Guest Article: “The Explosion of Robot Selling to Increase Sales,” by Leanne Hoagland-Smith

The Explosion of Robot Selling to Increase Sales
by Leanne Hoagland-Smith

It may be just me, but the explosion of robot selling arena appears to be contradictory to the goal to increase sales. Every day I receive messages from robots, oops I mean salespeople, wanting me to buy this or try that.

Just yesterday I got this one:

Hi Leanne,

I was checking on this.

This ends at 5pm today.

Let me know if you would be interested. Regards,

What he was checking on was a previous marketing message that I had personally answered, but his “robot” sales process did not even read my email because he was engaged in “robot selling.”

Over at LinkedIn, second connections who share similar groups believe they, too, can engage in “robot selling.” These folks send out broadcast emails with the hope to snag one or two likely sales leads, while ignoring the fact they potentially alienated a whole lot more folks with their intrusive marketing messages.

Now there are email marketing to social media firms who assure their clients that email and social media marketing works.  Maybe it does, but my sense is small business owners are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to their buying decisions.

People buy from people, not robots.

This is why the term is relationship selling not robot selling.

People also buy from people, not robots, they know and trust.  When businesses and more specifically professional sales people are engaged in robot selling (think automatic emails, robo calls, recorded voice mail messages,  etc.), they ignore the human factor.

Automation type marketing tools are great especially when you are posting content.  However, there still must be some personal interaction from you as the human being unless your target market is robots if you truly wish to increase sales.

This human or personal interaction may be a handwritten note or postcard, a phone call, something that differentiates you from all those other gray suited robots. Additionally, thanking or liking postings to actually leaving a message shows you have some real interest in others and it is not just about you wanting to sell.

So continue with the robot selling if that is working for you meaning you are securing your goal to increase sales. However, for this old Swede, I will continue with my focus on relationship selling and building those critical relationships necessary to increase sales. My sense is at the end of the day, I will have ticked off far less people, enhanced my personal credibility and built some new relationships based on trust.

Leanne Hoagland-Smith is the Chief Results Officer for her executive coaching and consulting company.  She brings a no nonsense approach to her clients that is results focused.  You can read more from Leanne at the Increase Sales Blog.

Guest Article: “Help! I Can’t Close Sales: 5 Ideas to Increase Your Close Ratio,” by Jill Konrath

Help! I Can’t Close Sales: 5 Ideas to Increase Your Close Ratio
by Jill Konrath

Recently I got an email from Ahmed that said, “Do you have anything on how to close sales? Getting into an account isn’t a problem for me. But I get stuck after submitting a proposal.

“By this time, I’ve already sent them all our marketing materials and given them a demo. They seem interested. Then, after they get my proposal, nothing. What am I missing?”

I can’t tell you how many times salespeople have asked me to help them get better at closing. However, despite what you think, it’s not the real problem. 

Your inability to close is a symptom. What it really means is that your prospect does not think it’s worth making a change right now. In short, it’s nice to know about your offering, but not necessary.

Five things you can do to get better at closing sales.

1. Know your impact. Make sure you’re clearly able to articulate the business value of your offering. You should ensure that you’re talking about key business drivers such as reduced operating costs, increase sales conversation rates or improved efficient. Adding metrics makes your message even more impactful.

2. Be a storyteller. Share examples of how you’ve helped other customer improve. Be able to explain how they were doing things before, the challenges they faced, and the results they’ve achieved since working with you. 

3. Slow down. Based on what you said, you may be moving things along much too fast. You’re showing your stuff, sending collateral and giving pricing. It’s highly likely that they don’t feel like you’re focused on their success. Take time to build the relationship so that they truly feel that you’re a credible resource, not a self-serving sales guy.

4. Connect the dots. It’s imperative to engage your prospect in a discussion. This helps you/them determine if your offering makes sense for them. Here are some good ones to start with:

• How are you currently handling your needs in this area?
• What are your objectives relevant to the business drivers this product/service addresses?
• What initiatives do you already have in place to get there? 
• If you achieved results similar to our other customers, what would this mean for your organization?

See where I’m going with this? If your prospects aren’t making the connections between what you sell and the value they could get from it, it’s because you’re leaving it to happenstance. 

Don’t let that happen. Plan your questions ahead of time. They are your greatest tools in getting to a yes. 

5. Stop trying to close. Instead, focus on helping your prospect determine if it makes good business sense to change. If it does, they’ll say yes. If not, they’ll stay with what they’ve got. 

Today’s prospects are too savvy to fall prey to any closing techniques. The more you try to do it, the less they want to do business with you. Instead, put your emphasis on the front end of the sales cycle.

Before you know it, your prospects will be saying, “How soon can we get going on this?”

Jill Konrath is the author of two bestselling sales books and is a popular speaker who helps sellers crack into new accounts, speed up sales cycles and win more business.  You can learn more about her at her blog or her website.

Sorry, Buddy, But Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

I have received several email responses to my recent The Value of Fear post that have been very critical of my position that fear not only is a great motivator but that sellers need to experience failure in order to learn to fear it.

A good many of the emails chastised me for suggesting that sales leaders should allow sellers to experience failure.  Rather their position is that the sales leader should be doing everything possible to help sellers avoid failure in order to help them grow their self-confidence and that they should never criticize a seller’s failure but in all cases be encouraging and supportive.

The implication is that if one criticizes then by definition they are not supporting the seller.

That position, I believe, has more to do with Political Correctness than reality—and does far more to destroy the seller, the sales leader, and the company than whatever good some mushy soft hearted encouragement in the face of failure can ever do.

I’m not saying encouragement is bad.

I’m not saying that helping a seller to find some positive in failure is bad.

What I am saying is that protecting sellers from the consequences of their failure is bad.

Sellers need to feel the pain of failure and if we try to soft-pedal their failures into some weak, fictional success we’re setting them up for even more profound failures in the future.

Worse, we could be setting them up for the ultimate failure of getting hit out of left field with the disturbing news that they no longer have a job.

Let me relate a brief email exchange from the past week:

Me (to a sales leader who had emailed me with his disagreement with my post on fear): So all of your conversations with you salespeople are 100% positive even when they have failed?

Sales Leader: You misunderstand.  They never fail.  When they don’t succeed they learn something.  There is no such thing as failure.

Me:  How can you not discuss their failure with them so that they understand the real meaning of it, that is, that it is more than a learning opportunity, it is a missed sale that hurts them, the company, and even the prospect?

Sales Leader:  It is never about failure.  It is never about pain or hurt or missed opportunity.  It is about a positive experience—they saw a prospect; they made a presentation; they learned something new.  Talk of fear and failure and pain and missed opportunities kills the spirit and I want my people to experience nothing but good, to feel good about themselves and what they are doing.

Me:  What happens to those salespeople who don’t have enough successes to meet quota?  What do you do with them after they’ve missed quota time after time?

Sales Leader:  Well, certainly there are some that we have to part ways with, but that’s just one of the unfortunate parts of business.

Me:  So you’re giving these people positive feedback, telling them to continue doing their best and all will be good, never letting them know failure, and then out of the clear blue one day you say, “Hey, buddy, your best isn’t good enough.  We have to let you go?”  Is that fair to the seller?

I haven’t received a response yet from the sales leader.

Sellers need to experience the consequences of their actions—both positive and negative. 

Sales leaders need to communicate honestly with their charges and that includes letting them know when they failed, why they failed, and what their failure means.  Trying to sugar coat failure, trying to protect the delicate feelings of sellers will eventually do far more harm than good.

We grow through our experiences–all of our experiences, good and bad, success and failure, those we are proud of and those we aren’t.

Overly protective sales leaders need to learn to let go and let their salespeople know the real pain of their actions, as well as the success. 

And ultimately maybe the desire to protect sellers from experiencing the consequences of their failure says more about the sales leader than the seller.
Connect with me on Twitter: @paul_mccord

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/McCordTraining

Guest Article: Outselling a Price Slasher, by Dave Stein

Outselling a Price Slasher
by Dave Stein

I’ve been getting emails recently from salesreps and managers asking me to provide advice on how to overcome competitors who slash prices to win. Although I’m certainly capable of providing guidance, it occurred to me that I had a section in my 2004 book How Winners Sell addressing that.  So, after a bit of editing, here is the adaptation:

How do you compete against a competitor that drastically discounts at the last minute to win business?

Early in evaluation cycles prospects may say that price is a consideration, but not first on their list. Later on, once they have ignored or devalued any unique capabilities that your product or service can provide—to the point where they “can see no measurable difference between your offering and your competitor’s” — price gets elevated to the number one consideration. We’ve all seen it happen. By that point it’s generally too late to remedy the situation. You’re trapped. So recognizing potential situations early on where a buyer will buy on price is critical.

Here are some recommendations that will point you in the right direction. Of course each of these recommendations should be integrated into your team’s selling methodology.

Qualify. In any competitive sales situation you have to monitor the prospect’s decision criteria like a pilot checks her instruments—vigilantly. During the course of an evaluation decision criteria often change. In fact, aren’t we often the ones who attempt to effect that change to gain competitive advantage?

Among the most critical of all decision criteria these days is price. What are the key evaluators’, buyers’, recommenders’ and decision makers’ requirements and expectations with regard to price, today? If you are just getting engaged with a prospect and their number one decision criteria is price, you (or your manager) will have to decide whether it’s even worth competing. Clearly, knowledge of your competitor’s historic actual selling price will be critical in this decision. So will an understanding of your prospect’s recent buying patterns with regard to price.

Buyers focused on price de-emphasize or entirely ignore factors such as:

• Supplier product or service quality
• Supplier viability
• Supplier post-sales support capabilities
• Post sales costs (contributing to total cost of ownership)
• The knowledge and experience a supplier can bring forth
• Areas of additional value that you may be able to provide above and beyond what they have specified
• Quality, knowledge, and experience of supplier personnel
• References

Address the issue head on and early. “Is your company going to make a decision based entirely or substantially on price?”  And please, make sure you are asking these questions of, and selling to, decision makers. All this matters very little to the people at lower levels in organizations.

Educate yourself. Here are just some of the questions for which you need answers to outsell a competitor that dramatically discounts to win business. (Ideally we’d like your Sales Enablement team to provide you with these answers as well as what’s needed to overcome the challenge.)

• Is their discounting tactical or, in the case of some very successful companies, strategic—a key component of a go to market strategy supported by their business plan? (It’s hard to compete against Walmart on price…)
• When do they offer these drastic discounts and under what conditions?
• How do they dilute the unique value of what you are selling in the prospect’s eyes?
• How well do they deliver post sales service?
• How often do they produce new products or upgrade their services?
• What is the satisfaction level of their customer base?
• What is their financial position? If they are publicly held, look at their P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement for the most recent quarter and going back in time. (If they are privately held, get your CFO or a finance resource to create a pro forma set of financial statements that might represent what that competitor’s financial position might look like. It could provide you with insights into where that competitor’s vulnerabilities lie.)
• What do you know about their human resources? Look into staff and executive attrition rates, quantity and quality of SMEs (subject matter experts), levels of staffing, and customer care hours—anything that will point toward discount-caused reduced margins impacting operating effectiveness.
• Look at their corporate culture. What do they value? Integrity? Quality? Are they doing the right things for building a long, profitable future or are they highly opportunistic, with little regard to what will happen tomorrow?
• Uncover what the competition uses to deflect their prospects from exploring the areas listed above. In technology, you’ll often find that the lowball competitor has the sexiest demo, for example.

Discover and Quantify Your Value. Whether or not you suspect that a low-price competitor will be included in the bidding process, you (or other resources within your organization) will need to quantify the value of your offering—in terms of financial return. When you are competing against someone who drastically discounts, it’s especially important to get close to the prospect and really understand their requirements. Not only will that enable you to better position your solution, but, more importantly, you’ll be able to uncover areas of potential additional value for the customer that can be derived from the differentiators that you are selling. If these differentiators are linked to financial impact for the prospect, they are not likely to become expendable nice-to-haves, eliminated from consideration in what might turn out to be a commodity buy. Even if the prospect doesn’t want to or can’t invest in that added value now, you’ve expanded their vision past what your competitor has done and have set yourself up for add-on business later.

Educate and Position. Winners who are really good at competitive selling subtly but definitively alter their prospect’s perception that buying at the lowest price is the prudent thing to do. You can really only do this effectively when you are selling at the appropriate executive levels.

• Talk to the buyer about the challenging business conditions that face all of us, and the natural tendency to buy at the lowest price.
• Talk about companies in the prospect’s as well as your own industry who have gone out of business as a result of tactical discounting, and the impact that had on those companies’ customers. (You need to do some homework here.)
• Implore the prospect to ask questions of the other contenders that will expose weaknesses that result from tactical discounting. (See “Educate Yourself,” above.)
• Educate the prospect on the differences between price, cost, and business value and the impact on of those factors on their business. Understand the prospect’s own business model, their culture and how they sell to their customers so you can link your approach to theirs. (If they sell a commodity themselves, at the lowest price, you may have a serious challenge.)
• Immunize the prospect in advance against what will likely be a lowball bid by your competitor. Explain how, when, and why it will happen. Prepare the prospect for what you know will come. Don’t just sit back and wait.
• Convincingly reduce what will likely be price differentials into meaningful, real terms. “Since there is typically a five-year life cycle associated with my product, and it will, admittedly require potentially a $240k additional investment, I figure that comes to $4k per month, which, you have to agree is less than a rounding error (or full-time employee) in terms of the business value we’ve been talking about.”

Get creative. If you haven’t tried risk-sharing, phased deliveries, guarantees, extended warranties, or other creative approaches that will enable you to win the business without discounting, you need to do some brainstorming with your team. Very often a cash-strapped competitor who has been discounting to win business falls flat on their face when asked to match such creative selling.

Few of us can afford to sit back and wait for the competition to slash their price and walk away with the business. Understand your customer, your competitor, and your unique value.

---

Adapted from How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale   (c) 2004 — Dave Stein.  All Rights Reserved.

Note: I need to make it clear that it is not the responsibility of the individual salesrep to figure all this out. Nor is it her job to build the approach, tools, messages, and everything else required to compete against price slashers and consistently win. That’s what a strategic approach to sales effectiveness provides.

Dave Stein is CEO of ES Research Group, a company that evaluates sales training companies as well as providing in-depth industry research and reports on sales training trends.  You can find Dave at his blog: http://davesteinsblog.esresearch.com/about/

The Value of Fear

“I’m not afraid of anything,” goes the boast so often heard from sellers who are trying to impress their manager. 

The idea that a top seller is so confident, so cool, so well prepared that they’re not afraid of anyone or anything, including failure, seems to be more prevalent now than in the past.  Maybe I’m just more attuned to it now than I had been. 

Whichever it is, I’m hearing it more and more often and most of the time it seems to be coming from young sellers who grew up being told that they not only could do anything they put their minds to but they deserve success because they are the most educated and admirable generation ever.

It seems that the coddling has bleached out all sense of fear and anxiety—and a great deal of hardness and determination—from the up and coming generation of sellers.

And although this isn’t universal, of course, it seems we’ve done them a mighty disservice. 

To pervert one of Gordon Gekko’s quotes, “Fear is good.”  Fear is, in fact, the stuff that success is made of.  Fear of failure.  Fear of losing one’s job or status or position or respect.  Fear of disappointing oneself and others.  Fear of not achieving.  Fear of not living out one’s dream.

Fear is more powerful than the lure of success.  It puts more demands on you than the want of things.  Fear is a motivator like no other.  For most of us it isn’t the carrot as much as the stick that is the base motivating factor.

And we have a generation that has been force fed unwarranted success through the elimination of the potential for failure and, thus, the purging of the sense of fear of failure.

I’ve yet to find a highly successful person who doesn’t respect fear—and if you haven’t had the opportunity to taste it in big chunks you can’t respect it.  It is so simple and terrible, yet so powerful.  Don’t allow yourself or your sales team to live with the illusion that success can be acquired without the help of fear.

If you’re a sales leader who has sellers who voice a lack of fear, encourage them to go out and get a really good taste of failure.

Guest Article: Reputation Recovery, by Charles H. Green

Reputation Recovery
by Charles H. Green

When you are more virtuous than your reputation would suggest, you have a communications problem.

When your reputation for virtue exceeds the facts on the ground, you have a ticking business problem.

When Image and Reality Part Ways

When you have a communications problem, the communications team should hire a PR firm. Most firms do this.

But in the second case – where the reputation is better than the truth – most firms do not do what they should. They don’t even thank their lucky stars for having a better reputation than they deserve.

Instead, they begin to believe the hype.

Then one day, It Happens. The subsidiary defaults. The pipeline springs a leak. Animal byproducts show up in the food. Someone comes forward to testify.

Let’s be clear. These things just kind of seem to happen more often to the non-virtuous than to the virtuous firm. If the event truly is an anomaly, it doesn’t last on the front page. Acts of god don’t make good news for long.

But what about the non-virtuous firm?

When Disclosures Accelerate

When it turns out the smoke really did indicate fire, the non-virtuous firm all too often behaves predictably. Having believed their undeserved hype about being virtuous, they then do what the virtuous firms did – they hire a PR firm.

Which is all too often the wrong thing to do – and hardly ever the main thing to do.

In an interesting display of PR sensitivity, BP chose to hire Dick Cheney’s former campaign press secretary as head of PR, and a Wall Street PR firm as outside advisors.

Of course, there is a role for communications experts even in a crisis. With multiple constitutencies and tons of experience at keeping things secret, perhaps it made sense for Penn State to hire two outside PR firms.

But most non-virtuous firms aren’t looking for technical expertise; they’re looking to follow the lead of Muammar Gadaffi in seeking spin.

PR: a Delicate Balance

It cannot be an easy thing to tell clients seeking spin that the solution is to become virtuous. Clients want virtue now, and backdated if possible, thank you very much.

In such a milieu, the temptation for ambulance chasing is high. How can you keep on teaching virtue when the clients are paying you to shut up and stop the pain?

Yet that is what must be done. Arthur Page, the poster child for “good” public relations, had it right. He had a list of seven principles, the first of which was “tell the truth.” What a concept.

He also said that public relations is 90% doing and 10% talking about it. In other words, if you are virtuous, you’re not going to have much of a problem explaining crises.

Recovering Virtue

The fallen firm wants to know what they can do now to recover. After all, they always sought fast fixes in the past, and they worked. But there simply is no fast route to virtue recovery if you’re coming from a history of un-virtuous behavior.

At a personal level, it’s conceivable that someone could have an instant conversion and become virtuous, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen it – most conversions I have seen have come through pain and hard work.

And at a corporate level? Fuggedabout it. The fastest route to serious change is to change all the top leadership, and even then you’ve got habits, policies and cultures to change. Minimum 6-12 months, and I can’t off-hand think of an example where change has happened that fast.

Non-virtuous leaders who’ve been caught with their pants down don’t want to hear it, but the best way to handle crises is to prevent them happening in the first place. The best way to be trusted is to be trustworthy.

Spin is not the solution; spin is the problem.

You may not be able to change by tomorrow, but you can always start the journey today.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

The Key to Generating Business Changing Referrals

Most sellers want referrals.  Almost all sales trainers preach the need to generate ’em, usually by saying something like, “all of my clients give me four or five great referrals to their friends and family, while I’m filling out the paperwork, just write down the names and phone numbers of four or five people who might need my services,” or, “by the way, do you know of anyone else who might need my service?” or the equally vapid, “who else do you know that I can help as I’ve helped you?”

Most salespeople learn very quickly that these approaches don’t work well.  Sure, a salesperson might get an occasional name and phone number, but usually they aren’t much better than taking out the phonebook and pointing at names at random.

There are several reasons these approaches don’t really work such as not defining for the client what a good referral is, not giving the client time to get comfortable with the idea of giving referrals, and not giving the client a reason why they should give referrals.  In order to get a large number of high quality referrals, you must address and overcome each of these issues. 

But one of the major reasons clients don’t give lots of quality referrals is that they don’t know whom to refer.  They just don’t know enough about your business to give you really good referrals.  They really don’t know what you’re looking for-even after you define who a quality referral is.  Besides, they have enough to think about, they don’t need to be doing your job for you.  It isn’t their responsibility to do your prospecting for you–it’s yours.

Does that mean you can’t get great referrals?

No, not at all.

It does mean, however, that you can’t rely on your client doing your job. 

It means that you must do the work for your client and make giving you great referrals so easy for them that all they have to do is say “yes.”

So, how do you get referrals from clients without them having to do the work?  Simple.  You do some detective work to figure out who your client knows that you know you want to be referred to. 

OK, it isn’t simple. 

It takes work on your part–real detective work.  But it’s your business, not theirs.  You have to take responsibility for building your business, not pass it off to your clients.

Being a referral detective means you have to listen to your client. 

You have to ask the right questions. 

You have to observe his or her surroundings. 

You have to be alert to discover who you have reason to believe they know that you know would be a good prospect for you.

Most often you’ll uncover referral opportunities through casual conversations with your client and observing their office or home surroundings. 

A few examples:

• If you’re speaking with the VP of Finance for XYZ Company, during your rapport building, casually asking them whom they worked for prior to joining XYZ will reveal a potential referral. 
• If your client is purchasing a car, asking who’s next in their family to purchase a vehicle may reveal a referral
• If your client has a plaque from the local chamber of commerce for his work as one of last year’s directors, whom in the chamber do you know you’d like to be referred to?
• If your client is a purchasing agent for ABC Company, what companies do they purchase from that you’d like to be referred to? 

Instead of asking your client a general question that he or she may easily answer in the negative, ask your client if they would refer you to the person or company you’ve uncovered from your detective work. 

Your conversation might go something like this:

YOU: “John, I’ve been trying to connect with Joe Blow over at ABC Company for some time and just haven’t made contact.  I noticed that he’s one of your customers and wondered if you’d be comfortable introducing me to him.  Would you be comfortable doing that?”

 If you’ve done a great job and you’ve uncovered someone they know, they will say yes.

Or you might say something like:

YOU: “John, I’ve been trying to connect with Joe Blow over at.ABC Company for some time and just haven’t made contact.  It dawned on me that you might know him.  Do you know Joe?”

CLIENT (if you’ve done your detective work well): “Sure, I know him, why?”

YOU: “Well, I was wondering if you’d be comfortable introducing me to him.  Would you be comfortable doing that?”

Again, if you’ve done your job well your client will be happy to agree to make the introduction.

Yes, this isn’t as easy as asking the typical ‘referral’ question; but are you looking to build your business or just slide through doing as little as possible? If you’re serious about building your business, take responsibility for its success and do the work for your client.  You’ll get a lot more referrals-and lot better referrals-for your effort.
Connect with me on Twitter: @paul_mccord

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