Strategic Sales & Marketing Solutions

As we approach the end of October and head into the November-December year end, there are a few things you need to understand as a Salesperson-slash-Strategic Marketing Professional:

1). MANY…far TOO MANY…business owners took a “time out” for the entire YEAR of 2009 when it came to strategically marketing their businesses.

2). Item #1 above, by default, created the return of “low hanging fruit”…the “market share” created by business owners too frightened to market their own businesses.

3). Many business owners have hypnotized themselves into believing that January 1, 2010 is a magic date…a date upon which the Heavens will rain gold coins upon their heads for “renewing” their marketing efforts.

4). The business owners are kidding themselves, because…through their own actions, or lack of them…they have knowingly and willingly surrendered their success to the business owners who remained committed to their businesses and continued to brand and market their offerings in 2009, no matter HOW much it hurt, no matter WHAT sacrifice was required.

There are NO “victims” in 2009…ONLY “volunteers.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”

Anyone still hiding and hoping for a windfall of cash on 1/1/10 needs to wake up, and wake up NOW.

OR…just surrender. That’s it, plain and simple. Let your competitors harvest ALL of the fruit.

WHAT is stopping YOU?

Understanding the Fear

The underlying reason for poor performance (and low productivity) when setting first appointments on the telephone is a lethal combination of Fear and Pain.

The Primary Fear is one of sounding stupid, or unprofessional, in front of a target when you get them on the phone. You fear that once you have a target on the phone, you will stumble and fail to convert the conversation into an appointment. This is not a fear of rejection: we are sales people and rejection comes with the territory. No, this is a fear that comes from not having mastered the simple, but critical, sales skill of converting a conversation into an appointment.

The Second Fear is that you are not “working” the target correctly; that you are in a random pursuit. A call here, a call there; leave this voicemail and craft an email to say what, exactly. You flail and you fear your results will correspondingly flail: your efforts will be ineffective.

The Third Fear is the dread in starting a process that you inherently believe is unproductive and painful. You have the same hesitation and take the same deep breath you would take before starting to rake leaves with a shovel in a wind storm. Experience says that there is no efficient way to do this task with this tool in this environment.

The Pain in prospecting is entirely mechanical (and, arguably, fosters the third Fear.) The tool kit you currently use to manage your calling, to record results and to generate reports requires a fairly high degree of “software literacy and operation.” You must correctly sequence through multiple screens to operate the correct pursuit process (that you may remember from sales training.) And, it always feels like you spend more time navigating the software than you spend talking on the phone.

OK, now what?

To address and resolve these issues, proper attention must be given to the three (3) core elements for developing an effective calling or business development process and make these elements easy for the caller to execute. These three areas are:

Art (Skills Training): A proven way to improve the ability to control the flow of the conversation, to handle pushbacks and to secure an agreement to meet. The Art defines how to deftly and professionally handle the predictable negative responses to a request for an appointment and still secure an appointment. There is a confidence that comes from being able to control the conversation. Having the skill to turn the “I’m not interested, I’m too busy, Send me something” into conversations and then into appointments.

Best Practice (Methodology): Sets in place the specific pursuit of any group of suspects including how many times to call, the frequency of those calls and the messaging used in voicemails, emails, and/or videos. Developing a Best Practice will eliminate the feeling of flailing or being caught up in a random pursuit going nowhere.

Science (Technology): A proven, specialized process engine that enables callers to execute the pursuit of multiple Best Practices (cycles) very precisely and in the most efficient way. Generate Automatic metric reports so callers can manage their activity and in larger organizations the reported activity will assist first level management in coaching and any level of upper management in forecasting based on previous and predictable activity levels.

A process can now be put in place to improve the process over time and hold everyone in the organization accountable for the business development activity necessary for success.

Further on Reporting and Metrics:

While most sales meeting focus on leveraging success once an opportunity is in the pipeline, proper attention (in sales meetings) should be given to the way sales teams use the telephone to find new business to keep pipelines filled. Accurate and automatic metric reporting facilitates this process but management and callers themselves currently lack this necessary information because it is unavailable to them or is not easy to assimilate with the current available technology.

Also, being able to understand and track information such as how many initial appointments are needed for a sales person or sales team to achieve quota, how many conversations are needed to get those appointments, how many calls are needed to make my conversation goal give a definite purpose, direction and ability to improve the calling process over time.

The solution is to set up a calling process that will automatically report on what a sales rep has done and is generated from a program the sales rep embraces because it works. A good sales rep will adopt any process that works and if that process provides accurate reports as a byproduct, then everyone wins.

Roger Hamilton is Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Contact Science and may be reached at 214-483-5800 or via email at rhamilton@klpz.com. The Cold Calling 101 system combines prospecting effectiveness with prospecting efficiency, creating the first holistic solution that allows companies (and independent professionals) to design a combined and custom solution to their telephone prospecting process that addresses their total sales picture.

More calls in less time, with more conversations converted into appointments and activity reports generated automatically.

Charles Stanley shares a funny little story in his book Our Unmet Needs. There’s more than a little wisdom here for salespeople…

A young man was discussing his love life – or rather, his lack of a love life – with his grandfather. He admitted to his grandfather that he hadn’t been out on a date in several months. He finally gave a big sigh and said to his grandfather, “Gramps, I guess I’m just going to have to trust God to send me a wife.”

His grandfather replied with a twinkle in his eye, “I suspect that God would be a lot more eager to help you if He knew that you had the nerve to ask the girl He sends you out on a date.”

As entrepreneurs and business owners, we all have dreams of closing sales beyond our wildest dreams, signing up lots of clients, and making more money than we ever thought possible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen as quickly as we’d like it to.

Many entrepreneurs and business owners come to me frustrated with their lack of sales, hoping to learn specific sales skills to turn around their businesses. They hope by learning new selling techniques, their sales will quickly grow and their businesses will flourish.

Some of my clients quickly apply the sales skills I teach, reaching extraordinary levels of success, while other clients reach minimal sales success. Why was this happening for some and not for the others? Both groups had the same level of experience, yet the level of success was significantly different.

At first, I was puzzled, frustrated, and saddened I could not make a difference for all my clients. Over time, it became clear I could share all my sales knowledge and show my clients everything I knew about sales; however, it was up to them to make it happen. I realized it took more than just learning the right sales skills; it took shifting the mindset.

A crucial key to unlocking unlimited abundance in business and life starts with shifting our inner mindset. Unfortunately, many people work really hard getting minimal sales results because of their mindset. On one hand, they want to break through their barriers. On the other hand, they allow their emotions to keep them from making the changes necessary to expand their businesses.

You can learn all the skills, techniques, and strategies; however, without a positive inner mindset, your financial success is limited. If you want to create an abundance of sales and clients coming to you, it starts with shifting your mindset.

When you shift your inner mindset, you make the decision to rewrite the way you think. By changing the way you think, you’re changing the direction of your life. You’re now becoming the author of your life. Then you’ll begin to attract everything you want with ease.

As a coach and mentor, I am always learning from my clients. I saw in my own business how I would reach a certain level of success and then stop. I knew deep in my heart I could achieve much more, yet I was afraid of taking the leap. So I started studying with the experts, taking personal growth workshops, and reading more self-growth books than I can keep count.

As I made these internal changes to my thinking, something magical began to happen. I began to appreciate what I have, started “being” in my business rather than “doing,” and let go of the worry. I’m now taking bigger steps in my business and following my purpose. New opportunities are coming my way and it’s because I’m letting go of the fear.

From the journey I’ve taken and I’m happily still on, I saw there was a process I followed that opened me up to receiving abundance in my business. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and created 5 key steps to follow that will change how you are being in your business and help you easily attract an abundance of everything you want.

1. Shifting the Mindset. You must first believe you can. As soon as you have a doubt, fear, or worry, those feelings take away from believing. Your thoughts, emotions, and actions must be congruent with your belief so that the universe can give you what you want. Your thoughts and feelings create your reality.

2. The Power of Choice. You get to choose the direction you want your life to go. Through the power of choice, you decide how you want to create your life to be. What occurs in your life is not by accident. It’s a result of the choices you’ve made. Are you choosing to live your life powerfully or are you blaming others? Are you choosing to take responsibility for the growth of your business or are you blaming circumstances?

3. 100% Responsible. Responsibility starts with being accountable for every aspect of your life. When you can recognize, acknowledge, and own that you are responsible for your life, you experience a new level of freedom, power and ease in your life. When you’re being responsible, you’re no longer at the affect of any circumstances that come your way. There’s no complaining or blaming others. You know that the buck stops with you.

4. Moving Beyond What’s Stopping You. What have you been putting up with, tolerating, or trying to change? Whatever you put up with drains your energy and keeps you stuck in the same place. Do you make excuses for not going forward in your business? What’s the excuse really covering up? It’s probably an underlying fear that you’re holding onto. When you make the decision to move past where you’re stopped, all tolerations, excuses and fears will lose their power over you.

5. Letting Go of the Past. Are you letting past experiences keep you from moving forward? Some of our past experiences keep us from appreciating what we have in the present because we believe it will happen again. These experiences affect how we communicate, relate to others, grow our business, and even stop us from going after all the things we really want. By letting go of the past, you’re free to attract anything you want in your life and your business. You now have a blank slate from which to create anything and everything!

I believe by applying these steps to your business, you’ll begin to experience a shift in how you sell and interact with clients. You’re now becoming a master of the inner game of sales. I invite you to follow these steps to opening your mind to unlimited sales success.

Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

In the movie My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci plays novice attorney Vincent ‘Vinny’ Gambini, a man who can’t get anything right. All of a sudden, Vinny finds…for lack of a better word…his “mojo,” and now he can do no wrong.

There’s one moment in the film that should speak volumes to any professional salesman. Fully confident, fully aware of his powers, Vinny struts away from a completed witness interview proclaiming “Now I’m finished wit’ DIS guy!”

In the prospecting phase of selling, we often spend too much time “processing” a lack of interest. We need to be skilled in qualifying our prospects. They need three things, and three things only:

1). A need for / interest in our products or services.

2). Willingness to buy right now. Not tomorrow, not next week, noth next month, not after the first of the year, now.

3) the means to buy right now, A.K.A. money.

Before you spend unnecessary time in the presentation phase, you need to work through the checklist above. If the answer to one or more questions is “no,” your immediate response should be “Now I’m finished wit’ DIS guy!”

But don’t take it from me.

Take it from your cousin Vinny.

Happy selling, and never give up.

Up Your Sales with a Simple Strategy

Do you have a sales strategy plan for growing your business and bringing in more sales?

The dictionary’s definition of a “strategy” is a plan of action intended to accomplish a specific goal; a method of making, doing, or accomplishing something.

Your sales strategy plan is a very clear statement of what your business has to do for you to achieve your sales goals. The wonderful thing about having a plan is it gives you a sense of control over the direction of change in your life.

Now, the type of plan I’m talking about is a plan for growing your sales and clients. If you’re serious about doubling your sales and bringing in tons more clients, you have to know how you’re going to do it.

The key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you want, and write it down. If you don’t put it into existence, you don’t own it.

Sadly, most people spend little or no time working on their sales strategy plan. Without a clear plan of what it is you want to accomplish and how you’re going to accomplish it, chances are you won’t reach all your goals.

I recently spoke to a business owner who was struggling closing sales. When I asked her how she sold her services, she said by calling people she knew. She thought if she just reached more people, she’d get more appointments, and make more money.

I asked her what else she’s doing to market her business? She said, “I’m planning to network; however, things keep getting in the way. And, I hope to create my website shortly.” She was vague and unclear about what steps to take, and easily getting sidetracked by other tasks without a clear plan to follow.

Let me share with you the process I followed to create a sales strategy plan for my client, Judy, and the results that followed:

The Situation
Judy is the owner of a tile and stone company. She dreamt of producing a website and creating a brochure; however, without clear steps to follow, she easily became distracted by the daily details of her business. Her dream looked like it was going to remain a dream.

Judy came to me because she lacked focus and direction. Without clarity and a clear sense of how to increase her sales, she was confused and overwhelmed with the responsibility of owning a business. She clearly was not running her business; her business was running her.

The Process
Early on, I had Judy create 3 specific and vivid goals she wanted to achieve in the first 3 months. With each goal she listed the action steps to take and a due date for each step. We divided the goals into business, sales, and marketing categories.

Before Judy got into action, I had her make a list of all the barriers she had that were keeping her from reaching her goals. She saw she had some fears that were keeping her stuck. These same fears were also stopping her in other areas of her life as well. I helped Judy understand these fears were not real and what needed to be done was to take action. The more she moved forward, the less fearful she felt. Judy began to feel freed up and energized about her business!

The Results
Judy now had a clear vision of what she wanted her business to look like. With her renewed energy, she continued to be more productive and in action, and the results happened almost immediately. Her dreams became real. She produced a beautiful brochure to give to her customers, created a website that professionally showcased her company, and designed a new logo. With the new company image, sales increased by 60%! Judy is now running her business; her business is no longer running her.

A clear and concise sales strategy plan provided Judy with a step-by-step process that gave her clarity and direction. She quickly started closing more sales, signing on more clients, and making more money.

With her own sales strategy plan, she mapped a clear pathway to reaching all her dreams and goals.

Rochelle Togo-Figa, The Sales Breakthrough Expert, is the creator of the Sales Breakthrough System™, a proven step-by-step sales process that will help you close more sales, sign on more clients and make more money with ease and velocity. To sign up for her free sales articles and teleclasses on closing more sales, visit www.SalesBreakthroughs.com.

A stomach for great slabs of fortune: In the body of wisdom, a big mouth is an organ of no minor importance, because great capacity requires large portions. One worthy of more will not be gorged by good fortune. One person’s indigestion is another’s appetite. Many get sick when the food is rich, because they are naturally weak. They are neither accustomed to nor born to high living. The business sours on them, and they get dizzy on the fumes of their unearned distinction. They run great danger in their high places, unable to maintain themselves in them because unaccustomed. So let the really big person display the capacity for even larger enterprise, and scupulously avoid anything that suggests a faint heart.

“All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success.” – Dorothea Brande

Know how to help yourself. There is no better companion in the great struggles of life than a stout heart. When it flags it must be supported by the organs that stand about. Anxieties grow less in one who knows how to defend himself. Never surrender to fate, for then she ends by making herseelf intolerable. Some help themselves little with their burdens; in fact they double them because they do not know how to carry them. One who really knows himself brings thought to the support of his frailities. Wherefore the person of intelligence comes out victorious from under everything, even the unlucky stars.

The Art Of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian

Every time our economy stumbles, we hear those four magic words: “Work Harder, Not Smarter.” We find ourselves surrounded by catch phrases like “productivity gains,” which can often be a euphemism for “We just fired the person in the cubicle next to yours, so now you will be doing your job as well as his.”

When times get tough, the tough occasionally want to intellectualize. You can think yourself out of a lot of problems in life, but you can’t think your way out of a hole. You have to grab the rope and start climbing. Falling into the “work smarter, not harder” trap is nothing more than an excuse for you to cease working and start daydreaming. Successful selling is never a matter of what you know. It’s a matter of what you do with what you know. While all living and breathing creatures must evolve, maybe the problem isn’t the fact that you need a new game plan. Maybe you have a great one and you simply are not working it hard enough.

This doesn’t mean that continuing education should be absent from your Professional Selling career…quite the contrary. You must learn something new every day. But you must learn while doing. Greatness has never been achieved strictly through the pursuit of knowledge. Greatness is achieved by learning and applying that knowledge, by taking action and risks and falling down and getting up and doing it all over again.

Professional Selling is built on a foundation of several pillars that may vary in appearance, but are always consistent in principle.

First, you must love the art of selling. If you don’t, you will never be a successful salesperson. You must embrace selling as your chosen profession and you must have a deep, burning desire to excel. When you show up for a job that you don’t like…maybe even a job that you hate…you watch the clock, contribute only the bare minimum that will keep you employed, show up late, leave early, take long lunches, surf the Web when your boss isn’t hovering over you, make personal phone calls, email your friends, and spend all day Saturday and Sunday dreading Monday morning. That’s not life. That’s a prison sentence.

Second, you must think like Elvis Presley and Take Care of Business…”T.C.B.” Elvis distributed gold-plated “T.C.B.” trinkets to the members of his “Memphis Mafia” as a constant reminder of his personal manifesto. What is your manifesto? Is it to show up late and leave early, to take care of business, or some other point in between? People must be able to trust that you will keep your word and follow through on everything you’ve promised. You will occasionally run into extreme, unpredictable circumstances which are not within your control, but most people will understand and appreciate your honesty and direct, immediate communication during these times. On the other hand, if you let something fall through the cracks because of your apathy, laziness, or neglect, you will begin to erode any trust you’ve built among your customers, colleagues, or peers, and will be on the fast track to “unemployable.”

Third, you must believe in the product or service you are selling with an unshakable sense of faith. You must believe that while you may have competitors, you have the superior offering. You must be able to back this up with client testimonials and success stories, not simple arrogance. If you do not already have this belief, or you cannot foster it over time, you are selling the wrong product or service. Get out now and find the right scenario for you.

Fourth, you must embrace the age-old goal setting wisdom that dictates you will strive for “this or something better.” You can never control the final outcome. You might meet a prospect and close the sale after one or two brief conversations. You might also invest considerable time in proposals or consultations, only to find that the prospect is either price shopping or just curious, with no means or motivation to buy in the near or distant future. Both of these scenarios are realities along the Professional Selling landscape. You must accept what is in your cup, whether it is fine wine or ashes, and realize that your path is a forward one. You have no time for self-pity, anger, hurt, or resentment. As you are driving away from your failed sales call, struggling with your emotions, your prospect is buying a candy bar from the vending machine and thinking about 100 other things that don’t involve you. Celebrate the successes and move on. Acknowledge the lesson in the defeats and move on. Never stand still.

Fifth, always earn the sale. The exact moment in which you earn the respect, admiration, and future referrals from your customers is the exact moment in which you give them everything they paid for, everything they expected…and you haven’t slowed down a bit. They’ve gotten everything you promised and you’re still delivering. One aspect of sales that is true in any economy, strong or weak, is that the salesperson who consistently exceeds expectations is the same salesperson who will never fret over an empty or diminished pipeline. Be as passionate about the success of your customers as if it were your own.

Finally, take the advice of a wise old friend of mine. When you are facing the lion and the lion has only one thought…to eat you…stand firm, stand tall, and look the lion straight between the eyes. Smile, and say “I hope I taste good.” Fear and weakness and doubt have no place in sales. Economies come and go. When you build your motivation on favorable circumstances and a level playing field, you will reap nothing beyond the low-hanging fruit. In a tight economy, that fruit has already been picked by your competition. You must make a stand, decide to fight, and work harder.

The overwhelming majority of limits in life are self-imposed. The concept of an “eight hour work day” is wrapped around companies who must pay overtime for anything beyond eight hours. If you are a Professional Salesperson…especially if you are a sole proprietor or entrepreneur…there is no time clock. There are no weekends.

There is only life. Life’s what is happening to you right now, while you are reading this article.

There is your work, your passion, your craft, your success. Don’t work smarter. Work harder. You already know what to do and how to do it. You’re just not doing enough of it. Make a decision right now to change that behavior. You can do it, and you will see immediate results.