Category: Sales call in a box

A Simple Sales-Boosting Hack for 2017: Be On Time

How often do you show up for meetings “a few minutes late”? Those “few minutes” are damaging your reputation and costing you money.

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sales tip: the best sellers are on time every time

Photo by fotofabrika/dpc

A while back in this space I listed three sales resolutions you could make to increase sales in the new year. Here’s one more sales resolution:

Be on time. Every time. Starting now.

I know, I know. You’re busy. You don’t mean to be late, but stuff comes up.

When you show up late, you raise a big question in your client’s mind.  Brent Beshore of Forbes says,

Your punctuality says a lot about you… If you can’t keep your calendar, what other parts of your life are teetering on the edge of complete disaster?”

You’re clients are busy, too. Stuff comes up for them, too. When you show up late, you are telling them that your stuff is more important than their stuff.

You are also costing them money. As Beshore points out in Forbes:

Let’s consider a scenario where five people are holding a meeting at 2 p.m. Your sauntering in ten minutes late just wasted 40 minutes of other peoples’ time. Let’s say the organization bills $200/hour. Are you paying the $133 bill? Someone certainly is.

Make a habit of this, and you will pay the bill in lost opportunities.

Here are four steps you can take to drive lateness out of your life:

  1. Stop trying to bend the laws of physics – don’t schedule by “wishful thinking”. If your first appointment’s at 8:00, the meeting is projected to take an hour, and there’s a 30-minute drive to the next call,  you won’t get to the next one by 9:15.
  2. If your client has multiple locations, double-check the address. Last year in California, we arrived 45 minutes late to a meeting with significant revenue potential because the client was at one of his clinics and we went to the other one across town.We did not get the revenue.
  3. Download directions in advance. In the age of Google Maps, there is no excuse for getting lost on the way.
  4. Build in time for “stuff happening.” There will be traffic. A meeting will run long. 30 minutes of unscheduled time in the middle of the day can save your afternoon.

A Special Note to Sales Managers

“I hate bringing my managers on calls,” a very successful television Account Executive confessed to me last year. “They’re great people, but they always make me late.”

His managers were overscheduled. Meetings back to back. Spreadsheets due at corporate by close of business. One more email to return… and then another one… and then another one.

Often, he told me, someone would buttonhole the manager on the way out of the office, causing a 10-minute hallway conversation… and a 10-minutes-late arrival at the customer’s office.

“I’ve learned to come up with an excuse for going in separate cars,” he said. “That way at least one of us will be on time.”

If this sounds like you — and it is a phenomenon I witness often on the road — what message are you delivering to your sellers?

Punctuality means respect, and respect will earn sales. The most effective salespeople, and sales managers, in any industry show up on time.

[reminder]What’s your best tip for keeping your day on track?[/reminder]

Is The Marketing Director Wasting Your Time?

A few months ago, I wasted several hours in a very nice Midwestern city.

Shocker: You can't sell if they can't buy
Photo by Igor Gromoff /dpc

 

A television station salesperson had set an appointment for me with the Marketing Director of a large medical practice. The AE assured me that this was the person who made all the advertising decisions for the practice.

To put it mildly, this turned out not to be the case.

It turned out that Marketing Director’s role was to gather proposals from advertising salespeople, and show them to the Controller. From there, if the Controller liked a proposal, it would be shown to the partners at the practice.

How did I find this out?

Simple. I asked.

Rookie media sellers often fall into this trap. They are introduced to the “Marketing Director” and assume, that this is the person who can make the decision. About half the time it’s true — many Marketing Directors do run their own ship.

But in other cases, this person’s authority is very limited. A significant number of people with big-sounding titles have to get approval from someone — and often several someones — higher up the ladder.

This scenario is common with larger companies, and extremely common in health care organizations.

[shareable]If they can’t buy it, you can’t sell it. You’ve got to find the person who can buy.[/shareable]

In the medical practice we were calling on, the Marketing Director could say no, but she couldn’t say yes. She could refuse to show our proposal to the Controller, but she did not have the authority to buy it.

The Controller could say no — he could refuse to show it to the partners — but he couldn’t say yes.

The real decision-makers were the partners. And the partners were two levels above the Marketing Director.

How can you know if you’re in front of the real decision maker?

Ask. Carefully.

Don’t ask, “Are you the decision-maker?”, or “Who makes the advertising decisions here?”

A question this direct can put your prospect on the defensive. An insecure customer might claim to have the authority whether they do or not.

The question I asked at the medical practice was: “When someone shows up with an advertising idea and wants you to make an investment in it, what’s the process for evaluating the idea? Who else besides you gets involved in those conversations?”

The Marketing Director was very open about the path from her office to the Controller to the doctors.

A good rule of thumb is this: If your proposal has to go more than one rung up the ladder from the person you’ve presented it to, you should be presenting to someone else.

With health care, you often have to start at the bottom and work your way up. It takes patience and perseverance, but over time you can get in front of the doctors. Just don’t kid yourself before you get there.

If they can’t buy it, you can’t sell it. You’ve got to find the person who can buy.

[reminder]What’s your best technique for qualifying a prospect?[/reminder]

 

 

What to Do When They Hate Your Idea

Recently I presented a carefully-thought-out campaign idea to some people who run an auto dealership. They didn’t like it.

radio tv sales tip: you can recover if they hate your idea
Photo by DDRockstar/dpc

It was at the end of a week in which I’d already made 16 presentations, and gotten a positive reaction to my recommendations on the vast majority.

But I missed on this one. Big time.

The head of the dealership politely but emphatically explained that my idea did not fit the personality of his stores. It did not project the image that he wanted the public to have of his already-very-successful-business.

I was offering a strategy to aggressively go after new markets. He was happy with what he already had, and didn’t want to mess with a winning formula.

Sales Skills:
What Do You Do When The Client Hates Your Idea?

It’s never fun when your idea bombs. But there are steps you can take to get the conversation back on track:

Ask some questions to make sure you fully understand the objection. It’s not enough to know that the client doesn’t like something. You need to know what they’re not comfortable with, and why. This will help you determine if your idea can be tweaked, or if you need to start over.

Explain the rationale behind the strategy you chose. If you still believe in your idea after you’ve probed the objection, take a moment to defend it and show how it fits for them. Sometimes it turns out that the client didn’t understand your initial explanation.

Seek common ground. It might be possible to modify your idea in a way that addresses their concerns and still delivers the right result.

Don’t get defensive, and don’t argue.   Jeb Blount, author of the book Fanatical Prospecting, puts it this way:

Scores of salespeople try to argue their prospects into changing their minds — to prevail with debate. This is why prospects lie to us. They expect when they say no that they’ll face a battle and be disrespected.

…Overcoming doesn’t work. There is a universal law of human behavior: You cannot argue another person into believing they are wrong. The more you push another person, the more they dig their heels in and resist you.

Be willing to look for another solution. The fact that your client disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The concerns may have merit. There may be another way to attack the problem. As Jeb Blount recommends, “If the horse is dead, dismount.”

Recognize that sometimes “No” gives you the tools to get to “Yes.” There are cases where the fastest way to learn what clients want is to first find out what they don’t want. In Ask, his book about online surveys, Ryan Levesque discusses a struggle we’ve all been through:

Think about the last time you and a group of friends were hanging out and thinking about where to go out to eat. You are all sitting around and someone says, “Hey, anybody hungry? What you all feel like doing for dinner?”

What’s the most common response? “I don’t know, what do you want?”

Sometimes that conversation goes around in circles – endlessly.

Why? Because, at the end of the day, people don’t know what they want.

However, if you’re hanging out with that same group of friends, you can ask a different sort of question: “Well, is there anything you don’t feel like eating for dinner tonight?”

Interestingly, people are much better at answering that type of question.

Your friends might say, “I don’t feel like pizza because I’m trying to eat gluten-free.” Or “I don’t want to do sushi because I’m allergic to shellfish.”

People are really good at telling you what it is they don’t want.

Similarly, you can also ask each of your friends one by one, “What did you have for dinner last night?” People are also very good at answering that question as well.

The reason why is because people essentially are only good at answering two basic types of questions when they don’t know what they want: what is they don’t want, and what they’ve done in the past.

 

In the end, that’s what saved my meeting with the car dealers.

Learning what they didn’t like opened up a conversation that offered us some strong clues on what they would like. The head of the store and one of his managers tossed out several suggestions that made a lot of sense. We are working on crafting those suggestions into a new strategy to put in front of them.

When the meeting’s over, see what you can learn from the experience. I’ve gone back through my notes of the initial needs analysis, trying to figure out what I missed. I’m convinced that there’s a question or two I could have asked at the first meeting that would have taken me down a different, and better, path.

[reminder]How do you handle it when a proposal bombs?[/reminder]

Pipeline Math: How Many Active Prospects Do You Need?

Are you overestimating the value of your sales pipeline? It may not be as full as you think.

Sales skills: calculate your pipeline the right way
Photo by olly/dpc

“The ball don’t lie.” – former NBA great Rasheed Wallace

Sales Pipeline Math: A Story Problem

This comes from Jeb Blount’s new book Fanatical Prospecting:

Becky has 30 prospects in her pipeline. Her closing percentage is 10%. She closes one deal. How many prospects remain in her pipe?

At first glance, the answer seems easy – she had 30, remove one, now she’s got 29? Right?

Wrong.

As Blount points out, the real answer is 20.

Here’s the math. Becky has a 1 in 10 probability of closing a deal. That means on average she will close only one deal out of 10 prospects she puts in her pipeline. The net result is when she closes one deal, the other nine are no longer viable prospects. This means her pipeline will be reduced by 10 prospects rather than one. She must now replace those 10 prospects to keep her pipeline full.

This is why when you get on a hot streak and close a bunch of business in a month, you wake up the following month with nobody left to close. Your prospect pool has suddenly evaporated, and you wonder where everybody went.

[shareable]The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math doesn’t lie in sales.[/shareable]

Closing a sale creates new responsibilities: credit apps, production forms, creative meetings, collections. It is easy, when you are busy, to put off prospecting. You take a look at your pipeline, figure you’ve got plenty left, and stop making new business calls.

Here’s the problem: making a sale doesn’t just take one prospect out of the pipeline. It takes that one, multiplied by the number of active prospects you need, on average, to close one sale.

The next time you have a quiet moment, do some calculating.

  • How many proposals does it take, on average, to close a sale?
  • How many proposals do you have under active consideration right now?
  • How many prospects will each sale take out of the pipe?

The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math won’t lie on your prospect list. Run the numbers, and then get on the phone.

[reminder]What’s the biggest struggle you have in keeping your sales pipeline full?[/reminder]

How to Unlock Sales Possibilities With This Magic Question

I have no idea who came up with this idea. I only know it works.

Sales skills: the magic wand question
Photo by Elnur/dpc

A Sales Call Surprise

A few years ago a television advertising salesperson on the West Coast took me to meet the marketing director of a medical practice. The practice covered a lot of ground — among their divisions was OBGYN, aesthetic medicine, ear/nose/throat, hearing, plastic surgery, and sleep medicine.

Our conversation quickly focused on the aesthetic medicine department, and we spent 50 minutes talking about botox, fillers, laser hair removal, and chemical peels. In my mind, I had a pretty good idea of the creative strategy I was going to work on; it was time to wrap the meeting up.

So I asked her the “Magic Wand” question:

“Let’s say you had a magic marketing wand. You can wave it and make your advertising accomplish one thing for you that it’s not doing now… what would you use that wand to do?”

I assumed that she’d use the wand to increase Botox sales, or bring in more hair removal customers. Boy, was I wrong.

“I’d use it to sell more hearing aids.”

This sales question can bring a surprising answer
Photo by Ana Blazic Pavlovic/dpc

We’d been talking for more than an hour, and she had not said a single word about hearing aids. But it turned out that the practice owner had been complaining about sales in the hearing division, and she was going to have to do something about it.

Instead of one idea to bring back, I now had two. Instead of one division’s budget to work with, we now had two.

Instead of the $3,500 per month we’d been planning to ask for when we came back, we proposed $7,000 per month. We didn’t get all of it, but we got close.

Sales Skills: Why The Magic Wand Technique Works

In Close More Sales! Persuasion Skills That Boost Your Selling Power, Mike Stewart says that the Magic Wand Technique

…can start the creative juices flowing in your prospect and increase his involvement in the sales process…Encourage your customer to explore different possibilities. You never know what he might come up with, and you never know where he will find a solution that you can provide and that will be the emotional trigger needed to close the sale.

Don Fitzgibbons, author of The Guru’s Rules for Local Advertising, has this advice for making the question most effective:

The wish has to be very specific. A wish for “more customers” is not specific. A wish for “more customers who will buy four wheel drive trucks” is very specific.

The wish must also be realistic. “I want more people to buy air conditioning in December.” Sorry, not gonna happen.

I learned the Magic Wand Question almost two decades ago as a radio Account Executive, and have been using it ever since. It works because it makes clients stop and think about what they really want. There is often a long pause, as the customer gazes at the ceiling and ponders.

How often does the Magic Wand Question elicit a big surprise? Not that often. In a typical week of needs analysis calls with a television station, I might meet with 20 clients and get three genuinely surprising answers.

But those three can be big ones — and I never know which three it’ll be — so I ask the question every time.

[reminder]What’s the most surprising answer you ever got to a sales question?[/reminder]