Not long ago, I took a “no” from a client who should have said “yes”.
I didn’t react well.
photo by fresnel6/dpc
That weekend, I spent a lot of time stewing about the effort I’d put in, the difficulty of communicating with the decision-maker through a third party, and my firm belief that if he’d had the guts to try what I’d recommended, it would have been a profitable investment for him.
What snapped me out of my snit was an old (from 2008) post from Seth Godin called “Two Ways to Deal With No” . Godin lays out the choices this way:
You could contact the organization that turned you down and explain that they had made a terrible mistake, the wrong choice and a grave error…
or
You could be more gracious than if you’d won the work. You could send a thank you note for the time invested, you could sing the praises of the vendor chosen in your stead and you could congratulate the buyer, “based on the criteria you set out, it’s clear that you made exactly the right choice for your organization right now.”
The full post, which you can read in its entirety here, has much to ponder.
I’ll add a thought of my own — advice I’ve given many times when I’ve conducted sales training, and which I managed to forget during my bout of resentment:
[bctt tweet=”A no isn’t the customer’s fault. There’s always something you could’ve done differently.”]
Don’t blame the customer for not buying. It’s a losing strategy, and most of the time you’re wrong. In the course of the sales process, you have choices in how you present your ideas. There’s always a way you could have done it differently.
If the choices you made didn’t result in a sale, your mental energy is more profitably invested in thinking about what adjustments you’ll make in your presentation the next time you get a chance.
Godin’s second option will go a long way toward ensuring that the chance will come again.
Sometimes the least efficient forms of communication have the most powerful effect.
Photo by BillionPhotos.com/dpc
Personal Interaction Sales Skills Lesson 1
My Toastmasters club meets every Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning there are three speeches, and a club member evaluates each one. The roles are assigned in advance. Every now and then the meeting organizer has to fill a role at the last minute.
Generally, the organizer sends out a mass email to the whole club — “Hey, everyone, we need an evaluator for Jim’s speech. if you can fill in, please let me know!” Generally I glance at those emails and move on.
But I didn’t delete last week’s email from David Johnson.
Dear Phil,
We have two slots open for the meeting on Saturday.
Dominic volunteered for the grammarian spot
Would you like to be the General Evaluator or Ruth’s speech evaluator?
The email went on to describe Ruth’s upcoming speech, and ended with a nice assumptive close: “Please let me know which role you would prefer.”
I wrote back and signed up to evaluate Ruth’s speech.
Why did I respond to this email when I’ve ignored most of the others?
Because I know David, and he had written directly to me. It is certainly possible that he copied and pasted the body of the email, but it felt like a personal message.
Personal Interaction Sales Skills Lesson 2
I fly on business at least twice a month, usually on United Airlines. Most of the time the flights go smoothly, but every now and then the plan breaks down: weather or mechanical difficulties can result in missed connections and hassle.
When that happens, I often get an automated email from United the next day apologizing for the inconvenience. I delete those as fast as they hit my inbox.
Last week at Portland International Airport, I was attempting to fly to Columbia, SC. My plane to Dulles sat on the ground as a mechanical issue turned our 8:00am departure into an 8:30 departure… then a 9:00 departure… then a 9:30 departure. When it became clear that I was going to miss my connection, I talked the flight crew into letting me off the plane so that I could book a new itinerary.
As I stood at the gate working out the paperwork with the agent, the pilot walked off the jetway, introduced himself, and apologized to me for the inconvenience.
“If I could just divert the flight to Columbia and drop you off, I’d do it,” he said. We chatted for a few minutes, he thanked me for my flexibility and patience, and he got back on the plane.
I’m a grown man and have been for a while, but there’s a little kid in me who was thrilled to be personally acknowledged by the pilot. I was so startled that I neglected to write down his name.
I told that story on Facebook the same day, and told it to several of the salespeople in Columbia. It will likely make its way into my sales seminars.
…when you are playing at a higher level, creating and capturing more value, efficiency isn’t the goal.
A human being helping connect you to the person you need to speak to creates greater value than a call tree that first requests your customers language, asks them to pay attention because their choices have changed, and then offers them 8 different choices in a voice that makes it difficult to pay attention.
A human being showing a real interest in developing a relationship with you creates a very different experience than a slightly customized email with a clumsy ask at the end. A human being that has personally sent you ideas, in their own handwriting, with highlighted passages and personal notes, is different than an automation funnel.
The salesperson who sold you something calling you to follow up to ensure you are 100% satisfied and that you are getting the outcome you bought and paid for is different than a survey link being sent my email. One says “I care about you” as a person, and as a client. The other says that your company is checking the box.
Are you really connecting with your customers, or just checking the box?
Iannarino acknowledges that there needs to be a balance — for getting your work done, automation can be a godsend. But efficient isn’t always effective.
There’s nothing complicated about media sales. To paraphrase author Dan Jenkins (who was writing about baseball), if sales was half as complicated as some trainers try to make it, most of us couldn’t sell.
photo by iQoncept/dpc
Sales skills can be taught. But what separates the best and most successful salespeople from the mediocre isn’t skill level — it’s the willingness to put the work in, and practice some very simple steps consistently.
Here’s what the best salespeople do all the time that that the others don’t.
They are constantly looking for new business. Account lists are shaky things. In a good year, 20-25% of your list will turn over no matter what you do. Businesses get bought and sold. They reorganize, downsize, close entirely. The contact you’ve spent years cultivating suddenly takes another job. These factors are completely out of your control.
In a bad year, it can be a whole lot worse than 25%.
The best salespeople read their local newspaper every day, looking for leads. They tune in to commercial radio in their car… listening for new advertisers. They don’t skip the commercials on TV — they watch the commercials on TV. And they follow up on what they find.
They read constantly.Books, magazines, blogs. They read about sales skills, networking, effective advertising techniques, copywriting, technology, business.
During training sessions, I am often asked what books I recommend. I point people to this poston my blog. The links are Amazon affiliate links. I don’t do the affiliate links to make money — the commission is something like 32 cents a book. I do it so that I can see whether anyone takes action.
The best salespeople I work with buy the books….and read them.
[bctt tweet=”Sales skills are easy to learn. Putting the work in every day is hard. Top sellers do the work.”]
They “think like a rookie”— no matter how much experience they have, they’ll try something new. Rookies will try anything — they don’t know any better. The longer we do the same job, the greater our tendency to dismiss a new technique by saying, “That’ll never work.” Top sellers recognize that they don’t know everything. They try things.
They learn from their failures.When I was a new radio seller, someone taught me an exercise to do in the parking lot after every sales call. I’d take my notepad out of my briefcase, turn to a blank piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. I’d label the left column “What Went Right” — even the worst call had something redeeming. The right column was titled “What I’d Do Differently”. There’s something to learn from every call — writing the lessons down right after the meeting helped me retain the lesson long enough to act on it.
They keep their commitments.In the past five years, I have talked to over a thousand advertisers in 31 different states. In every market I’ve visited, clients have told me stories of Account Executives who didn’t return phone calls, or deliver the information they promised, or get the copy produced on time. In fact, this has often worked in our favor — the reason we were let in is because the other guys dropped the ball.
It pains me to say this, but if you promise to call with information on Wednesday and you actually call with the information on Wednesday, you will be the exception.
They present solutions from the client’s point of view.Years ago, a Dale Carnegie Sales Training seminar leader put me through the “Which Means to You” drill. I had to take every claim in a proposal and add the words “…which means to you” to it. If I couldn’t articulate why the client would care about a specific point, the point had to come out. It was infuriating to have the instructor interrupt my presentation over and over again with the words, “WHO CARES?”, but the lesson has stuck with me for a couple of decades.
You’ve got a budget to hit, your manager’s got a quarter to make, and your clients don’t care. You know why you want to sell that package — why would your client want to buy it? The best salespeople develop a deep understanding of their client’s problems and goals. They position their offerings as tools to solve those problems and achieve those goals.
Can your proposals pass the “Which Means to You” test? How about your media kit?
They are careful about who they work with.The late Jeffrey Mayer taught me that sales is a process of disqualifcation. He gave me a three-part formula:
No Money = No Sale
No Authority = No Sale
No Need = No Sale
Make a list of the people you’re calling on. Have you established that they have a need for what you’re selling? Do they have they authority to buy it? Do they have the money to spend what it takes? For a story about how he got me to dump a prospect, click here.
All of these steps are simple. The sales skills are easy to learn.
Practicing them every day is hard. Really hard. The best salespeople perform the steps and make the real money. Can you?
A while back, I met with the Marketing Director of a home improvement company in Texas. The company had been around for two decades. For most of that time, they’d had great success with an image campaign. Sales had been good, and customers mentioned how much they liked the commercials as they filled out the paperwork.
A few years ago, that started to change. Response to their messages had taken a huge drop. Showroom traffic was down, sales were down. The economy hadn’t helped, but even when it came back up the numbers had hardly budged.
They showed me a recent commercial they had done for windows. For 20 seconds, as pretty guitar music played, the screen showed kids in a backyard, playing in the leaves. The camera slowly panned back back to show that we were looking through a window.
Eventually the store logo and address showed up, and a pleasant voice came on with a slogan — “Windows never looked so good. Life never looked so good. We’re at [location]. Don’t forget to ask about our Best Value Guarantee.”
Fade to black. Commercial over.
After a moment, I asked the client: “Does anyone ever ask about your Best Value Guarantee?”
“No, she said.”
She was baffled. Her strategy had been successful for nearly two decades. What had changed?
[bctt tweet=”In the Age of the Smartphone, marketing fluff is deadly. Make your advertising a fluff-free zone.”]
The answer may involve the way we now process information. In 2010 the New York Times ran a series of articles called “Your Brain on Computers”, detailing the effect of information overload on our thinking process.
One installment discussed the effect of multitasking — working with multiple screens delivering a constant stream of information:
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists.
In the five years since that article appeared, it is likely that the problem has gotten significantly worse.
What do you do about this? How do you generate results in the age of digitally-rewired brains?
* Get to the point fast. Nobody’s going to stick around while you “ease into it.”
* Offer a direct, measurable benefit that comes when they do business with you. It’s not enough to make your target feel good about your brand.
* Tell your prospects exactly what they should do. Pick one action you want your prospects to take, and tell them — explicitly — to take it.
* Offer a reward to take the action, and include a deadline. Make the deadline specific. “This deal ends Friday at 8pm” is much more powerful than “Hurry, this offer ends soon.”
Here’s one way to make sure that your message opens on a strong note. I learned it years ago at a Dan O’Day copywriting seminar:
Write your script, and go through your standard editing process.
Delete the first sentence.
Does the message still work? If it does, leave the first sentence out and begin the commercial with Sentence 2.
It’s amazing how often the first sentence of the script turns out to be unnecessary fluff.
In the Age of the Smartphone, marketing fluff is deadly. Make your advertising a fluff-free zone.
On a recent Tuesday morning I met with an insurance company executive who had a gripe to share.
I told your competitor a month ago that I wanted a weather sponsorship without commercials. Just 5 seconds that says, “This weather report is brought to you by [name of the agency].” I didn’t want any commercials — just the mentions. He came back with a big package with a bunch of commercials. It’s like he didn’t even hear me. So I sent him away.
Two days later I heard a variation on that theme from a home improvement company owner:
We’re a franchise, and we’re required to use our home office for everything we do online. I’d love to run on your station, but all I need is TV ads. If you try to add your “digital package” [at this point she made air quotes with her fingers] I’m just going to make you take it out, so don’t waste my time or yours.
I told her it sounded like she’d been through this before.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I tell everyone who comes in that we’ve got online covered. It doesn’t matter what I tell ’em. All the radio people… and the TV people… and the newspaper people keep trying to push their ‘digital solutions’ on me. They don’t listen. Drives me crazy.”
Photo by Innovated Captures/dpc
Are you listening when your client talks?
The best salespeople learn to negotiate with two separate parties to get a sale done: the client, and station management.
Your company may have a policy that “every pitch has to include digital.” Can you convince your manager to make an exception in an exceptional case? Don’t assume — try before you go back.
Maybe your standard weather sponsorship package always includes commercials. Is there a way around that? Find out — if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
…this attorney talked about his impressions of sales reps over the 20 years he’d been advertising. He said, “The best were the ones who really paid attention to what I said and didn’t try to sell me stuff that didn’t fit with my target or challenges. The worst never seemed to ever pay attention to what I had told them was important in my business.”
I get it. Sometimes your management won’t budge, and you simply won’t be able to deliver exactly what the client asked for. What then?
Some AE’s are scared to deliver bad news. They just show up with their standard package and hope that the customer doesn’t remember what they asked for in the last meeting. Some don’t go back at all.
Both are losing strategies.
Your best approach is to deliver the news in person as quickly as you can, and openly acknowledge the discrepancy.
Look the client right in the eye and say, “I know exactly what you asked for last time. I heard you. Unfortunately, we can’t deliver it just that way — and believe me, I tried. Here’s how close we can get, and this is how you’ll benefit if you do it this way. I hope it’s close enough, because we want to earn your business. If it’s not, I’ll understand.”
Who knows? Maybe the customer will surprise you and agree.
Even if the answer’s no, you’ll preserve the relationship, and the client’s respect… as one of those rare salespeople who listens.
