Category: Uncategorized

How Easy Are You to Find?

How many sales opportunities do you miss without knowing you missed them?

Sales tip: make yourself easy to find
photo by creative soul/dpc

Matt Sunshine of the Center for Sales Strategy recently wrote about a salesperson whose email signature cost her the chance at an RFP:

It was a short turnaround situation, the client told her, and when the client looked for Debbie’s phone number in a recent email, it wasn’t there. She was in a hurry, and rather than look it up, the client just moved on to someone else.

To protect your interests, Sunshine recommends making sure your email signature contains “these five pieces of information:

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Title or Personal Brand Statement
  3. Your Company
  4. Your Phone Number
  5. Your Email Address

I will add one thing to his list: make sure the information is text rather than an image.

Many people now use software to scrape contact data from an email directly into their contact file — that software won’t find that data in an image. Rather than typing it in by hand, some buyers won’t bother — which means your phone number and email address won’t be in their smartphones.

Given a choice between looking your number up manually and just pressing your competitor’s name with her thumb, what’s your client going to do? Unless she really has to talk to you, she’ll do whatever’s easiest.

Is Your Voice Mail Greeting Chasing Business Away?

Have you ever called someone’s cell phone and gotten this greeting?

You’ve reached five… oh… three… eight… one… nine… eight… oh… three… three. The person you are calling is not available. Please leave a message after the tone.”

Did you wonder if you had the right number?

If your clients don’t know if they’ve reached you or just some random cell phone, they may not leave a message — it’s easier, and feels safer, to just call the next name on the vendor list.

Take a few minutes to set their mind at ease: record a personal greeting with your own voice. Just give your name and ask callers to leave a message.

And if your voice mailbox is full — or if your wondering if it might be getting full — clean it out.

[reminder]

Survey Results – and How You Can Help a Rookie Out

The results of my 2015 Reader Survey point to an opportunity for the veterans among my readership to help the young ones.

Sales Tip: veterans can teach the rookies
Photo by djoronimo/dpc

First, a few numbers:

  • Not surprisingly, most of my readers work in media. The biggest pieces: 40.7% in TV, 29.6% in radio.
  • About half – 48.1% – are salespeople/account executives. Another 25.9% are Sales Managers or Directors of Sales.
  • Three out of every four of my readers – 74. 1% — are over 45. Almost none of you – 3.7% – are under 35.
  • It’s an experienced group. The vast majority – more than 70% – have been doing this for more than 10 years.
  • 18.5% have less than five years’ experience. 11% have been doing this for less than three years. 7.4% are in their first year.

An Opportunity for Sales Veterans to Help The Next Generation

 

Sales is a tough business, with a tremendous amount of turnover. Most of the big media companies provide some training, and most managers do their best to provide guidance. But there is often not enough company provided training, and not enough hours in the day for a busy manager to provide enough guidance.

The Account Executives who make it are the ones who take the opportunity to learn on their own. They just need to know where to look.

That’s where you – the 70% of my readers who have been at this for 10 years or more – can help the young ones. Even if you don’t have the time to spend one-on-one, you can certainly point them toward some resources that can help:

Resources You Can Pass Along

 

1. Here is a list of five essential books that every media salesperson should read. They are affordable even on a tight budget – a rookie can buy the entire set for around $100, and probably find some of them in the local public library.

2. Here is a list of five essential blogs. They are free.

3. I offer an e-book on pre-call preparation. It is also free, to anyone who subscribes to my blog. Download it here.

Take a moment to send one (or all) of the links above to an inexperienced AE who would appreciate the help.

If you already get this by email, I will make it easy for you. Just hit “Forward” and send this email to a rookie. Tell them to click on links toward the bottom.

sad salesperson
Photo by Maxim Malevich /dpc

You can help a struggling salesperson out. Or you can turn the page. Won’t you help a rookie out today?

Reminder: Please Take My Quick Reader Survey

One of the challenges for any blogger is deciding what to write about. This is an advertising, marketing, and sales training blog — with this as an umbrella, I want to do the best job I can in delivering value for you.

That said, could you take a moment and fill out this quick survey?

Scroll down on the right side of the survey to get to all the questions.

This survey will benefit you by helping me address topics that are on your mind. If there’s a marketing subject you’d like me to tackle, or a sales question you wish I’d answer, this survey is your chance to get it on my radar.

I’m also working on another project — details to follow in a few weeks — and your survey answers will be crucial in nailing down the specifics.

If you’ve already filled it out, thank you. If not, the whole thing should take you three minutes or less. Please click on this survey link , or fill out the version above, and let your voice be heard!

How Customer-Focused Are You… Really?

Everyone says they’re customer-focused. The stark reality is that most of us aren’t.

radio sales tip: be customer-focused
photo by uismolinero/dpc

Sales coach Gavin Ingham recently expressed a frustration common to those of us in the sales training business — our clients want advice on how to close sales, but don’t seem interested in earning the right to make the sale in the first place:

As a sales speaker, I often get asked by sales directors what they should do to make more sales. How do we convince the client? How do we demonstrate value over price? How do we negotiate a better deal? How do we shorten buying cycles? Etc etc. All of these have one thing in common and that is that they are all about you. They are not all about the client.

I rarely (for rarely read never) get asked for help that is client focused. People do not call me and ask how they can better understand their clients, they call me and ask how they can close more sales. People do not call me to understand why their clients went elsewhere, they call me to ask how they can convince their clients to buy from them. People do not call me to ask me help them understand why they did not engage their clients, they call me to ask how they can persuade and influence more effectively.

This may sound like semantics but it is a BIG deal.”

 It is a big deal. Salespeople already know what they want to sell, and why they want to sell it. What many of them never bother to find out is what their customer wants to buy, and why they would want to buy it.

Two Easy Customer-Focus Tests For Salespeople

 1. Look at the last couple times a customer turned you down and went to the competition. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they did it? (Advice on what to do about that is here.)

2. Think about the last couple of times a customer cancelled an order in mid-campaign. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they cancelled?

I often hear from salespeople who just took a big cancellation and want advice on how to change the client’s mind. Unfortunately, it’s too late by then.

The best time to reverse a cancellation is before the cancellation happens. Click To Tweet This  

Cancellation prevention requires knowing what the customer’s goals are for the campaign. Knowing about challenges to implementing the campaign, and working with the client to address those challenges. Constantly checking in to make sure that results are meeting expectation.

In short, cancellation prevention requires true focus on the customer

If you don’t know why the client cancelled, or went with the competitor, you may not be as customer-focused as you think you are.

What did you miss, and how can you do better next time?

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[reminder]

How Sales and Production Interact — a Classic Radio and TV Primer

In any organization of significant size, there’s a sales department and an operations department. There are three principles that apply:

* They need each other.
* They don’t understand each other.
* Sometimes, they flat-out hate each other.

radio sales tip: respect production
photo by iofoto, dpc

 

So it is with radio and television stations. When an advertising salesperson sells a commercial schedule, the vision of the client travels from the client through the seller to the Production Director. And although the technology has changed since this was recorded in 1995, the interaction still goes a lot like this:

Hat tip to my former-KEX-colleague-and-now-voice-man Bill Cooper for alerting me to this a while back. And a salute to Clear Channel/IHeart Production Directors past and present: Matt Jones, Bill Stevens, and Todd Tolces.

[reminder]Got a great sales-and production story? Spill it![/reminder]