Archive for July, 2009

How can you get more customers to buy from you without selling?  

Well simply you can’t.  You will always have a salesman’s hat on it’s more how obvious and offensive the hat looks.  Neil Rackham wrote an interesting book for selling large ticket products or services and demonstrates through research the differences from small sales.  

The book Spin Selling chunks the process in to an acronym “Situation Question”, “Problem Questions”, “Implication Questions” and “need-payoff Questions”.  My take on the book is that through the process of questioning you can dig deeper to find out what the real pain point(s) are for your prospect.  Once you know what your customer is wanting you then ‘sell’ a solution to solve that pain.  Overall the book covers very well the key pain indicators and the differences of small sales and large sales.  An area where I think the book should have explored more is the more difficult measurable of emotion and behavior. 

These softer issues are often very difficult to recognize during a sales call or even while building a relationship with a prospect.  Successful sales people have a good sense about people and often do well as a result of this.  The question(s) that I think need to be asked are how to you improve your sales team or selling skills when you can’t see these important characteristics.  Should we even group or categorize people in order to sell more effectively.  

The sales process in large capital equipment must combine a number of key elements.  Understanding your customer’s true needs through questioning, knowing your customers emotional behavioral profile, understanding your prospects life views, and knowing your own personality characteristics all play an important role in making the sale.

The key to any successful strategy is to continue to develop, review and refine to form a comprehensive strategy. Knowing what works and what doesn’t is critical in moving forward. Often marketers fail to see their own pitfalls for fear of being embarrassed or worse reprimanded. An open approach will allow you to see not only what didn’t work but more importantly what did. It’s the ‘did’s’ that you build on to improve your strategy.

Where to start when developing a framework for success?

Email Marketing Strategy Checklist.

Email Branding

Segmentation

George Carlin’s famous “Seven Dirty Words” you can’t say on TV definitely applies to email marketing. There are simply certain words that will cause you, and your email, to be instantly rejected. If you’re writing for your own company or providing a service to others you must proof your copy, and more than once.

• Free
• 100% Free
• Amazing
• As seen
• Call now
• Earn
• Compare
• Opportunity
• Make Money
• And so on…

Often sales people are hungry for the order and will do almost anything to get it.  It’s the drive and desire to win that keeps them going and keeps business alive.  So how can you sell more, keep that drive and be successful?   

To often inexperienced sales people get in to the fight.  The fight against competition is one you simply don’t want to get yourself in to.  This is where you will lose most of your potential orders.  It’s the sales person who listens carefully to the customer and offers what they want, not what the competition is.  I just had a conversation with an experienced international sales manager.  He explained to me how he ‘stole’ an order from the competition.  He won this order by keeping in touch with the customer daily.  He would offer a solution; the competitor would match it and up the ante.  He would return the folly and do the same.  This went back and fourth for a few weeks.  Included in all this were lengthy and expensive trips to the customer’s location.  The order was won because the competitor was flying back on a Friday when our salesman pushed the customer to buy.  It was shear luck that got the order.  Although the salesman may disagree it was just play luck.  If the roles were reversed and he was flying back they would have won.

So what can you learn from selling apples?

Well in the story above both companies were selling apples, they kept on changing slightly the type of apple.  So what should have been done?  From the outset you must separate yourself from the competitor.  You must make a wide enough difference that the customer doesn’t see you as the same.  Now you are selling a basket of fruit and the competitor is selling apples.  I’m not suggesting you selling everything under the sun but rather you sell what the customer wants.  It’s at this point where the customer buys in to your solution.  Too often sales people see only the fight against the competition rather then the order with the customer. Oh, by the way, the order above was for $1 million dollars, not a small deal.

So next time you’re in the fight remember to listen first then react.