Sales Basics: Top 5 Tips for New Sellers
I was recently asked, "If you were mentoring a new salesperson, what would be your top five sales tips, and how did you learn those?"Good question! It really got me thinking. There are so many things I'd like to tell a new seller. But what are the most important? What things could I recommend that would have the highest impact on success?
1. Focus on Making a Difference
Nobody cares about your product, service, or solution. That's the hardest thing for sellers to realize. All prospects care about is the difference you can make for their organization.
For example, today I sell sales training. If I called a vice president of sales and mention that, he'd tell me they're not interested. However, once I changed my focus to the tangible outcomes his organization would get from using my sales training, the door opens wide. After all, they would be extremely interested in shortening their sales cycle, reducing the ramp up time for new hire sales reps, and driving revenue growth.
This was one of the hardest things for me to learn. When I first started selling, I was so eager to be successful. I tried to wow my prospects with my great product knowledge. I closed often and early. But the more I tried to rush things, the more resistant to moving forward my prospects became. They'd throw out obstacles and objections that I couldn't overcome. When I learned to slow down, parcel information out over multiple meetings, and simply advance the sales process one step at a time, suddenly my sales increased.
When you're scared about not getting the business, your prospects can intuitively sense your fear. One of the major symptoms is rushing the sales process.
3. Pay the Price of Admission. Do Pre-call Research!
To get into big companies, you can't make a 100 cold calls saying the same thing to everyone. Several years ago corporate decision makers stopped answering their phones and rolled all calls to voicemail. They delete most messages within seconds because they sound like salespeople making their pitch.
I discovered that the only way to capture the attention of these corporate decision makers was to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research in their firm. Once I started doing this, I started setting up meetings.
4. Create an Account Entry Campaign
It takes seven to ten contacts to crack into a corporate account these days. Most sellers give up after three to five attempts. If you want to set up a meeting with a corporate decision maker, plan multiple touches from the onset. It takes a while to break through their busy-ness and register on their Richter scale, but it can be done.
You can use multiple formats in your campaign, too: voicemail, email, direct mail, invitations to teleseminars, and more.
5. Analyze Your Sales Approach from Your Customer's Shoes
It's not important what you say. The only thing that matters is what your customers hear. For example, when I was trying to reach a decision maker a while back, I decided to leave the message on my own voicemail first to see how I sounded. When I listened to my message, I was appalled. I sounded pathetic! So I worked on scripting my message and kept calling myself over and over until I finally created something I would respond to if I were the prospect.
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your sales goals can be your worst enemy
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Goals can be a major impediment to your success? Take cold-calling, for instance. Most sales pros see cold calling as a goal-oriented activity — fill the pipeline with “X” number of prospects, in the hopes of creating as many customers as possible. But it makes you see each conversion that results in a prospect as a “win” and each cold call that ends in some other way as a “loss” - even if the person you called had absolutely no use whatsoever for your product! And that’s setting yourself up for failure, because the nature of cold calling is that only a small percentage of the people you contact will be potential customers. The majority will be people who simply aren’t interested or are not a fit for a variety of reasons.
- The root cause of this deeply flawed “win/loss” thinking is focusing on the goal rather than the process. If you’re focused on the result, you are visualizing the future (i.e. “will I make my goal???”) rather than experiencing the present moment. As a result, there’s no way that you can really listen to the prospect, because your attention is on a possible event in a future-yet-to-be. Because your focus is elsewhere (on your goal, that is) you’ll find it difficult to be creative and flexible in responding to what the potential prospect actually says.
- Here’s how you fix this. Define cold-calling as a process rather than goal-oriented activity. Stop focusing on the result and start focusing on the potential prospect and the process of communicating with that prospect to determine if in fact, there’s truly a fit. Changing your way of thinking is that you’ll immediately become more effective because it removes the “sting” of contacting a lead that turns out, for whatever reason, not to be a real prospect. Rather than a “loss,” the event simply becomes something that you happened to discover during the process of cold-calling. More importantly, treating cold-calling as a process keeps you focused on finding ways to help potential prospects and customers - and on not wasting the time of those who don’t need the help.
- Your true goal shouldn’t be to make your sales goal, but to emulate an olympic athlete. Top athletes visualize “winning” (the goal) before competing, but when they’re actually performing they focus on what’s happening right then and there. Focusing on process rather than your goals increases the chances that fulfill your goals. In other words, know your goals, then forget them, and put your mind into the process. If you do this right, your goals will take care of themselves, because your process will make them happen without you wasting time obsessing on them.
5 WAYS TO BREAK SALES RECORDS
Want to break the sales record for your organization… or even for your entire industry? If so, here’s the EXACT recipe:
Want to break the sales record for your organization… or even for your entire industry? If so, here’s the EXACT recipe:
- Step #1: Prepare to change. If you’re thinking of breaking sales records, it’s probably because you’re already pretty good at what you do. However, it is impossible to break sales records simply by doing tomorrow what you’re doing today. You’re going to need to do something different if you’re going to “amp it up” to the next level and beyond.
- Step #2: Research “best practices.” Breaking sale records means excelling at every sales skill. Go through your organization and find people who are the best at each skill. Learn how they think and how they execute that skill. Then incorporate that “best practice” into your own tool kit by writing down what you’ve learned, studying it, and practicing it… every day.
- Step #3: Measure your behavior. No matter how committed you are, you WILL relapse into your old behaviors, unless your new skills are reinforced. Figure out a way to measure each of your new skills and behaviors, so that you know exactly how you’re doing. If your enthusiasm starts flagging, come up with a reward process that will reinforce the right behavior.
- Step #4: Keep evolving. As you measure, examine what’s working, and what’s not. Continually find areas where you can improve your skills. Look for additional role models; keep reading up on sales technique. Experiment. Find ways to use “down time” to improve your selling skills. Treat yourself like a top athelete — and then be your own coach.
- Step #5: Don’t stop. Top athletes come in two varieties: the one-hit-wonders who have a great season and then rest on their laurels, and the all-time champion teams that break record after record after record. The champions know that if they set the bar higher, and continue with basic training, reinforcement, measurement and correction, they’ll be continue to achieve at their highest level.
Not Everyone Needs to Be a Thought Leader
"They told me I had to become a thought leader or I'd never achieve great success as a professional." This is what a leader at a professional services firm told me recently that a marketing consultant told him.
He didn't say this to me matter-of-factly either. He said it with a mix of fear, skepticism, sadness, and hope.
- Fear. Because he can't write and doesn't have much "new" to say, and neither do the rest of the folks on his leadership team.
- Skepticism. Because he didn't think it was true that thought leadership was now a requirement, but he was starting to hear it so much he thought maybe the tide had turned and it now was.
- Sadness. Because he liked his job selling, delivering, and managing and didn't want to become, as he put it, a "professor type."
- Hope. Because he was hoping I'd say what he wanted me to say: that it was not true.
He was…right! It's not true. Ludwig Feuerbach* noted, "A being without suffering is a being without being." Given the drumbeat of advice to professionals to become thought leaders, you might be convinced that a firm without thought leadership is a firm not worth a damn.
Some industry watchers and consultants these days are downright dogmatic in their belief that, to achieve all you can achieve as a professional, you have to become a thought leader. And to differentiate your firm, you have to become a thought leader. Same for generating leads, raising prices, and competing for the best clients.
False. Not true. El wrongo.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of thought leadership, partly because as a member of the faculty at Babson College I am a "professor type," but mostly because of what good thought leadership can do for a firm.
Thought leadership helps with:
- Lead generation
- Fee maximization
- Branding
- Winning deals
- Drawing the best candidates to work at your firm
- Repeat business
- Confidence of the thought leader
And the list doesn't stop there. No question, thought leadership is helpful, but is it necessary?
Let's say you need heart surgery. All you know about your two potential surgeons is that one pioneered and is most widely published regarding the surgery you need, and the other is in the prime of his career and has performed the surgery 1,500 times but has never published.
Let's say you need much greater efficiency in your supply chain. One consultant wrote the book on it, and while the other hasn't written a lick about it, she and her firm have a long track record of success getting done what you need to get done.
Let's say you just got word that another company stole your patent. Which lawyer do you hire: the one who writes most often about winning the type of case you want to win or the one who has won the most?
It's likely most buyers would prefer the latter in each. Perhaps you might have said to at least one of them, "Well, I don't know!" In either scenario, you prove the point: thought leadership isn't necessary. As some of you might have hoped, you may not have to devote time, energy, and money into becoming the leading thinker in your space!
But you probably do have to spend time, energy, and money on something else if you want to outfox the thought leaders and benefits that thought leadership brings to them. Here are a few thoughts that can get you started on how you might do it for your firm.
1. Most buyers aren't persuaded by thought leadership per se, they're persuaded by authority. The concept of thought leadership implies originality in thinking. Not only does good thought leadership not have to be original, you really don't have to add anything at all to your field to establish yourself as an authority. What you have to establish is expertise in the subject and proof of your ability to perform successfully in the subject area. You can do this through publishing case studies. You can speak at conferences and events with your clients at your side about the work you've done and the value it delivered. You can become a leader in a professional association and be seen as a fixture in the industry. All these things create authority, and you don't necessarily have to have one original thought in your head to do them!
2. Buyers buy helpfulness. Perhaps you're an innovation consultant, or compensation consultant, or a lawyer. In your marketing process you can demonstrate your helpfulness through a host of methods such as case studies, client testimonial videos, clear and logical service descriptions and packages, email newsletters that highlight (but don't introduce) new thinking in the industry, professional development seminars, and so on. In your selling process you can demonstrate your helpfulness by listening, uncovering needs, crafting a strong solution, and delivering value even before they start working with you. You can do all of this without a book, white paper, or article to your credit.
3. People buy consistency and quality. I don't know about you, but many times I've simply wished a service provider did what they said they were going to do, and did it to a high standard. We don't always need new thinking, but we need to trust that people can deliver when they say they can so we don't have to worry about it or do it all over when it comes out poorly.
4. People buy who they like best. In Mastering Rainmaking Conversations, we tell a story about how a CFO friend of ours chose one of the Big 5 (at the time) accounting firms to take a company public. The long and short of it is that while he publicly justified it with an analytical argument, he told me privately that he hired the firm whose staff he liked best.
Another key argument in the you-must-be-thought-leadery-
For example, imagine you're all of the good things (consistent, likeable, helpful, etc.) noted above. Develop a reputation for these and you set yourself apart right there. You can also develop a compelling service package that will seduce people with your value and stand out from the crowd. As we wrote in Professional Services Marketing, Bain uses the Profit Hunt service well in this regard. We use the Revenue Growth Benchmark Assessment. There's no reason you can't offer your own.
Yes, thought leadership can help you stand out, but you don't need thought leadership to stand out. You can convey, without being a thought leader, what sets you apart from others as well as how hard it would be to substitute your firm with another provider. I'm not saying it's easy to convey these things, but then again, anything that's worthwhile to pursue isn't likely to be easy.
The truth of the matter is that not everyone can or should be a thought leader, and that does not make them second-class professionals. As helpful as thought leadership might be in the right situations, you can achieve fabulous success without it.
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34 MISTAKES SALES MANAGERS MAKE
Change the compensation plan after hiring a rep to drastically to reduce the compensation that’s actually paid.
Change the demographic of prospects every two weeks, discarding any progress made towards closing an actual sale.
Create product lines that aren’t reasonably debugged or field worthy, thereby murdering the sales rep’s reputation.
Demand sales increases and then fail to compete on bids after the rep got your product specified.
Fail to provide competitive analysis, leaving the rep to figure out how to fight off attacks from the other guys.
Have a sales rep build up business in an area then declare them ‘house accounts’ that don’t pay a commission.
Hire more sales reps for a region than revenue from that region can support, so they’ll all compete for the same business.
Ignore a potential consistent customer-base in favor of higher-ticket, more difficult to close prospects.
Insist that all contact info belongs to the company and demand all copies when the sales rep leaves the company.
Keep dumping more and more responsibilities on the same size sales force, with no additional support.
Know that a product is on back-order indefinitely but still encouraging sales reps to sell it.
Let a new rep bootstrap their income by cherry picking accounts belonging to another rep.
Limit the sales reps’ access within your own firm to minor players so that they don’t “get in the hair” of top management.
Make sure that the most popular products are unavailable to the reps, especially if demonstrating is key to closing a sale.
Make the compensation plan incomprehensible and then make the rep fight for every dime.
Offer a better price to customers on the web site than the sales team can offer directly to the customers.
Openly praise reps who set an unachievable high target while degrading the ones who set practical ones.
Overload your sales staff with administrative reporting and trackers that take up time that could be spent selling.
Permit discounts in order to close business but then demand customers pay full price.
Promise the reps good commissions but hold off paying them until the end of the quarter or the end of the fiscal year.
Promise to support a new product and then produce zero case histories, sales tools or good training.
Raise the quota every month at least 10% so that nobody ever achieves a commission check.
Refuse to give reps laptops or smartphones so they can compete with the other sales teams in their markets.
Refuse to go on field sales calls to a “difficult” customer in order to show the rep how to handle that customer.
Save all the best leads for the top rep and send the questionable ones to the other reps, just in case they might get lucky.
Say something like: “you can’t tell ME anything I don’t already know. I’ve been doing this for 24 years.”
Schedule joint calls and cancel because you found something more important to do.
Set a sales target to sales rap but fail to devise or communicate a sales strategy to achieve that target.
Set ambitious targets intended to impress top management when you know that the reps cannot really achieve them.
Shout, throw fits of temper, and act like a big baby rather than listening and coaching reps on how to perform better.
Spend big money on a sales and marketing campaign that has no tie-in to the products that the reps must actually sell.
Update the website without telling the sales team, so customers can tell them what’s new in your product set.
Use words like “you’ve been overpaid” when making changes to the compensation plan.
Wait until a rep is about to bring in a large account and then cap commissions.
LEAD QUALIFICATION QUESTIONS
• How serious they are about solving the problem.
• Whether they’ve got viable alternatives to buying.
• Whether they see the problem as a spending priority.
• Whether your competitor is already in the account.
• Who (what group) might gain power if they don’t buy.
• Who (what group) might lose power if they don’t buy.
• The REAL time-frame for solving the problem.
• Whether or not they’ve thought the problem through.
• Whether or not they’ve thought the solution through.
• Whether the deal might be a dead-end with no purchase.
TOP 1O REASONS WHY NEW SALES REPS FAIL
Last week’s huge post “Is a Sales Career Right for You?” went through the characteristics that top sales professionals share. However, the lack of those characteristics aren’t the only reason that sales pros fail. Here are the top ten reasons that people (mostly new-hires) fail to build a successful career in Sales. Some of them are similar to the ones described in the original post, but some are new:
• REASON #1: They base their self-worth on what other people think. If you define your sense of worth based on how you assume your boss, co-workers, and customers see you, you’ll be deeply hurt by anything that smacks of criticism. Selling, and working inside a sales organization, begins to look like a series of horrible and (finally) intolerable rejections.
• REASON #2: They assume that past failure defines the future. Some people find failure so unpleasant that they try to avoid it at all costs. As a result, they avoid any situations where failure is a risk. Because any meaningful sales effort entails risk, such people seldom, if ever, accomplish anything significant in a sales organization.
• REASON #3. They believe in destiny, luck and fate. Some people believe that their status in life and potential as a human being is determined by luck, fate or divine intervention operating upon the circumstances of their lives…
These beliefs, however, constantly keep you focused on what you can’t change (e.g. fate) and not on what you can (e.g. your skill set.)
• REASON #4: They lack the right attitude. The right attitude for a sales pro consists three qualities: 1) Empathy, so that you can understand customer needs. 2) Confidence, so that your can bring customers to the point of buying, and 3) Resilience, so that you can use rejection and temporary setbacks as spurs that constantly move you forward.
• REASON #5: They don’t perceive the subtleties. When mediocre sales pros make sales calls, they are so busy “trying to sell” that they miss the nuances of the customer relationship. Top sales pros know that the most important element of a successful sales call is the value that the sales professional can bring to the customer, rather than whatever might eventually be sold.
• REASON #6: They’d rather be doing something else. Failing sales pros often wish they had the nerve get out of sales and do something completely different. If a sales pro’s ideal occupation is to play baseball, be a musician, write a novel, or do anything else that not in Sales — they’ll eventually sabotage their sales career.
• REASON #7: They don’t learn from their mistakes. Sales pros tend to avoid looking at their failures and would prefer to examine their successes - and then attempt to replicate them. However, until and unless you understand how, why and where your sales process is failing, it’s impossible to correct systemic problems in your sales approach.
• REASON #8: They can’t follow simple instructions. Sales skills must be learned. Some people are naturally resistant to learning new ideas and new techniques, especially if they’ve already achieved a certain level of success. Many a sales pro has “topped off” at the lowest level because of a failure to understand that news skills are needed at each stage of a sales career.
• REASON #9: They lack true honesty and candor. Sales is all about relationships and relationships are all about trust. People who lie and fudge the truth may become good at fraud or other criminal acts, but they’re at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to being successful at an honest sales job. Most customers can “sense” when a sales rep isn’t being real… and avoid buying.
• REASON #10: They can, but won’t, do the work. This is true not just of selling, but of every other activity in the world. Sales pros who don’t makes their numbers either can’t or won’t do what it takes to make sale. When you can’t do the job, it’s usually because you don’t know what to do. When you won’t to the job, it’s because you simply lack the drive.
34 MISTAKES SALES MANAGERS MAKE
Change the compensation plan after hiring a rep to drastically to reduce the compensation that’s actually paid.
Change the demographic of prospects every two weeks, discarding any progress made towards closing an actual sale.
Create product lines that aren’t reasonably debugged or field worthy, thereby murdering the sales rep’s reputation.
Demand sales increases and then fail to compete on bids after the rep got your product specified.
Fail to provide competitive analysis, leaving the rep to figure out how to fight off attacks from the other guys.
Have a sales rep build up business in an area then declare them ‘house accounts’ that don’t pay a commission.
Hire more sales reps for a region than revenue from that region can support, so they’ll all compete for the same business.
Ignore a potential consistent customer-base in favor of higher-ticket, more difficult to close prospects.
Insist that all contact info belongs to the company and demand all copies when the sales rep leaves the company.
Keep dumping more and more responsibilities on the same size sales force, with no additional support.
Know that a product is on back-order indefinitely but still encouraging sales reps to sell it.
Let a new rep bootstrap their income by cherry picking accounts belonging to another rep.
Limit the sales reps’ access within your own firm to minor players so that they don’t “get in the hair” of top management.
Make sure that the most popular products are unavailable to the reps, especially if demonstrating is key to closing a sale.
Make the compensation plan incomprehensible and then make the rep fight for every dime.
Offer a better price to customers on the web site than the sales team can offer directly to the customers.
Openly praise reps who set an unachievable high target while degrading the ones who set practical ones.
Overload your sales staff with administrative reporting and trackers that take up time that could be spent selling.
Permit discounts in order to close business but then demand customers pay full price.
Promise the reps good commissions but hold off paying them until the end of the quarter or the end of the fiscal year.
Promise to support a new product and then produce zero case histories, sales tools or good training.
Raise the quota every month at least 10% so that nobody ever achieves a commission check.
Refuse to give reps laptops or smartphones so they can compete with the other sales teams in their markets.
Refuse to go on field sales calls to a “difficult” customer in order to show the rep how to handle that customer.
Save all the best leads for the top rep and send the questionable ones to the other reps, just in case they might get lucky.
Say something like: “you can’t tell ME anything I don’t already know. I’ve been doing this for 24 years.”
Schedule joint calls and cancel because you found something more important to do.
Set a sales target to sales rap but fail to devise or communicate a sales strategy to achieve that target.
Set ambitious targets intended to impress top management when you know that the reps cannot really achieve them.
Shout, throw fits of temper, and act like a big baby rather than listening and coaching reps on how to perform better.
Spend big money on a sales and marketing campaign that has no tie-in to the products that the reps must actually sell.
Update the website without telling the sales team, so customers can tell them what’s new in your product set.
Use words like “you’ve been overpaid” when making changes to the compensation plan.
Wait until a rep is about to bring in a large account and then cap commissions.
LEAD QUALIFICATION QUESTIONS
• How serious they are about solving the problem.
• Whether they’ve got viable alternatives to buying.
• Whether they see the problem as a spending priority.
• Whether your competitor is already in the account.
• Who (what group) might gain power if they don’t buy.
• Who (what group) might lose power if they don’t buy.
• The REAL time-frame for solving the problem.
• Whether or not they’ve thought the problem through.
• Whether or not they’ve thought the solution through.
• Whether the deal might be a dead-end with no purchase.
TOP 1O REASONS WHY NEW SALES REPS FAIL
Last week’s huge post “Is a Sales Career Right for You?” went through the characteristics that top sales professionals share. However, the lack of those characteristics aren’t the only reason that sales pros fail. Here are the top ten reasons that people (mostly new-hires) fail to build a successful career in Sales. Some of them are similar to the ones described in the original post, but some are new:
• REASON #1: They base their self-worth on what other people think. If you define your sense of worth based on how you assume your boss, co-workers, and customers see you, you’ll be deeply hurt by anything that smacks of criticism. Selling, and working inside a sales organization, begins to look like a series of horrible and (finally) intolerable rejections.
• REASON #2: They assume that past failure defines the future. Some people find failure so unpleasant that they try to avoid it at all costs. As a result, they avoid any situations where failure is a risk. Because any meaningful sales effort entails risk, such people seldom, if ever, accomplish anything significant in a sales organization.
• REASON #3. They believe in destiny, luck and fate. Some people believe that their status in life and potential as a human being is determined by luck, fate or divine intervention operating upon the circumstances of their lives…
These beliefs, however, constantly keep you focused on what you can’t change (e.g. fate) and not on what you can (e.g. your skill set.)
• REASON #4: They lack the right attitude. The right attitude for a sales pro consists three qualities: 1) Empathy, so that you can understand customer needs. 2) Confidence, so that your can bring customers to the point of buying, and 3) Resilience, so that you can use rejection and temporary setbacks as spurs that constantly move you forward.
• REASON #5: They don’t perceive the subtleties. When mediocre sales pros make sales calls, they are so busy “trying to sell” that they miss the nuances of the customer relationship. Top sales pros know that the most important element of a successful sales call is the value that the sales professional can bring to the customer, rather than whatever might eventually be sold.
• REASON #6: They’d rather be doing something else. Failing sales pros often wish they had the nerve get out of sales and do something completely different. If a sales pro’s ideal occupation is to play baseball, be a musician, write a novel, or do anything else that not in Sales — they’ll eventually sabotage their sales career.
• REASON #7: They don’t learn from their mistakes. Sales pros tend to avoid looking at their failures and would prefer to examine their successes - and then attempt to replicate them. However, until and unless you understand how, why and where your sales process is failing, it’s impossible to correct systemic problems in your sales approach.
• REASON #8: They can’t follow simple instructions. Sales skills must be learned. Some people are naturally resistant to learning new ideas and new techniques, especially if they’ve already achieved a certain level of success. Many a sales pro has “topped off” at the lowest level because of a failure to understand that news skills are needed at each stage of a sales career.
• REASON #9: They lack true honesty and candor. Sales is all about relationships and relationships are all about trust. People who lie and fudge the truth may become good at fraud or other criminal acts, but they’re at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to being successful at an honest sales job. Most customers can “sense” when a sales rep isn’t being real… and avoid buying.
• REASON #10: They can, but won’t, do the work. This is true not just of selling, but of every other activity in the world. Sales pros who don’t makes their numbers either can’t or won’t do what it takes to make sale. When you can’t do the job, it’s usually because you don’t know what to do. When you won’t to the job, it’s because you simply lack the drive.
9 Strategies for Selling Smarter
Having more prospects in the pipeline does not necessarily mean more sales because you cant hunt so many clients at once. You need to do the following as well : to sell to the RIGHT customers and in REDUCED sales cycle
· #1. Increase the percentage of time you spend selling
o Get someone to do paperwork and data entry
o Yse smart phone apps
o Optimize travel time
o Use web conferencing
· #2. Think about your solution as a verb
o If you sell glue, don’t say you sell glue (a noun). Instead use verb preceded by an adjective.. say you are selling “efficient gluing under high operating speeds”. This leads you to think of solving problems of customers.
· #3. Consider yourself the customer’s ally. Do not see a customer in terms of “convincing”, “overcoming”, “winning”. Visualize how your company can help the customer achieve specific business goals and be free to offer advice even if it is not specific to your offering. The customer will notice, develop more trust and confidence.
· #4. Disqualify more prospects. Every prospect does not need your product. If it turns out that the customer really doesn’t need what you got, leave and consider the sales call a major victory, because you’ve helped that customer avoid an unnecessary expense. As a bonus, you’ll build a reputation for having your customers’ best interests at heart.
· #5. Ask more questions during conversations. Rather than talking to the customer about what your product can do, use questions to lead the customer to the natural conclusion that the customer needs your solution. Ask intelligent questions that the prospect is capable of answering, so that the two of you can discover whether the customer really needs you to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Use questions to help the customer visualize how things would be better if the customer had the solution in hand.
· #6: Increase the average quality of your leads. If your leads come from marketing, communicate clearly, based upon your own experience in the field, who’s interested and who’s buying. Provide specific details, including job title, industry, typical organizational structure, etc. Bring some sample customers in to meet the marketing group so they understand the target better. Don’t have a marketing group? Do the same thing, but apply the knowledge to your own lead generation efforts. A small amount of effort in this area can yield disproportionately large results, because a positive change ripples through the entire sales process.
· #7: Increase your conversion rate. Make sure that you’re talking to the REAL decision-makers, and not just the influencers and sideliners. When you meet a decision-maker, stay in regular communication throughout the sales cycle. Don’t let long periods of time go buy where you don’t know what’s going on, or what’s changing inside the account. And don’t the competition. Find out who the other guys are calling on, and how they’re approaching the account. Then figure out how to outflank them. Build a short sales plan that documents the process and the players, so that you don’t spin your wheels trying to remember who needs to do what and when.
· #8: Increase your average dollar value. While it may take more effort to cut a $1 million deal, it’s less than ten times as much effort as cutting ten $100,000 deals. The more money that you can make on any one sales opportunity, the more money you’ll make overall. To keep the numbers high, always remain aware of new opportunities in an account. Use discounts sparingly or not at all, except when they’re bundled into a larger deal. Find more ways to help the customer, today and in the future. The more you can be of service, the more the customer will buy from you.
· #9: Decrease the effort required to close. Find out the customer’s “compelling event” which will actually trigger the buying process and time your selling effort to match. For example, a prospect might have budget in the current quarter, making the “compelling event” the end of the quarter. Similarly, a prospect might be waiting for an order from its own customer before making a new purchase. Schedule your activities backwards from the event and you’ll spend the least amount of time developing the opportunity.
