My friend Michael Hughes over at www.networkingforresults.com just sent me this practical tip and I thought I’d pay it forward to you.  Check Michael’s site for some other great resources.

A new west-coast contact called using Skype. It was early morning there. Suddenly she shrieked, utterly embarrassed, realizing her laptop’s web cam was on. She was sitting in bed in her pyjamas.

A fellow speaker contacted me. Before returning his call, I Googled him and found him on two links. When I asked about these, questioning their validity to his area of expertise, he paused nervously and said “are they still there?”

I was in a meeting with a corporate executive who was key to securing a large project. Halfway through our conversation, my cell phone rang. I can still feel his cold eyes saying “how unprofessional” (I didn’t get the deal).

This week’s tip:
Technology is a requirement for success in today’s fast-paced business environment. However, when not used properly, it can be as much a liability as an asset in building trust and developing relationships.
Perform a “tech check” as part of your preparation for every meeting, event or contact. That way, you’ll be more confident, focused and be perceived as more professional.

SPECIAL NOTE: Never check your Blackberry or PDA during a meeting or event. It does not make you look important. It is rude and demonstrates a lack of respect for those around you.

Now, get out there and sell something!

Do you know what your customers really want?
Do you find yourself battling over price or fee?

In this day and age of Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, eBay, Global trade, and the access to it through the internet, everyone is offering good quality products and services at similar price points. Often our customers know more about the products and services being sold than even the salespeople representing them which leaves price as the final frontier of selling features. This has caused virtually everything in the marketplace today to become a commodity. So what do you do about it and how do you get price off the table?

Price does not need to be your final frontier of selling features.

At High Output we know that there are 3 fundamental truths to selling anything anywhere to anyone. But first and foremost amongst those is that 75% of your success or failure comes down to the level of trust and rapport you establish with your customers in the initial stages of your presentation and in the building of your relationships with them.

I’ve just finished reading one of the most thought provoking and well researched books on the subject of sales I’ve come across. In his book “Achieve Sales Excellence – The 7 Customer Rules For Becoming The New Sales Professional” Howard Stevens CEO of the HR Chally Group shows us by tracking the spending patterns of corporate America against the attributes of the sales people doing the selling what corporate clients really want. And, if it just so happens that you’re in the retail or B2C sectors, sit up and take note, these apply to you too.

Here’s what your customers demand:

1. Advisors who truly understand their businesses or situations.
   Your customers want sales people and business partners that take the time to understand their businesses and unique situations well enough to act as trusted advisors, offer unbiased perspective and provide solutions that help them achieve their goals. They are not buying your products or services, they are buying the outcomes that those products and services produce: better ROI, better efficiency & productivity, the satisfaction of their own internal and external customers, and the confidence that they are making the best purchasing decision amongst the myriad of choices available to them.
2. Partners who understand their own companies.
   Your customers want sales professionals who they trust to understand the workings of their own companies well enough to manipulate the internal politics, policies and systems to deliver the outcomes that they promised. They need to know that you will act as their advocate within your company and sell internally just as hard as you do externally with them to achieve the results promised to them.
3. Personal accountability.
   They are looking for business partners who are personally accountable for the results delivered and are willing to step up without excuses and take responsibility to fix the problem if and when things go awry . They don’t expect you to have all the answers nor to take all the heat, but they do expect you to be easily accessible and act as the single point of contact to making it all happen.

None of these customer demands have anything to do with the traditional skills typically associated with selling such as prospecting, probing and closing the sale. Everyone of these demands has everything to do with the 75% success factor that’s directly correlated to the trust that you deliver on those 3 fronts. Sales people take note: You can’t close before you open. And opening the sale simply means establishing rapport and conveying that you’ve got a deep understanding of where your customer is coming from and what he or she really needs.

Of course it’s important to know how to prospect, how to uncover the true need and how to close. There is a process to it and at High Output we do teach our clients how to professionally perform these tasks, but more importantly we help them build true differentiation into their sales process and show them how to become those trusted professional advisors that their customers want.

If you can stay away from trying to make the perfect pitch, and get into the habit of asking intelligent questions (spending 20% of your time talking (asking) and 80% listening to the answers), and then making purchasing recommendations based on your understanding of the client’s situation, you will be well on your way to establishing true value equations in you, your company and your product or service offerings. When you do that price is off the table and your customer has gotten what they really want.

One of the best ways to follow up a great sales call or meeting is to write your prospect the next day and thank him or her for their time.  This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stand out from the clutter of your competition and reconfirm your interest in the relationship you’re building. 

In this day and age of email, SMS, voice mail and other technologies the good old fashioned hand-written note has become so rare that when they do arrive in our mail boxes and on our desks we’re thankful to receive them and they stand out to be remebered.  The simple truth is that the vast majority of sales and business people intend to send thank you notes but never get around to actually doing it.  That creates a great opportunity for you! 

Before sending out your note there are a couple of ground rules to consider:

1. Stay away from the email shortcut.  Everyone uses email for the majority of their correspondence including you and me.  The point of the follow up letter is to stand out and show a little extra effort.  An addressed, stamped and delivered by post note does that.
2. Send your letter within a day or two.  By sending your letter promptly after your meeting (and this could include a telephone meeting), you re-establish your presence and your commitment to helping the prospect achieve their desired outcome.  You can be sure that once you left their office or hung up the receiver the prospect didn’t sit around pondering you and your compny for the next 48 hours.  Their phone rang, other meetings came up and their customers demanded their attention.  Your timely letter re-focuses them on you while they still remember the conversation!  If your letter is too late it loses its relevance.
3. Keep it brief.  The purpose of this letter is thank your prospect for the meeting and to reinforce the potential relationship with you a valuable partner. That’s it … don’t write an endless novel here.  Less is more.
4. Don’t try to close!  You may have left the meeting feeling that you are the best match with best solution for your prospect and that may infact be the case.  But I will strongly encourage you not to give into the temptation to point that out here.  You can undo a lot of your hardwork by taking an assumptive tone.  The purpose of this short and sweet note is to reinforce the relationship and the spirit of cooperation.  Speak in terms of possibilities, not absolutes.  Stick to your sales cylce and to agreed upon follow up meetings when it comes to closing.

Take a look at the following example: Your note should resemble it fairly closely.

Dear {Prospect’s Name},

I just wanted to drop you a short note to thank you for taking time out and sharing a few moments with me yesterday. 

I found the information we exchanged quite stimulating and I come away from our meeting feeling that there could be a nice fit between us.

I’m looking forward to the prospect of a mutually beneficial relationship with you and  {prospects firm}  and to opportunities the future may bring.   I hope also that you’ll feel free to call me with any questions, challenges or problems I may be able to help you or your associates work out.

Sincerely,
{your hand written signature}
Your Name

Sending a note like this on company stationary can go a long way to winning positive attention for you, your company and your offering, however, most of us just don’t do it.  Why?    Because it takes time and effort, we may not like our own handwriting, or we simply don’t have the creative energy some days to think of what to write.  All of these were my illegitimate excuses until I found the solution that that ended them all.  I created for myself a standard template on my PC using MS Publisher.  Publisher will automatically format the document with your contact details and your logos and create a simple note card using the standard paper sizes.  I selected a handwriting type font to make it personal and made the template.  Now at the conclusion of a meeting I just open the document make some slight modifications, hit print, fold it and stuff it into an envelope!  My sample letter can be found here.  It’s that simple and it’s fun.  It’s also rewarding knowing that you probably made someone else’s day with just a little effort.  The results that it brings speak for themselves.  It amazes me how many prospects go out their way to thank me for taking the time to thank them! 

It doesn’t take much to exceed the expectations of your customers and prospects.  To go just a little further than your competitors is really quite simple.  At 211 degrees water is hot, with just one degree more at 212, it’s powerful boiling  steam.  Going the extra mile doesn’t take much and there is no congestion on the last mile! 

Do you want to exceed your sales targets?

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!

 Just Do It!:

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

Those of you who have attended any of my seminars, workshops or key note addresses know that that I place heavy emphasis on practical “How To” action plans that get you results.  You also know that I preach long and hard that the stuff I teach will have no impact if your “thinkin’ is stinkin’”.

Long before Nike hit the scene with it’s now famous marketing slogan, Art Williams, a high school football coach from Monroe Georgia had an idea and a dream to create the largest insuance 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 empowerd 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 ….. mms://stream.yourgalaxy.com/bitron/audio/Art_Williams.mp3   

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  Just click on the image in this post to get one of them for yourself.

Thanks to my friend Chuck Pinnell and the good folks at Bitron Global for sending me this audio link and for hosting the stream.   Enjoy, Get fired up, and Just Do It!

Amateurs Tell, Professionals Sell

The only reason a professional makes a sales call or presentation is to be of genuine service to the customer or prospect. Professionals understand that customers buy for their reasons not our 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 good well managed, customer focused communication. 
2. Selling is helping people make a decision that is good for them.

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 even the customer doesn’t 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.

Occaisionally during the exploration or qualification stage of a meeting it is discovers 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 don’t ask questions, they don’t understand their customers and they endlessly tell all the reasons they beleive a customer should purchase their product or service. 

As a professional you must never in clear conscience persuade your prospect to buy something they don’t want, don’t need, or can’t afford.  However, when you do find a need  that you can genuinely address, which is more often than not if you’ll just thake the time to sell and not tell, you have every right and responsibility to sell it well.

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.

At High Output Training Systems we teach a precise step by step procedure that helps professionals through the entire sales process so that they can be of genuine service, painlessly close and sell more … more often.

What’s your reason for making a sales call?

Question:

“Our company successfully implements the first 4 steps of the High Output Sales System. Due to the nature of our business the process has evolved where step 5 consists of agreement by the prospect to receive a “statement of understanding”. This is essentially a document from our company stating what we understand their needs to be and nested in it is a proposal to move forward. The document is written following the first 6 steps of the process. We attempt to follow up with the prospects to complete the process but have been unsuccessful in booking the appointment. What do you suggest?”
T. St Germain

Answer:

By the nature of your question, it sounds to me that you are mailing, faxing, emailing or sending by courier your statement of understanding to your prospects. In other words, it sounds like you are not personally delivering these proposals. That is a dire mistake. 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.

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 during your initial sales call is to establish the relationship and to gather a deep understanding of the prospect’s current situation. Having done that you will have a good understanding of true need and how you can possibly help them. Simply state a confirmation of need as you understand it, until both you and the client are on the same page with same understanding of the current situation. Next, advise the prospective client that what you would like to do is prepare a statement of understanding, and deliver it personally so you may present it to them. What you want to right now sell the next appointment. Choose a date for a future point in time by which you can have your presentation finished and schedule the appointment right then and there. You could say something like this:

“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 full letter of understanding which outlines what we see as the current situation, and where we see ourselves being able to add value to you. I can have that document ready next Tuesday, if I can deliver it to you for review next week, can you think of any reason, why we shouldn’t go ahead and set that up?”

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 letter of understanding. Since it contains your action plan for moving forward, you will then be ready to close the sale to move forward.