Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 317

Improve with Improv

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You may have heard me refer to graduates of the Efficiency Sales Professional™ Certificate Boot Camp as “Sales Ninjas.” Like ninjas, efficiency sales professionals are fearless, quick on their feet, and highly tuned into their prospect’s every move. They can adapt to any situation in which they find themselves and come out triumphant. Regardless of whether or not these skills come naturally to you, they can (and should) be developed and honed.

While training to become an actual “ninja” is not the most effective way to develop these skills, according to an article published this week on the Inc blog, improv acting classes may be just the ticket. The article draws a parallel between successful sales and leadership professionals and improv actors. To summarize the article’s argument… 

Both groups handle themselves with confidence outside of their comfort zone
Both groups understand how to avoid negativity
Both groups are adept at seeing the world through their partner’s shoes
Both groups are sensitive to the body language and emotional state of their partner

If you’re interested in developing your “ninja” skills in a practical way, I highly recommend you read this article (and perhaps even sign up for an improv class!).

http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/4-leadership-lessons-improv-actors-know.html

 

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Efficiency in the Hospitality Industry

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As someone who does more than 100 speaking engagements a year all over North America, I spend a lot of time on the road. Every time I pass a Motel 6, I am reminded of the tag line they adopted in the mid-Eighties – “We’ll leave the light on for you.” In fact, for the chain’s 50
th
 anniversary in 2012, they began using the motto, “50 Years, the Light’s Still On.” For decades now, the hotel industry has been obsessed with perfecting hardware and software that keep the lights (and HVAC) turned off in unoccupied rooms. Nonetheless, those Motel 6 mottos remain indelibly etched in my mind.




The last time I checked, U.S. hotels were spending close to $4 billion in energy every year. Think about how much could be saved if those costs could be reduced by even just 10%. The numbers are truly compelling.




One of the metrics that hospitality analysts focus on is the Average Daily Rate, or ADR. Years ago, the ENERGY STAR
®
 program released data suggesting that if a hotel were to reduce its energy costs by 10%, it would be the equivalent of raising its ADR by $0.62 if it were a limited service hotel and $1.35 if it were a full-service hotel. 




In this age of total rate transparency – with Hotels.com, Priceline.com, Kayak.com, and all of the other online options for comparing hotel ratings and pricing in a given area – the competition for overnight stays is fierce.




Now I ask you, if a CFO wants to increase his chain’s ADR to demonstrate enhanced profitability for his investors, would he be wise to raise his hotel rates across the board? Probably not, since given the aforementioned rate transparency, his chain would likely lose market share in the wake of that price increase.




On the other hand, what if that same CFO decided to benchmark his hotels, find out what improvements could be made, and pursue the ENERGY STAR label in as many properties as possible? The resulting decrease in energy costs might have the same economic impact as if he had raised his rates, but he wouldn't be losing market share. In fact, his chain might actually 
gain
 market share because his hotel rooms would be deemed to be more comfortable, the online reviews would see an uptick, and more people would book. In addition, sustainability-minded travelers might select his chain over others in the wake of announcing a new sustainability agenda (and perhaps even a few newly minted ENERGY STAR labels).




So what’s the moral here? It's a win-win for hotels to pursue efficiency measures, and if you can convey this to your prospects in the hospitality industry, they should be more willing to embrace your efficiency solutions.

 

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The Repeat Customer

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Finding new prospects is a time-consuming activity and often requires a great deal of research, cold calling, email campaigns, and so forth. If you’ve ever done repeat business with a past customer, you know how time-efficient (and lucrative) it can be. When is the last time you combed through your customer list to consider how you might continue to provide value for them?




I was interviewing a very successful efficiency sales professional in preparation for a two-day presentation that I gave to a group of mechanical contractors. This sales professional had recently decided to expand his business beyond simply service contracts and start focusing on efficiency-motivated retrofits. He shared with me that his change in focus had paid off handsomely. He said, “90 percent of our roughly $10 million in energy work last year came from existing customers.”




That statement underscored something I've been telling vendors and service providers for years. People say, “I want to morph this service business into an energy-efficient retrofit company. I don't know where to start. Where am I going to find new leads?” Are you kidding me? You have file cabinets filled with projects you've done since you first set up shop. You already know their situation. You know what the installed systems are. You know where the skeletons are buried in those buildings. You know which systems are legacy systems, no longer supported by their manufacturers. At least some of those installed systems have an obvious upgrade path that you could suggest.




This sales professional used that valuable information to his advantage. He said, "Well, these are the buildings that we're servicing. We happen to know that some of these buildings are paying us more in maintenance annually than they would be paying in debt service to totally replace their existing systems with new ones. Let’s sell them some new equipment.”




Bottom line, take a careful look at your existing customers. You have the advantage of being the incumbent. You have the advantage of already having a relationship with them – you’re trustworthy, you're always on time, you charge them fairly, and you've been doing business with them for years. Those factors effectively eliminate the trust-building phase of the relationship that you would have to go through with any new customer.




So, pay attention to your current stable of customers. There's a lot of work that can be done without ever calling anyone new. And, by the way, every present customer for whom you design new solutions has plenty of other peers who will eventually become referrals for you if you play your cards right and inject new value into your existing relationship.

 

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What Changed?

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Suppose you get an unexpected call from a prospect who says he’s interested in replacing his building’s HVAC system with your energy-efficient technology. Many salespeople would say, “Great! Let’s set up an appointment and we can go over the details.” A sales professional, on the other hand, would say, “Would be happy to oblige. Just out of curiosity, what made you call us today about replacing your HVAC system?”

Why is this question important? The answer will get you inside the prospect’s head. You might learn something about the decision-making dynamics in your prospect’s organization. More than likely, you’ll get a glimpse of how you might use energy efficiency as the lever to alleviate pain and/or produce gain.

You might learn that your prospect is chasing utility bill savings. Or perhaps he’s more interested in capturing the praise and labels associated with sustainability initiatives. Or perhaps he’s received an ultimatum from a tenant who won’t renew his lease unless certain thermal comfort problems are definitively addressed.  Having this information ahead of time will help guide and focus your value proposition and allow you to hit the ball out of the park during the first meeting.

 

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Price and the Decision-Making Chain

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One of the keys to successful selling is being able to customize the benefits of your product or service so that they resonate with each and every stakeholder. Different stakeholders are going to be resonating at different frequencies. It’s your job to make sure that you resonate at each and every one of those frequencies at the right time to soft-circle the approval of all of the initiators, influencers, gatekeepers, decision-makers, buyers, and end-users who will ultimately need to say “Yes!” in order to make your proposed project a reality.

In Anthony Parinello's best-selling book, Selling to VITO (The Very Important Top Officer), Parinello addresses the fact that the higher up the corporate ladder you get, the less price matters. In Tony’s words, “Decision-makers make the budget, and non-decision-makers spend the budget.” If you find that price is a barrier, you're probably not high enough in the food chain. If you have a compelling proposition to present to a CEO, price will be less of an issue. In fact, you may have heard me say before that two of the most important questions to answer when addressing a CEO are: “Will what you are offering make the organization easier to manage?” and “Will what you are offering make the enterprise more valuable?” You can be sure that the Board of Directors, which hires the CEO, has those two key performance indicators in mind as it assesses the CEO’s effectiveness over time. Hence, it should come as no surprise that reframing your value proposition to resonate at the frequency of those two metrics should be music to your CEO prospect’s ears.

At the same time, if a decision-maker at any level is unconvinced that you have a viable solution, it doesn't matter if it's free. I was talking to a colleague recently whose company implements “direct install” programs for utilities (i.e., the utility pays 100% of the cost of putting the equipment in). He shared with me that their success rate for direct install was just 70%. So, the next time you think that price is the answer, remember that 30% of this energy professional’s prospects typically say “No!” even though the offer involved zero dollars out of pocket! (In actuality, “cost” is not just the dollars required to do the deal. The time and effort that the prospect must invest in being sold to could actually be a greater “cost” than the “price” of the proposed project.)

I often return to Seth Godin’s hierarchy that non-owners in a B2B environment use to make decisions. If the product or service you’re proposing is perceived to be too risky or inconvenient, if it won’t bring praise or power to the buyer, or if it’s simply not fun to pursue, then the fact that it’s free won’t matter.
 

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Selling Energy

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Each Monday, I review a book on this blog that I think will help you all improve your professional success. This week, I’d like to share a review of my new Wall Street Journal best-selling book, Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This review was published on the Energy Efficiency Markets website and is an insightful piece – particularly for anyone who has not already purchased and read the book. Here’s the review, which you can also view directly on the Energy Efficiency Markets website HERE.

(From Elisa Wood’s review on EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com)

A Confession and a Review of the Book “Selling Energy”

Confession time.

I often engage in a contest with a friend, a science writer, which we call find-the-most-outrageous-industry-speak. We peruse power points, regulatory decisions, news releases and marketing materials for entries.

My friend comes up with some great gobbledygook. But as an energy writer, I usually win, thanks to the inadvertent contributions from my industry.

As energy geeks, we are masters of language that confuses. (Read any FERC NOPR’s lately?) We even have different regional dialects. An energy service company (ESCO) in New York operates a completely different kind of business than the ESCOs in the other 49 states. And how many different definitions of renewable energy credit (RECs) are floating around – or is it renewable energy certificate?

My friend and I play this game not to be unkind, but as a self-warning. It is easy to slip into jargon that is understandable only to the specialist or insider, even when we speak or write for a broader audience.  And let’s face it, the energy industry is so multi-faceted that even if you gather people who specialize in a niche, say green energy, it feels a bit like a United Nation’s meeting. There are niches within the niche (geothermal, fuel cells, demand response, energy efficiency, microgrids, biomass, solar, wind). Each niche has its own lingo.

So this leads me to why I liked the new book, Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! by Mark Jewell with Rachel Christenson. The 202-page book is an entertaining read that uses accessible language and provides concrete advice about marketing and selling energy efficiency to customers.

I didn’t expect to enjoy Selling Energy. So many energy books read like regulatory filings, chuck full of acronyms, which make you sleepier than a Thanksgiving dinner. (‘Fess up, your eyes went heavy after you read the earlier paragraph with FERC, NOPRs, ESCOs, RECs).

But Selling Energy is a kind-to-the-reader book. And its lessons are conveyed in stories, anecdotes and natural humor. (“You could probably put the words, ‘Up Yours!’ anywhere in a thick proposal…and never be called out because people don’t read them!”)

One of my favorite stories was a confession from Jewell about a meeting early in his career with a CFO from a Fortune 500 company. Jewell launched into a myriad of technical specifications about lighting. The CFO wrote nothing down, until Jewell got to the word “chromaticity.” He asked Jewell to spell and define it. “He studiously copies my description word for word, then sets his pencil back down on his legal pad and says, “Thank you. Go on.”

Did Jewell win the sale because the executive was fascinated by light bulb  chromaticity? No,  Jewell lost the sale. It turns out the CFO had been thinking about a vocabulary game he played with his 11-year-old daughter every night. He figured ‘chromaticity’ would stump her.

The lesson: “The more information you shower on a prospect, the worse your chances are of closing the sale,” says the book.

It’s easy to forget that most energy efficiency customers have little interest in energy. They’re interested in their own businesses, and are willing to listen only to what directly pertains to their daily worries.

Better not to kill customers with truck-loads of information. Here are a few other pieces of advice, of the many worth repeating, from Selling Energy.

Look beyond the green agenda – the Republicans in the room may not believe polar bears are drowning
Why free audits don’t work – if customers can’t afford the audits, they probably can’t afford other services
Become an expert in your prospect’s industry

Sometimes energy efficiency sales people focus on the wrong savings. Do employers really care about saving $2 per square foot on a utility bill, when they spend $200 per square foot on payroll? Instead of talking energy bills, it might be better to talk employee comfort and productivity, the book says.

“If you do the math, you’ll realize that if an office worker present for ten hours a day is able to work an additional six minutes a day as a result of an improvement you make to his/her workplace, you will have accomplished a 1 percent uptick in productivity,” says the book.

Energy Efficiency is a tough sell, as we all know. It’s invisible. It’s a “high dollar intangible,” Jewell says. “Your customers aren’t really buying metal chillers.”

How do other industries sell intangibles? Consider the vacation industry, the book says. It provides “emotional images about how much better you’re going to feel once you’re on vacation.”

I offer a final piece of advice from Selling Energy. It is from the chapter, ‘The Three R’s of Informed Selling.” Warning, I’m being self-serving here.  The first ‘R’ is Read; in particular, read the trade press!

Details about ordering Selling Energy are available here.

 

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Weekly Recap, October 5, 2014

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Monday: Whether you have experience in leadership or not, transitioning to a new leadership position can be difficult. Read The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, by Michael Watkins for tips on how to make a smooth and successful transition. 


Tuesday: Read this blog for a list of questions that will help you determine what your buyer is actually thinking (adapted from Jeffrey Gitomer’s e-book).


Wednesday: Discover why you don't always need a rebate or incentive to justify a project, and how to combat the myth that rebates are necessary for project approval. 


Thursday: When you’re developing a quiver of elevator pitches, one of the key things to consider is whether or not your pitch is memorable enough to be worth repeating to others. Learn why it's valuable to have a catchy pitch.


Friday: Learn why your elevator pitch should adhere to the “rule of three.” 


Saturday: Read this article from SmallBizTrends.com and learn how to memorize a speech or presentation more quickly and efficiently. 

 

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Speech Memorization

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Have you ever spent hours trying to memorize a speech or presentation? Those of you who are not 100% confident speaking in public may find it comforting to know that you have your entire presentation committed to memory, word-for-word. While it can be intimidating to face an audience without knowing the exact words you plan to say, delivering a well-prepared and effective speech may not require as much rote memorization as you might expect.

An article published on SmallBizTrends.com suggests that it is more efficient to memorize concepts and images – and the relationship between the two – than it is to memorize a speech word-for-word. If you can create images in your mind that trigger the topic or story you plan to discuss, you will be able to remember everything that you plan to say without having to go through the laborious process of committing each sentence to memory.

This method may not work for everyone, but I recommend giving it a try the next time you have a speech or presentation to memorize:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/09/how-to-memorize-a-speech.html

 

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The Rule of Three

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In keeping with yesterday’s blog about creating memorable and repeatable elevator pitches, your pitch should also adhere to the “rule of three.” If you’re not familiar with the “rule of three,” it’s the concept that people are comfortable with things that are grouped in threes. I’m sure you can all think of numerous real-world examples of this concept – “Location, location, location,” “Lights, camera, action,” “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” “Three blind mice,” and so forth.

So what does this mean for your elevator pitch? When you’re coming up with pitches, make sure you don’t list more than three things. When someone asks you what you do for a living, you don’t want to have more than three things. After the third thing, your listener will likely trend toward “stack overflow” and miss the fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.

If you want to get creative, you could choose three words that have a nice ring to them. Your audience would appreciate it, and your pitch would become more easily engrained in their memory.

While I encourage you to explore how you might work this concept into your pitches, don’t feel as if you have to list three things. You can have a great pitch without listing anything at all, as in the example I offered yesterday about the “Building Whisperer.” Just don’t overwhelm your audience with a list that contains more than three elements.

 

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Make It Memorable

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When you’re developing a quiver of elevator pitches, one of the key things to consider is whether or not your pitch is memorable enough to be worth repeating to others. It is one thing to capture your prospect’s attention; however, if they cannot repeat it, you are squandering a wonderful opportunity to make that message go viral.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching the weeklong Efficiency Sales Professional Certificate Boot Camp to a group of four controls companies that had hired us to do a command performance for their teams. When we got to the section on elevator pitches, I had each person take some time to write down an elevator pitch to test out on the class for feedback.

With the exception of one, all of the elevator pitches needed some serious work. The one guy who had an excellent pitch stood up and presented his pitch: “You know that show, ‘The Dog Whisperer’?” He paused to let the audience think and everyone said, “Yes.” He went on… “I am the ‘Building Whisperer.’ I tame unruly buildings and make them more comfortable for their occupants to occupy.”

Of course at this point, the whole audience cracked up. In five words – “I am the Building Whisperer” – he had given much more information to his listener than if he has said, “I am a retro-commissioning specialist. I tune-up buildings and HVAC systems.” His pitch was also instantly memorable and repeatable. It was so impactful, in fact, that for the rest of the week, people said, “Hey Building Whisperer, it’s time for lunch,” or “Hey Building Whisperer, take your seat. Class is about to start.”

So what’s the moral of the story? If you can come up with a memorable and repeatable elevator pitch – particularly one that is creative and funny – people will remember who you are and what you do.  

 

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