Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 301

Cut the Stress

When stress and anxiety take hold, it can be difficult to stay productive – and even to keep emotions in check. In much the same way as we reframe efficiency to convey value for our prospects, we can reframe the way we mentally approach stress to prevent it from creeping into our lives. It’s just a matter of making an effort to shift our outlook on the things that cause us stress in the first place.

An article published this week on the Inc blog suggests several actionable ways to keep stress and anxiety from pervading our lives. My favorite of their suggestions is to write a “hard-luck” script and an “empowered” script, based on difficulties you’ve had in the past.

To read the full list of recommendations, read the article below:

http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/how-successful-people-beat-stress.html

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You Must Be a Sales Professional

Most organizations seeking to advance the sale of efficiency projects have widely varying staff roles supporting their mission. Utilities have account execs, program designers, program managers, third-party program management contractors, trade allies, program evaluators, and so on. Mechanical service contractors have business development staff, inside sales staff, dispatchers, and field techs. So how many roles in these and similar organizations really need to understand how to sell efficiency effectively? More than you might think.

I like to start any discussion of selling efficiency more effectively with the following three guiding principles:

Energy efficiency products, services, and programs all require effective selling.
Professional sales skills will help you advance efficiency, regardless of your role in the process.
You can be a sales professional even if your job title does not include the word “sales.”

Frankly, anyone in your organization who works with customers needs to understand efficiency-focused professional selling. They will uncover plenty of needs if they know what to look for, what questions to ask, how to field the customer’s questions, and how to migrate a conversation from a service call to an exploration of how enhanced efficiency could make the customer’s operation more competitive, profitable, and valuable. Moreover, their input will help you triangulate the organization’s requirements so that you’ll be more knowledgeable when your actual business development person ultimately connects with whatever person on your customer’s staff has the final say on which products and services they will buy from you. On a related note, one of the hallmarks of sales professionalism is the ability to move from “reactive” to “proactive” sales. Can you really grow your business by simply fielding calls and producing estimates upon request? By the time you hear about a project using this approach, you are oft en too late. There are several dimensions of being proactive:

Coaching others in the decision chain to drive requests for premium approaches.
Communicating compelling value propositions that preempt value engineering.
Selling directly to the owner. 

If you are proactive in developing interest in and demand for higher efficiency approaches, you will be paving the way toward increased sales. Getting to the owner and communicating how your solution makes his or her life easier or more profitable sets the stage for more effective selling later on.

By the way, having utility account reps, field service techs, and other non-traditional selling roles trained in efficiency-focused professional selling yields another vital advantage. It gives you the insight you need to take threads of information returned to you from your “field operatives” and craft them into proactive and compelling messages that will create demand for your offerings from the top of your prospect’s organization. That “intel from the field” will also help you identify all of the players whose endorsement you will need to “soft -circle” prior to going to top management with a plan you feel confident will win organization-wide approval.

 

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Be Like the Personal Trainer

Most people think sales is all about forming strong relationships with prospects. If you do that, they’re going to want to buy from you, right? Not so fast. While I wouldn’t disagree that relationship-building is closely related to successful selling, I believe that relationships are the result of, rather than the cause of, successful selling.

When you first meet a prospect, I think that rapport-building is more important than relationship-building. You’re probably wondering, what the heck is the difference between rapport-building and relationship-building? Think about it. You can have good rapport without necessarily having a strong relationship with your prospect, right? Rapport is simply the conduit for effective communication. It suggests trust and mutual respect. It allows you to deliver your message effectively.

For the sake of analogy, consider how an effective personal trainer produces results for his or her client. The client has a fitness-related goal. The personal trainer is responsible for facilitating the achievement of that goal. Unless the client understands and trusts the trainer, that end goal will remain elusive. In such a situation, while “rapport” is necessary, an actual “relationship” is not. Rapport allows the personal trainer to push his or her client beyond the comfort zone. Without a little stress and that extra push, the client would not likely achieve the fitness goal.

So how does this analogy relate to sales? A salesperson can aim to be a relationship-builder – giving his prospect complimentary hockey tickets and the like – yet a lot of business will still go to a competing vendor. Why? Is the other vendor offering more impressive gifts?

Maybe his prospect actually has more respect for a competitor’s offerings or approach? Could it be that competitor has the courage to take a “Challenger Selling” approach – laying the foundation for good rapport by listening intently to what the prospect thinks he wants or needs, and then redirecting the conversation to what the sales professional knows will produce superior results for the prospect? 

Complimentary hockey tickets or similar “gifts” don’t make your prospect’s business more competitive, profitable or valuable. Taking the time to translate your offering’s benefits so that they can be measured using yardsticks the prospect is already using to measure his/her success….now THAT’S a great way to motivate your prospect to leave his/her comfort zone and embrace your offering over your competitor’s.

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7 Tips for Capturing Attention

When you’re giving a presentation or pitching a sale, you’re always at risk of losing the attention and focus of the audience. Let’s face it…people have short attention spans. So what can you do to keep people from tuning out? Here are some tips: 

Smile
Use shorter sentences
Change your delivery speed from time to time
Use pauses
Insert a blank slide when talking about a key topic – this will encourage the audience to listen to what you’re saying
Ask a question and pause before you answer it
Tell a captivating story

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A Mind Trick for Call Reluctance

The more you think of yourself as the connection between a product or service that is available and someone who needs it, the more effective a sales professional you’ll be. This shift in perspective can have an enormous impact on your performance across the board.

A attendee at one of our Efficiency Sales Professional Boot Camps recommended a book called, “The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance” by George W. Dudley and Shannon L. Goodson. It’s quite a thick tome…My first reaction upon seeing the book was that someone could delay making cold calls for a very long time if he or she elected to read it cover-to-cover rather than just picking up the phone! 

It’s been said many times that one of the easiest to visualize and most helpful tricks for overcoming cold call reluctance is to imagine that you’re calling your prospect to return his or her wallet, which we’ll assume you found in the back of a taxi cab.

Why does this little thought experiment help? Because if properly visualized, it will have a dramatic effect on the way you’re going to address the person who answers your call. For one thing, the gatekeeper is not going to prequalify you with twenty questions if it appears you are calling to give rather than take, and the way you communicate while you’re in this mental “zone” will definitely give the impression that you have something important and valuable to offer.

Staying with this scenario for another moment, how much do you think that hypothetical lost wallet is really worth? Let’s assume your prospect is well-heeled and has great taste in leather goods. Say it’s a TUMI wallet lined with a couple hundred dollars of cash your prospect had just withdrawn from the ATM. It also holds a couple high-limit credit cards, a driver’s license, and perhaps a few other items that are relatively easy to cancel or replace. The whole value of the “prize”?  Probably less than five hundred dollars, including the labor cost of his assistant who would wind up replacing the wallet and reporting the credit cards lost.

Now, let’s return to the real reason for your call…an expense-reducing capital project with a projected life of a decade or more. What is the net present value of the energy-saving solution you’re about to introduce to this prospect? Is it $500? How about $5,000? How about $50,000? If you’re selling complex solutions, the NPV might well exceed half-a-million dollars! Think about it…That’s equivalent to returning 1,000 lost wallets worth $500 apiece! Now why would you ever hesitate to pick up the phone to return 1,000 wallets?

Don’t ask yourself, “Why would this guy want to take my phone call?” You should be asking instead, “Why in the world would this person not want to take my phone call? It's like finding 1,000 of his wallets in the back of a taxi cab!”

Regardless of which mind game you intelligently deploy to overcome cold call resistance, always remember one thing. You have something valuable to offer, and you are the connection that links your prospect to that value.

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Persistent or Pesty?

There’s a fine line between being persistent and being a pain in the tuchus. Persistence is a trait to be admired, and it’s one that all sales professionals should embody.

What is persistence? In the sales setting, it’s following-up with your prospect or client, knowing what the next step is, and respectfully keeping them informed and on-track so that you can complete the project.

So how do you exercise persistence without becoming a pest? Limit the number of times you contact your prospect or client. Don’t call or email them every time you have a question or need something from them. Instead, make an ongoing list of questions or follow-up items and wait until your next phone call or meeting to address them.

If there are deadlines involved, make sure to let your prospect or client know about them well in advance. This allows you the breathing room to follow-up several times before the deadline without bombarding them right before it’s due.

The fact of the matter is that someone’s got to play the adult in the relationship. More often than not, your prospects and clients will be too busy to advance the transaction to the next step. You have to be the one to ensure that things are moving forward. Just make sure you do so without crossing the line between “persistent” and “pesty.”

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Your Brain at Work

On Saturday, we discussed the value of the “brain dump” as it relates to productivity. Ridding your mind of tasks, appointments, due dates, and so forth frees it up to do more important work. While the “brain dump” is a great (and simple) way to free up space in your mind, it is just one of the many ways in which we can improve our mental functions and abilities.

In David Rock’s book, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, Rock helps readers maximize their mental performance. He provides a high-level overview of how the brain works and explains why we get overwhelmed and stressed. He also provides a number of actionable strategies for improving weaknesses and making the most of your inherent mental abilities.  

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients’ offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

“In this book, we travel inside Emily and Paul’s brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they’re presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they’re in good hands: David Rock knows how the brain works -and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. Rock shows how it’s possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but succeed in it - and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

“YOUR BRAIN AT WORK explores issues such as: 

Why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources
Why it's so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions
How to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable problems
How to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible
How to collaborate more effectively with others
Why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier
How to be more effective at changing other people's behavior”

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, August 16, 2015

Monday: Read  Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention , by Ben Parr, and learn how to capture - and keep - your prospect's attention. 




Tuesday: When you're giving a presentation, make sure you don't overwhelm the audience with information. Keep it focused.  




Wednesday: Learn what to do when a prospect tells you he or she does not have enough financial "cushion" to afford your project. 




Thursday: Find out how to win a sale without having proof that your solution has worked for other customers.




Friday: Discover how to turn the chief engineer into your internal champion.




Saturday: Read this article from the Fast Company blog and learn how a "brain dump" can improve your productivity. 

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The Key to a Productive Mind

I’m sure most of you utilize a variety of productivity tools on a daily basis. As powerful as these external tools can be, we are ultimately limited by our own internal abilities. What good is a fast computer with dual monitors if we aren’t using our minds efficiently?

According to an article published this week on the Fast Company blog, making mental lists (rather than physically writing them down) has a detrimental effect on productivity and creativity. Are you able to store all of your tasks, appointments, deadlines, etc. in your mind without some things slipping through the cracks? Perhaps. However, you’re stifling your brain’s ability to be truly flexible and productive.

The solution? Set aside some time once a week (or even nightly) to do a “brain dump.” Get everything out of your head and on paper. You’ll free up space for more important brain functions, and you’ll be able to better utilize your other productivity tools.

For more on this topic, read the full article below:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3049177/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/why-your-organization-method-is-draining-your-productivity

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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How to Recruit an Internal Ally

When you’re collecting information for a proposal, the person with the power to approve the project is generally not yet in the picture. At this early stage, taking the time to forge solid relationships with the non-decision-makers will pay off handsomely later in the game.

In the commercial setting, for example, you’ll probably do the initial building walk-through with the chief engineer. You want this chief engineer to step into the role of internal champion when it comes time to present your proposal to the ultimate decision-maker. So how do you recruit this non-decision-maker to join your team? Help him out. Make him look good in front of his boss.

At my previous company, we did hundreds of large building audits. The first thing our energy engineer did was go to the chief engineer of the building and have a heart-to-heart chat.

“Listen, you live in this building. We’re here for one day. We’re going to rely heavily on your expertise about how this building could be made to run better. If you have any projects that you have proposed that have not been taken seriously by management, we can be your voice to get those initiatives taken more seriously. If you share with us every proposal you’ve made that’s been summarily dismissed, and any other things that you think that this building could do to improve its operational efficiency, we promise to evaluate your input carefully and feature it prominently in our report as appropriate.”

Keeping our promise, on the first page of the report we would say, “We would first like to thank our colleague, Bill Johnson for spending the time to share with us measures 5, 6, and 17…etc.” 

People dedicate their books to their kids and dogs. There’s no reason not to dedicate a report to the chief engineer who walked you through the building for a day and told you where all the skeletons were buried, which ultimately allowed you to craft a more impactful proposal.

When you do this with sincerity and grace, you’ll make a friend. That chief engineer will look great if a highly praised consultant from out of town tells his boss that he was right all along. He now has a vested interest in making you look good. If he doesn’t, he’s essentially devaluing the opinion of the person who just praised him!

Protect the ego of the professional who runs the building, and he will in turn protect you and help your proposal cross the finish line.

There is one important caveat to using this approach. If it becomes apparent that the chief is incompetent, considered the “village idiot” by others in his organization, or worse yet both, aligning yourself with his interests would not be a good idea. 

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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