Fire Some Customers for more Profitable Revenues

Business media is rife with the importance of acquiring more (and more) customers. And marketing largely develops general messages that broadly appeal to many prospects. The dot com boom popularized the notion of getting eyeballs without accompanying revenues. You combine those and end up with a large number of irrelevant users and unprofitable customers. You need neither of those unless you are an academic, hobbyist or a charity. Instead, choose your customers. Let’s talk about prospecting, weeding your current customer list and nurturing the ones you want to keep.

How to Turbocharge Your Presentation

Most salespeople get pretty good at public speaking. After all, it's a big part of the job… even if you're usually speaking in front of an audience of one. But even the best speakers can usually benefit from a little advice. Here are some tips for improving any speaking opportunity, whether it's a sales presentation, a webinar, or a speech at your next industry event.

1. Stand Up
When you stand as you speak, you are literally speaking from a position of strength. A standing person feels more energetic than a sitting person, and that will come through in your presentation. It's also easier to speak loudly and clearly when you're standing, because sitting puts pressure on your diaphragm. And finally, standing allows you to use your body language to its full extent - pacing, gestures, writing on a whiteboard, etc.

7 Ideas for Smoother Selling

If you talk to enough prospects, eventually you'll make sales - even if your sales skills are minimal. Selling well is basically a way to reduce the number of prospects you need to meet with before you can make the requisite number of sales. Instead of making hundreds of cold calls in a day, you might be able to get by with a few dozen and still make the same number of sales. Here are some ideas to help you improve your sales results.

1. Be Likable
People want to do business with people they like. Of course, not everybody likes the same things. In a selling situation, the trick is to understand your prospect well enough to get along with him. Being likable is the first step towards building a relationship with a prospect. And building relationships with prospects and customers is the key to selling, not once, but many times. 

Why You Should Be Cross-Selling

Closing ratios vary across companies and industries, but for the most part average salespeople close about one deal in four to new prospects, and great salespeople close about one deal in three. That means there are really only two ways to get more sales. You can increase the number of leads you go through, because one in three of 500 prospects is a bigger number than one in three out of 100 prospects. Or you can turn your attention to existing customers and work on your cross-selling and up-selling.

Social Selling: The New Practitioner's Guide

Complex sales involve a number of different people. You will find multiple decision makers, buyers, each having a completely different role and need than the next one. As a sales professional, it is up to you to work within the ranges of expertise and knowledge to present your solution in a compelling manner. This is where social selling helps!

How to Improve Your Closing Ratio

Closing the sale is a crucial and necessary part of any sales process. It's the point where many slam-dunk sales fall through simply because the salesperson fails to close. On the other hand, a sale that's not going well can sometimes be saved by a powerful close. So how can you become a better closer?

Many people don't realize that the close starts at the very beginning of the sales process. That's because the better the rest of the process goes, the easier the close will be. A prospect who's already convinced that your product is exactly what he needs can be closed by a simple “Sign here and we'll get this delivered to you by Tuesday.” So if you improve the rest of your sales skills, you can get by with weaker closing skills.

Powerful Qualifying Questions

The sooner you can narrow down your lead list into a prospect list, the better. Turning a lead into a prospect means determining whether they have a need for your product and are able to buy it. Once you've sorted out your leads and identified the true prospects, you can start moving down the sales process and head for the close.

If you don't fully qualify your leads early on, you'll be wasting a lot of time with people who will never buy from you. But on the other hand, if you ask too many private questions right away, they'll be reluctant to answer. So qualifying is a balancing act between leaving enough time to build rapport without waiting so long that you've wasted everyone's time. Many salespeople resolve this problem by asking a few very basic qualifying questions during the cold call – to weed out the obviously unqualified folks – and then finishing the qualification process during a second call or at the beginning of the sales presentation.

Writing a Powerful Sales Proposal

Receiving a RFP (request for proposal) is both an exciting and a frightening moment. It's exciting because it means you've got a chance to win this sale. But it's frightening because you'll be competing with other bidders, some of whom are probably larger companies with plenty of resources. The solution is to create such a powerful proposal that you'll stand out from the rest of the pack. A strong proposal can get you the sale even if you're against competitors who offer a better deal.

Before You Make Your First Sale

Starting a new career is pretty unsettling. As a salesperson your job is to convince people to buy your company's product or service. That can be daunting, but rest assured you can succeed... and when you do make your first sale it's an incredibly good feeling! Just follow these steps to get started selling as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Get to Know Your Co-Workers

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Build Sales for Entrepreneurs

Some entrepreneurs and small business owners (and their salespeople) are talking about the stock market. Others are strategizing on and successfully growing revenues. Which camp do you fall into?

Here are ten sure-fire ways to grow revenues in your business. You don’t need to do them all to be successful, but you DO need to do a number of them. If your business is at a plateau and needs a jump start, put these sales strategies into place and then roll up your sleeves and work to make them happen.

1. Have a very clear brand promise / value proposition – how do you add value to your customers, and why should they work with you?  Can other people articulate this? DO others talk you up? 

Seven steps for successful rollouts of sales technology

My inspiration for this post: This week’s Sales 2.0 conference, my presentation this week at the Marketo Summit on the Automated Sales Organization, and just an overall affection for the incredible transformation technology is driving in sales.   There are amazing things happening right now in the Sales 2.0 space — Sales leaders are accepting technology as part of their keys to success and looking to spend more.  Step one in the tranformation is complete:  Agree that technology can help. Step Two is implementation and roll-out.  As we have learned from CRM, the hard part is getting sales people to use new tools aka adoption.   Sales people are inherently efficient people.  They develop patterns and habits over time that they rely on.  When you introduce something that takes them out of the pattern, they will push back.sales 2.0, sales , crm    There is a process for successfully rolling out Sales 2.0/Sales technology.  I have chronicled here in this post.  

New Sales Compensation Plans

Over time, even the best sales compensation plan will go stale. It might not represent the industry as it now stands, or product changes within the company might have made it obsolete. But even salespeople who really need a new compensation plan will resist the idea. After all, change is frightening, and when the change will affect your livelihood in a big way it's even more frightening. So when you begin working on your new plan, you'll need to keep that attitude in mind and prepare for it.

How to Think About Pricing and Value

Price and Value

If you sell something with a price of X, your customer won’t buy it if they perceive what you sell to be worth X. They have to believe it is worth more to them than X. It must be worth X+. (That + is the value)

Here is a simple example. If you buy a book on Amazon.com for $9.99, you do so believing that the ideas contained in that book are worth more than the $9.99 you spend and the 6 hours it takes to read the book (That’s why books, when read and applied, are the greatest value on earth. I’ve read books that have been worth literally millions of dollars to me). 

Cold Call, revisited: Best practices for getting in the door

Cold call versus not cold calling ….blah, blah, blah

The purpose of this post is to talk about the art and science of reaching out to someone who doesn’t know you. Call it what you want.

First, let me start with a couple important notes:

• Inbound marketing works.  It does.  It creates great, cost effective leads.  Who doesn’t want someone to walk into their store?  I did not write this to say “you shouldn’t commit to inbound marketing”.  Stay tuned, there are more considerations on the topic but I will recommend inbound marketing til the cows come home.
• I don’t believe quota-carrying sales reps should spend their time reaching out to people they don’t know.  Organizations should invest in either an internal inside sales function in charge of reaching out to and qualifying leads for the direct reps or hire an appointment setting organization or an out-sourced tele-organization to do it instead.  It just takes too long.  Should sales reps prospect? Yes…but if you have sales reps filling their own pipeline all day you are taking away valuable selling time.

7 Negotiation Don'ts

Negotiating is a big part of sales. Every prospect you meet wants the best deal possible, and some of them are very good at negotiating favorable terms for themselves. Before you head into your next negotiation, familiarize yourself with these negotiation don'ts and you'll have a much easier time of it.

1. Don't Negotiate with Non-Decision Makers
In a complex sale you'll end up talking to several different people, but not all of them are going to be in on the final decision to buy. So if someone starts negotiating terms and details with you, discreetly confirm that this person is an actual decision maker. For example, if you are demonstrating your product to an end user and he starts asking you for specific features, make a note of his requests but don't try to negotiate on it. When you sit down with the final decision maker you will likely find that his needs and wants are quite different. 

How to Make the Most of a Sales Rejection

Rejection has probably destroyed the careers of more salespeople than any other single thing. No one likes rejection and only a very few get to a point where they are not affected by it. But in sales you will need to learn out how to constructively handle rejection.

These are a few techniques I use to get through it:

1. Be rational about your rejection.
Stay rational, not emotional when you hear "no." Convince yourself that it doesn't mean you or your offer are being rejected, but that the customer merely needs more information. No doesn't mean you are deficient or personally being rejected. There is zero value in getting emotional about a client's rejection. Instead, find out what the no means. 

Emotional Selling

The vast majority of prospects buy based on emotion, not logic. They decide to buy because it “feels right,” then use logic to justify the decision to themselves. So the better you are at making an emotional connection between the prospect and whatever you're selling, the easier you'll find it to close sales.

Your job as a salesperson is to help prospects see the benefits that they'll gain from owning your product. Benefits all have an emotional hook; that's what makes them different from features and that's why they are effective in a sales situation. You can and should start this process right from the first moment of contact. This will usually happen during a cold call to the prospect.

Closing Cold Calls

Every salesperson knows that you have to close a sale yourself rather than hope the prospect does it for you. But what you may not realize is that it's just as important to close your cold calls. In that case, you're closing for an appointment rather than a sale, but the same principles apply.

Don't make the mistake of trying to close the whole sale during your cold call. It won't work. There is no way to fully qualify a prospect, collect information about his needs, and come up with a solution in a single brief phone call. The only exception to this rule happens when you call a prospect who has already decided to buy but hasn't taken action yet. In that case, he may invite you to extend the cold call out so that you can go through the whole sales cycle in one call. However, this situation is rare and comes under the category of a windfall sale.

How To Be Super Confident About Selling

Sales managers often tell their salespeople that the best time to make a sale is right after they’ve just made one. While I can’t prove a statistical correlation between closing one sale and then, quickly thereafter, closing another, I can tell you that it makes sense to me. There is no doubt that after making a sale, salespeople typically experience a significant increase in their level of confidence. And it would be logical to believe that amplified self-confidence would make it easier to sell.

Of course, the opposite holds true as well. A salesperson in a slump finds it harder to sell than ever! So, if confidence has that much impact on sales success, how can a salesperson increase his or her sales confidence?

 Here are six things you can use to increase your sales confidence (or the sales confidence of someone you manage): 

6 Common Lies Prospects Tell

It's actually pretty common for prospects to lie to salespeople. Many otherwise upright citizens justify this practice by telling themselves that salespeople are all liars, so it's OK to tell a few lies in return. Here are a few lies that you'll hear quite often from prospects, and how you can respond in a productive way.

1. “I can't afford it”
Sometimes a prospect really won't have enough of a budget to buy from you, but the majority of the time this prospect simply doesn't think it's worth the money. He's already allocated his spending to something else that he thinks is more critical. In a few cases, prospects will declare that they can't afford it as soon as you give them a price, strictly as a bargaining tactic to see if you will offer a discount. The cure is to find out his pain points and then show how your product with relieve them while standing firm on price – and in most cases he'll suddenly find the cash he needs.