Sales Training Tip: Why Tips Don’t Work

Last week, a salesperson contacted me to say that their sales were not growing despite having read a number of sales tips that they believed really fit their sales needs. After spending a couple of minutes talking to the person, I helped them realize that they had been merely thinking about the sales training tips, not really putting them into use. Unfortunately, I’ve heard this issue many times before. Often salespeople like what they hear and know what they need to do, but, in the end, fail to do anything about it. It's imperative that you don’t just read or think about something. Get out there and do it! (Gee, isn’t that what a certain shoe company says to do?)

Sales Training Tip #151: Low "Trial" Closes

When you’re about to "trial" close a customer, be careful not to mention anything that may come across as an amount or quantity less than what you want the buyer ultimately to buy.

Prefessional Selling Skills Training: How’s Your Sales Development Coming?

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Sales Training Tip #150: Strength of Your Voice

Listen carefully to your voice, especially when you are talking about price or any issue you’ve been struggling with. Your voice will often reveal nervousness in those situations. Sharp buyers listen for this and will leverage this weakness against you.

Professional Selling Skills Training: 3-Step Shuffle

Recently, the following question was posed by a conference attendee:

"The discussion for the 3 step shuffle was good to learn. Could tell me again the time lag I should have between the steps? I got the first step, 72 hours after exchanging business cards."

The 3-Step Shuffle is awesome! I use it regularly. I was at an event today and picked up 3 cards and by tomorrow each of the 3 people will have received their first contact. In this case, I'm doing just a "thanks and great to meet you". The second one I'll send out in about 4 more days and it will be an article I found on the web that I'll send out via e-mail. Then, I'll wait a full week to give them a call. Now, I normally like to end with an e-mail, but in this case I'm choosing to end with a phone call because by that time, I want to either get the appointment to meet or be done with them. These 3 have the potential size where I need to move now or not at all.

Professional Selling Skills Training: How is Yours?

Do you spend time on your professional selling skills training? I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to highlight an interesting figure in a recent Business Week Magazine. The article was talking about competition and how in a survey they conducted, the majority of people believe the most competitive employees in a company are in the sales department. (In particular, 38% of the companies surveyed said sales was the most competitive.) That begs the question: If companies, in general, view sales people this way, how competitive are you when you’re out selling against other sales people? Are you allocating enough resources to developing your professional selling skills?

Prospecting for Clients: Getting Referrals

What does it take to get a customer to give you referrals? You have to ask! Many salespeople don’t ask for referrals because they’re afraid of the customer's response, especially if they suspect the service they’ve been providing them is less than par. You have to ask yourself if this is really the case. The vast majority of times, it is merely a perception that is lingering in the mind of the salesperson. I like to recommend that sales managers create a sale referral period during which they require each salesperson to contact all of their customers to ask for referrals. For the majority of salespeople, asking for referrals is as difficult as cold-calling. Unless it’s mandated, it won’t happen.

Sales Training Tip #149: Forget the Sales Materials

If you can’t make every phase of a sales call without using any sales materials, then you don’t know your business. High-performing sales people routinely prospect and close sales without the aid of any sales materials.

Professional Selling Skills Training: Size of Sales Pipeline

Professional Selling Skills Training: Is there a formula people can use to determine how big their sales pipeline needs to be? Your pipeline should always contain as many contacts as it takes to replace all of your business during the current sales cycle. For example, if you’re currently doing business with 25 customers and it takes six months to close a sale, then you would need to either have at least 50 prospects in your pipeline or enough prospects that would bring in the same amount of business to replace your existing business. Additionally, a quick rule of thumb is if your sales process takes more than six months, you need to add the number you need by the number of months above six times your base number. So, for a nine month sales cycle, take the base number of prospects you need (for example: 50) and add another 30% (9 months - 6 months = 3 months). In this case, you would add another 15 prospects.

Prospecting for Clients: Timeline

Prospecting for Clients: How do you know when it’s right to stop calling on what you thought was a perfect prospect? You never ever stop calling on a prospect! Rather, you slow the process down to ensure that you don’t waste your time. The key to determining when they’re no longer a good prospect is if they’ve stopped sharing with you crucial information or information that would not be readily available to others. Prospects who are turning back into suspects are many times those people who will continue to be courteous to you, but won’t extend you any new information or give you their best time. If you decide they’re no longer a hot prospect, then move the person further down in your sales process and let your communication with them be through your on-going marketing campaigns. At a later time, you can leave them a voice mail message asking them to call you back. If they don’t, then certainly they’re still a suspect. If they do call you back, don’t rush to schedule a live meeting. Rather, use the phone call as a way to see if they’re willing to provide you with some information, etc. If they quickly provide you some, then consider them back on the prospect list. If they don’t, then keep them on your suspect / marketing list.

Prospecting for Clients: Handling Hesitation

Prospecting for Clients: How do you deal with the prospect who is hesitant to make a decision?
First, you have to go back and ask yourself if you really know what their buying timeline is and if the person you’re talking to is qualified to buy. You then have to focus in on two areas: the customer’s pressure points and their decision drivers. Let’s look at both of these for a moment. If a customer truly has a pressure point, then they will buy. But often what happens is that our questions aren’t tough enough to enable the customer to understand the magnitude of their pressure point. Remember, the key is you can tell the customer all you want, but until the customer says it’s a pressure point, they won’t believe it. Second point, you have to know the customer’s decision drivers. Again, you have to ask yourself if you really know how they make a decision. You have to be asking questions that many times are not related to the sale you’re currently working on, but are designed to get the customer talking about other decisions they’ve made. When you get them talking about other decision they’ve made and how they made them, you can determine what their decision drivers are and how to leverage them.

Sales Training Tip #148: C-Suite Is Focused on Solutions

When you’re dealing with anyone in the C-Suite (CEO, CFO, COO, etc.), make sure your focus is all about providing solutions. Don’t waste your time dealing with price because it is not a factor in a C- Suite discussion. As I like to say, “Leaders are looking for solutions. Company managers are looking for price.”

Sales Training Tip #147: Get Motivated on a Daily Basis!

Beginning this week, The Sales Hunter Daily Video Motivator is available to you for free! By watching these 45 second clips of practical, ready-to-use strategies for sales success, you will be motivated to jump start your day. These links will be updated on a weekly basis and will appear at the top of each weekly Sales Hunting Tip or via our website. Spend a minute getting motivated and then, get out there and sell!

Professional Selling Skills Training: Search Engines on the Move

Recently, I’ve been amazed at the differences that are beginning to appear in the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Each seems to be tweaking their processes more and more so their results for a particular search can be dramatically different. For those of us in sales, it means we have to sharpen our thinking even more when we are trying to leverage the effectiveness of our websites. If we’re using search engines to help us sell, we must now be careful to not limit our queries to a single search engine.

Sales Training Tip #146: Decision-Maker Calls

How many decision-maker calls do you make each day? Salespeople often think they’re making sales calls when all they’re really doing is talking to random people. The focus of your selling time must be on talking to decision-makers (those who can truly buy).

Professional Selling Skills Training: Value of a Customer

I recently read an article in Fast Company magazine (a must-read for anyone looking to succeed). In the September, 2006, issue, there is a great article by David Lidsky. He quotes a study stating that more than 87% of all company executives do not know what the value of a customer is to their company. Wow, totally scary but so true! I was pleased to find in writing what I’ve been hearing from companies for a long time. Even worse is a number in the article stating that 91% of executives do not know the true cost of acquiring a new customer.

For sales people, these are powerful numbers because it helps to reinforce both the importance of sales and of having competent sales people. Many times, I’m asked to evaluate a company’s sales and marketing efforts and in the vast majority of cases, I find there are no benchmarks to measure these numbers against. No wonder so many sales managers feel they’re fighting an uphill battle with senior management! However, they can only blame themselves for not taking the time to put into place benchmarking procedures to measure the true cost of sales.

Thanks to Fast Company magazine and to David Lidsky for both his article and his research with The Strativity Group.

Sales Training Tip #145: 4-Legged Sales Calls

Taking another person with you on a sales call is often a great way to demonstrate how committed you and your company are to completing the sale. Prior to going, make sure the person with you is well briefed on what they should and should not talk about. Keep in mind that it’s still your role to close the sale. Don’t leave that task to the other person.

Professional Selling Skills Training: Bad Sales Copy

Marketing materials are often developed by very competent people who know the business well. In fact, they know the business too well and we see the results of this in the final marketing copy. Many times it turns out to be a great product copy, but it is terrible in terms of allowing the customer to understand how they will benefit from the product or service. Next time you develop marketing materials, take the time to get input from real customers before you print them.

Sales Training Tip #144: C-Suite Strategy

When you’re trying to break into the C-Suite (CEO, CFO, COO, etc.), don’t hesitate to develop relationships lower down in an organization as a way of uncovering information. However, it's important to remember that what you hear at a lower level is not always repeatable at the C-Suite level. The last thing you want to do is share something that may not be totally correct and, ultimately, winds up jeopardizing the status of the lower level personnel you’ve been talking to.

Sales Training Tip #143: 50 Words

Salespeople love to talk and they often talk too much. If you could only speak 50 words in a presentation, what would they be? If you were limited to 50 words, you’d use them to ask the most crucial questions. Keep your focus on asking better questions so you get the customer to talk.