Sell, Sell, Sell!

The release of “ACT! and Outlook are Holding You Back” has produced a ground swell of questions!  Readers want to discuss how they can apply these principals to their own businesses.

It seems that the feeling of being unable to reach your full potential in sales and service is unbelievably common.

On Tuesday, February 26, at 3pm Eastern, join us for “Making Contact Management Work“. 

This free webinar will include:

The Who, What, Why, Where, When and How of managing your customers
How to develop a strategy for success before you spend your money
Open discussion and real world examples of customer and prospect management strategies that work
Your opportunity to get help with specific challenges in your business
Just click this link to sign up.

Its going to be fun!  I hope you’ll join us.

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You’re a small business.  You’re lean and mean.  You can make your competition look like a bunch of chumps!

Except…

ACT! and Outlook are holding your business back from being everything that it can.

We’ve just posted a new report that includes:

4 Reasons ACT! and Outlook are not working for you
7 Easy to implement tips on taking your customers service and sales to a new level

This is not a sales pitch!  This is a power packed report based on years of experience designed to point you to simple, affordabe steps you can take to treat your customers like kings and make your competitors look like chumps.

The report is available free here.

Enjoy!

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If you own a small business, you know what your larger competitors have that you don’t.  They’ve got resources to do things bigger and “ostensibly” better than you can.

But, do you know what you have they your competitors don’t?

Your lack of size and resources can actually be your greatest advantage!

You can turn your organization into the most responsive organization your customers have ever dealt with!

Because you’re lean and mean, you have the opportunity to transform your organization.  When your clients call, every individual within the business can have the right answers, on the spot.

If you’d like to make your competitors look like chumps by responding to your customers’ instantly, stay tuned!

In the coming few days, I’ll be releasing a new report packed full of specific actionable suggestions for turning your company into the “go to” company in your industry.

More info to come early next week!

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Another great article by Daniel Sitter!

This one about how frequently the flaw in your sales process is that you’re just not following up.

I can tell you from my point of view, as the CEO of a contact management service, that its true. In 2008, just remembering to call the right people back is a big challenge for most sales people and entrepreneurs.

The good news its not hard to fix this problem

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SalesTeamTools.com has asked its contributors to answer the question, “What’s the one thing you changed in 2007 that had the greatest impact on sales?”. There have been some fascinating responses. Jan Visser, founder of SalesTeamTools.com, asked me to contribute my two cents to the discussion. Click here to read my post to SalesTeamTools.com

The question isn’t that simple to answer. It gets you to thinking…

A change in my outlook or attitude? A new sales technique? Rededication to a certain market or lead source? Sometimes its tough to seperate all the little things from each other…

I finally chose as a topic “Do You Know How to Separate Good Prospects from Dead Ends?”.

Looking back on it, there were a lot of things that had to come together to give us the confidence to stick with our process through ups and downs. But, what it did for us was invaluable!

The sales staff became a team, not just a collection of individuals. New sales reps were able to find success almost immediately. Our marketing efforts became more focused on cost efficient.

Its what I preach to our customers all day everyday but, the truth is its been tough even for us. We finally got it right in 2007 and its paying big time!

I hope you’ll enjoy my post on SalesTeamTools.com.

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I’m a gadget guy so, this post on SalesTeamTools.com got my attention.  Great suggestions for using your camera phone to help you sell.  There are some really good ideas here!

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I’ve got a young family and so, I don’t get “out” like I used to…

Last week, I let an old college buddy talk me into meeting him out for a beer or two after work.

Didn’t spend too much time or have too much fun but, the topper was when I walked outside, I discovered my car had been broken into and my computer stolen.

Ouch!

When your technology is ripped away, you realize what it really means to you.

The good news - So many of the systems I depend on are hosted on the web that I was able to get the things done that needed to be done.

The bad news - you get things the way you like them with time.  When its all disrupted, you can function efficiently and its frustrating.

All this made me realize how much I depend on Internet based marketing efforts.  I spend a couple of hours a day tweaking PPC campaigns, blogging, etc. and it works.

And still, when I ask most of my clients if they’re marketing on the Internet, I hear “Well, our website is almost ready for release.”

Its like I’m in a parallel universe.  My clients have almost no experience with the kind of marketing I take advantage of everyday.

For any sales person or business owner in any industry, you have got to try it.   I know you’ve read all the stuff online about “Cold Calling is Dead”, etc.  Its not dead but, there darn sure is an easier way.

When you reach out to someone through traditional advertising or cold calling, you start an education process that may lead to a purchase after a few steps.

When someone searches for you online, you already know they want what you have.

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I once worked with a sales veteran who could show up and sit down in just about any situation and start building relationships and closing sales almost instantly.  His secret weapon was that he had worked for a Xerox distributor early in his career and had participated in a lot of Xerox sales training.

This guy had absconded with a copy of this huge binder that he had received as a part of this training.  The binder was an excruciatingly detailed sales process for selling copiers.  It had detailed step by step instructions for every scenario…  if its a referral, do it this way, if its a cold lead, do it that way, etc….  Each individual process was very detailed…

Call and say this.

Send this letter, then wait 7 days.

Call again and say that.

If the prospect responds this way, then send this letter and call again in 10 days, etc.

My associate had figured out that the words in the letters or what the binder said to say in a call where not important.  What’s valuable about that binder is the detailed documentation of all the steps, the timing and all the possible branches on the tree of possible outcomes along the way.  He could apply it to selling any product or service.

In the 70’s, Xerox was known for having one of the most comprehensive sales training programs ever developed.

So, when I ran across this article by Daniel Sitter, in Idea Sellers, I had to pass it along!

Actual video of Xerox President Joe Wilson from back in the 60’s.  The video is of Joe welcoming a group of new reps to their training program.

Its still timely and moving.

I hope you enjoy!

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That’s right, I said “put them in a bucket”…

Of course, what I mean is to categorize them.  There are all kinds of potential markets and customers for your business out there.  You need to know which ones are the most profitable for you.  I call them “buckets”.

You can only carry 2 or 3 real buckets at a time.  Its the same in marketing your business.  You have to divide and conquer.  Each bucket has certain needs.

If you’re not sure which buckets are most profitable, then identifying the buckets and who’s in which one is the first step.

The pay off is that you can then create touch marketing campaigns that are extremely effective and affordable.  Of course you can target your sales approach to each bucket also.  The bucket analogy has to do with the touch marketing part though….  Your marketing campaigns pour leads into each bucket and then your sales efforts pour money out of the buckets!

Bottom line, if you better understand who you’re dealing with, you can better serve them. So keeping detailed notes and files on each customer is a way to “know” everything about them but, its hard to quickly use that information.

If you identify objective facts that define each bucket, you’ll be able to quickly ask a customer a few simple questions and know a LOT about them.

So, how do we know what the key facts are?

Some things are obvious - industry, size (employees, revenue, locations, etc.), title, income, etc.

Pick one of the most obvious and easily identifiable things you need to know about a prospect and make a list of all the possible categories - if its industry, then your list might be Real Estate, Financial Services, Residential Construction, etc.

Now, imagine that you’re at a cocktail party and a friend is telling you about his uncle who he thinks might be a prospect for you.  What would you ask your friend about him?  The key here is not to focus on what you ask your prospects.  That’s because you often can’t ask them questions as directly as you would like to.  So, imagine your asking a 3rd party who knows them and trusts you.  There’s nothing you can’t ask.

You’d ask your friend things directed at understanding whether you should spend your time pursuing his uncle right?

What is the problem or desire your product or service addresses? What can you ask your friend to know if the prospect has that problem or desire?

These are the questions you need to get written down.

Now keep the answers to these questions front and center for everyone on your staff.  Your receptionist should know exactly which bucket a customer is in immediately when the call comes in.

Happy selling!

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In front of the customer, they’re instinctive…

But somehow, they’re tough to write down on a piece of paper.

Your qualification questions.  The questions you ask a prospect so that you understand they’re needs and what solutions you may have that they’ll see value in.

So you’re asking, why do I need to put them in writing?

Well the obvious answers are:

1. So you can select market segments to target.
2. So you can teach others to do it too.
3. So you can create things like web forms that pre-qualify leads for you by asking some of these questions.

But there’s another reason to firm up your grasp on what you need to know about a prospect - so you can be a better sales person!

How do you know who’s hot and who’s not?  Do you just remember?  Do you have notes written down that you can review to devine the quality of each lead?

That’s great but, its not good enough in this brave new world!

Here’s why:

There is a limit to the number of relationships you can manage in your head.  Pat Sullivan, the founder of ACT!, says you can multiply that # by 5 fold if you use a database to do it.  Imagine increasing your pipeline of potential sales by 5 fold!

The most productive activity a sales person undertakes is contacting customers.  In most businesses, you have to call a prospect a few times just to get them on the phone.  Most times you dial the phone, you get voice mail, gate keepers, etc.  If you have to read anecdotal notes before each dial of the phone, you wasting time repeatedly for each prospect.  Putting the key information in quickly visible and understandable form allows you to dial more often and contact more customers.

Having your prospects in a list or database that includes this key information and can be sorted or searched using these criteria allows you to quickly pull up a call list for today or a list of customers to send a certain product announcement to.

The tough part is getting that seat of the pants questioning that you’re so good at into a managable set of database fields.

When you do, you can create a simple call sheet that lists the questions and the most popular answers.  When you’re talking with a prospect, you just circle the answers that apply.  This is a good way to test your first draft of the questions.

Then make them fields in your contact management system.  Create drop down lists for the answers that are most common.

Now, when you’re on the phone, you instantly know which questions you’ve already asked and which still need to be asked.  You can record the answers with a couple of clicks.

More tomorrow on a simple approach to getting the questions on paper.

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