18, 2015

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Monday: Read  Selling to Big Companies , by Jill Konrath, and learn how to target the right people, how to get meetings, how to prepare a clear and concise value proposition, and much more.




Tuesday: Determine why someone would feel compelled to purchase from you and base your value proposition off of those reasons.




Wednesday: Learn why you should feed your mind with sales material on a regular basis.




Thursday: Find out how to overcome unrealistic expectations in the sales setting.




Friday: Get some tips on how to sell expense-reducing capital projects.




Saturday: Read this article from the LifeHacker blog and learn why you should set aside one or two hours each week to review your to-do list and plan for the coming week.

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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Benefits of a Weekly Review

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One of the best ways to stay productive and on top of your to-do list is to set aside some time for a thorough review of everything that needs to be done. When you have a long to-do list, it’s easy to scroll through and knock off any tasks that can be completed quickly; however, you risk forgetting about the bigger picture. What’s most time-sensitive? What needs to be started in advance in order to meet a future deadline? Are any of my clients or co-workers waiting for something from me? What long-term goal will never be reached if I don’t start taking action soon?

An article published on the LifeHacker blog suggests setting aside one or two hours each week to review your to-do list and plan for the coming week. Starting your week off with a prioritized list and a clear picture of everything that needs to be done can save you a lot of time (and also prevent you from missing opportunities and important deadlines). This article has a lot of great suggestions and presents a compelling case for why we should all do a weekly review. Give it a read and see what you think:

http://lifehacker.com/5908816/the-weekly-review-how-one-hour-can-save-you-a-weeks-worth-of-hassle-and-headache

 

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Selling to Income Properties

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One of the first questions you need to ask yourself before attempting to sell an expense-reducing capital project to a prospect is:  Is the prospect an owner-occupant, a landlord, or a tenant? Why? Because each of those parties has entirely different values and decision-making drivers.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an efficiency expert returning from the field after having met with an income-producing property owner, totally aghast at the outcome of the interaction. “We did all this work to show him how he could save so much energy in his building, and at the end of the presentation, all he said was that we should show the proposal to his tenants because they were the ones who would benefit!”

The last time I checked, non-owner-occupied property comprised almost 40% of the built environment in both the office and retail segments in the US. If you don’t take the time to understand the business dynamics of landlords and tenants, you are taking 40% of the pie off the table before sitting down for dessert.

Income properties are prime targets for energy efficiency retrofits. Why? To use a phrase that my friend Bob Sauchelli of the US EPA coined when we worked together back in the ‘90s to roll out ENERGY STAR for Commercial Real Estate, “The building is the business.” In an owner-occupied building, the owner must pay the payroll of everyone who works in that building. In an income property, the landlord is only responsible for a few heads – the engineers, the property manager, the porter, etc. He’s certainly not paying the payroll for everybody who occupies the building. That means that while payroll is likely the largest expense for the typical tenant, it’s likely one of the smallest for the typical landlord.

In fact, if you look at the Building Owners and Managers Association’s Experience Exchange Report, which summarizes operating expenses for a wide variety of building categories across the country each year, you’ll likely find that utilities (which admittedly covers more than just energy) is the typical landlord’s largest controllable operating expense. Notice that I say "controllable," as opposed to “uncontrollable” (e.g., real estate taxes and insurance).

Keep in mind that just because utilities are the largest controllable operating expense, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the landlord pays that cost without recourse. In fact, in most buildings, some or all of that expense is redistributed to the tenants based on each tenant’s rentable square footage percentage or some other protocol. 

It’s vital that you understand exactly how much of the utility cost the landlord is presently responsible for, and how the proposed energy measure would impact that number. That is where the gold nuggets are buried, particularly in cases where a lion’s share of the efficiency savings would inure to the benefit of the landlord, increasing not only his net operating income, but also his property’s appraised value.

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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That's How It's Always Been

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One of the most common roadblocks to a successful sale (that I’m sure many of you have run into) is the prospect or customer with unrealistic expectations. People have a tendency to expect things to be the same as they’ve always been.

This idea reminds me of a story about a little girl who goes to the multi-generational Easter dinner and the mother is cooking ham for the family and cuts the end of the ham off, puts it in the pan, and puts it in the oven.  The little girl says, “Mommy, why do you always cut off the end of the ham before you put it in the pan and put it in the oven?” She says, “I don’t know, that’s what my mommy always did. Here, Grandma’s out in the parlor talking to your sister. Why don’t you go out and ask her?” 

She goes out and asks, “Grandma, why does mommy always cut off the end of the ham before she puts it in the pan and puts it in the oven?” Grandma says, “I don’t know, honey, that’s the way my mommy always taught me to do it. She’s outside with the dog. Why don’t you ask her?” 

So she trundles out to the yard and says, “Great Grandma, why does everybody in this family cut off the end of the ham before they put it in the pan, before they put it in the oven?” Great Grandma says, “I don’t know, child, I did it because the ham didn’t fit in my pan.”

What does this story teach us? It teaches us that people often make decisions based on what they’re accustomed to… without grounding those decisions in reality. When it comes to justifying an efficiency project financially, this can be a problem for us as sales professionals. You may have prospects tell you that they’ll only do a project with a payback of two years or less, for example. Why do they have such unrealistic expectations? Probably because they were doing business in the ‘80s when the prime rate hit 21 percent. It’s your job to paint a new picture for them – to be the “Great Grandma” who reveals the reason for their unrealistic expectations and explains why they shouldn’t dismiss your proposal. 

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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Consume and Learn

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How often do you read blogs and online publications related to sales and marketing (aside from this one, of course)? In my experience, most people do not feed their minds with sales material on a regular basis. And it’s a shame, because it’s not as if you have to spend a lot of money to do so. Thanks to the immense reach of the internet, you can find a wealth of free resources for staying motivated and on top of your game.

One of my favorite resources is Seth Godin’s blog. Seth is a marketing genius. He's written best sellers on consumer marketing and similar topics. I particularly enjoy exploring concepts that he writes about and overlaying them onto the energy efficiency sales world because a lot of it is universal human psychology and can be applied to our industry. I highly recommend checking out Seth’s blog (and signing up for email updates so you don’t miss a beat).

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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It's All About the Why

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Why do people buy your product or service? This is a question that you should keep in your mind at all times and remind yourself to think about frequently. If you can’t determine why someone would feel compelled to purchase from you, how can you expect to present them with a compelling value proposition?

f you look back at the last 20 years of energy efficiency campaigns, one of the most successful and most highly adopted programs is ENERGY STAR®. Think for a moment about why people invest time and money to get an ENERGY STAR® label for their building. Is it because they want to make their building more efficient? Is it because they want to increase tenant comfort and retention? Is it because they want to charge higher rent? There may be a correlation between efficiency, tenant comfort and retention, high rent, and buildings with an ENERGY STAR® label, but it’s not why building owners want the label. They want an ENERGY STAR® label to fulfill a personal sense of pride. It’s a way of showing the world that their building is green.

If you can get to the root of the “why” and focus your energy on persuading your prospect why they need your product or service (and leave the “what” and “how” for later), you’ll be miles ahead of the competition. 

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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Selling to Big Companies

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When you’re trying to sell to a big company, it can be difficult to capture the attention of the decision-maker(s) – that is, if you can even get your foot in the door to meet with them in the first place. If you do get a meeting with the right people, you have to make sure your value proposition is clear and strong and that you demonstrate your ability to be a problem-solver. The last thing a C-level exec wants is a project that is going to make his/her life more complicated, so it’s vital that you come to the table with a game plan that establishes your competence and thorough preparation.

If you currently work with large companies or are planning to target them in the future, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Jill Konrath’s Selling to Big Companies. This book covers a range of topics, including how to target the right people, how to get meetings, how to prepare a clear and concise value proposition, and much more.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Setting up meetings with corporate decision makers has never been harder. It's almost impossible to get them to pick up the phone. They never return your calls. And if you do happen to catch them, they blow you off right away. 

"It's time to stop making endless cold calls or waiting for the phone to ring. In today's crazy marketplace, new sales strategies are needed to penetrate these big accounts.

"Discover how to:

Target accounts where you have the highest likelihood of success.
Find the names of prospects who can use your offering.
Create breakthough value propositions that capture their attention. 
Develop an effective, multi-faceted account-entry campaign.
Overcome obstacles and objections that derail your sale efforts.
Position yourself as an invaluable resource, not a product pusher.
Have powerful initial sales meetings that build unstoppable momentum.
Differentiate yourself from other sellers.

"Use these sure-fire strategies to crack into big accounts, shrink your sales cycle and close more business. Check out the Account Entry Toolkit for ideas on how to apply this process to your own unique business.”

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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