It’s always rewarding to close a sale and immediately have the new client sign the documents to secure the sale. No matter how many years in the business, this always feels good. We all have stories about new customers who have “fallen into our lap” and bought quickly. For some reason, we can’t seem to forget the great rush that occurs from these new clients. I’m here to say that as good as the rush might be when we allow a sale to occur too quickly, we wind up leaving money on the table.
When beginning to talk with a new customer, the salesperson and the customer invariably have the intent of doing so with a specific product in mind. It may be any number of products you sell. The initial interest expressed by the customer always guides the discussion. Once the discussion turns to a specific product, the customer’s focus becomes even more closed to any other products. The real danger comes when the customer agrees to buy. At that moment, the customer feels the process is over, and their mind moves to something else, usually something totally unrelated to your business or products.
To avoid a situation like this, the salesperson needs to ask the necessary exploratory questions early to determine the customer’s other needs. By asking exploratory questions early, you are able to assess which additional products may interest the customer. If you wait to ask these types of questions until after the initial sale is complete, you will always be behind. This is the whole principle of not closing too quickly. You need and want enough time to explore and determine all of the customer’s needs.
What are exploratory questions? Exploratory questions generally are open-ended questions that get the customer talking. Questions may include asking the customer about their job and the types of benefits they receive in the job. A question of this nature is non-threatening and is likely to start a conversation in which the customer shares about the dynamics of their work, particularly the level of security they do or don’t have in their position. When a salesperson can get the customer talking and, more importantly, talking about items about which they do not feel secure, the greater the likelihood the salesperson can identify additional products that will alleviate some of the customer’s pain.
Whether in a face-to-face meeting or over the phone, the salesperson must take the time to engage the customer early on. The key with the early questions is to not blatantly ask, “What other products or services would you be interested in?” Asking a new customer this type of a question before a relationship has been established runs the risk of alienating the prospect. Plain and simple, they will view you as a “hard-sell salesperson.”
Engage the customer in a non-threatening manner and that customer will be more likely to share information without throwing up defensive barriers. Keep your exploratory questions short and simple, so that that the customer can do most of the talking. Customers are much more willing to share key information in short segments rather than long drawn-out responses that more-complicated questions dictate.
Due to the wide number of issues the typical customer faces today, it is a privilege to be a salesperson in today’s economy. When you are able to assist a customer with multiple solutions, the customer feels at ease, and you have truly done your job. Building a solid relationship instead of going for the quick close just makes good sense when you are striving to build a long-term sales career. Begin today to incorporate exploratory questions into your sales process as a way of engaging the customer.
About the Author:
Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip, or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit www.TheSalesHunter.com. You can also follow him on www.Twitter.com (TheSalesHunter) and on www.LinkedIn.com (Mark Hunter).
Month: November 2009
Categories
Top 5 Twitter Pet Peeves
I was speaking with a consulting client yesterday about using the social networks. This client is somewhat new(er) to social media, and is getting a fast-tracked education. 🙂
We got on to the subject of Twitter, and started talking about Twitter do’s and don’ts. While I know what my personal pet peeves are, I was curious as to what other tweeters thought. So, in a highly unscientific survey, I asked.
Here are the responses I got:
1) Lack of engagement
Several people cited this as a major pet peeve, where people follow them without trying to connect with them or find out more about them. This came up most often. It does seem that people really do want to use the social networks to connect.
2) Automated messages after following
This was the second most cited pet peeve. People feel like these messages are clutter and kind of clog up the works. From my perspective, if I follow you, you don’t need to welcome me. Just give me some good information (i.e. be a good tweeter) and I’m happy. Likewise, I am certainly thumbs down on all the direct messages about making money with Twitter, joining your Mafia family, and the like.
3) Spam and porn
This was the third most commonly cited Twitter pet peeve. People, in general, say they are blocking and reporting people who spam or send out pornographic links or tweets. There are some things which should be left to the imagination.
4) Too much tweet repetition
This pet peeve relates to people repeating their tweets. There are various services which let you set up recurring tweets, but the latest news is that Twitter is cracking down on accounts which make notable use of repeated tweets. This means that you can’t really “set and forget” your Twitter account without running a higher risk of suspension. I imagine that occasional repetition is fine, but just keep in mind that people want new information. Every tweet you send out has the potential to build your brand, so be original.
5) Too many hashtags or @ names
This means that people don’t want to read tweets that have too many labels or tags. They also don’t want to read ones which seem blanketed with user names. I, too, notice that I tend to glaze over when I read a tweet that references multiple users. Maybe the balance is to use names, but maybe 3 or less per tweet.
If you want to get attention, gain followers, and be more effective with using Twitter, keep these pet peeves in mind- and don’t do them.
Special thanks to my Twitter connections who contributed to this post:
@paganmomblog, @adamsherk, @Agotthelf
@jodhikavespa, @driveindustries, @mollyzmommie
@SchereLLC, @GAStroz, @AdaMarcom
(If you’re looking to connect on Twitter with people who add value and like to engage, follow them!)
Dr. Rachna Jain is Chief Social Marketer at The Mindshare Corporation. Rachna works with speakers, consultants, authors, and small business owners to develop and execute effective social media marketing strategies. Her proprietary persuasive social media process (sm) focuses on building influence, credibility and visibility online. This translates into greater recognition, increased website traffic, faster lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, and more opportunity for her expert clientele. She blogs regularly at The Mindshare Blog
After being in business for as long as I have, there’s one thing that never fails to amaze me — the capacity entrepreneurs have to sabotage their own success. (Not to mention how creative those ways can be.) While there’s about a million ways this manifests itself, here’s one way I see popping up over and over again.
Is Your Timing Keeping You From Being Successful In Your Business? (Part 1)
After being in business for as long as I have, there’s one thing that never fails to amaze me — the capacity entrepreneurs have to sabotage their own success. (Not to mention how creative those ways can be.) While there’s about a million ways this manifests itself, here’s one way I see popping up over and over again.
And that’s timing.
What do I mean by timing? I mean either entrepreneurs are moving too slow, and thus miss opportunities to make money, or they move too fast and are reckless and miss out on opportunities that way.
What’s interesting about timing is it’s not as clear cut as “one person moves too slow and one person moves too fast.” What I actually see is entrepreneurs move BOTH too fast AND too slow. They just do it at the wrong times.
And where do I see this happen the most? When they’re planning to launch a new product or program.
Here’s what typically happens — people will move WAY too slowly creating the product or program and will move WAY too fast to launch it. With the end result being they miss out on opportunities on both sides — it takes them forever to actually get thing done (so they’ve missed out on money selling the product or program) and then they rush through the launch like they have a bunch of hungry vampires chasing them and they don’t make nearly the sales they could have.
What REALLY should be happening is they should move quickly creating the product then slow down while launching it.
That way, they get the best of both worlds — they get the product or program to market faster and can start profiting from it sooner, and they take their time to work through ALL the launch steps so they wring as many sales as possible during the launch.
Now, there are variations of this. I have met people who are slow during the product creation AND launch, just like I’ve met people who whip through both as well. (And then there’s another group of people who either never get their product done or they finish products and never actually get around to launching them.) All of these are sabotaging techniques, which is part of the reason why this is far more complex problem then would initially appear on the surface.
So if you suspect you might struggle with one or several of the above, what can you do? How can you stop it? And how much time do you REALLY need to launch? Well, I’m going to answer all those questions over the next 2 articles. Next week we’ll look at why it takes some entrepreneurs so darn long to finish their product and how they can speed up the process, and the week after we’ll cover racing through the launch process.
When you were a kid, what did you dream of growing up to be?
This may sound obvious, but before you can find the career you really want, you have to know what you are seeking. Career planning is a delicate process. The work we do, as well as where we do it (our work environment), have a huge impact on our ability to experience life and career success.
Too often when asked to define an ideal career, people think immediately about salary and benefits. As a result, there are plenty of people who earn a great living with exceptional benefits, but hate their jobs and are very unhappy.
A job you really want can’t be based on financial criteria alone. And, with a few exceptions, the industry is often not as important as the actual day-to-day activities. If a “great” job does not allow you the opportunity to do what you love and nurture your natural talents, it is probably not the ideal job for you.
Understanding and discovering natural talents is an important key to a successful job search. Finding our talents helps us uncover those things that we love and enjoy, and nurturing those at which we excel. Discovering our talents also helps us figure out the areas where we do not excel – the things that make us unhappy and leave us feeling unfulfilled. When you waste your natural abilities you often end up stuck doing something you hate. It is important to weed out those skills you dislike and find out what it is you really love.
Effective career planning means figuring out the specific criteria and values you want the job to fulfill. By this we mean it is important to consider those daily activities that are going to make the best use of your natural skills and talents? Consider this:
* If you are an outgoing person and a job isolates you from interacting with other people all day, it is not for you.
* If you are orderly and find yourself in a work environment that is chaotic, you will wear out over time.
* If you work well with only occasional supervision, a job where you’re micromanaged will be annoying.
Knowing who you are is key to finding the right job for you. Ask yourself some self-reflective questions. Define the criteria that make up your “perfect” job. What’s important to you in the work you do? What brings you satisfaction? What expectations do you have for work-life balance? What natural skills and talents do you have?
You’ll also want to consider the answers to questions like:
* Part-time or full-time?
* Flexibility or consistency (both in hours and tasks)?
* Amount of interaction with others?
* Specific skills you want to use?
* Travel?
* Do you like to make decisions or follow procedure?
Answering these questions is the first step in finding the path that will lead you to ultimate career satisfaction. When we are doing what we love, we are often performing at our best. This leads to a kind of fulfillment that allows us to live life passionately and happily.
About the Author:
Lynda-Ross Vega is an accomplished business executive and management consultant with more than 30 years of experience in human and technical systems. She’s the co-founder of Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents. To find out more about how to discover your Perceptual Style and uncover your natural skills visit their website at www.vrft.com.
Categories
Only Losers Cut Their Prices
Article Contributed by Mark Hunter
In today’s marketplace, offering discounts seems to be the number one technique people are using to try and get business. Management has bought into the age-old argument that the only reason their salespeople can’t sell more is because their price is too high. It’s time to put this to rest. This argument of cutting prices actually reveals the lack of selling skills by the salespeople who are using it. It also indicates a management team failing to provide necessary strategic planning and direction for the company.
Rarely does a salesperson say that the reason for a lost sale was their inability to uncover the customer’s true needs or to create a sound price/value relationship. Salespeople are by nature confident people, so they automatically assume the loss of a sale couldn’t have anything to do with their own skills. The natural progression in their logic is that “it is management’s fault” or “the price is too high.”
I am not offering specific steps a salesperson can do to alter a customer’s behavior. Rather, I’d like to focus on the steps a salesperson must take in how they view their role in the sales equation. It starts with the salesperson no longer going into a selling situation believing they are all-knowing in terms of how they will handle any situation. Too often they walk into a situation and within 30 seconds believe they’ve summarized how the sales call will go, and that their incredible selling expertise will allow them to close the sale. Here is where I start to laugh, because the solution the salesperson always comes up with is the exact same process they used yesterday. In fact, it’s the same sales strategy they use on nearly every sales call. Then, as if on cue, as soon as the customer starts to show any signs of resistance, the salesperson immediately starts to think the only way to save the sale is by cutting the price.
Behavior modification on the part of the salesperson is the only way to get around this problem. Many people believe if they just give the salesperson some new marketing materials, some really great testimonials, or a proven list of questions they can ask, they will be able to overcome the urge to offer a discount. Yes, I agree that each of these do help, but the problem is they tend to be short-term solutions.
When a salesperson is given new tools like these, many times they will go out and find some success in closing more sales and doing so without offering a discount. Eventually, however, the newness of the sales tool wears off. The salesperson before long is facing a hesitant customer, and they fall back into their old habit of offering a discount.
Long-term behavior modification comes only when the salesperson truly believes in their pricing strategy. This seems obvious, but I have often found that salespeople don’t believe in their company’s pricing strategy. This perception is then reinforced (sometimes subconsciously) by emails from management about the state of the business and the pressure to make a number. A key behavior killer is when management puts out a report detailing sales results. Many companies release reports stating why certain sales did not occur. When companies do this, they encourage (or expect) the salesperson to provide reasons. The salesperson is often going to point to price. Do you see the vicious cycle that occurs? Price cutting becomes the “go to” method to keep bringing in sales (but quantitatively, profit is going down).
In my 10 years of sales consulting, I’ve watched this single report do more to kill the behavior of salespeople than anything else. There is a stigma that prevents the salesperson from admitting that the reason they didn’t get the sale was because of their own doing, not because of price. To eliminate the effect of this stigma and the “price is too high” excuse, management needs to stop compiling reports that require a salesperson to say why they didn’t get a particular sale. There are other far more effective ways to measure the value of a salesperson than by creating a report that encourages a salesperson to not state the truth.
A second matter that requires management’s attention is to stop cramming every cost reduction technique into the laps of the sales team. When the majority of correspondence a salesperson sees from management has to do with how and why they need to cut expenses, it only winds up reinforcing in the minds of the salesperson that they too need to cut the price they’re charging customers.
Yes, this is a challenge – finding ways to hold down expenses without deflating the pricing perception of the sales team. It might be a challenge, but this is what management gets paid to do – to make the tough decisions without impeding the end goal of making quarterly sales and profit numbers. This is no different than a parent/child relationship. There are many times a parent will make a decision that impacts the child but doesn’t tell the child in a way that leaves the child feeling upset or scared. For example, a parent tells their child to fasten their seat belt while in the car. They do this to protect the child, but they don’t go into detail about all of the things that could occur to them should there be in an accident. An approach like that would leave the child feeling scared about riding in the car. When we apply this same concept to the environment of sales, I think we would all agree that management doesn’t want their sales team “scared.” Fear is not the greatest motivator for long-term positive results.
A third behavior change is one the salesperson must do themselves. It starts with removing from their thought process that offering a discount is even an option. If a salesperson knows a discount is an option, they’ll take it. I call this the “last-dollar principal,” which says it’s amazing how fast your money will go until you suddenly find yourself down to your last dollar. When you have only one dollar left, it’s amazing how far you can stretch it. You could have handled your money more frugally when you had more, but because you had more money at the time, you didn’t feel the same pressure to save and protect it. When you get down to your last dollar, you sense that pressure more acutely.
Management can help their salespeople steer clear of discounting price by not allowing salespeople to have control over price discounting. In my years of sales consulting, I’ve worked with many companies that have taken away from the field all pricing flexibility. After the sales force gets over their whining about the loss of control and their proclamations that the world will end, it’s amazing what happens to the bottom-line. In each case, the bottom-line profit has gone up. Many times profit has increased not because of more sales, but because the sales that are made are more profitable (no price discounting has occurred).
Finally, a salesperson needs to believe in their pricing as much as they believe in their selling skills. Management and a sales team need to work together to continually reinforce why their pricing is correct. It’s no different than a coach and team working together to achieve the highest potential possible. Discounting is for losers, and there’s not one person out there in sales or management who wants to be a loser. We all want to be winners, and that means we are proud of what we provide our customers. In the end, it’s not the price that matters. The quality of the salesperson will determine the outcome.
About the Author
Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip, or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit www.TheSalesHunter.com.