May 21, 2015 | Customers, Sales
Making an offer they cannot refuse is the ultimate selling outcome, notwithstanding the limitations of the law, and common decency.
So how do you make a Godfather offer?
- Know your customer intimately
- Know their business intimately
- Know their pain-points like they were your own
- Create an offer that removes the pain-points for them
- Make the payoff compelling
- Make the payoff unique
- Present the offer like your life depended on it, with passion, conviction, and from the receivers perspective.
- Create tension in the decision by ensuring there is a decision time after which the offer is off the table.
This works pretty much all the time.
When you are able to the identify components of a problem a potential customer has, for which you have a solution that is both valuable to them, and unique, and you clearly understand all the challenges in their situation, why would they not buy from you?
May 18, 2015 | Change, Customers, Sales
mindset switch
Access to information, the tools to make up our own minds has not just changed our behaviour in the way the sales process works, it has changed our mindset.
In a fundamental way.
We believe information we source ourselves, and distrust anything we are told.
We filter the available information and make up our own minds about the bits we will accept, and blend into our version of the truth.
The power to say no” has never been stronger because there are a myriad of options available to us to get the information ourselves.
I work from a home office, and usually do not answer the home phone, as most of the time it is an unwanted cold sales call, and those who I need to be able to contact me almost always do it via the mobile or email.
However, last week I did answer the phone, and yes it was a sales call, but a pretty good one. A very nice Aussie lady, so her first language was English, rang and politely inquired if she could take a moment to speak about how her insurance company could save me a heap of money.
As it happens, I had been considering just that proposition, I am over 60, work from home, but still pay full whack contents insurance, so I had concluded that I should save some money by changing, or at least negotiating rather than just paying the auto premium.
So what happens when the nice lady rings, I surprise even myself given I had concluded that I should change and said “No thanks”.
It was not her, she did a good job, unlike most cold phone sales calls.
It was not that the timing was wrong, I had decided to do the research and take some action.
It was my mindset.
Being given information on a plate by someone who I saw as having a vested interest was automatically rejected.
Yes, I understood she could help, and that it was great timing, but the opportunity was still rejected almost without thought.
Imagine how hard it is to make a sale when all the stars are not aligned, when you cannot even get past the front door when they are!
Selling used to be a staged process with information delivered by someone who had the access you did not have, but needed to make a purchase decision.
No more.
The process has been completely disrupted and reversed, all the power is with the buyer, and if you try and sell them, even the if tools you use smell of you trying to sell them, you lose because the automatic response now is “No”
Think about it the next time you set about motivating the sales force at the Friday rev up, as you will probably just be wasting everyone’s time if you do not recognise and accommodate the mindset change that has occurred in the last decade.
May 1, 2015 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Design your sales process
Everybody in business is in one way or another, in sales.
After all, you do not make a living by giving stuff away, you actually have to sell it.
It is also true that not everybody will want your stuff, in fact, usually very few will want it, so the challenge is to find them, engage them, demonstrate the value, and then create a transaction.
All this takes time and effort, it will not happen by some sort of osmotic process, giving a bloke a sales folder, a car, and map no longer works, the sales process needs to be specifically designed to create the circumstances in which a transaction can take place.
35 years of designing them in one way or another has led to a few conclusions on the best way to go about it,
- Ensure you understand the buyer, and their buying processes. One size does not fit all, each will be different, and by whatever means you need to define their processes, pain points, and priorities so you can build messages that resonate.
- Design a detailed process. Given each prospect will be different, the process needs to be both robust and sufficiently agile to accommodate the nuances of each customer. Generally it will have a number of stages that fits the product you are selling. Office supplies will differ substantially from power stations, but the principal remain the same. Set the stages, and the triggers that move a prospect from one stage to the next.
- Develop a playbook for each stage. This will involve both the response to the persona of the prospect and delivering the type of content that they will respond to at their point in the sales cycle, the delivering the content in the most appropriate manner.
- Routinize the sales process. Like any process, a sales process is best if it works routinely, in a predictable and consistent way. Improvements then come from the anomalies and outlier things that pop up, and become very obvious simply because they are outside the norm. it may be a inquiry from a market you had never considered, or an idea on how to improve your product for a particular purpose, whatever, the sales process needs to make the odd thought obvious so it does not get missed in the welter of activity that occurs.
- Manage the metrics. Like any process, a sales funnel can be continuously improved, you can also ensure sales priorities are optimised, and KPI’s set and managed.
- Engage your sales force in the process design and ongoing improvements, and feedback loops. Over time as the process evolves and new sales people come along, to keep a sales process delivering it needs to be able to evolve at least as fast as the customers you are seeking to serve. Sales people come in many colours, like the rest of us, and managing any diverse group of people requires that they buy into the objectives of the strategies in front of them sufficiently strongly to resist the temptation to chase the new shiny thing.
None of this is easy, despite all the verbiage out there that seems to indicate it is. Designing an effective sales process takes time, effort, investment, and iteration. The good pat is that effective process design quickly pays for itself.
Apr 29, 2015 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
sales rule No. 1
Shut up!!.
I have been spending a bit of time recently helping develop and implement strategy in a very interesting start-up with an innovative, and potentially extremely valuable piece of Intellectual Capital. Even after doing this stuff for so long, there is always something to learn, and being involved with this process has brought home a lesson learnt a very long time ago about what works in sales and what does not
The founder is deeply, irrationally, in love with his product.
Usually this emotional attachment to the product is seen as a great thing, but it can be a bad mistake, as potential clients rarely share the attachment.
As a result in this case, when he finally gets to talk to someone who may have the need for such a product, he delivers a passionate diatribe about all the things the product, can do, will do, can be adjusted to do, and how it evolved. Little about how it can deliver value to these potential clients, little about the potentially substantial problem successfully addressed, and little in words the potential client would use to describe his current situation.
Yawn.
Asking questions, followed by listening intently to the answer, and reflecting that answer in another follow up question is the single best sales technique there is.
The best sales people I have ever seen always do surprisingly little talking.
If you are the seller, and you do more than 30% of the talking, you have probably failed, or will fail. You will not at first know much about the potential customer, what their problems may be, how they are currently solving the problem and what they might be thinking when you show them solution, so you need to find out.
Ask questions: even confronting ones,
Why did you take this call?
How are you solving this problem now?
What would it be worth to solve this problem quickly?
How would it feel…etc. etc.
Sales however is still a numbers game.
Not everyone, no matter how well qualified, will want or see the need for your product. So, have many sales conversations in parallel, having done sufficient research on your targets that you know them sufficiently well to control the conversation, so you do not have to do the talking.
Follow up religiously, but politely and respectfully. They may not have opened your follow up email or called you back for the 3 times you called, sometimes it means you have made not piqued their interest and will make no progress, and sometimes it is just that life can get in the way.
However, do not forget that the most important resource a small business has is their time, so you need to invest yours wisely, and your prospects will thank you or not wasting theirs.
Mar 17, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
marketing funnel
Creating a marketing funnel is the basis of all digital marketing initiatives. If you put the term into google, you get back 3 million plus responses, many of them having nice illustrations attached that in one way or another, look like a funnel, with stages and various names attached.
However, there are very few places with useful advice on how you create and manage a funnel, perhaps it is easier than I have found it.
Every situation is different, and every prospect needs to be addressed personally in some way, nevertheless, there are a number of generalised stages I have seen, which drive the manner in which you deploy the digital tools.
Step 1. Create a “Hook”. A “Hook” is something that arrests the attention of someone in the target market. This implies, accurately, that you have defined your target market in considerable detail. I am working with someone who is an expert at setting up self managed superannuation funds. His target market is the owners of small businesses that rely on the owners presence, often they are tradesmen, who are over 55, and have not put enough money away enough for retirement. The “Hook” we have evolved is “If you are over 55, and behind in savings for your retirement, you have the opportunity to use a tax effective self managed super fund which delivers a doubling of your net worth in 7 years”.
This statement is in 4 parts:
It identifies the prospect very clearly,
It is very specific about the situation the prospect finds themselves in
It tells them of a solution to the situation
It makes a big promise.
Without the very specific definition of a target market, the Hook is less effective, as it does not speak to anything specific to which a reader will relate, it becomes too general.
Step 2. Generate traffic. This can be done by a variety of means, using both paid and organic means. Organic is slower, and is centred around personal networking, blog posts, articles, and other content that gets shared on social platforms. It is a passive approach. By contrast, paid traffic generation can be very effective with the great degree of target definition that can now be generated by all the social platforms. For my self managed superannuation (SMSF) client, we are targeting the small business owners with a very specific and targeted Google Adwords campaign, coupled with an extensive organic program.
Step 3. Customer capture. Having driven traffic to a website, you need to do something with them to progress them through the steps towards a transaction. Usually this involves the download of something of value for free in exchange for a name and email address. The lead is then followed up with a staged set of automated emails that are responsive to the actions of the potential customer, often offering further “freebies”. This tactic is now so widely used that it is losing its effect, so increasingly it is being supplemented with the further offer of something of greater value still for a minimal amount, $3-7. This does two things:
It qualifies the lead as a real lead, not just a freebie follower,
It gets leads used to using their cards to purchase from you.
Step 4. Transaction development. This process can take many forms, from the gentle prompting towards a transaction that can be a highly iterative and lengthy process, to the maximisation of a sale by adding value to the original offer. By way of example, it takes me ages to come to the conclusion that I need to buy a new suit, it is a substantial cost, and occasional purchase. However, once in a shop, the opportunity to also sell me a tie, belt, shirts, and perhaps another pair of shoes is real. The upsell stage, or as McDonalds have perfected, “would you like fries with that?”
Step 5. Remarketing. Once you have a customer who has bought and hopefully had a good experience, it is easier to sell them again, and again, and over time you can build a very good picture of what they like and what they do not by their interactions with your database. Again, by way of example, I still buy a lot of books, real books from one of the few remaining bookshop chains. I have a card that gives me a discount based on purchases, yet they insist on sending me emails with offers that bear no resemblance to the purchase habits exhibited on their database via the card. Utterly stupid, and exactly the reason they will go out of business eventually. Amazon will never make that mistake, their offers are very specific and targeted to behaviour, not just of the individual, but of the cohort of individuals with similar behaviours that can be ascribed to the individual. In addition, once someone subscribes to your database, you have their permission to market to them, so irrespective of where they may be in the funnel, there should be processes in place to periodically “re-tweak” their interest.
Funnel management Toolbox. There are a range of tools, digital and otherwise, for each step in the sequence, and their relative performance is the subject of much very effective review, so I will not repeat it. Suffice to say several specific tools are necessary for any effective automation.
- Registration page . To attract the registration and manage the delivery of the “freebie” and of the leads details to the auto responder software. There are many around, but Leadpages seems to have the game pretty well sewn up. Recently both Facebook and Twitter have added “one click opt-in” capabilities to their sites that leads people directly to your autoresponder.
- Autoresponder software. Absolutely necessary, and there are a host of suppliers, from those with simple tools to those fully integrated with CRM systems with more bells and whistles than even the most sophisticated and technically savvy medium sized business will struggle with, so my advice for the small businesses where I operate, is to keep it simple. Mailchimp and Aweber are the most popular around my patch, and both work well.
- Creativity and originality. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for some of us this does not yet come in a box, or made available for download, it resides between the ears of real people.
- Customer centric copywriting skills. As with the above, not available via download. It is one thing to get all the digital tools right, but someone still has to be able to make them work to optimum levels, and the copy writing skills and experience needed are significant.
- Technology implementation . Again, somebody who knows what they are doing with this technology. It is one thing to know how it works, it is another entirely to actually make it work. Implementation simply is not as simple as all the vendors would have you believe, for most small businesses, implementation sucks.
PS. The illustration at the top of the post is confusing, hard to understand, and not at all like the last one you saw. Just like in life!!
Mar 16, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, retail, Sales
Words spoken cannot be taken back
Gaining distribution in supermarkets is really hard, and more to the point, expensive.
Supermarkets control the key “choke point” between you as a supplier, and consumers. On occasions when you are pitching a “me too” product, a decision just comes down to the retailer margin and the amount of promotional and advertising dollars that are being thrown at the launch, which both reassures the buyer that you are committed, and offers some confidence that consumers may be receptive. Generally with a “me too” product, you need to be prepared to take something out of your own range to make space, or be able to pinpoint with data an under-performing competitors product that can be deleted.
New products are usually a bit more complicated. For a retailer to put a new product on shelf, in addition to their existing ranges, it is often more than just a simple one in one out decision, particularly if the new product claims to be opening up a new category or subcategory.
In either case, the simple fact is that retailer stores do not have elastic walls, and space needs to be made somehow.
Over the years, I have launched many new products, some category creating products that have been a huge success, and some not so much, and many line extensions of various kinds. However, in the launching of them, I have done hundreds, if not thousands of presentations to supermarket buyers, and found a number of things that should not be said of you are to be successful.
It really is important to recognise that even though you may think your new product is the best thing since sliced bread, supermarket buyers see hundreds a year, and have heard it all before, so your presentation must be sympathetic to that simple fact.
Some of the wrong things to say which have come out of long experience are:
- “Our research says that this product will increase the total size of the mart by $50 million in three years”. You both know that research is usually rubbish, and that everyone lies to supermarket buyers about theirs. If you cannot support the research claims with very solid data, just be honest about it, recognising that even supermarkets buyers cannot tell the future, and be realistic.
- “Our sales forecasts are conservative” See above, and the truth is that the forecasts are usually these days just spreadsheets with autofill, and are really meaningless. Speak more about the assumptions that are the foundation of the numbers rather than the numbers themselves.
- “You are the only chain that has yet to confirm their acceptance and promotional program for this product“. Nonsense. While someone is always last, it will not usually be one of the big retailers. They know you need them more than they need you, so better to honest, although being desperate is also the wrong tactic.
- “XY company, the current category leader is too slow and locked into their ways to react quickly, so we will have this new segment to ourselves for a long period”. Big companies do not usually get big by being stupid, they may be a bit slower than the small guys, but they do know their stuff, and can move quickly when necessary. A buyer will see your confidence as misplaced, and react accordingly.
- “ABC Co do not have the will to risk their cosy positon by innovating” or some similar comment. Denigrating a competitor is a common fault, and should never be done, you just might be denigrating the people who give the buyer his most profitable products, and he will not take kindly to having his stocking decisions being questioned.
- “This product has been protected by patent” More rubbish. Only very few companies have the resources to develop something genuinely new, patent it, then be prepared to spend the megabucks to protect the patent. The last one I can remember is the Nestles cappuccino product in a pouch, a genuine innovation that gave them just a small amount of time before the copy cats arrived. If Nestles cannot so it, you almost certainly cannot, and the buyer knows it, so do not kid yourself.
- “We have first mover advantage“. This is sometimes true, but is may not worth all that much unless there are long lead times involved in equipment. When a new product can be made on existing plant, you cannot usually count on more than about 12 weeks start, after which the copy cats can arrive, correct any mistakes you have made, and capitalise on your investment with consumers to open up the new category. Sometimes it is better to be second mover, and step over the carcass of the pioneer, who gets the arrows in his back. Having said all that, First mover in a genuine innovation does give you a good chance at distribution.
- “Our plant is state of the art“. Retailers do not care much about your plant, so long as their orders are filled, the product is safe for consumers, and moves quickly off their shelves.
There are 40 years experience in these points, some of it painful, but there is no greater (commercial) feeling than seeing a product you have conceived, developed and successfully launched still on the shelves 20 years later, still meeting consumers needs and delivering profits to all concerned.
