Competitive Excellence - "Superior Sales Results" with Stu Schlackman

3 Sales Tips for a Successful 2012

Happy New Year and welcome to another year with a new sales budget! You may already be thinking about the potential challenges you might face. Are you wondering, will the economy continue to improve or will it backslide; is my new sales quota achievable; what other challenges might I face either internally or externally? All these and many more are valid concerns that most of you have. But when you focus on the positive - the possibilities - you will jumpstart 2012 and your pacing will be ahead of schedule! Consider implementing these 3 tips to make this year a huge success.

1-Follow up. Start this year by taking an inventory of those clients you have been working with this past year and which ones have potential to add incremental business. Which ones showed signs of interest but never made the ultimate commitment? Contact them and remind them of the benefits you discussed in the first place. Think about adding even more value that they would benefit from and how that added value makes getting together now even more important for them. Even better, come up with a very explicit “benefit for meeting now”. Why would your solution make a difference this year? Make sure that you have a “stay in touch strategy” so that your prospects and customers don’t forget about you - remember the old saying “out of sight, out of mind”.

2-ROI. Re-examine the return on investment your solutions bring to your customers. For existing customers, set up a meeting to review how your products and services have been performing for them. This is an excellent opportunity to ask about their goals and objectives for the new year and how you might be able to support them. It’s always easier to add business to an existing client and typically has the shortest sales cycle since you have already established a relationship where trust and credibility exist. This type of engagement with your customers also helps to preempt the competition who would be left out if they skip the request for proposal process saying the business is a modification to an existing purchase. With many companies new business from existing clients can easily be over 50% of your revenue generation. Understanding your clients ROI is important as it is proof of your solution’s success. The more proof you have to give to new prospects about what your customer’s have experienced is usually the MOST marketing you can do. Customers today want tangible evidence that your products and services will do what you say they will do.

3-Incentives. Most of you have all experienced company incentives at the end of the quarter or the year as a way to generate business and meet your revenue targets. Why not start the year out by adding incremental value to your solutions as an incentive to buy now. A new year for your customers usually means a new budget cycle and now is the time to stimulate their interest and get ahead of the curve. You’re not discounting your products and services, you’re adding value that might attract the customer or prospect’s attention. Adding value can have a low impact on your margins compared to lowering your price. Knowing your customer base and their needs will help you craft the right incentive that would gain their interest.
Make 2012 be your best year ever. Being proactive from the get go will show your customers and prospects that you have their best interest at heart.
Implement the 3 Sales Tips:

1- Follow up,
2- Show them a healthy return on their investment and
3- Craft the right incentive to spur them on to invest in you and your company.

Happy New Year and good selling for 2012!

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Relationships Trump Everything in Sales

Many moons ago I was competing for a large computer sale against IBM. This sale was ours to lose and we didn’t plan on losing. Our price was lower, our technology was superior, the service levels were better and there would never be any additional fees for upgrading to a larger system. Yet, we lost! How was that possible? The answer had to be that the customer was just plain ignorant! Well, that wasn’t exactly the case. IBM had a relationship with the CEO that had spanned nearly 20 years. Does that really count? You bet it does and please let me explain why relationships trump everything in the world of sales. Let’s look at 2 reasons why relationships are the key to sales success.

But first, let’s look at the definition of “relationship”? It’s the state of being connected. How are we connected to friends, family or business colleagues? We are connected through our emotions. We connect with others by engaging the right side of our brain where our feelings and emotions reside. We connect with people when we discover things we have in common. It’s our values, interests, hobbies, and our views that help us to connect with people who make it easy and are interested in developing a relationship.

1. Your attitude
The first reason customers want to develop a relationship with you is your attitude. I’m sure you’ve heard many times that attitude is everything. Well it’s certainly a huge reason why people will gravitate to you. And interestingly, even in business, attitude usually trumps aptitude. Attitude is critical in having strong emotional intelligence. Customers want to see a positive, can-do attitude in you. They see it in the way you handle the tough questions and objections they might have for you. They see it when you focus on their agenda. In other words they want you to better understand both their needs and who they are. If you’re just there to just make the sale - you’ve already lost them, because the customer can tell. Your attitude is in your control and it affects everything you do and every relationship you have.

2. Your value
The second reason a customer wants a relationship with you is because you add value and help them solve their issues. Most often it’s more about you the person and not your company, unless of course you worked for Enron or WorldCom. It comes down to their confidence in you, which is directly proportional to trust. According to Stephen M. R. Covey in his book- The Speed of Trust, there are two components to trust - character and competence. Both are necessary and you will never have the chance to add value if either of these trust components are missing. Character is your ability to uphold what is right in the eyes of the customer. It’s looking at the right solution at the right price and making sure that the outcome is fair and equitable for both sides. Putting the customer’s needs first is always paramount. Competence is demonstrating that your customers can trust you to solve their problem. Customers expect sales professionals to be the experts in their field and to know what is best for solving their problem. They also expect you to know that they have alternatives, to you, your product or service and even whether to make a purchase at all.

Customers intentionally build relationships with sales professionals that have the right attitude towards them and the right intentions-trusting you will do the right thing. They also expect you to provide value through competence and character.

When you focus on building strong and trust-based relationships, they will trump your products, services and hopefully your competitors-that’s why your customers do business with you.

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3 Facts About the Psychology of Selling

When it comes to reviewing a sales opportunity that either ends in a win or a loss you assess what happened. Why did you lose or why did you win? But what really matters is, “did you connect with the prospect”, and what does that mean? When you connect with your customer, it means that you understand their perspective. Further you convey your message in a manner that lands - they see the value of your solution. When you establish a comfort level with them, they can rest assured that they will be successful partnering with you. That is the psychology of selling.

People don’t buy just for the logical facts about your solution. Why do you buy a car? For the 30 miles per gallon, it’s rating in the consumer report or the safety record? While these are all important, the real decision relates more to the look and feel of the car. It’s what is going on in the emotional part of your brain. There are 3 facts about the psychology of selling. But before we get into these facts we need to define what selling really is. Selling is the transfer of emotions from one person to another. It’s not selling logic or rationale; it’s engaging the customer’s emotions. Now let’s look at the 3 facts.

Fact number one: consider a little brain science. Customers react to a pain 3 times more often than a gain. Why? Because dealing with pain is emotional. Your emotions reside in your limbic brain. Logic resides in the neocortex. Your limbic brain is stimulated 3000 faster than your neocortex. People respond to pain by finding a cure as soon as possible. As a sales professional, your goal is to find the pain and heighten the impact of what that pain can do. That’s why impact questions used after uncovering a problem are so successful when engaging the customer. Think about having an illness and what goes through your mind before seeing the doctor. Is it just a cold or is it more serious than you think? When you don’t have a solution to pain, you worry which only increases your sense of urgency.

Fact number two: in order to impact the customer emotions, you need to take them into the future. If you don’t alleviate the problem now, or you wait six months, what happens? Again, when you go into the future you have the opportunity to create what you see. Will it be bad by not taking action, or will it be resolved by fixing the issue now? It’s human nature to take things to the extreme especially when you look into the future. You can either paint the ugliest of pictures or the brightest of opportunities. Depending on the situation at the moment, you have the opportunity to steer the customer in the direction that favors your solution.

Fact number three: when customers are engaged emotionally with us, you will build stronger relationships. Think about the relationships you have with friends. Are they built on logic or emotion? You connect emotionally 100% of the time. Emotions have the upper hand over logic every time because our brain is hardwired that way. That’s why customers buy emotionally and back it with logic. Your first reaction to anything is emotional. Just think about how you connect with a movie. It’s not the words or the actions, but the music in the background that connects us emotionally to the scene. Emotions are a right brain activity and relationships are formed in the right brain. To engage the customer’s right side of the brain you need to establish a conversation that takes them to what’s most important to them personally. This is when they will take action.

When you understand that selling is really all about psychology, you’ll
- Focus on the pain
- Take them into the future
- Engage your customer emotionally to build the relationship

Only then will you earn the right to handle their business for the long term.

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