Inspiring or Draining?

Are you inspiring your customers every time you engage with them? Or are you draining their energy? One company (Creative-Brand Communications) in Portland, OR has a thriving business helping their client organizations in the banking and credit union industry find creative ways to “push the envelope.” They go beyond what customers can see and connect with all of the senses: hearing, touch, smell, taste and sight. They do this in a way that brings their clients’ brand to life in every way possible.

Great companies realize the best way to inspire their customers is to inspire their own employees first. We can’t give what we don’t have. Consistency is the key to a highly motivated and inspired workforce. The most effective organizations make it more than a one time event. However, if you do need an extra shot in the arm, Matt Weinstein is one of best at delivering inspiring and motivating events, that work every time. If your company doesn’t give Matt a standing ovation at the end of the interactive presentation, the event is free!

A very successful SVP of Sales and friend of mine claims he doesn’t motivate sales people, he hires motivated sales people. This is a great first step. However, I think he has it half right, literally. When it comes to motivation, inspiration and attitude, I believe employees bring 50% of this from home, however we can influence the remaining 50%. How? Through the environment, contests, continued education and career coaching/counseling.  Contrary to popular belief, studies show that compensation is not the number one motivating factor for professionals. The number one motivator is the desire to contribute to the success of your organization.

How do you ensure your employees understand how they contribute to the success of your organization? Perhaps even more challenging may be to answer the question, How do you help your employees gain the knowledge and skills to contribute in more ways each year?

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Categories: Engaging Your Customers, Team Building, branding yourself, professional growth

Effective Negotiation Skills

How important is your ability to negotiate, your ability to get what you want and/or need from others? My friend’s daughter wanted to play volleyball in college after a successful high school career. She was accepted into Seattle Pacific University for her academics and the volley ball coach welcomed her onto the team, but didn’t offer her a scholarship. My friend suggested that his daughter specifically ask for a scholarship. After a little more prompting and motivation, my friend’s daughter did ask, and she did receive… a half scholarship! A huge value!

In the book, Women Don’t Ask, by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, they note that “By neglecting to negotiate her starting salary for her first job, a women may sacrifice over half a million dollars in lost earnings by the end of her career…” Imagine what effective negotiation skills might mean to you in your personal life, professional career and your ability to make a major impact for your company.

I’d love to hear about the biggest negotiated win you’ve achieved and how you did it! Please share in the space below.

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Categories: Differentiating You, Sales Management, Sales Stories, Tactical Selling Skills, career development, negotiation skills

Just the Right Amount of Customer Contact

I’m often asked about the best ways to follow up with prospects and customers. I find most sales people are concerned about following up too much and coming across as aggressive, while sales managers have a fear that their sales people may be too passive and not following up quick enough or on a consistent basis.

Based on a McKinsey Quarterly article, The basics of business-to-business sales success, there is good reason to pay attention to how you do follow up. This article is based on a study that shows the “most destructive” sales activity in the eyes of the decision maker is “too much contact (in person, by phone, or via email)”.

I’ve found the best way to ensure the appropriate amount/timing of follow up is to take the guess work out by asking the prospect. At the end of each conversation, agree together how you can best track with and support the customer’s decision making process and when you should talk next. This simple idea saves sales people a tremendous amount of wondering, grief and head ache as to when to follow up. Some of my clients have tripled their weekly productivity by becoming better at closing each phone call with an agreed upon clear next action step with their customer.

“When” you follow up is important, but perhaps the bigger question is, “are you adding value every time you make contact with your prospect or customer?” Here are some simple common sense ways that may help ensure your conversations are relevant and meaningful to your prospect:

1. be brief and to the point
2. open with a quick summary of relevant info from your previous conversation
3. confirm/establish the objectives, then the agenda of the meeting
4. summarize the key take aways from the conversation
5. confirm next action steps and who is responsible for what, including the date/time/objectives of the next conversation

Running effective meetings or facilitating effective conversations is more science than art. One of my clients, an SVP of a very large technology company, shared with me that the most valuable training he had ever participated in was a week long course on how to run effective meetings.

Please share your approach to ensuring the right timing and ways you facilitate relevant and meaningful conversations with your prospects and customers.

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Categories: Closing Skills, Engaging Your Customers, Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Prospecting, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Tactical Selling Skills, Uncategorized, sell, selling

The Oldest Negotiation Tactic in the Book

My client met with a prospect who was interested in consulting services to help streamline product development cycles. During the visit, the President said, “we could really use your help, but we don’t have a budget for this, give us your best pricing and we’ll see what we can do.” Not having budget and not having resources to pay for services are two different things. Listen closely to your prospects and customers, but don’t let negotiation tactics get you down. When it’s time to present your proposal, make sure you share with your prospect you listened and understood his/her concerns about expenses. Point out specifically how you’ve taken his/her comments into consideration into your proposal to make sure you can meet the confirmed needs and budget requirements.

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Categories: Negotiation, Prospecting, Sales Skills, Sales Stories, Trust and Credibility

Negotiating for What You Want

What you don’t negotiate can cost you.
You’ll never know what you can get unless you negotiate for it. The following story is a reminder to me that “negotiation” is a skill that has to be learned, developed, and thoughtfully put into action to work.

Do you ever wonder how much you are paying for your airline seat compared to what the person paid for the seat next to yours? How about what the person at your athletic club is paying to use the same equipment as you each month? And finally, how about the office space next to your office? Well, one of my career development clients just learned the hard way. She was paying $1300/month for a one person interior space with no windows. She was told that the one person office across the hall with the beautiful windows with the forest view was $1800/month. When she asked if their was any room to negotiate, the response was “no.”  A few months go by and she starts to talk with person who ended up leasing the window space across the hall and learned that he was paying $1300/month. After she got over her frustration that she was paying the same as him without the window…, she asked how he got that rate? He replied he asked the management firm to match another (less desirable) space across town or he would walk. He used the “competition” tactic like a pro and it worked!

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Categories: Negotiation, Sales Stories, Tactical Selling Skills

Selling is a Profession

Selling is a profession. Therefore the skills involved in this profession can be identified, learned, reinforced and improved. To become successful and stay competitive, sales professional must utilize the right approach at the right time with the right customer and present the right product. In the present competitive environment nobody sells alone. Understanding how to utilize internal company resources and various teams to achieve desired results certainly must be considered a significant priority in the overall generation of revenue and profits . Additionally, each selling organization has unique training requirements that cannot be satisfied in total by standardized shelf courses.

To generate the most repeat sales in a competitive marketplace, leading organizations take a customized approach to sales skills that begins where sales professionals need assistance, builds on strengths, always reinforces previous training, establishes habits of successful selling and generates more business again and again. Sales training becomes a process not a series of discontinuous events.

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Categories: Major Account Selling, Presentation Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Selling Strategies

Selling in Difficult Times

A good friend of mine shared a short story with me about a software sales person who told his boss,  “I can’t sell anything… half the country is unemployed!” The boss replied, “Then sell the other half.” I love that story!

Based on first hand experiences and the situations I help my clients deal with, these are very difficult economics times with countless examples of empowered CFO’s scrutinizing every current decision as well as reviewing any past decisions to explore ways to unwind or minimize their expenses. In the big picture, economies go up and down, trends come a go, but solutions to problems never go out of style.

Are you selling products or solving problems?

-Scott Olsen

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Categories: Sales Skills, Sales Stories

Where Are Your Prospects?

When the market gets soft, the first thing that many companies do is “go back to basics”. This has always driven me crazy. Shouldn’t you always focus on the fundamentals?  I remember hearing how Larry Bird was always the first one to show up to practice. Even though he had one of the best free throw shooting percentages, he still felt that he always needed to focus on the basics.

When it comes to your database, the same holds true. You should always be “fine tuning” to make sure all of your prospects are on your radar screen. If you don’t know where they all are, how can you sell to them?

One big challenge most companies have (even Fortune 500’s) is that they lack visibility. I have found that many companies that are household names don’t even know about 65% of their prospects. They are not even on their radar screen?

Just like there is a process in free-throw shooting, there is one for building and maintaining a database:

Start by making sure that everyone who should be in your database is.
Continually look to update your database by adding or deleting companies.
Verify and validate the critical info to make sure it is always up to date.
For large account sales, make sure you know of all sibling companies and their relationships to the parent.

To have and maintain a world-class database, you have to commit to the process. No matter how good you think your database is, you can always do better. That’s the first step. Just step up to the line, commit and shoot.

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Categories: Prospect database, Prospecting, Sales Management

Don’t Give Up!

You have a solid sales process that used to produce lots of money per sales rep, but now is producing next to nothing. What went wrong?
The answer is that the clients started answering your questions with vague answers.  When the person asked for clarification, the client would stall the sales rep with things like we have a few things to check, budget, time lines, etc. The truth: they just were too scared to be honest with us!
Salespeople are numb to the fact that people are not buying.  When you make your follow up calls, they tell you that it’s tied up in budget…but to check back again.  So you wait to follow up, with answers to their questions, but you get stalled again. It’s not until you dig further that you are made aware of the true problem: they aren’t buying and have no idea when that will change.  So as any good salesperson, you dive into your list and start the process again. But the changes are apparent at all companies…there just not telling you!

So we present our sales leaders with some difficult choices. What do we do? Do we just give up? Offer them free terms?

You just need to ask tougher questions. Instead of asking questions about budget, ask questions about their intent to buy. Do you intend to buy this? What will cause this situation to change? Why are they looking to make a change? Where else are they looking? If they have to decide today, will we win or lose? Why? Is anything going on in the company that we need to know about? If you get the answers to these questions, at least you’ll know the status of the deals and now your pipeline becomes real.

Just try it today and let me know if it works.

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Categories: Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Questioning Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Stories, Tactical Selling Skills

Prospecting is Not For Dummies

One of my favorite stories about prospecting happened when AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and their “sales people” experienced their first taste of competition. A vice president of sales was speaking to a large group of sales people. He was going on and on about how they would need to adjust their approach now that they had real competition. They would have to be proactive and go out their and prospect for new business… they couldn’t just wait for the customer’s to call them.  He went on for a few minutes until one of the sales people raised his hand and asked, “What’s prospecting!”

When salespeople struggle to achieve their numbers, the first questions I ask are “How are you prospecting?” and “How are you closing?” Through my experience in talking with, observing others as well as studying my own conscience, prospecting can be a very thrilling, anxiety ridden, stressful and empowering experience. It reminds me of exercising, because it doesn’t always sound like fun, but I’m always better for it afterwards.

What does your prospecting experiences remind you of…?

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Categories: Prospecting, Sales Skills, Sales Stories, Selling in Difficult Times, sell, selling

The Olsen Group Blog

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Categories

• branding yourself (1)
• career development (2)
• Closing Skills (1)
• Differentiating You (2)
• Engaging Your Customers (3)
• Executive Selling (2)
• Listening Skills (1)
• Major Account Selling (3)
• Negotiation (2)
• negotiation skills (2)
• Presentation Skills (1)
• professional development (2)
• professional growth (1)
• Prospect database (1)
• Prospecting (4)
• Questioning Skills (2)
• Sales Management (3)
• Sales Skills (10)
• Sales Stories (8)
• Sales Training (1)
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• Selling in Difficult Times (1)
• Selling Strategies (1)
• Tactical Selling Skills (4)
• Team Building (1)
• Trust and Credibility (2)
• Uncategorized (3)