No! It is not closing business. No! It is not qualifying prospects. These are very important and are of course how salespeople are ultimately paid. However, the number one priority for sales people is prospecting … Building a pipeline. Put enough people in your pipeline and no matter how bad you are at the qualifying and closing you will hit your goal. Yes, I know that if you are better at qualifying and closing you need fewer prospects. However, the secret to success in sales is consistent daily prospecting; not wild periods of activity interspersed with long periods of doing nothing. I would rather be a master prospector than be a master closer and have no one to work my magic on! Here is a one-minute video that speaks to this topic.
Stop Leaving Messages
October 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
If you have never met the person, and they do not know you, don’t leave a voice mail message. So here’s a question for you. You have a message on your voicemail system. You listen for 5 seconds, you don’t recognize the person but you do recognize what they are doing, namely, selling … trying to get you interested enough to call them back. What do you do? Listen to the full two-minute message and copy down their number so you can get right back to them? I doubt it! You hit delete and move on. So what makes you think anyone is going to listen to your message? Hang up and try again later. Hit “o” and get to a real person. Find a gatekeeper somewhere and find out when your prospect will be back. Ask if there is a better number to call her on. Do anything but leave a message. Lots of young people don’t even check voicemail. Their phone captures the number and if they recognize the number, they hit the call button. Sometimes they do that even if they don’t recognize the number … it might be important! … or interesting?!
Listen to the Prospect
October 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Increase sales effectiveness by truly listening to the prospect. Listening means occupying your mind with nothing else but each word expressed by the prospect. If you listen that intently, you will know what to say when the client stops talking and wants to hear your thoughts.
Persistence
October 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Persistence is a critical attribute of the Optimal Salesperson® but is often misunderstood. Most people think of persistence as that quality in a salesperson which allows them to follow up and follow up and to never tire and to never give up until they get the sale. This is a great work ethic and is one that is admirable and very useful in some professions. But it can be counterproductive and it is not what I am talking about for the salesperson. Weak salespeople with a strong work ethic will get by, but to get to the top in sales you need a different kind of persistence.
To be the Optimal Salesperson® you need to be willing to fight internal battles with that same type of persistence. When you are uncomfortable asking a question about when a prospect will make a decision, you must be persistent within yourself and ask it anyway. If you ask a prospect how much money they would like to spend and the prospect gives you an evasive answer, you want to accept it and move on to something more comfortable, like how you can solve their problem for them. But you must be persistent with yourself and fight the instinct to move on and ask a follow up question to get at the financial information you need to have. If you are not persistent on the sales call you will find yourself working way too hard for the sales you get.
Here’s a quick example. Joe asks the prospect how much money he has to spend for this project the prospect says he doesn’t know and Joe accepts the answer and ends up writing a proposal for $15,900. When the prospect gets the proposal he is shocked at how high it is and embarks on a task of calling other suppliers. Joe follows up for two weeks calling every day or so. The prospect ducks the calls or tells Joe he just hasn’t had time to review the proposal. Eventually Joe finds out that his competitor got the order. Joe had a good work ethic but lacked persistence. Dave, Joe’s competitor, met with the same prospect uncovered the same problem and asked the same money question. But when given the same evasive answer, Dave persisted. He said “You must have a ballpark idea of what you are looking to spend, can you share it with me?” He stayed right there until he get the prospect to tell him that he wanted to be under $10,000. Dave’s persistence had paid off. Dave told the prospect to get all of the problems solved it would be more like $15,000 but he do the critical part for about $10,000 and asked if that would be acceptable. The prospect said yes. Dave closed the deal right there and submitted the proposal the next day and got started.
If you are persistent in the right places you will save yourself a lot of work and frustration.
Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010. Get his weekly 1-minute video sales tips and some free sales training www.optimalsalesperson.net
Is Your Outlook Affecting Your Sales?
October 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Your outlook is how you see the world. If you have a positive outlook you see the glass as half full. If you have a negative outlook you think that nothing good can happen in this environment. The economy is bad, my company is suffering, nothing is going right, etc. the glass is not only half empty, it is cracked and leaking.
Outlook acts like a force multiplier when you are selling. It amplifies everything you say and do. Your outlook communicates itself through your body language and tonality along with the substance of what you say. You might ask for the order but if your outlook is negative it will come out sounding to the prospect like you don’t really expect them to buy. It will be difficult for you to even pick up the phone because you will say to yourself “what’s the use nobody is buying anything anyway”. If you do pick up the phone and you do ask a question, if you don’t get the right answer or the one you were hoping for, you will just give up resigned to the fact that there is nothing you can do and this is just one more example of it.
On the other hand if you have a positive outlook you are eager to get to work. You are excited to pick up the phone because the next call might be the prospect that makes your whole year. You are undaunted by rejection or not getting the answer you were looking for. You just back up adjust your approach and try again. you view the rejection as a necessary evil on the way to success in sales.
So how do you keep a positive outlook in the face of adversity? One way is to remember the good times and try to recreate them. Remember how you felt and how you acted when you saw the glass as half full. Focus on some part of your life that is going well, even if it is not the business part of your life. You can also find someone who has an “up” attitude and talk to the m. they will infect you with their enthusiasm. Ask them why they are excited and maybe one of their reasons will excite you as well. If all else fails … fake it. Pretend to be excited. But don’t go over the top or it will come off as phony. This video will help explain more about outlook.
To get more sales tips click here to sign up for the free OPTMAL SELLING™ weekly video sales tip.
Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of Attributes of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.
“Do you have three minutes?” The conservation of mental bandwidth
October 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
It’s not the three minutes it will take to do this favor for you. Everyone has three minutes.
And it’s not even the noise and the wear and tear of the mental clutch as we shift from one task to another.
For me, and for many people, it’s the leakage of mental bandwidth.
Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and of starting things. The resistance hates those things—they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.
Click here to read more on Seth Godin’s blog.
Don’t ask for the decision maker
October 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Increase sales effectiveness by not asking for the “decision maker”. Ask questions like “who are the people involved in the decision process?” and “what are the steps in the decision process?” You not only may be getting the valuable information you need but the person who is answering the questions may very well feel you respect their knowledge of the organization.
Who Defines The Next Step In The Sales Process
October 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
This article could be just one sentence – “Always know the next step in the sales process”. If you do always know the next step in the sales process then I guess you can stop reading. But wait! Let me ask you a couple of questions:
Do you know it because you assumed it or because the prospect told you what it was?
Do you tell the prospect or does the prospect tell you?
Let’s take them one at a time. The first one is a common mistake that many experienced salespeople make. They have been through this so often that they just know what the next step is or should be, so they fail to ask. Sometimes they are right but often they are not. This leads to wasted time, inaccurate sales forecasts and frustration. The remedy is simple just ask the prospect what the next step is to make sure there is no misunderstanding.
Weak salespeople tell the prospect what the next step is. Strong salespeople ask. Really weak salespeople define the next step and to make matters worse, will take on work just to bail out of a call that is not going so well. It might sound like “Well Mary, why don’t I just get back to you with a plan of action and some numbers which will make this much clearer.” Or they might say “how about I get you a quote on that?”
The remedy for this mistake is easy to explain but not so easy for the perpetrator to implement. Just don’t volunteer the next step; let them ask you to get them something if they want it. And don’t bail when the going gets rough. If it looks like you are not making headway you should say something like “it looks like I may have confused you”, or “it looks like you are not impressed so far”, or “Maybe there is not a good fit here”. What you say Is not as important as communicating what you are feeling at the moment. This sounds pretty simple but the real problem is that the weak salesperson will view those questions as an overly aggressive move or a statement likely to upset the prospect. There can be other feelings about those questions but they all point to a self limiting belief or other hidden weakness that the salesperson has. A top salesperson has to be mentally tough. If you are overly sensitive to offending a prospect you may have a weakness we call need for approval. Having this weakness means that you are more worried about whether the prospect likes you than whether or not they do business with you. In the above scenario having need for approval will cause you to spend time writing a proposal just so you do not have to have the seemingly difficult conversation about the fact your product did not fit what the prospect was looking for. The Optimal Salesperson™ knows they can’t win every deal and recognizes it early in the sales cycle. They confront the issue (not the prospect) as described above and move on to the next sales call.
To get more sales tips click here to sign up for the free OPTMAL SELLING™ weekly video sales tip.
Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.
Here is a link to a related video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FImFskoIC9k
Magical Selling
October 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Miscommunication is rampant among unsuccessful sales people. They know what they want to hear and they know what they think the prospect needs. Then they magically convert what the prospect says into what they were expecting if the two are anywhere close to each other. What happens next is they stop asking questions and just assume that they are on the same page as the prospect. They don’t verify that there is a compelling reason to move forward, they don’t confirm that there is enough money available to address the issue, and worst of all, they move through the sales process too fast. This causes pipelines that are bloated with prospects that are never going to buy. It also causes lots of wasted time writing quotes and proposals for unqualified prospects.
The problem is not only “magical hearing”. One of the primary culprits of miscommunication leading wasted time and pipeline bloat is being too accepting of what prospects say and not being skeptical enough to ask more questions. I am not suggesting that you disbelieve everything the prospect tells you … but keep an open mind … and verify what you think you heard by asking for more clarification. When you think they are saying what you want to hear, ask for more details. When you think you heard what you were hoping they would say, ask them why they believe that, or think that, or need that.
You don’t have to be confrontational, in fact you shouldn’t be (that’s a whole other subject for a future article). But you need to be curious enough to get deeper, to get behind what the prospect is telling you and get enough detail or enough of the rationale to be sure you are not just suffering from “happy ears” … hearing what you want to hear. Remember that prospects are Leary of salespeople until the salesperson earns their trust. They don’t intend to mislead (most of the time) but they do want to maintain control of the sales process and they do want that information that you can provide them. So they tell you enough to keep you in the game and let you draw (or jump to) you own conclusions. Sometimes they are just too nice to tell you no forcefully enough … and you get the wrong idea on your own.
So the lesson for today is to be skeptical about what prospects tell you. You will be surprised how that will change the nature and depth of the conversations you have with prospects. Watch this video to understand more about how that works and get more examples. To get more sales tips click here to sign up for the free OPTMAL SELLING™ weekly video sales tip. Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of Attributes of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.
It’s A New Economy Out There
September 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Over the last few years buyers have made a significant change in the way they buy. It is now estimated that up to 70% of the buying cycle is completed before the buyer ever talks to or engages a salesperson.
In the past, buyers may not have welcomed a visit from a salesperson but they needed us. If they wanted any information they had to contact us as that was the only way to get the information they needed to make decisions. Now with everything “on line” and “in the cloud” they can get most of what they need without engaging a sales professional.
So what does this mean for the average salesperson? It means that the buyers frequently have the upper hand. Your “line card”, brochures, and data sheets are no longer of any help to getting you in the door. The sales cycle is more than half over before you even get started. Sales processes and techniques born in a different era will not be effective.
It is more important than ever to proactively get to decision makers before they are actually “in the market” for your product or service. Because once they are in the market, a few clicks of a mouse and they have access to worlds of information that render most of your value as a sales professional obsolete. You need to be in talking to them about their situation and helping them to solve problems. This is the very definition of a consultative sales process. Introductions are more important than ever. The truly efficient and effective salesperson will cultivate a network of people who are well placed in the industry to put them in touch with prospects who are beginning to think about attacking a problem that they are positioned to solve.
I don’t think we will ever return to “normal” after this most recent down turn. Companies have learned to get along with fewer staff members and those who remain in place have totally integrated smart phones, tablets, and other devices into their daily life. Executives work from home and on the road and handle things efficiently they used to delegate to people who are no longer in place. It’s a new economy out there and the old methods won’t work anymore.
Click here for a video that explains it in more depth. To learn The Attributes of the Sales Overachiever needed in the new economy, Click on this Free Report link.
Dan Caramanico is a salesforce development expert and he is the author of Attributes of The Optimal Salesperson® One of Selling power’s top ten books for 2010 and Optimal Selling, Sales Conversations of the Optimal Salesperson.
