Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 299

Tips for Making Introductions

Often an introduction leads to a new friendship or business alliance… and sometimes the whole process can be awkward. Here are a few tips on how to make a proper introduction: 

The Basics
When meeting someone for the first time, stand up, smile, make eye contact, express a greeting, and shake hands. To make the person feel welcome, and to help you remember his or her name, try repeating the person’s name during your greeting. For example, “It's nice to meet you, Rachel.”

Who Introduces Whom?
A proper introduction can set you apart from your peers.

Remember this rule: Talk to the most important person first. 

When executing an introduction, address the most important individual first and introduce the other person to the most important individual. Offer snippets of information about each person and use proper titles such as Mr. and Ms. in formal settings. For example, if your client’s name is Neal Page and you want to introduce him to your colleague, Del Griffith, the conversation would go as follows:

Turn toward Neal and say, “Mr. Page, I’d like to introduce you my colleague, Mr. Griffith, who specializes in energy efficiency solutions for the hospitality industry.” Then turn toward Del and say “Mr. Griffith, please meet Mr. Page of Page and Associates.”

Suppose you are meeting with a prospect and the CEO of your company walks into the room. Whom do you introduce first? The answer is easy according to Judith Bowman, author of Don't Take the Last Donut: New Rules of Business Etiquette. The prospect is more important than the CEO and should be addressed first because, without clients’ business, there would be no company and no CEO.

Above all, the etiquette rules behind introductions are meant to make people feel comfortable and ease conversation. The next time you find yourself making introductions, decide for yourself whether a formal or a more relaxed social introduction is appropriate given the context.

Forgotten Names
If you’ve forgotten someone’s name, don’t panic or avoid the introduction. Introduce the person whose name you know first and hope the person with the forgotten name picks up on situation and introduces herself. Otherwise, quickly apologize and admit that you’ve suddenly forgotten the person’s name. This happens to everyone occasionally and most people are understanding.

The Handshake
Handshakes are appropriate, not only during introductions, but also when you welcome people into your office, run into a colleague outside of work, and when you say goodbye. Until recently, it was considered polite for a man to wait for a woman to extend her hand before offering his own. According to Peggy Post, author of The Etiquette Advantage in Business, this is an old-fashioned custom. In modern business settings, everyone should shake hands with everyone without hesitating to evaluate who should extend a hand first.  

The Online Introduction
As you grow your business through social media, you may find yourself in the position of wanting to meet someone in your social media network. LinkedIn is a great tool for facilitating professional introductions. The LinkedIn “Introductions” feature lets you contact members in your extended network through the people you know. If you want to contact someone more than one degree away from you, you can request an introduction through one of your connections. Your connection will then decide whether to forward your message on to the desired recipient. When you request an introduction, you’ll be prompted to write a note to your mutual connection and then a separate note to the person you want to meet. In both cases, draft a compelling subject line and a short note that introduces you and explains why you hope to connect. Just remember never to ask directly for a job—it’s neither polite nor appropriate.

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6 Tips for Successful Presentations

As sales professionals, we’re called upon to give presentations from time to time. Here are six tips to help you present like a pro: 

Know your content inside and out. If you are under-rehearsed, you will be nervous (and your audience will likely be able to tell).

Make it clear why you're there. You may even start your presentation with “I'm here because…”  While I prefer to open with something a little more poetic, say whatever you have to say to make it clear why you’re there. Why is this important? In many cases, people just get called into meetings by their boss and they don’t actually know what the agenda is going to be. It’s very helpful to spend the first minute or so letting them know what’s coming so they know what to listen for.

Get to the point quickly. Audiences are selfish. There’s this little jingle that plays over and over in their minds: “WAMWIG.” It stands for, “What about me, what do I get?” If you don’t get to that answer quickly enough, your audience will grow increasingly impatient. Some people may tune you out altogether.

Ask questions and encourage audience participation. It’s easy to lose the attention of your audience. When you ask a question, you bring the audience into the discussion and they’re less likely to tune out.

Don’t go over your allotted time. There’s nothing worse than getting cut off or rushing through the last few minutes of your presentation. How do you ensure that this won’t happen? Make fewer slides than you think you’ll need, and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Always leave time for questions and answers. Even if you did a good job of preemptively addressing the most likely questions and concerns, you need to leave plenty of time for Q&A. It affords the opportunity to take the audience’s temperature…Did they receive the message you aimed to send? Do you detect any potential resistance that might stymie forward progress? Ideally, you can neutralize that resistance before leaving the room. That final interaction with your audience may be the most important time you spend in the room.

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It’s Story Time!

Telling a great – and relevant – story can be a powerful sales tool. The right story can be an effective way to teach, persuade, or simply connect with your audience. Using stories will also make you more memorable, and let’s face it, they’re a lot more fun to listen to than a rambling assortment of facts and stats.

If you’re not a natural at telling a gripping tale, that's okay - there are plenty of resources to help. We recommend Nancy Duarte’s Resonate and Peter Guber’s Tell to Win. Once you've crafted your story, practice telling it to friends and family before sharing it with your prospect. Pay attention to your listeners’ reactions both while you’re telling the story and afterwards. Were they engaged? Entertained? Confused? Did they understand the point you were trying to make? Refine your story as needed – much as a comedian might fine-tune the pace or wording of a new routine to maximize the applause. 

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It Doesn’t Pay to Wait

Technology is constantly improving, and when you’re trying to sell efficiency, you’ll inevitably encounter prospects who want to wait for “the next big thing” to hit the market or for production costs to decrease before they’re willing to buy. So how do you overcome this objection? Show your prospect the cost of delay. In many cases, you can pay for the current generation of technology through savings long before the new one becomes available.

A few years ago, I met a utility-scale solar installation developer who we’ll call Tom. He told me that he was tired of hearing his prospects say, “I'm going to wait on these panels because the cost of silicon is going down and the panels will likely be 50% cheaper in five years.” What did he do about this situation? He said, “I finally decided to put an Excel spreadsheet together to prove that the cost of the panels is only 20% of the job. Copper, framework, labor, and all that other stuff is the other 80% of the cost. And all those things are going up in price rather than down.”

So even if the protesting prospect was accurate and the cost of the panels was going to be 50% less in five years, the price of 80% of the job was going up by 3% a year, compounded annually. On top of that, if the prospect decided to wait five years, he or she would lose five years’ worth of potential PV production.

Tom said that as soon as he started showing people the spreadsheet, his prospects had little difficulty understanding that waiting for the price of silicon to go down was foolhardy.

I think the moral of the story is clear: don’t let prospects wait to buy. Make the effort to quantify the cost of delay and share it with them. Let the figures do the selling for you.

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Winners Dream

Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m a firm believer in the power of goal setting. I’ve used goals throughout my entire career, and they’ve helped me achieve success every step of the way. Through experience, I can confidently say that you need to be setting goals that are above and beyond what your logical mind tells you are achievable. These “reach” goals – when pursued with an action plan in place – push you to greatness.

So how do you execute an outsized goal? According to Bill McDermott in his book, Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office, teamwork is key. A leader should inspire his or her team and instill a sense of purpose as they work toward what may seem like an unachievable goal. This inspiration and purpose come from kindness and coaching on the part of the leader, not from fear of failure.

I recommend this book to anyone who needs some guidance on how to make “reach” goals reality.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“A leadership and career manifesto told through the narrative of one of today’s most inspiring, admired, and successful global leaders.

“In Winners Dream, Bill McDermott—the co-CEO of the world’s largest business software company, SAP—chronicles how relentless optimism, hard work, and disciplined execution embolden people and equip organizations to achieve audacious goals. 

“Growing up in working-class Long Island, a sixteen-year-old Bill traded three hourly wage jobs to buy a small deli, which he ran by instinctively applying ideas that would be the seeds for his future success. After paying for and graduating college, Bill talked his way into a job selling copiers door-to-door for Xerox, where he went on to rank number one in every sales position he held and eventually became the company’s youngest-ever corporate officer. Eventually, Bill left Xerox and in 2002 became the unlikely president of SAP’s flailing American business unit. There, he injected enthusiasm and accountability into the demoralized culture by scaling his deli, sales, and management strategies. In 2010, Bill was named co-CEO, and in May 2014 he will become SAP’s sole, and first non-European, CEO.

“Colorful and fast-paced, Bill’s anecdotes contain effective takeaways: gutsy career moves; empathetic sales strategies; incentives that yield exceptional team performance; and proof of the competitive advantages of optimism and hard work. At the heart of Bill’s story is a blueprint for success and the knowledge that the real dream is the journey, not a preconceived destination.”

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, September 6, 2015

Monday: Read  How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the Art and Science of Persuasion and Motivation , by Susan M. Weinschenk, and learn how to use the principles of psychology to persuade people. 




Tuesday: Read this story about an efficiency sales professional who went the extra mile to turn a skeptical prospect into a believer.




Wednesday: Learn how to sell to prospects who own or manage buildings with high vacancy.




Thursday: Discover the benefits of hypothesis-based selling.




Friday: Use segment-specific business acumen to reframe your value proposition. 




Saturday: Read this article from the Entrepreneur blog for some tips on how to overcome the challenges of remote teamwork. 

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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Remote Teamwork

The concept of the “remote employee” is a fairly new one, and it’s becoming increasing prevalent among businesses of all sizes. Whether employees are traveling, working from home for a day or two, or permanently working out of a home office, teams must learn to collaborate effectively without being tied together by physical proximity.

An article published this week on the Entrepreneur blog has a number of great tips on how to overcome the challenges of remote teamwork. If you work remotely or collaborate with people who do, I highly recommend reading this article:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249917

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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Reframing the Refrigerator

Suppose your goal is to convince a multifamily landlord to improve the energy efficiency of his building by replacing all of his units’ kitchen appliances. You may very well find that he doesn’t give a hoot about appliance efficiency since his tenants are the ones paying the utility bills. This is an all-too-common scenario.  Some people call it the “split incentive” problem. Guess what? You have a much greater chance of commanding your prospect’s attention – and prevailing at the end of the day – if you reframe your value proposition with the help of some segment-specific business acumen.

Let’s return to the example of the landlord whose apartment building is filled with old appliances. Your job is to convince him to replace those appliances with ENERGY STAR®-labeled ones. What are the benefits of ENERGY STAR® appliances? New appliances require less maintenance, which means fewer disruptions for tenants and fewer headaches for the landlord, right? Since they’re new, they’re also more aesthetically pleasing, which should help with tenant retention and attraction, right? And of course, they result in lower utility bills…admittedly a benefit the tenants capture if the building is submetered.

If you present these facts exactly the way I just did to a skeptical landlord, you’ll probably fail to close the sale. Why? The investment of time and money is not worth a few less maintenance calls and an ambiguous increase in tenant attraction or retention. So how do you reframe this scenario to hit the ball out of the park? Take the time to quantify and monetize the benefits of replacing these appliances using terminology that is sure to resonate with the landlord.

I was advising a large public benefits program a couple years ago on how they could increase the market penetration of their multifamily direct-install programs. I suggested they determine the approximate difference in utility bills between an apartment outfitted with ENERGY STAR® appliances and one that is not. They did the math, and I believe it turned out to be about $40 a month in utility savings for a one-bedroom apartment.

Knowing this information, your pitch to the landlord could go something like this: “What if you invested roughly a thousand dollars to install ENERGY STAR® appliances in each of your units, and then you said to every prospective tenant, ‘These newly installed appliances will lower your utility bill by about $40 a month. You may have noticed that our rent is about $20 per month higher than the building across the street; however, with a $40 per month lower utility bill, you’ll wind up keeping an extra twenty in your pocket every month that you can use to buy a six-pack of your favourite craft beer.’” (I was told that beer was the most fungible currency among young renters in that particular town…feel free to modify this pitch to appeal to your local audience.)

The next step is quantifying and monetizing the landlord’s share of the benefits. What does an incremental $20 per month in rent mean to the apartment building’s profitability and value? $20 per month equates to $240 per year. Using the Direct Capitalization Approach to appraisal and a capitalization rate of 10%, that incremental Net Operating Income of $240 per year has the potential to drive $2,400 worth of incremental asset value for the landlord! That’s almost 2.5 times the cost of the new appliances. And at a lower cap rate, the jump in appraised value would be even more pronounced. Keep in mind that the landlord wouldn’t have to sell the building to enjoy the benefits of that appraised value bump…It also increases the amount of equity he could take out when refinancing the building.

And by the way, what if the new appliances did help retain a tenant? The landlord benefits further by avoiding some or all of the following costs of tenant “churn”: the leasing commission; rent lost while seeking a replacement tenant; the cost of cleaning, repainting and potentially re-carpeting the unit as well as the rent foregone while doing so; and finally, rent lost during a “free rent period” if such a perk is customary to induce a tenant to sign.

After presenting such a compelling case, you should have the landlord’s undivided attention. You’ve shown him the true value of the proposed project on the back of a napkin (or beer coaster as the case may be). Moreover, you’ve shown him how to reframe the upgrade for both his current and prospective tenants. His current tenants should willingly accept the installation inconvenience, and his new tenants should gladly accept slightly higher rent, in exchange for lower utility bills and the convenience and aesthetics of brand new ENERGY STAR® appliances. 

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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Sell Through Hypothesis

You first learned to hypothesize, or make educated guesses, in grade school science class. Now it’s time to reframe that blast from the classroom past as a business tool. In hypothesis-based selling, the method championed in Matthew Dixon’s The Challenger Sale, one’s ability to accurately predict the needs of a customer organization is a critical component to success.

Hypothesis-based sellers lead with ideas about what a customer organization needs.

To put this method into practice, you need to do some homework. Research your customer organization’s industry and history so that you enter the initial meeting with several hypotheses on your customer organization’s challenges—in other words, your ideas on what the customer organization needs. Focus on big-picture outcomes rather than measurements or technical details at this stage.

Next, reframe your hypotheses in the context of a bigger problem or opportunity. Your unique insights into these customer challenges become your unique value in the eyes of the customer.

Hypothesis-based selling works because you are giving the customer a new opportunity rather than focusing on a known problem. Don’t ask a customer what he or she needs and then explain how you will fulfill that need. Tell your customer what is needed and then explain the unique value you bring to the opportunity.

Striking out as one of a hundred applicants to the same job posting?

Hypothesis-based selling works for job seekers too. Before approaching a potential employer, develop a list of hypotheses. The list should include what you believe to be problems or opportunities for that employer. Next, brainstorm ways for your unique skills to solve those problems or take advantage of the opportunities on behalf of the employer.

Don’t wait for an official job posting—call up potential employers and ask for a few minutes to present some of your brilliant ideas. The mutual benefit of this job-seeking method is that the potential employer gains your informed insights while you create demand for your unique skills.

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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Vacancy? Not a Problem!

Have you ever tried to sell an efficiency product or service to a prospect that owns or manages a building with high vacancy? If you have, you probably know that it’s not an easy task. Vacant space doesn’t pay rent, and without that money, it can be hard to convince a prospect to front capital for efficiency improvements to those square feet. I’d like to share a success story from a graduate of the Efficiency Sales Professional Certificate program (who we’ll call Tom) about his experience prevailing in such a situation.

Tom approached a developer in Silicon Valley who owned a building that was 35% vacant with the goal of selling him a high-end lighting control solution. The offering was a state-of-the-art system that allowed the user to control the brightness of each and every luminaire (“lighting fixture” to mere mortals) using a desktop widget that connected the user’s computer to a server, which in turn was networked to the lighting ballasts via a unique IP address for each one. It was a truly high-tech system, and its price reflected it…It would cost about $4 per square foot to install.

Tom approached the developer with the following “elevator pitch”: “You know, the kinds of tenants that you’re hoping to attract are most likely high-tech prima donnas – venture-capital-backed game designers and the like. They would really appreciate this technology.” The developer asked him, “What are you getting at?” Tom replied confidently, “Well, you’re 35% vacant now. I suggest that you buy our whiz-bang high-tech lighting control system for the 35% of your building that is vacant so that you can use it as a differentiating amenity as your brokers are trying to find tenants to fill that space.”

The developer thought about it for a moment, then said, “If you’re willing to sign a memorandum of understanding saying that you’re not going to sell this system to any other building within 25 miles of mine (so that my brokers can actually use this lighting control system as a differentiating amenity), then I’ll buy the lighting system from you. Of course, you also have to agree to educate our brokers as to how special it actually is (and why it’s important to our potential tenants) so they can effectively leverage this competitive advantage.”

Tom didn’t consider the 25-mile radius limitation to be onerous, so he agreed, and they signed the deal.

What happened in the wake of the retrofit? Six months later, the building’s vacancy percentage had dropped to 5%! Who do you think made more money: Tom, who sold a $4 per square foot system, or the landlord, who just filled up 30% of his building? The landlord, of course! Think about the annual rent per square foot…and the concomitant increase in appraised value that the landlord enjoyed now that his building was 95% occupied.

There’s a funny epilogue to this story as well: After the tenants moved in, they called Tom and said, “Listen, we like the system, but we don’t like the way it’s programmed. Could we pay you to reprogram it for us?” Tom agreed, of course, and made another three bucks per square foot reconfiguring the system. Within a six-month period, Tom closed two sales: one for $4 per square foot and the second one for $3!

Most salespeople would probably have approached this situation saying, “There’s no way a landlord is going to spend money outfitting vacant space, especially not with a top-of-the-line lighting control system. Why would they buy from me?” Tom, a true sales professional, used the powers of positive thinking and reframing. He understood exactly what was most important to the landlord and reframed his offering based on that insight.

So what’s the moral of the story? The more you can reframe energy efficiency as an amenity that gets people more of what they already know they want (in this case, more occupied square feet!), the more successful you’ll be in selling it.

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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