When I ask people “How do you get new customers?” at my seminars,  referrals always comes on the list somewhere near the top with advertising and cold calling. If I was to ask a direct question like “How many referred customers have you got this week?” There is always a long silence. One or two people may come up with one or two referred customers but  from an audience of 100 or more that is not enough.

In selling there are two ways to close more sales, there is the easy way and the hard way.
Your job in selling is to take your customers down road to the close. Unfortunately it is not always as easy as that but let us suppose for the moment that it is. You have a number of customers in a month, let us say 40, and you close 8 of them, then your strike rate would be one closed sale every 5 customers or 20%.

What happens after 7 years of marriage?
It didn’t happen to me of course but they say that after you have been married for 7 years you get the “Seven year itch”. You, apparently get bored with what you have and start looking round for something else. You get an itch that has to be scratched.

How do you get to see the customer when he has already got a supplier and is not interested in changing?
There may be a number of reasons why the customer is not looking around. He may be satisfied with what he has. He may see no difference between one supplier and another. He may have a good relationship with his existing supplier. He may not like the sound of your voice on the telephone.

 

I was reading an old sales training book a few days ago, in which the writer made the comment that it is only polite to ask the person you are ringing if they have time to speak at the moment. This is a mistake. I was sharing this with a friend and he told me that this was the way he was trained just last year!
Please don’t fall into this trap even if you were at the same training course as my friend.

This is an interesting question and one that will get a number of different responses when asked of any group of sales people.
“Come back over and over again”, or  “Recommend you to a friend”, or “Pay on time”. In fact statically the best thing your customer can do for you is:
Complain!
Let me explain.

 

(Me) “Can I help you sir?”
(Customer) “I’d like to complain.”
(Me) “Certainly Sir. Would you like the standard ten minute complaint or do you want to go for the full half hour?”
Apologies to Monty Python for the above.
We are human, so we all make mistakes. Which of us didn’t make a mistake last year?

Have you ever noticed how quickly negativity spreads in your office? Have you ever wondered who starts it? Ever thought it might be you?
We are all guilty of negativity from time to time. Consider the following people:

Do you believe that you can earn a million rand this year?
No?...... Why not?
Don't worry about it just yet, you are in the majority, most people feel the same way. "A Million Rand" We say, "I will never earn a million rand in a year". Our belief system tells us that we can not do it so we do not even try.

Last time we discussed the way our belief system controls our destiny. You believe that you can only earn R10,000 per month for instance and that is all you try to earn. At the end of the month you have only earned R10,000 and this proves that your belief system was right.
This is called a self fulfilling prophecy and it is limiting what you could be achieving right now. In order to achieve much greater things we must get beyond our belief system and in the review this week I am going to talk about two very effective ways of doing just that.

Do you have a written plan for your life? In my experience about 3% of the people I ask this question say “yes”, but these are usually the most successful 3%
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that you know exactly what you want to achieve in your life and it is all in your head. That’s fine of course except there is no commitment to a thought pattern. Ever wondered what happened to those wonderful ideas that you had last year, what you were going to do, the successes you were going to achieve. It is very difficult to put ideas into action until they are written down.

In our late teens and early twenties there were plenty of opportunities and there is a temptation to say that things are different now. They are. There are far more opportunities now for people young and old than there have ever been. They are there and they will appear as if from nowhere if you are active.
"Get Active!" Activity is the mother of opportunity.
Let's say the company changed and you lost your job. You could sit at home blaming the Government, the Company, your age,  your colour, the economy, the weather, anything! What will that achieve? Nothing... Apart from a good understanding of the local soaps.
Get Active!

Many years ago, when I had a proper job, I employed a salesperson called William. Even at his interview, this guy was very impressive. He dressed well, said the right things, asked the right questions and answered my questions accurately. I was so impressed I offered him a job there and then and he took it. (This is not a course of action I would recommend, but in William’s case it worked)
William was paid a basic salary and commission. I knew that he would perform well so I put him straight into a good area and he started work. The area I placed him in was worth about 180,000 commission per year to a good performer so the incentives were worth the effort.

Over the last few months I have been contracted to train many sales people and managers for large corporates like MTN, Old Mutual Bank, and Transnet among many others. At then end of every training session I always include a section that can loosely be called motivation.
Motivating people is not difficult, the real challenge is to make people see that they can motivate themselves. Encourage them to believe that they capable of far more than they are achieving right now and giving them the skills to achieve that greatness. I can help people to go away from a seminar all pumped up but the challenge is to ensure that lasts longer than the trip home.
So how do you do that?
Well... I am glad you asked.
There are two things involved here.

What are you motivated by? When I ask this question at Seminars there are usually five or six things that get mentioned. Money, success, power, wining, love and even hate on occasions. Everybody is different and each occasion is different so it's hard to tie it down to one thing or another. When we explore this issue deeper, however each of the above drivers can be tied down to two things;  The avoidance of Pain or desire for Pleasure.

I was chatting to a small group last week and one of them said to me “I would love to write a book but I can’t afford to take the time of work”
How often have I heard that or something like it. How easy is it to blame someone or something for our own mistakes.
There is a little of the victim in all of us. A victim would prefer to find someone to blame than find a solution. You will hear two or three victim statements everyday at work, and you will sometimes catch yourself being a victim. Consider the following:

Developing the skills to sell is easy. There are many great sales trainers, books, training courses, DVDs and sales coaching websites that will give you the skills. The hard part about becoming a great salesperson is not getting the skills but developing the attitude to use the skills.
All the great sales people agree. Selling is 30 % skills and 70% attitude, but do you have the right attitude to sell? Try this little test:

A few weeks ago I had an e-mail from a very distraught salesperson. She was upset because her company had set her an impossible target to reach and while she liked her job she didn’t feel she could carry on working for them if they set targets she can not reach.
Have you ever felt like that? I remember many years ago being sent targets from head office by people who plainly did not know what is happening on the ground. It seemed as though they had completed their budgets and needed another 30% over inflation to balance, so guess what? The sales department gets the burden.
Okay, now I understand. Now that I have worked both sides of the fence I can see that the pen pushers in Head office weren’t just sucking the figures out of their thumbs. There is usually some science in the work they do (not always, but usually) but the poor sales person hasn’t been given insight into the calculations, they are just told to get on with it, and if they wont, there are plenty of sales people in the wings who are waiting to take over.

Each product and service is different, each situation is different and each customer is different, so each close is different. There are some guide lines however, that will be of assistance in the process of closing. the basic close comprises of three separate steps:

Last time we talked about the 3 steps top closing any sale.
Look for Buying Signals
Summarise the Benefits
Ask for the Business
This time we are going to look at what happens next.

Ever heard that objection?
Only once or twice... A day!
When you get the “It is too expensive” objection what is the customer thinking?
I know that sounds obvious but give it some thought.  He may be thinking "I have not got the money" but in fact that is not very likely. It would be more common for the customer to be thinking any of the following:

You will get price objections. Until you are able to demonstrate the difference between your product and that of your competitors the customer will have little else to go on. It will be your job to handle those price objections and you should do this by demonstrating the value of your product or service.
For instance the customer may say “Your wheel bearings are too expensive. I don’t want to spend that much on wheel bearings.”

“We are happy with our current company and we are not looking to change”

Very often we get an objection because of our approach. You are right in thinking that this is an "Indifferent Objection", but you may have got it because of the way you started the phone call in the first place. This is the type of objection that cuts off the sales person leaving them with very few options. Your prospect probably has a good relationship with their current supplier so you are not only battling with the benefits but also with the relationship. The ready made answers to this depend on your product or service. Find out who you are competing with first ( "That's interesting Mr.Smith, may I ask who is supplying you at the moment?" ) and then;

Price is always an emotive issue. "We have to lower the price to keep in line with the competitors" I hear the same statement from sales teams throughout the country. "How do you expect us to sell at this price?" they say, or "I couldn’t make the sale Boss, the customer was putting too much pressure on me to lower the price." Actually price is not the most important issue as far as your customers are concerned.

I had a question from a Richard’s Review reader that made me think a little. The question was about restaurant prices, and how dare they charge that much for a piece of chicken.
Of course, expensive restaurants have been around for as long as there have been places to eat out, and they are often successful. I remember when I was 18; my Mum asked me what special treat I would like to have on my birthday. I didn’t have to think long. “Lunch at the Café Royal” I said. This was a very smart restaurant in London, and at the age of 18 seemed to me to be the most expensive. Why would an 18 year old want a fancy meal rather than a party? What is it about such places that make us want to eat there?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the risks we face in business with a weakening economy.

Some of the replies I got back said that was okay, but what can we do to make sure that we are still in business at the end of the year? How do we compete in a shrinking market?

The first rule here is differentiation. We have to make sure we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors so that the customers can see us as different. In a growing market when there is enough business to go round there is less pressure to differentiate. In a shrinking market we must be seen to be different or die.

If the customer can see no difference between you and your competitors they will choose the cheapest price.

Let’s imagine I have two identical products (or services) in front of me. They come off the same production line in Taiwan so they are identical, in fact the only difference between the two products is that one is priced at R300 and the other is priced at R400. Which one would you buy?

This is an interesting question and not one that is easy to answer. I thought that I should at least be able to define quality if I am discuss the subject so I looked the word up in the dictionary. The result of that search was as follows:
Quality :  Degree of excellence
Well that is not very helpful at all. If we are talking about a degree of something then there is good quality and average quality. Not very helpful.

For years now, companies have accepted the need for a good CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System. Most companies fall down at this point. They have the need but don’t have the drive to put such a system into place.

If you are not sure what a CRM system is let me outline principles for you.

You start with a “Suspect” and qualify him to be a “Prospect”. Once you have sold something to him he becomes a “Customer”. If you are clever you keep an ongoing record of the customer’s details and the process he has been through. This is called a Customer Relationship Management system. Of course the best systems can do a lot more than simply store the contact and recent purchase details, but this is the basis of the system.

When you have a relationship with a friend you remember his details, birthday, wife’s name, sporting preferences etc. in your head. When you have 200 customers (or 20,000) it is impossible to remember that sort of information but you still want each of those customers to feel special so you store that critical information on a database for retrieval at any time.

Okay, It’s fairly clear that we are going to have a tough year this year. Plenty of opportunities out there but very little time to time to take advantage of them. So how can we manage our time better?
When you are faced with a pile of unrelated tasks to perform, it is sometimes difficult to know which to do first and how long to spend on each task. You have to decide upon a formula to categorise each task and I recommend the following:
Imagine you have a number of tasks to do and you have to decide which to do first. Take each task and give it a value as to it's importance and it's urgency.

What do you think is the best two letter word for any negotiator? Give that some thought and I will let you know what I think at the end of this article.
In negotiation we are often tempted to give something away to show good faith, or to "throw in a little sweetener". That may make you feel good but what do you think it does to your negotiating opponent?

Who wins in a negotiation?
I expect you know where I'm going with this. The principle of a win - win in a negotiation is well-known, but in my experience very few people understand the principle and even fewer use it.

Last time we discussed the importance of going for win - win in your negotiations. Win - win is not a matter of making sure that both sides in the negotiation end up with an equal share of what is to be negotiated, but rather making sure that each side in the negotiation end up with items that they considered to be of high value. What is valuable to me however may not be valuable to you, and a good negotiator will insure that he knows, in advance what his negotiating opponent will consider to be of high value and use that knowledge in a negotiation.
If you are going to go for win - win in your negotiations, you had better make sure that you have "Power" before you start.
So, where does power come from the in any negotiation? This is an interesting question.

A few days ago I was presenting a series of negotiation skills to a group of sales people who, at first, felt that they didn’t negotiate with their customers. I presented the skills using the following Questions:
Who wins in a Negotiation?
Always go for Win/Win, nothing else works.
Where does the power come from in any Negotiation?
Power comes from Information, Preparation, and your NDA (No Deal Alternative).
Is there an Alternative to Positional Bargaining
Negotiate on Interests not on positions.

Some time ago I had an interesting experience in a shop that I would like to share with you. As an author, I work from home and inevitably get called upon from time to time, to complete household tasks when I should be working. On one occasion, I was battling with a particularly difficult part of a book when the lady who cooks for us, knocked on my office door and announced that there were no potatoes and she needed them straight away.
I was angry.

I have heard many answers to this question over the years and some of them not too complimentary. Some people not in sales and even some who are, have an idea that the art of selling is a less than honourable trade. They have the feeling that the best salespeople are close to con-men who would do anything and say anything just to make the sale. They meet a sales person and are on their guard watching for the trick that will make them buy something they don’t need or can’t afford.
This is not sales. Unfortunately there are a few con-men who give the trade a bad name but most of them do not last long, having to move from product to product or industry to industry to keep one step ahead of their reputation.

When I left school I didn’t want to be a salesman. Few teenagers leave school with the idea of going into sales, they want go into teaching or catering; they want to become attorneys or engineers. Selling is rarely considered to be a career, and when I was young very few parents would have encourage their children to become salespeople. Very little has changed in this regard.
I followed my basic education with two years at Hotel School where I was taught how to be a waiter, a chef and a hotel manager. I learnt how to make beds and why you can always get instant hot water in a hotel bedroom even though the water heater is as much as 100 meters away.

I have been training sales people for many years and thousands of sales people have been through my courses. At the beginning of each course I ask each person to introduce themselves and, of course, along with the introduction we get their job title. There have been hundreds of different titles but the most common are:
Sales Representative
Sales Executive
Marketer
Marketing consultant
New Business Development Officer
Internal Sales
And, of course, just Sales

What is communication?
Well, it can be a lot of things of course, but for this article “Communication is the process of imparting information or emotion in a way that is fully understood and hopefully accepted by the Communicatee”. (The person who is on the receiving end of the communication)

“Ah!” I hear you say. “Surely communication is a two way process? Isn’t listening as important, or in fact more important, than talking? Isn’t the process of communication the understanding of each other’s point of view?”

“True” I reply “ But”

Personalise. Personalise, Personalise.!
Selling is all about relationships. Developing a good relationship with your customer is not just a “nice to have” so long as the specs and the price are right. Developing a good relationship is a “must have” before the other things are even discussed.
If the customer does not like you, he will not buy from you.

I got off the plane from Cape Town this morning and wandered into the bookshop to fill in time before my lift arrived. Murphy's Law states that if the plane arrives early the lift will be late.
As I approached the counter I was asked by the very nice lady “Can I help you?”
This is not unusual of course. In fact if you were to go on a shopping spree anywhere in the country (and most of the English speaking world for that matter), you would hear the same words in nine out of ten shops. “Can I help you?” And what do you think the normal reply is? That is right “No thank you, I am just looking”
This is fine of course, for the shopper but a terrible waste for the shop. If you ask a customer “Can I help you?” This is a closed question and is likely to get a “yes”, or more likely a “no” answer. Either way you are no further forward.

Today I was asked an interesting question. In my line of business I get a lot of interesting questions. Usually they are raised at a seminar with 200 people looking at me for advise and I am asked a question I can’t answer. I don’t want to make a fool of myself by getting the answer wrong of course, but I don’t want to, not have a good answer either, so I often say “That’s an interesting question, what do the rest of you think about that?” There are usually a few people in any audience that have an answer to everything, so they get on with voicing their opinion and I listen intently while I am formulating a good answer for myself.
Today was different, however. I knew the answer to the question, but it was not what the questioner expected.
“What,” I was asked, “is the most useful skill for a good salesperson?”
“Listen!” I replied

There are a number of techniques that buyers use to get a better deal for themselves. These are mostly tricks and the salesperson must avoid falling for them. I have listed a few of these “Tricks” below so that you can be prepared.
What do you do .......  When the buyer says your product is no good.

On the sales coaching website last week, someone asked a simple enough question about the difference between a feature and a benefit. I know that you know the answer to that question and in fact many of the people who visit the website could easily have written a good reply but I was reminded of an excellent way of demonstrating the difference that I heard from a speaker when I was in Birmingham last year.
The simple way to answer to the question is to define the three words that we, in sales, use more than any other; Features, Needs and Benefits.

Last week my wife and I were in Cape Town for the weekend. This was just a fun trip and on the Saturday we were driving around the mother city in the rain getting quite lost and then we drove past a lovely little shop in a residential area called “The Chocolate House”. So, of course, we stopped.
The shop was delightful but empty.
A very nice lady came out to help us with our chocolate purchases and while we were choosing my wife asked “Where’s the Chocolate made?”
There was a brief silence, and then the lady replied “Oh…. The chocolate maid is away today she will be back on Monday.” We, of course, roared with laughter.

Last week one of the members asked a question about a customer who wasn’t there for a prearranged meeting.
This is a tough one and without knowing more background it is hard to give a definitive answer. In principle, if a person isn’t there having confirmed an appointment, he is rude and it is down to him to apologise and make sure you are happy. In the real world however, this is not likely to happen. Sales people will tell you it happens all the time.

There are three distinct types of sales people, the hunter, the farmer and the farmer's wife.
The Hunter
The hunter is a wily character. He goes out each morning in search of his prey. He will research an area to find where the best meat is available and he will focus his efforts there. He will generally go for the big kill, not bothering with the small prey unless he is really hungry. Hunting is hard work. He may have to run for miles tracking a large animal but the rewards are high when he succeeds. If he fails he goes hungry. Hunters do not spend years cultivating a relationship with their prey, they simply go for the kill and move on.
Good hunters are rare, a special breed, and while the successful hunters live the high life with plenty of protean to eat, the hunters who are not successful often starve to death. The hunter is a risk taker.

I was first exposed to formal performance appraisals about 25 years ago. Management systems were very different in those days, being far more autocratic and less participative.
The HR department of the company I was working for had just attended a 2 day workshop and were keen to implement what they had learnt. The other management however, were more of the opinion that subordinates should do as they are told and if they don’t like it find another place to work on the FIFO principle (That’s Fit In or Find Other employment), so spending time on appraisals seemed such a waste. The CEO, who was a little more enlightened, introduced annual appraisals as mandatory and so we had to do it.

In August 1963 Martin Luther King had a “Dream”. Forty three years later we are still quoting him… Why?
Eight Months later at his Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela dreamed “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”
Twenty years later Bill Gates said that in his dream one day every desk in every office would have a computer in it. Well... we have certainly bought into that dream.
Steve Jobs set up Apple Computers with a dream. He left the company but the dream was so compelling, 10 years later, he took over the company again and still drives it today. Apple is an interesting example of this type of selling. In the early days they didn’t have a marketing team, they had Evangelists. Successful sales people know, as Customers we never buy products we buy dreams.

I hate it. When I tell people I teach selling skills the first thing they think of is the really bad sales experience they have had. You know the one; we have all had such an experience. When the sales person wouldn’t take no for an answer for instance, or they push so hard you would prefer to eat dirt than buy from them. Then we have the sales person who has such a high opinion of himself that you are uncomfortable just being next to them or when you know they are lying to you but you just don’t know which bit of their sales pitch is a lie
Sales people the world over have created such a bad press for themselves that customers build up a barrier, a defence mechanism that will protect them from a bad purchase.
Customers think that to be a good sales person you almost have to be disabled (heartless, deaf and blind), and certainly have to be impervious to customer’s needs.
This is just not true.