How to Make It Easier to Win Back a Lost Client

One of the things that makes it difficult to win back a client you lost through no fault of your own is that it can be embarrassing to bring you back.

No Fault of Your Own

• Sometimes your clients buy the lie that they can get better performance at a lower price.
• Sometimes your clients believe that they need to shake things up and try something new.
• And sometimes your client is mad at you when they’re really the source of their own challenges. It’s easier to blame your vendor for poor performance than it is to deal with the real problem.

Regardless of which of the above reasons was used to justify firing you, bringing you back means that your client was wrong for releasing you. And most people don’t like to admit that they were wrong, especially when it’s visible to a lot of other people.
 

Allowing a Face Saving Line of Retreat

Value Proposition Examples - Words That Get Meetings

Jay is the owner of a massage therapy company. He's trying to figure out how to sell his services to the corporate market.

Like many of you, he doesn't have a strong business case to capture a company's attention. That's why he recently asked me:

"I'm have trouble figuring out my value position for selling to bigger companies. When a company's challenges are rising cost from suppliers or trying to go "green," it just doesn't cut it to tell them, "Hey I can reduce your stress during those stressful times." Any advice you can give is appreciated."

Here is my response:

Want bigger and better sales? Try slowing down your sales process

You know that prospects and customers are crazy-busy nowadays, and that the pace of business is faster than ever. That being the case, slowing down the sales process might seem like giving an edge to the competition.

But there are good reasons to do so. In fact, while it’s counterintuitive, slowing down can actually result in more and better sales. Here are five reasons why:

1. You learn more about the customer’s real needs
The mistake too many salespeople make is trotting out their solution too soon – often in the first conversation with a prospect.

4 Backwards Sales Principles

Some aspects of sales are natural and, while they may not be easy to master, they at least make sense from the start. The concept of closing a sale is a perfect example. If you don't require your prospect to make a decision on the spot, they likely won't – makes sense, right? But other concepts are not so easy to wrap your head around. Here are four of the most important ones along with some of the reasons why they work the way they do.

#1 Selling Kills Sales

10 Ways to Validate a Sales Forecast

Even without data, there are other ways to test your projections.
You have an interesting new business and you’re working your plan, thinking about seeking investors when you come to the sales forecast. How do you validate a sales forecast when you’re talking about something new? Of course there’s no data. So now what?

Closing the Sale - A Realistic Perspective

There is not a salesperson in existence who hasn't repeatedly heard of the need to "close the sale." Every new sales manager must view the process of encouraging his/her sales force to "close the sale" as an initiation into the profession. If you're going to be a sales manager, you, therefore, must improve everyone's ability to "close." Doesn't it come with the job?

The sales training literature is awash with advice. Some of it tedious and trivial: "If he says this, you say that." Other advice is grandiose: "35 new sure-fire closing techniques." Still other is harmful. "Overcome that objection," as if selling in the B2B world was a contest between you and the customer, with one of you winning (overcoming) and the other losing (being overcome). That's an attitude that won't get you far.

All of this advice shares one common element. It's incredibly overdone. There is no one aspect of sales (at least in the B2B world) that undeservedly receives more disproportionate time and talk than the subject of "closing the sale."

5 Tips for Successful Video Sales Calls

After the advent of voicemail, fax, and email, our sales teams lost quite a bit of opportunity. The in-person sales call started to become more and more rare, with executives and decision-makers being increasingly unwilling to take valuable time to listen to a pitch.

Unfortunately, sales isn’t nearly as effective when done via email or telephone. Those media don’t allow for the full benefits of body language and, in the case of email, voice inflection and intonation.

Today, however, video conferencing offers the sales force a unique opportunity to bring back the face-to-face sales call. Yet, effective video sales calls differ in some ways from other options, including in-person calls.

Here are some tips to maximize your chances of success with your video sales calls:

Why You Should Give Prospects Homework

One of the most common benefits salespeople use to promote their products is the 'saves time' benefit, because everybody is really busy these days. So it might surprise you to learn that giving your prospects a homework assignment can actually improve your closing ratio.

Cognitive psychology teaches us that the more time and effort people invest in something, the more they value that thing once they actually get it. If you send your prospects a link to a ten-page document that contains information about your company and products and ask them to read it before your appointment, and they do so, now they've invested some time in you and in this purchase. They don't want to have wasted that time, so they're more inclined to think seriously about buying from you. It also takes the pressure off you to spend precious appointment time explaining product features – the prospect now knows all the basic details, and you can focus on asking qualifying questions and presenting the appropriate benefits.

Don’t Forget Your Sales Process

This time of year always brings a convergence of all types of activity. We’re closing the last deals of the year–that frenzy to make the numbers. We’re getting ready for the Holidays and New Year. We’re getting ready to launch the New Year with a bang.

New plans and programs. Some inevitable restructuring, new territories and realignment. Always the new quotas and compensation plans. New initiatives focusing on the fastest start possible.

But year after year, we enter the year with the same old sales process–you know, that one we developed a few years ago–or in the case of one of my clients, over a decade ago!

How can we hope to maximize performance if we are executing (or not executing) and old sales process?

How More Calls and Conversations Will Provide You with Strategic Business Intelligence

It’s not rocket science – response rates and budget optimization are the crux of a successful advertising strategy.  But, it is surprising the number of businesses we talk to that don’t have a solid plan in place to track leads and response rates so they can accurately tie results back to a specific campaign and budget, and therefore justify the money they spend.

Today, advertising is required to be efficient and meet many expectations; generate leads, optimize budgets and stay one step ahead of the competition.  It also has to be clever, inspiring and unique.  Many of these challenges are addressed by creative executives, designers and media buyers and negotiators.  Other challenges, like ensuring lead generation and a good ROI are more difficult to achieve, but not insurmountable.

2013 Top Sales Trends

Harvard Business Review is arguably the most prestigious publication for business leaders and management thinkers. Here’s one of my recent Harvard Business Review articles titled “TOP TEN SALES TRENDS FOR 2013.”

What are the top business-to-business sales trends for 2013? Here’s my list based upon my experience of working with some of the world’s best sales organizations this past year.

1. Sales Force Behavior “Modeling”
Models are verbal descriptions and visual representations of how systems work and processes flow. Models enable repeatable and predictable experiences. More organizations will study their top salespeople in 2013 to understand how they formulate their winning account strategies based upon customer politics, evaluator psychology, and the human nature of executive decision makers that are unique to winning every account.

Creating Prospect Urgency

Every prospect has needs that your product can help them to meet. If they didn't then they wouldn't be prospects. Just having a need isn't always enough to get a prospect moving, though. The need has to be an urgent one, and the prospect has to know that it's urgent, or he's likely to put off the need to make a decision until he feels that he must.

Creating urgency is often the only way to break through prospect inertia and get him to make a commitment. You can help the process along by using tactics such as the limited-time offer (“I can give you a great discount on the green one, but only until the end of the month”) but the most effective approach is to show the prospect why his need itself is time-critical.

Use Energy and Enthusiasm to Set Appointments

People can feel your energy and enthusiasm through the phone and through your email messages. If you are in sales, you need to become a student of communication and learn how to master sharing electrifying passion for your products and services. Was that a gasp I heard?

Yes, electrifying enthusiasm, interest in your buyer, and in the services and value you offer them.

There is a big problem today with sellers who are calling and leaving bland, boring, blah voice mail messages. They may be brief, but they make the potential buyer feel like they are “call number 42 of the day.”

5 Steps to Implement a Sales Strategy Change

A big part of the sales manager's job is getting her sales team to fall in line with company sales initiatives and overarching strategies. This is easier said than done, as salespeople – especially the great ones – tend to be very independent, tough-minded folks. So how do you get them to sign on to and execute a new sales strategy that's been imposed on them from high?

Explain – Just telling the sales team what the new plan of action will be isn't enough. Remember, salespeople are often independent and contrary. If you're asking them to change their whole way of doing business, you must explain why the new strategy is important to the company and why you think it will work better than the old strategy. If you don't know the answers to these questions yourself, pester upper management until they tell you.

How to Sell at the End of the Year

The end of the calendar year may or may not be meaningful in terms of your own deadlines, but odds are that most of your customers and prospects go through some changes at that time. Business customers will often tie fiscal year to calendar year, meaning that their budgets will turn over when the calendar year changes. And consumers are often in an entirely different buying mindset during the holiday season.

For B2B salespeople, the end of the year is the perfect time to go after whatever funding your prospects still have in their budgets. Most managers and department heads try to spend every penny of their budget funds, because if they don't spend it all they'll be assigned a smaller budget next time – something that all managers dread. So call up all the accounts that are sitting in your pipeline and make a push to get some of that budget funding in your company's pockets. You may be surprised how responsive you'll find prospects who've been formerly digging in their heels, once they're confronted by the year-end deadline.

How to Add Value to Your Sales

Value-added selling has become one of the most popular sales approaches, as a sort of inevitable evolution of consultative selling. In value-added selling, the salesperson offers the product or service but then throws in something unique to make that product more valuable. Value-added selling not only helps differentiate your product from the competition, it also helps motivate buyers to come to you instead of doing their purchasing over the Internet.

Coping with an Angry Customer

As a salesperson, you are often the face of your company. You will find that customers will often call you if they have an issue, instead of calling the customer service or technical support departments. And that means you can find yourself facing more than your share of upset, angry customers. Often the problem they face has nothing to do with you, but because you are standing in as the company representative, you're the one who will face the brunt of the customer's wrath. When you find yourself in this kind of situation, remember the following eight tactics for defusing your customer's fury.

The Power of Pre-Appointment Planning

Like everybody else, salespeople often wish for more hours in the day. It seems like there are always things that don't get done and that drag on and on. The last thing most salespeople want to do is spend time preparing for a sales appointment. At the most, they draw up a list of standard questions for every appointment and just use that.

Yet preparing a plan for each appointment actually saves time later. If you've done your research and come up with all the questions you need to ask, you eliminate those follow-up calls and meetings that happen when you keep uncovering more questions for the prospect. Doing pre-appointment planning is also a powerful way to shorten your sales cycle, meaning you can get to the next prospect (and the next sale) much more quickly.

Why Negotiators Need To Negotiate With Everyone Who Is On The Other Side Of The Table

Just exactly who are these negotiations being conducted with? If I asked you this question, you’d probably tell me that you are negotiating with the other side of the table. You’d be both right and wrong. The negotiation process is much more complicated and you need to understand why if you are going to reach a deal on what is being negotiated.

Who’s On The Other Side Of The Table?

When you are sitting at the negotiating table and are spending your time staring at the person who is on the other side of the table and trying to see though all of their different negotiation styles and negotiating techniques, it can be all too easy to start to view them as being the only person that you are negotiating with. In most cases, the reality is actually quite different.

Big Brands Need to Understand Word of Mouth

“…the average American talks each day about roughly ten brands, and that the typical brand conversation lasts between three and five minutes. More that two thirds of these conversations involve a recommendation to buy, consider or avoid the brand,” from The Face-to-Facebook, Ed Keller and Brad Fey, 2012

“Typically, messages passed within tight, trusted networks have less reach but greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities,” quoted by Keller & Fay from a 2010 McKinsey study on Word of Mouth.

The impact of positive word of mouth about products and services on purchase decisions and opinions is growing. This has been a disputed trend for some time now.  Some simply say that word of mouth has been around since the dawn of time and there’s nothing much new to respond to. Others claim that the efficacy of traditional marketing has forever slipped off of a cliff never to regain its footing. The truth lies in the middle – things have changed, word of mouth is more important today.