Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 303

The Weekly Coaching Conversation

There are many different management styles (and many different types of mangers). The managers who know how to coach their employees – and who take the time to do so – end up leading the most effective teams. They give constructive feedback on a regular basis, work with their employees to strengthen weaknesses, and in turn, elicit high-quality performance from everyone with whom they work.

According to Brian Souza in his book, The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Team’s Performance – and Your Career – to the Next Level, managers should meet with team members on a weekly basis. In these sessions, the manager should strive to answer five questions: “What must they do? How should they do it? Did they do it? What did they do right? How can they improve next time?” The answers to these questions will inform the manager of the type of coaching the employee needs (if any).

For a more in-depth look at the “coaching” style of management, I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Improve team performance. Transform your career. Change lives.

“Whether your team is in an office, on a field, in a classroom, or in your living room have you ever thought they had more to give, but you weren’t quite sure how to get it out of them? Have you ever wanted them to play up to their potential, but didn’t quite know how to make it happen? Are you looking for that one new idea, that one simple strategy that will take your team’s performance and your career to the next level? If so, The Weekly Coaching Conversation is definitely the book for you.

“Every once in a while a book like this comes along with a message so simple yet so profound it literally changes people’s lives.

“In a story as inspiring as it is informative, bestselling author Brian Souza reveals the secrets to unleashing a person’s potential. Introducing a groundbreaking, yet simple-to-understand and easy-to-apply coaching framework that’s backed by years of rigorous research, The Weekly Coaching Conversation gives managers and leaders the playbook to turbocharge any team's performance.”

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The Next Client

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to turn prospects into customers. While you should always be looking for new customers to grow your business, you should also remember to leverage your existing customer base in an attempt to turn one-off buyers into long-term clients. In other words, don’t just look for the next sale – look for the next client.

So how do you turn a customer into a client? Think about what services your past customers might be in need of. Perhaps you have a new solution that would complement the previous one. Or perhaps they had a limited budget when you worked with them last year and you can leverage their new budget this year to retrofit one of their inefficient systems.

This strategy requires you to be proactive rather than reactive, of course. You can’t sit back and wait for your customers to call you in for a new project. You have to take the time to chart out how you could fulfill each customer’s needs, and then reach out to each and every one of them.

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Selling Values, Not Features and Benefits

There’s an age-old saw (pun intended) about selling benefits rather than features. Guess what? You shouldn’t be selling benefits either! You should be selling the value.

I like to use the Leatherman® tool as an example: Why do people buy a Leatherman? Do they buy it because it has scissors, tweezers, a toothpick, a corkscrew, and a saw in the same tool? Do they really fall in love with the Phillips head screwdriver or the can opener? Is that why they buy it? No. These are just features of the product.

Do they buy it because it can open a bottle of wine, cut some wire or saw a large branch? No. These are just benefits of owning a Leatherman.

People buy a Leatherman because of their values. Maybe they value the sense of having everything they need, right in their back pocket, whenever they need it. Maybe they buy it because it makes them feel like MacGyver. Maybe they want the opportunity to fix something on the spot and look like a hero in front of their date. Maybe they don’t have room for a box of Craftsman tools in their tiny apartment. Values cause prospects to become buyers. Not features. Not benefits. Values.

So how does this relate to selling efficiency? Take a high-tech lighting control system, for example. Does your prospect buy features – a certain number of control points and dimming ballasts? How about benefits – the ability to dim to a certain brightness or shed 25% of the lighting load during a demand-response emergency? Or is the prospect motivated by gaining greater control in general? Control boosts employee morale and productivity by allowing them to set their own lighting levels. Control allows the building owner to feel as if he or she at least has some options when an unforeseen demand-response event triples his cost/kWh.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself two questions: “What is my prospect really buying?” and “What should I really be selling?”

Once you discover the value your prospect perceives, you shouldn’t be selling anything else. If they’re buying lower lighting power density, then guess what? That’s what you should be talking about. But I bet that’s not what’s motivating the purchase, which means you need to be talking about something entirely different. 

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The Meeting Agenda

Whether you’re holding a meeting internally or with a prospect’s organization, it’s important that you create an agenda and send it to the invitees ahead of time.

Why do need to send out the agenda? For one, it allows the people attending the meeting to know ahead of time where you’re coming from, giving them a chance to come to the table with some ideas or questions. It also shows that you’ve thought through your talking points and that you’re not going to be wasting their time. Additionally, if someone is on the fence about whether or not to attend the meeting, he or she will be able to make an informed decision based on your planned topics of discussion.

Once you’ve sent out the agenda, stick to it and stay on track during the meeting. You’ll lose the respect of your audience if you go off on a tangent or fail to touch on all of the discussion points. Also be sure to leave enough time for questions (which may mean paring down your list of topics before sending it out).

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Friend vs. Professional

Think for a moment about your relationship with your prospects and customers. Do your customers think of you as a friend? Do you try to develop friendship with your new prospects? If so, you may not actually be positioning yourself for success in sales. People don’t buy from friends – they buy from people they trust to deliver. It’s fine to be friends with your customers; however, if you don’t – first and foremost – prove yourself as the most trustworthy and professional product or service provider, the sale will go to someone who does.

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. By agreeing to an efficiency project, you are putting your trust in the sales professional to deliver a quality product or service that will benefit your organization. You’ve received permission (and a big check) from your boss to make sure the project goes according to plan. You need to be certain that the person you endorse for the project is not going to let you down, get you fired, or cost you political capital within your organization. Do you hire the person who took you on a fishing trip, or do you hire the person who you can confidently say will get the job done without a hitch?

Don’t sell with friendship. Use rapport to establish trust and confidence, and knock the ball out of the park with a stellar pitch and 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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Predictable Revenue

Every business owner and sales manager wants to be able to predict revenue – whether it’s for the coming month, the coming year, or five years down the road. With so many variables at play, it can be hard to know what to expect. Even if you have a great team of sales professionals out in the field, they are at the mercy of the leads that they were given. Are those leads consistently high quality, or are they just “leads”? The answer could mean the difference between a great month and a lousy one. So how do you develop the consistent lead generation necessary to accurately predict future revenue?

In Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler’s book, Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com, Ross and Tyler propose a new marketing and sales system that is centered around high-quality lead generation. This system took Salesforce.com from a small start-up to the powerhouse that it is today. The way they structure their sales and marketing team is fascinating – and well worth exploring. If you’re tired of traditional lead generation and prospecting strategies (like cold calling), pick up a copy of this book and consider how these strategies might benefit your business.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:

“Discover the outbound sales process that, in just a few years, helped add $100 million in recurring revenue to Salesforce.com, almost doubling their enterprise growth...with zero cold calls.

“This is NOT another book about how to cold call or close deals. This is an entirely new kind of sales bible for CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales VPs to help you build a sales machine. What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? 

“LEARN INSIDE

How an outbound sales process (‘Cold Calling 2.0’), that without cold calls or a marketing budget, can generate a 9% response rate and millions of dollars from cold prospects.
The Seven Fatal Sales Mistakes CEOs and Sales VPs (even experienced ones) make time and time again.
How outbound sales and selling can be friendly, helpful and enjoyable.
How to develop self-managing sales teams, turning your employees into mini-CEOs.
And more...”

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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Weekly Recap, February 22, 2015

Monday: Read  The Secrets of Power Persuasion for Salespeople , by Roger Dawson, and learn how to become a power persuader.




Tuesday: Use stories and referrals to prove to your prospects that “this is not your first rodeo.”




Wednesday: Before you step into the room with a prospect, think about what he or she really values most and work that angle.




Thursday: Discover some voicemail best practices. 




Friday: Every sales professional gets turned down from time to time. Learn how to cope with rejection. 




Saturday: Read this article from the LifeHacker blog and learn how to make your desired habits more automatic.

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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Automatic Habits

As humans, we have a limited amount of mental storage space. When we’re busy and we have dozens of ideas, tasks, and goals to track simultaneously, things may start slipping through the cracks. Basic productivity tools such as to-do lists, calendars, reminder apps, and so forth help mitigate this mental overload. Most of us use these tools on a daily basis to keep track of our lives. However, we may not be using them to their full potential.

Suppose you have identified something that keeps slipping through the cracks – something that you wish were habitual so that you wouldn’t forget to do it. We all know how challenging it can be to form new habits and rid ourselves of bad ones. Rather than simply making a mental decision to change, approach habit change as if it were an appointment or scheduled task. Add it as an action item in your calendar at a specific time. Set a reminder for yourself. The less you have to think about it, the more automatic it will become. Eventually, your desired habit will truly become a habit (at which point, you’ll no longer need a tool to help you out).

If you’re interested in making desired habits more automatic, check out the following article published this week on the LifeHacker blog:

http://lifehacker.com/use-the-principle-of-automatic-savings-to-build-better-1686726584

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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Coping with Rejection

Rejection is something that many of us have to deal with on a regular basis, especially as sales professionals. Here are some things to keep in mind: 

Rejection is often the result of timing. You may have thoroughly impressed your prospect with your offering. However, if an unforeseen expense arises that needs to be addressed with the capital they had planned to spend with you, you’ll need to wait for a fresh supply of capital before they can do business with you.



You should always remember that it is easier for a customer to say “no” than “yes.” Someone might spend 20 minutes with you talking about the features and benefits of a product or service, and then at the end of the day decide they don’t want to buy it, or that they need to shop around first. This does not mean you failed; it just means that the person is not ready to buy yet – this is a normal part of the selling process.



Everyone gets rejected at some point. Remember that you’re human, and everyone has gone or will go through the same thing that you’re going through. Rather than losing motivation, use the experience as an opportunity to learn and grow.



It’s always a great idea to ask why. You might start by saying, “You would be doing me a great personal favor to let me know why you decided not to proceed. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’d just like to know why so that I can take whatever you say into account next time.”

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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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To Call or Not to Call?

The phone call is a valuable and powerful tool – especially in sales; however, it should be used with care and conscientiousness. People don’t like being interrupted by the phone. It is the equivalent of someone showing up unexpected at your front door. Modern-day etiquette is to email first and set up a time to talk.

Unless you know someone specifically prefers emails over voicemails or vice versa, err on the side of using both. Particularly when confirming information, it is better to over-communicate. Voicemails get ignored less often than email accidentally goes to spam.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Be aware of time zones.  

2. Get to know your prospect’s schedule...Are Fridays better than Mondays?  

3. Assume you are calling a cell phone unless you know for certain that it is an office line, which means don’t call too early or too late.  

4. When you call, assume you will get voicemail and be prepared with a concise message.

Keep it short and to the point.
If you have to convey details, do so in an email – and let them know that you will follow up with details in an email.
Make sure your voicemail has an action statement. If it is to call you back, great. If it is something else, say it. No need to play phone tag to get someone to fax you a rebate application.
When leaving your name and number, imagine someone on the other end of the line writing it down. Speak clearly and slowly and repeat it.
Leave your number at the beginning and at the end of the voicemail. If they have to replay the message to catch your number, they’ll be thankful to retrieve it in the first few seconds of the replay. 

5. Send an email documenting the discussion, including the action items and key take-aways. If your prospect were driving or otherwise indisposed while on the phone with you, they would certainly appreciate this courtesy.

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 Jewell Insights, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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