We’ve had a very active discussion over at Sales Gravy about the effective use of Twitter for business and twitter for sales people.  This just came in from my colleague  Lawrence Berezin over at New York Parking Ticket I think you’ll like his perspective.

Here are 5 mistakes I’ve made with Twitter for business:

1. Casting too wide a net. It’s great to follow people with a wide variety of interests, if you are interested in making friends with people in a distant place. If your interest is business, use the available tools to identify your target audience, and tweet them valuable links and info.

2. Tweeting on too many subjects. I suggest picking 2-3 subjects to tweet about, one being your business interest. Twitter isn’t the place to unleash a stream of business only info. People will not respond

3. Not using analytic tools to monitor feedback. I agree completely with Howard. Hootsuite is a terrific tool

4. Not engaging my followers and friends in conversation. It’s like being at a cocktail party and only talking about yourself. You’ll be drinking alone. Make liberal use of re-tweets. Ask questions. Continue a conversation started by someone else without immediately telling your story

5. Not having a focused strategy and the tactics to implement it. You can get lost in a sea of information about a gazillion topics. Identify 5 business targets, learn about what makes the company tick, who are the twitting executives…follow them and engage them in a conversation about THEIR business. RT some of the content they produce, with a brief comment inserted

I’ve learned from my mistakes and experienced some nice success on Twitter; but took my bumps and bruises before I figured out what worked and what didn’t work.

Great tips from Lawrence …. I hope you find them as useful as I did.

Professional selling is one of the most gratifying, secure and rewarding careers available. We have the opportunity to forge great relationships, set our own schedules, and to earn uncapped incomes. As incredible as these benefits are, to enjoy them we need to stay disciplined with our schedules and we’ve got to have the presence of mind to stay strong in the face of inevitable adversity and rejection.

We live in a mixed up crazy mixed up world  with a media that constantly bombards us with negative news of  fear inducing  events past and present.  We also have to face rejections from our customers and have the pressures of modern daily life to contend with.  Whether you concede it or not, these influences permeate our conscious and subconscious mind and the only way to combat them is to fortify ourselves with heavy injection of positive influences.

I’m often asked how I’m able to always be so “positive”.  Some of the practices that have worked for me I’m happy to suggest here for you:

• Begin each day by reading just 10 minutes of something positive before you get going with the rest of your day.  Make a coffee appointment with yourself and if time is an issue, substitute 5 pages of a motivational book for your favorite paper.
• End each day by reading 10 minutes of something positive just before you turn out the lights.  Our minds are like sponges and they take in what ever we feed them. If you watch the 11:00 news before going to bed that’s what you’ll reflect on in your sleep.  So feed your mind something positive to reflect on before you get your shut eye.
• Listen to positive CDs or MP3s during your commute to work instead of your favorite DJs on the radio; they may be funny but aren’t doing much to enrich your state of mind.
• Write down a good powerful affirmation that paints a picture of your ideal circumstance and review it daily.
• Tell anyone who asks how you are that you’re GREAT.  Honestly if your having a bad day, the world around you doesn’t care so you may as well put on a good game face.  If you’ll repeatedly tell yourself that you’re great eventually your subconscious mind will accept it as reality and you will be.

People are drawn to to those that uplift them and uplifting others is a key success factor.  So,  the Key to Success in my opinion is making sure that everyday is the greatest day you’ve ever been alive and taking the steps to make it so.  Your attitude after all is a choice.

In most situations, mailing faxing or emailing proposals is mistake for several reasons:

1. Follow up communication needs to be personal; 75% of your success or failure is directly related the trust and rapport that you establish, and therefore, you want as many opportunities as possible to solidify a relationship with your potential clients.
2. Things change at the speed of sound and in the time lag between your previous appointment and proposal receipt, circumstances could have changed for your prospect.  The first thing I always do before delivering a proposal is ask:
   “Here’s where we left off last time we got together, has anything changed for you in the meantime?”   If it has, I can adjust on the fly.  I suggest you do the same.

Every sales call or presentation needs to have an objective and sometimes closing the sale isn’t closing the sale; sometimes the close you seek is just an agreement for the next meeting date!   The approach I suggest you take is to ask for the next meeting at the conclusion of the current one.

“You know Mr. Jones, it seems there could be a good fit between what you and XYZ Corp are looking for and what we specialize in. Here’s what I’d like to do, I’d like to prepare a proposal which reflects our conversation today, and demonstrates where we see ourselves being able to add value to you. I can have that document ready next Tuesday.  If we can prepare it and I can present it to you next week, can you think of any reason, why we shouldn’t get together?”

All you want to do is get a committment to the next appointment. When you come back, re-qualify the prospect to ensure that everything is the same as it was when last you met, then review the proposal.  Since it contains your action plan for moving forward, you will then be ready to close the sale or move to move forward to the next logical step in your sales cycle.

Do you want a Life of Sales Success and Abundance?

Here is what The Dalai Lama has had to say about the keys to a happy life.  These keys are applicable to all spheres of your business and your personal life and if you apply them, you will find success.   I encourage you to reflect upon them and not to keep this message just for yourself.  It’s the Law of the Universe, whatever you put out is what will resonate back you.  I believe this is true for all of us – regardless of your religious belief or Faith….

Instructions For Life

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three R’s:
* Respect for self
* Respect for others
* Responsibility for all your actions
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. (A blessing in disguise)
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone everyday.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Do not keep this message all to yourself. Tell a friend, pass on this link and let this mantra leave your hands; begin to experience the Law of the Universe for yourself.

A picture can paint a thousand words but the right words can sell a thousand pictures.  So, what is the secret to effective word choice?

Sales people and advertisers have a lot in common; they both desire to inspire their audience to make a positive buying decision, and they are both in the business of influential customer  communication.   So just what is it that causes some communication to achieve it’s goal while some fails dismally?  First and foremost, our communications must be customer focused, but there’s more.

Legendary advertising giant, Leo Burnet, set out to define what made some ads successful and what caused others to fail.  According to Burnet “Dull and exaggerated ad copy is due to the excess use of adjectives.” To prove it, he asked his staff to compare the number of adjectives in 62 ads that failed to the number of adjectives in Lincoln’s persuasive Gettysburg Address, and other age-old classics.

Here’s what Leo Burnet discovered:

Of the 12,758 words in the 62 failed ads, 24.1% were adjectives. By direct comparison, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains only 35 adjectives out of 268 immortal words – only 13.1% adjective-to-total-word ratio. Winston Churchill’s famous “Blood, Sweat and Tears” speech rates even lower and has a 12.1% adjective ratio (81 adjectives from 667 words).

Mr. Burnett found that similar ratios applied to great works such as The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Conclusion: Use more verbs, not adjectives. Verbs increase the pulling-power and believability of ad copy, sales letters and sales conversations.

Keep this 108- POWER VERB CHEAT-SHEET close-by.

Abolish Accelerate Achieve Act Adopt Align Anticipate Apply Assess Avoid

Boost Break Bridge Build Burn

Capture Change Choose Clarify Comprehend Confront Connect Conquer Convert Create Cross

Decide Define Defuse Deliver Deploy Design Develop Diagnose Discover Drive

Eliminate Ensure Establish Evaluate Exploit Explore

Filter Finalize Find Focus Foresee

Gain Gather Generate Grasp

Identify Ignite Illuminate Implement Improve Increase Innovate Inspire Intensify

Lead Learn Leverage

Manage Master Maximize Measure Mobilize Motivate

Overcome Penetrate Persuade Plan Position Prepare Prevent Profit

Raise Realize Reconsider Reduce Refresh Replace Resist Respond Retain

Save Scan Segment Shatter Shave-off Sidestep Simplify Solve Stimulate Stop Stretch Succeed Supplement

Take Train Transfer Transform Understand Unleash Use Whittle-down Win

Sales people can learn a lot from effective advertising.  Whenever you begin to draft your next ad, sales letter, website, email campaign or discuss your features and benefits, use verbs from the list above.  Remember, your customer wants to know “What Will It Do For Me” and these power verbs are proven to put the pulling action into it.

So, what does it mean to really listen?  Real listening is an active process that has three basic steps.

1. Hearing
   Hearing just means listening enough to catch what the speaker is saying. For example, say you were listening to a report on zebras, and the speaker mentioned that no two are alike. If you can repeat the fact, then you have heard what has been said.
2. Understanding
   The next part of listening happens when you take what you have heard and understand it in your own way. Using the zebra example above which claimed that no two are alike you’ll think about what that might mean. You might think, “Maybe this means that the pattern of stripes is different for each zebra.”
3. Clarifying and Confirming
   After you are sure you understand what the speaker has said, simply give your level of understanding a reality check.   Just ask the speaker a simple question.  Sticking with the zebra example, you might ask: “So, if I understand you correctly, the stripes are different for every zebra?”  At the this point the speaker will either confirm that you got the correct meaning or will clarify and explain what was actually meant.  When this happens you have truly listened and you have had good communication.

Tips for being a good listener

• Give your full attention on the person who is speaking. Don’t look out the window or allow yourself to be distracted by your own thoughts or whatever else is going on in the room.
• Keep your mind focused. It can be easy to let your mind wander if you think you know what the person is going to say next, but you might be wrong!  If you feel your mind wandering, change the position of your body and try to concentrate on the speaker’s words.
• Let the speaker finish before you begin to talk. Speakers appreciate having the chance to say everything they would like to say without being interrupted. When you interrupt, it looks like you aren’t listening, even if you really are.
• Finish listening before you speak! You can’t really listen if you are busy thinking about what you want say next.
• Listen for main ideas. The main ideas are the most important points the speaker wants to get across. They may be mentioned at the start or end of a talk, and repeated a number of times. Pay special attention to statements that begin with phrases such as “My point is…” or “The thing to remember is…”
• Ask questions. If you are not sure you understand what the speaker has said, just ask. It is a good idea to paraphrase your understanding of what the speaker said so that you can be sure your understanding is correct. For example, you might say, “When you said that no two zebras are alike, did you mean that the stripes are different on each one?”
• Give feedback. Sit up straight and look directly at the speaker. Be fully attentive. Now and then, nod to show that you understand. At appropriate points you may also smile, frown, laugh, or be silent. These are all ways to let the speaker know that you are really focused on them. Remember, you listen with your whole body; your face as well as your ears!
• Think fast.  Remember: time is on your side! Thoughts move about four times as fast as speech. With practice, while you are listening you will also be able to think about what you are hearing, really understand it, and give feedback to the speaker.

People hunger to feel significant,  appreciated and understood.  More importantly, they need to understand that they have been understood. If you can form the habbit of really listening to understand, and then confirming that you understand, you are well on your way to creating and maintaining exceptional sales, business and life success. Listening and true understanding is where deep levels of trust are born.

The only reason a professional makes a sales call or presentation is to be of genuine service to a customer or prospect. Professionals understand that customers buy for their reasons not for the sales person’s reasons.  This fundamental truth can give you a whole new perspective on what it means to be a professional sales person and the rights and responsibilities that go along with being a pro.

We define selling in two ways:

1. Selling is customer focused communication.
2. Selling is helping people make a decision that is good for them.
3. Selling is articulating your ideas from someone else’s perspective

Professionals take the time in the early stages of a customer meeting to ask good questions and find out what the customer’s real need it.  Quite often the customer doesn’t even fully understand their own need until a professional shows up and gets them thinking through a few though provoking questions.  By our definitions, it’s clear that the only goal of a professional salesperson is to remain customer focused, to find a need and then provide true service to address it.

Occasionally during the exploration or qualification stage of a meeting it is discoverd that the customer really needs something you or your company can’t provide. Professionals understand that helping a customer make a decision that is good for them sometimes also means telling the customer that they can’t help them.  If your prospect has no need for your product or service, can’t use it, or can’t afford it you have absolutely no right to try to convince him or her to buy.

Amateurs by contrast are extremely product focused and try to convince someone to buy in every single situation. They’ve been trained in the A B C  philosophy “Always Be Closing”.   They don’t ask questions, they don’t understand their customers and they endlessly tell all the reasons they believe a customer should purchase their product or service.   That’s a sure fire way to decimate trust.

As a professional you should never try to persuade your prospect to buy something that isn’t a right fit for them. Walk away or refer the customer who can give them what they need.   It’s OK to tell a customer that you can’t help them.  This simple code of conduct will reap huge dividends in increased sales; even from customers to whom you admitted you couldn’t help.  By being completely honest and transparent, you establish deep levels of trust;  that trust often results future business and referrals you were never expecting.

3 Keys to Success – You Can’t Close Before You Open!

When I ask people what their greatest challenge in selling is, the most common response I receive is that they don’t know how to close.  That’s actually good news because 75% of the outcome of any selling opportunity is directly related to manner in which trust and relevance are established in the initial stages of a presentation.  In other words, what happens in the end is determined by the way you begin.  You may have a complex sale with a  long sales cycle or a simple product with a very short sales cycle but in either case you can’t close before you open.

There are three keys to making sure you get your meetings off to a good start and help you establish deep and lasting trust.  These keys will ensure you can properly close when the right time presents itself:

• Make a positive and lasting introduction to every meeting.
• Ask intelligent questions before you try to sell anything.
• Confirm your understanding of the situation based on the answers you received.

The number 1 rule in communication is that people prefer talking to listening.  That means that you prefer talking to listening and it means that your customers also prefer talking to listening.  Two people are trying to communicate and both want to do the talking;  this is a conflict.

Most salespeople go into meetings trying trying to show how smart they are.  They begin the meetings talking incessantly: they’ve got the best product, or cheapest price, or the most incredible company with the most history etc., etc., etc., but none of this really means anything if you don’t know where the customer is coming from.  Customers need first and foremost to trust you and they can’t trust you if they sense that you don’t understand them.  Asking questions is the key to understanding it’s also the best way to get get relevant and to get your prospect talking!

Next a prospect begins a meeting with something like: “thanks dropping by, what is it you think you can do for us”?  You can simply respond, that’s a good question, but I don’t know what to tell you because I haven’t asked you anything yet.  Then ask a couple of intelligent questions, listen to the answers and you’re on your way to making a sale.

Do you want to know what it takes to make it?  Just watch this  this ……

Long before Nike hit the scene with it’s now famous marketing slogan, Just Do It, Art Williams, a high school football coach from Monroe Georgia had an idea and a dream to create the largest insurance company in America.  When everyone told him he couldn’t,  Art rose up against the rejection and the inevitable failures along the way and built a multi billion dollar company that empower countless people to become millionaires along with him.  His company A.L. Williams was eventually bought by Citi Group and is today known as Primerica.

It doesn’t matter what you think of life insurance sales, or different types of business models, champions and winners from all walks of life have a couple things in common.  Find yourself 18 undisturbed minutes to listen to this piece of audio.  It will set your hair on fire!  This speech delivered by Art back in 1987 is probably more relevant today than it was then …..

I’ve read A. L. Williams book “All You Can Do is All You Can Do, But All You Can Do Is Enough” many times and consider it one of the best self empowerment books I’ve ever read.  It’s out out of print circulation, but I found 34 used copies available on Amazon.com  I encourage you tosearch around and get one of them for yourself.

Enjoy, Get fired up, and Just Do It!

Like it or not, your secret to success in selling begins with prospecting.  At High Output Training Systems, we can teach you the greatest sales methodology in the world (and we do) but if you  aren’t out selling,  there is absolutely nothing we can do for you – except, of course, give you some advice on prospecting.

Selling is helping people you find, but it all starts with finding people to help.   So when it comes to prospecting just how much is enough?   Rather than me looking at how many prospects I may arbitrarily believe is reasonable for you, let’s use some simple mathematical extrapolation to arrive at a reasonable number you can generate for yourself.   For this exercise we need to look at stages of development from suspect to customer.

To begin, we need to determine some metrics.  The questions we need to ask are as follows:

1. What’s your NEW revenue target, or if working with a team what’s the target of each rep?
2. What’s the average revenue of each existing customer? (Total revenue divided by number of customers)
3. How many phone calls to leads (suspects) does it take to generate 1 appointment?
4. How many appointments does it take to generate 1 qualified prospect (Has a need, has the authority to buy, and has the money)
5. How many qualified prospects does it take generate 1 new customer?

Since I don’t know what your actual conversion ratios are, I’ll use some generic numbers to illustrate and you can plug in your own numbers later:

1. It takes 10 phone calls to get 1 new appointment.
2. It takes 10 appointments to generate 1 new active qualified lead or prospect.
3. It takes 10 active leads or prospects to generate 1 new client.

Using this information, it’s now a simple matter to generate real target numbers for your critical sales activities.
I don’t know what your revenue targets are, but let’s say that based on the new revenue target and the average revenue per customer we determine that you or each rep needs to produce 10 new clients this year – reasonable?  Again, plug in your own numbers, but from here we can work backwards to determine activity:

1. Since it takes 10 active leads to get one client and we want 10 clients, we need 100 active leads.
2. Since it takes 10 appointments to get one new active lead and we want 100 active leads, we need 1000 appointments.
3. Since it takes 10 phone calls to suspects to get one appointment and we want 1000 appointments, we need to make 10,000 phone calls.

“Whoa!  Slow down,” you say. “10,000 calls! How am I going to do that?”  Well, the simple answer is discipline, applied one day at a time.  So let’s break this down into daily activity:

• 10,000 calls divided by 260 working days per year = 38 prospecting calls per day.
• Let’s conservatively assume 5 minutes per call.  This number is high because included in the 38 calls per day are no pickups, prospect unavailable, voicemail etc., which take only 30 seconds each.
• So, 38 calls times 5 minutes each = 190 minutes of prospecting every day. 190 minutes divided by 60 minutes per hour = 3 hours of prospecting per rep.  In actual fact some calls will be short some will be long, so a strict discipline to a minimum 2 hours or 38 calls per day, and you should be OKAY.
• 1000 appointments divided by 260 working days per year = 4 appointments with active leads per day.

Let’s see now:  2 hours of prospecting and 4 appointments per day, these look like pretty realistic daily numbers to me.   The question is:  Do you and / or your team have the will to do it?

Pareto’s law or the 80/20 rule applies  to just about everything and if you want to build a business, in the early stages you should probably spend 80% of your time working on generating new business and 20% of your time servicing it.  If you commit to that your portfolio will grow.  Once you’ve built your customer base, you can shift your activity to spending 80% of your time servicing and 20% prospecting.

As you and/or your team gets into the habit of achieving these targets, your proficiency will begin to increase and your conversion ratios from call to appointment will increase.  As your conversion ratio from appointment to prospect increases and your conversion ratio from Prospect to Client also increases, these numbers become less daunting and the freedom that selling can provide will materialize.

Here’s a suggestion for you:   Keep a phone log to keep track how many phone calls you make each day and how many appointments you get out of all those phone calls.  Make two columns on a sheet.  Every time you dial out just make a mark in one column.  Every time you get an appointment put a mark in the second column.  Keep track of this for a month, you will arrive at your true conversion ratios but you’ll also see your effectiveness increase.

One of the best books on the subject of prospecting that I ever read is: “Cold Calling Techniques that Really Work”, by Stephan Schiffman.  I offer it off my website  under our new section Recommended Reading feel free to check it out.
I’ll also be running a webinar called Painlessly Profitable Prospecting which will increase your telephone penetration rate.  When you really want to get serious, enroll in our two day program The Three Truths of Selling or book us to train your team to increase your closing rate!