5 habits of really successful B2B sales people.

5 habits of really successful B2B sales people.

May 30, 2017 | Customers, Sales

Last week, I was unfortunately the target of an unwanted sales pitch from someone who would not take ‘Not today’ or ‘No thank you’ or  ‘I am not interested’ or ‘Piss off I am busy’  as an adequate response to his ministrations.

Clearly he had been to a sales training course that had at its core,  the ‘ignore any feedback you might get, plough on regardless using this template‘ school of selling. This morning I stumbled across this video on YouTube, that nailed exactly the situation, except I was not in an office.

Sales is the key function in any business, without sales, there is no business.  Why is it then that sales people are often towards the bottom of the organisational totem, why do we allow anyone but our most trusted, intelligent, persuasive, sales trained, and effective employees anywhere near our source of revenue… customers.

Really effective sales people, those who bring in business that sticks, should be well rewarded, after all, they can easily go to your competition.

What sets the great sales people apart? How can you pick them?

Seems to me there are several characteristics that make super salespeople, based on years of watching them.

They speak to you as they would to their best friend.  The bloke in the video above not only worked to a script which did not fit the situation, he was absolutely full of faux enthusiasm, a sure sign of snake oil to come. If you want to engage someone, it pays to be respectful,  to seek their permission to speak, and deliver a message, and do it with humility that implies that you are doing them a favour, as you would your best friend, just because you can.

They build trust. Trust is a vastly overused word in sales training, everyone advises to build it, then sets about destroying any possibility by being assertive and overpromising. Trust is built on performance, not promises, so demonstrate that you deliver. Humans build trust in others by actually seeing evidence that they do what they say they will do, or by having those we already trust assure us of their veracity. This is why testimonials work on websites but they must be videoed, the person specifically identified, and they must be similar to you to be trusted. You would not trust the sales manager of ABC used cars to tell you the truth about their exemplary customer service, but you might trust someone who looks and sounds like you saying that they had great service from ABC used cars.  Your prospects must feel like they are buying from you, not that you are selling to them. The hard sell is out, it can work in some transactional and low value situations, but almost always leaves a bad taste that removes the possibility of a repeat.

Only subtle Anchoring is used. Anchoring is perhaps the most used sales tactic there is, you see it every day, and it screams ‘ hard sell’. Again, it can and often does work, it generates immediacy and urgency, which is why we have legislation that invokes a ‘cooling off’ period in some circumstances. Anchoring is when you see something promoted with words similar to ‘Normally this will cost $300 but if you buy in the next 10 minutes, we will give you this once only offer of this magnificent thingo for only $39.95‘. It does sound like a bargain, only because of the contrast between the so called ‘normal’ price and the deal not because $39.95 is itself a great deal. Anchoring does not have to be about price, although it most often is. Anchoring is about contrast, good vs bad, them vs us, up Vs down, any contrast will do.

They give reasons. When you give a prospect a reason ‘why’ that is credible to them, they will feel somewhat compelled to agree with you. This is the discipline of communicating the benefits rather than the features, and the more personal the benefit the better. A reason delivered with the word ‘because’ is always more powerful. ‘I want you to have this gizmo because it will double your productivity‘ rather than ‘This gizmo will double your productivity’. People are not silly, they know you are selling something, but if they believe that the reason you are selling to them is that you are looking out for them, that it is for their benefit rather than yours that you are having this conversation, they will tend to trust you, just that little bit more. It also puts the onus of making the decision onto them, so they will have a far greater commitment to the decision, than if they feel you pushed them into it.

They sell to the heart, not the head. We all know this, but so often we sell to the head because it seems  easier, and certainly requires less work. It is clear that nobody buys an expensive sports car because it will cover the standing 1/4 in under 5 seconds, they buy it because it tells everyone else that they can. Understanding the emotional triggers that apply in any selling situation rather than relying on the rational ones, which are always more  obvious,  will make you far more effective.

Call me when I can help you be more effective.

Header image courtesy www.gapingvoid.com. I use Hugh McLeod’s insights quite a bit

9 steps to making cold calling work for you

9 steps to making cold calling work for you

May 11, 2017 | Communication, Customers, Sales

I find cold calling really difficult, while recognising the potential effectiveness when the inertia is overcome.

For me,  it takes time and emotional energy far greater than the return I have ever got from cold calling, except when I have run  out of options, then it seems to work. When the instinctive fear of failure is overcome by the necessity to take a step, when the fear of failure, or rejection is beaten by the fear of not being able to feed the kids or pay the bill on the fridge, the fear of rejection by a stranger seems trivial.

What does it really matter if you are rejected by a complete stranger anyway?

A friend of mine treats cold calling as a game, she does it for a living, and is very good at it.

Recently I sat down with her to try and extract from her routine a scalable cold calling template, and realised two things:

  1. The fear of failure was crippling
  2. Cold calling is pretty much the same as sending a cold email , which I am OK at.

Her advice was to get over the fear, and she referred me to this terrific TED talk, and to treat cold calling with just the same set of disciplines I used for cold emailing.

I have a process for developing email success that I use as a coaching outline for those I work with, and it almost always gets great results when applied sensibly. However, adding Jia jiang’s Ted talk will add greatly to the effectiveness of the following pretty standard management process to increase your effectiveness.

Segment your list.  The better you know the prospect who answers the phone, the more likely you will have a successful call. The more defined your call list, with unique messaging and value propositions developed for each segment, the better. This is as different from the completely random call you get as you are sitting down to dinner in the evening, from someone in a call centre flogging home insulation, insurance or a holiday, as it can be.

Headline. The first sentence in a phone call, or headline in an email carry the same responsibility: to pique the interest of the receiver. Fail in the first glance of a headline, or 5 seconds of a call, and it is a long hard road back. There are plenty of headline generating tools around, but the best lesson in my experience is to go to the local newsagent, and just think about the headlines on the cover of the magazines you see. They are aimed to grab attention, and direct the reader to the following sub  head, which leads into the magazine article.

Them not you. Make the message about them, and the things that interest them, not about you, as generally they will not be interested, and you will have lost them. You need to  be able to spell out exactly how you can help them.

Be a peer. Speak and write like a peer, not a supplicant sales person. There are few worse sales turn-offs than a “needy” caller. Much better to be a busy peer, making a little time in a crazy schedule because you have discovered something that you think will be of value to them.

Credibility. Be credible by providing social proof, or better yet, a referral from someone the receiver knows and respects.

Personalise. Ensure everything is personalised, anything less than a highly personalised call will almost always fail. It is necessary for you to have done the research, to know a fair bit about the receiver, the problems they face in their role, and the value of a solution you may be able to provide. Making a call to the switch of a target company and asking to be transferred to the “person responsible for XXX” is a waste of everybody’s time.

Respect. Time is our most valuable resource, so respect the receivers time by keeping it short, but to the point, ending with some sort of call to action by you or them. However, the CTA needs to be consistent with the context of the conversation. Early stages may lead to a further conversation, or the inclusion of someone else, but rarely to a sale on first contact. Generally the objective is to get some sort of positive response, a step towards a sale, but not a sale, yet.

Differentiate yourself. If you are just the same as everybody else, why should the person you are trying to engage bother with you? While the call has to be about them, and not you, it is also about articulating the way that you can help  them in ways others cannot. The necessity here is that you have done some homework, at least enough to have a shot at articulating the solution you may have to a problem they face, or opportunity they may be unaware of. Differentiation early in the conversation offers a reason why they should continue to give you their time, and builds the status you have in the conversation, you are not just another cold caller.

Follow up. And follow up again, and again, politely and with respect. Generally sales people give up at about 3, whereas all the research indicates that 5-7 follow  ups are the point at which the ability to convert increases significantly. It reflects the old advice about advertising frequency, at about the time you are getting sick of the ad, if it is worth anything, the target audience is just building awareness of your proposition.

 

So, what is stopping you, pick up the bloody phone!

 

Photo courtesy Nancy Rose via Flikr.

 

Can you shrink your way to prosperity?

Can you shrink your way to prosperity?

Apr 21, 2017 | Customers, Strategy

There is the old story of the successful large business becoming an unsuccessful smaller one. Usually it is accompanied by stories of missed opportunities, poor strategies and a focus on cost cutting.

The poster boy for this transformation in my personal experience is Goodman Fielder, for whom I have worked on two occasions. First as a youthful marketing person in the glory days, when Meadow Lea was changing the spreads market by congratulating its consumers for their choice of margarine, and later as a General Management contractor tarting up one of their smaller business units for sale, as it shrunk its way to near oblivion.

To be successful in any commercial arena means that you have created value for someone else. It is a simple truism of business that only be creating value do you attract customers, the support of your value chains, and as a result, revenue.

Businesses do have the tendency to attract overheads, the way a boat attracts barnacles. They attach themselves to the structures and they slow you down, reduce manoeuvrability, and can eventually sink you. You cannot be prosperous while carting around the commercial equivalent of a barnacle covered hull. Cleaning off the commercial barnacles may result in some size reduction initially, but it also increases the potential to add value, agility, and sensitivity to the needs of your markets, so growth is the outcome when the cleaning is done well.

Growth is part of our DNA, it is a mind-set necessary for success.

Who would want to work for, or deal with a company that was overtly focused on squeezing out the maximum dollars from a transaction and relationship? You know the motivation is about their interests, so It would be easy to believe the service, quality, and longevity would be compromised by such a focus.

By contrast, who would not want to engage with a company growing quickly, innovating, and delivering value to customers, and offering opportunity to its employees.

Cost cutting is one thing, using your resources wisely to create value is another, and they are profoundly different.

Photo credit Wes Iverson https://www.flickr.com/photos/62425933@N04/7398646344/

 

Competition for attention creates Opportunity

Competition for attention creates Opportunity

Apr 12, 2017 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing

The nature of competition has changed dramatically in the last decade.

We no longer live in a world where information is limited and controlled, where the old truism that information is power  gave the few power over the rest of us applies.

It is no longer a competition amongst a few cashed up suppliers to use the power of advertising in a few tightly controlled communication channels to stuff the supply chain to limit our choices.

It is no longer a supply chain controlled by a very few of those who are able to supply, it is a demand chain, under the personal control of those who have a need.

It is now a competition for our attention.

Those with the money in their pockets, or at least access to it, have all the power, as there are literally millions of channels by which we can be reached.

I love the work of Hugh McLeod, have been following him for a long time, as those regular readers of StrategyAudit will know from the numerous times I have used his images as headers. It is because he is able to do with a few squiggles, what Albert Einstein recommended when he said ‘everything should be made as simple as possible, no simpler‘.

This post, and the borrowed header,  I felt really reduced the marketing task down to its simplest form. Gain the attention of people who care, those to whom your value proposition is relevant, and you have a chance to make a difference.

 

Are you solving the customers real problem?

Are you solving the customers real problem?

Mar 10, 2017 | Change, Customers, Marketing

Marketers spend huge amounts of effort and money trying to define the problems they solve for their customers and potential customers. Often they fail simply because they do not understand their customers motivations sufficiently well, or they are overwhelmed by the great, world beating features the engineers have built in.

Customers do not care about your features, they only care about the outcomes for them that come with use.

There is a process that leads from the prospect being identified through to the initial transaction, then the development of a mutually beneficial relationship

At each point in that journey, in order to build the relationship, marketers have learnt that stories are by far the best way to go about it.

There appears to be three types of stories, and these are prevalent not just in marketing, but everywhere we look that stories are told. Books, movies, the theatre, and even advertisements.

External: These are the superficial obvious pieces of the narrative, but do not go to the heart of  the reasons why things are happening. The role the external story plays is that it provides the context for the real messages being delivered.

Internal: The internal parts of a story is usually all about how the protagonists feel about themselves, and those with whom they interact, how they behave under different circumstances.

Philosophical: This about the basic motivators of human behaviour, and the roles being played. Good vs Evil, Envy vs generosity,  Us vs Them, and Right Vs Wrong.

Consider the original Star Wars movie. The external story is about the development of Luke from a boy to a trainee Jedi, and the trials that are encountered as he and his acquired companions try to keep out of the clutches of the Empire.

The Internal story is about the angst and confusion felt by a boy suddenly thrust into a strange world that is trying to kill him and his companions.

The philosophical story is about the battle between good and evil, which comes to a head in the climatic fight scene.

When considering the elements that make up your brand story, remember that customers buy solutions to internal and philosophical problems, not the external ones, as they do not really matter beyond a question of price.

In other words, do not bother selling the features, sell the beneficial outcomes of use.

This works for simple products as well as it does for a complex one.

One of my clients provides a specialist engineering service to large scale manufacturing plants and infrastructure. The external story is that they do a really great job in a potentially dangerous and  highly regulated area. The internal story is about the absolute confidence that clients can have in the technical and project management skills they deliver. The philosophical story is about the need to retain some of these key skills in Australia, as once gone, like the Tassie tiger, will not come back, and the impact of that is long term and painful to us all.

 

Why the accepted notion of ‘Brand Loyalty’ is rubbish

Why the accepted notion of ‘Brand Loyalty’ is rubbish

Mar 6, 2017 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

Brand loyalty, and one step further, finding those few  users of the brand who will use no other, and demand their networks do the same, is the holy grail of most marketing. It comes up in almost every marketing brief ever written.

However, there is almost always a flaw in the logic I see used.

Heavy and exclusive use of a brand is interpreted as brand loyalty, and occasional users are disregarded except as a possible opportunity to increase usage, if they are even picked up in the data. Consumers usually have a small pool of acceptable brands, and expect to be satisfied by the product they buy, whatever the usage, or they do not return. The brand is just one of the the filtering mechanisms of varying strength they use to make the choice easier.

While loyalty and heavy usage may be in a very few cases generated by the brand, it may also be that the heavy usage is just habit, availability, convenience, the shape of the package, or many other factors other than a behaviour changing loyalty to the brand.

Heavy usage and brand loyalty do not always have a cause and effect relationship. There is certainly a strong correlation, not necessarily causation.

My father would only use one brand of mustard powder, a blindingly hot concoction he used sparingly on an occasional sandwich. The stuff was only purchased once every blue moon, as he was the only one in the household who would go near it. Far from heavy use, but very loyal.

Conversely, if you look in my sisters fridge, there is only ever one brand of natural yogurt, and she consumes a kilo or more a week, in a number of ways. However, the choice is driven not by  the brand, although it is entirely satisfactory, but by the fact that the small supermarket she stops at every couple of days on the way home because  of the easy parking and friendly environment, to buy her milk, and a few other staples, only carries that one brand. Convenience drives the purchase, not loyalty.

Anyway, the nonsense that gets touted around by snake-oil sellers about consumers wanting to have a relationship with their brand is just so much crap it makes me sick. Brand loyalty is a rare thing, and is always, always given as a part of a whole package of value that is delivered consistently by the product to the consumer.

Consumers want a lot of things from  their favoured brands, but only a very few with some sort of emotional incapacity see a brand as a substitute for a human relationship, so lets stop talking about it as if it were.

My thanks again to Tom Fishburne.https://marketoonist.com/ When I went looking for a visual for this post, this cartoon says it perfectly.