The Sales Evangelist

Sellers must work to effectively plan their activities in order to accomplish the important tasks in their days, and since I’ve struggled with the same challenges, I’ve developed a new planning tool to help with that effort. For most of us, it isn’t unreasonable to find that we have more tasks due in a day than we can possibly accomplish, and we can end up feeling like we’ve failed when we come up short. Unless we change how we do things, our days will feel like Groundhog Day, and we’ll repeat the same ineffective patterns every day. Falling short If we fail to complete our to-do list every single day, we’ll end the day feeling like we’ve failed. Worse yet, our list will grow every day because it will include tasks from the previous day that we didn’t finish. Eventually, we’ll feel emotionally drained by our ineffectiveness. Now, while you’re trying to find new leads, get new deals, and close new opportunities, you’ll likely be preoccupied with your looming to-do list. You’ll never completely escape the stressful moments and days in sales, but if you learn to effectively manage the time you have, you’ll better manage that stress. Whether you’re selling cars or selling services, you’re at risk of being frustrated by the to-do list. Identifying the process I discovered in my own process of organizing tasks I was spending as much time planning the tasks as I did accomplishing them. The result was that I was going in circles. I had read a book by Kevin Cruz called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management that prompted me to take control of my schedule. (I recommend you read it, too. It’s available on Audible.) I started by writing down all the tasks I needed to do each day, keeping in mind that I function best when I keep my days broken up. Kevin recommended breaking your day into 15-minute increments, which was a great idea, but honestly 30-minute increments worked best for me. I planned my entire day, including tasks like reading a sales book, listening to a podcast, prospecting, LinkedIn outreach, follow-up with clients, or proposal preparation. Creating a planner I decided to create my own planner that specifically addresses my unique tasks. One side of the planner allows me to list all the different tasks I do and divide them into different categories. In my case, as a business owner, I have certain categories that other sellers may not have. The top of each page has my KPIs which will help me generate sales and move the needle. They include new prospects, new opportunities, deals, progress. I list my top three goals or priorities for the day and things that I know I must get done. Some of them will be sales related and some will be beyond sales. For example, Mondays are podcast interview days. Other tasks on other days might include working with a team member to accomplish an internal task or meeting with a bookkeeper. Some days I’m writing a guest blog post for Hubspot or some other publication or creating content for social media. I also include personal tasks like appointments. At the bottom of the page, because I’m also a consultant, I track my clients and the consultations I have with them. Devoting time On the second side of the page, I allocate time for each of the different tasks, in either 15- or 30-minute increments. I order the tasks according to importance because I have them divided by category. Over time, I can track the categories and tasks that are taking a lot of my time. In some cases, I can push some of those tasks to other team members to free time in my own schedule. As an example, I realized I was spending a lot of time handling emails and I wasn’t able to efficiently get back to people when I needed to. I trained my executive assistant to help manage my email account and invested a couple of days into helping her establish a process. Now she helps me distinguish between junk emails and those that require an answer. As a result, my admin tasks have diminished a bit. If you’re thinking you don’t have the luxury of an executive assistant, it’s possible to find trustworthy people on platforms like Upwork. Maximizing time Some tasks can be shared by other team members through the use of templates. If I need a presentation created, I can use a template from PandaDoc to have someone else create it for me. This frees up my time to focus on things that matter the most. At the end of the day, I can note my actual accomplishments for the day and how much I was able to achieve. Based on those numbers, I can judge how efficient I was. Did I get to 70 percent? Strive to get A’s, but know that B’s are ok. C’s are no good. I’m going to create a video to share on LinkedIn that will show you how you can build a planner of your own, and ultimately we’ll create a planner for sellers, though our current one targets entrepreneurs. Work to identify the tasks that only you can do and make sure those are the tasks that land on your calendar. Then judge your success based upon your ability to

Sellers that don’t have good data will struggle to repeat their success so we must recognize the importance of data in sales. Kyle Morris operates a company called SifData which features an application that sits on Salesforce to help companies track job changes. Defining data Sales reps are very intuitive. They understand things well and many people assume that anecdotes and data are the same. They assume that, because they closed a deal with a company similar to the one they are interacting with, that constitutes data. Because a tactic worked previously, they may assume that they can use that information as data moving forward. In other words, they assume that if a tactic worked once, it’s solid and they should continue using it. Kyle points out that the plural of anecdote isn’t data. We must stay objective and make decisions based upon actual information rather than sticking our finger to the wind to determine which way it’s blowing. Data is objective information about people, companies, or whatever your data set is that helps you make informed decisions. One of the easiest ways to identify the companies that could buy your product is by identifying the companies that have already bought your product. Figure out what’s common among them and then use that as a template to decide who to sell to in the future. If you’re selling to companies that are unique, you might find another market that also has that same commonality. Some data will get you pretty far but you must be able to fill in the gaps that data doesn’t cover. Having anecdotes that prove your point isn’t the same as having data. #SalesData Data problems The two biggest problems common to data are that companies use data sources that are inconsistent and that they have too much data that isn’t actually valuable. Consider Uber as an example. If you’re trying to sell to Uber, some sellers might consider it enterprise while others view it as mid-market since they only have a couple of thousand employees. LinkedIn might reflect that the company has 35,000 employees, including drivers. If companies aren’t careful about where they are choosing data, it can create confusion. Be consistent about where you get data, even if it isn’t perfect, because you’ll at least be consistently wrong. Limit the number of resources you use to make classifications, especially for things like territories or number of employees or revenue. Many CRMs have a full page of information that reps never use. It doesn’t add value and it actually becomes a burden to them. Approach this with the same mentality you use when designing your website: what’s above the fold is critically different than what’s below the fold.It’s impactful where things are placed, and if reps have a bunch of unnecessary information at the top of the form it burdens them. If the reps don’t absolutely need it, then remove it. Streamline your process. Develop a discipline around reducing the amount of noise that your reps see based on the information they need. If the data won’t actually impact how they work through the sales process, it should be removed since it won’t actually move the needle. Guesstimation Donald Miller says that if you confuse, you lose. We cannot confuse our reps. If we do, they’ll likely go back to what they’ve always done before, which is guesstimation. Imagine driving a truck built in 1965 versus a fighter jet built in 2019. The truck likely haas a stick shift and like two buttons for the radio, so almost any person can use it to get from point A to point B. Put that same person in a fighter jet with a million buttons and they won’t understand how to move forward. Sales reps must be able to execute and they shouldn’t be asked to fly a fighter jet if all they really need is a 1965 Chevy. Additionally, more data points mean that some operator has to maintain those fields. You must make sure the information is accurate because inaccurate data will make your CRM less valuable. Again, if that happens, your reps will start using anecdotes to make decisions again. Cry wolf All those unnecessary fields will prompt your reps to fill them in, which will become cumbersome. If it isn’t a useful data point, they may just plug something in to fill the blank so they can move on. Your reps must be able to trust the fields that are on the page. Make the process simple and easy to engage. Remove as much as you can from the page layout so that your reps are only interacting with data that moves the needle. Everything can’t be critical. You can’t have 10 tier-one problems with no tier-two problems. You cannot cry wolf and represent that everything is vital. Kyle recalls his operations team once telling him that they needed a new field to be added to the CRM. He insisted that the team could add one field if they could identify two that could be removed. He said that it forces them to be intentional about the information they gather. Words are currency. You must make sure the process is easy. Find ways to br

Today we’re celebrating our country’s independence and the freedom of religion and freedom of speech that we enjoy, but sometimes sellers relinquish their freedoms because of fear. We discuss challenges like this in the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, how they can hinder our success, and how we can overcome them. Storytelling We’re focusing on sales tools this month and one of the tools we’ve discussed is storytelling. We’ve talked about how to tell an effective story and how LinkedIn and other social media platforms can help you share your company’s values. In my own case, I recently relinquished my own freedom because I worried about what other people might think. Despite the fact that this is our 1,130th episode, I still worry about people’s opinions. You might think I’d be beyond that, but I still worry about my writing and how it will be perceived. I worry that if I write something, it might not sound great. I worry, too, about the videos I create and whether or not I’ll look and sound good in the video. As a result, I relinquish my freedom to express myself and share my thoughts because I’m worried. Trolls I appeared on a friend’s podcast recently and I shared my own experiences with content and how it has benefited our audience. Luigi, the host of the Sales IQ podcast, recalled his experience with a troll who was intent on nitpicking his podcast by suggesting that I wasn’t qualified to speak about sales. He claimed I didn’t have enough B2B experience and that I was like many others who were cheating people. Reading that was like a kick in the gut. Despite the fact that I’ve helped hundreds of people, I started to have second thoughts. Our clients have landed promotions and generated pretty decent income, but still I doubted whether or not I should express myself. Limitations I wanted to pick apart his arguments and defend my experience against his claims that my information was basic to selling. Luigi pointed out that many sales professionals understand the importance of basics now. Together, we realized that this gentleman wasn’t a fit for the things we offered. Though he told us he had 33 years of sales experience, he’ll likely limit himself because he doesn’t believe he can learn from anyone else, especially those who are younger than him. I also realized that this gentleman had done this kind of thing before. Experience He didn’t realize that I haven’t listed every single bit of sales experience on my profiles. I have more than 15 years of sales experience between B2C and B2B settings. Perhaps he also didn’t realize that the fundamental things we share are the key to moving the sales needle. We’ve had clients from Tokyo to Australia, Europe to Canada, and of course the U.S. I offered to set a time for me to learn about him and him to learn about me. He responded by telling me that I could buy his book if I wanted to learn more about him. I declined his offer to buy the book and suggested a phone call, at which point he said he doesn’t spend money on long-distance phone calls. I offered to have a Zoom meeting but he wouldn’t commit. The point is that there will always be detractors, but we cannot let them stop us from expressing ourselves. Not everyone will be a good fit for whatever you’re selling. You’ll always have haters. Content Our content isn’t for people who don’t like it or who don’t believe they need it. It’s designed for people like you and me who are seeking to be better sellers. We talk a lot about how to generate content for podcasts or for LinkedIn or for blogs, and how videos can help you share content about your industry. The truth is that most of the people who consume your content will contribute to the conversation, and you can shut down your whole operation because of a single person. Whether you’re in the hospitality industry or the medical industry or the technology space, you can share content with others around you. Curate something you found online or write your own piece and ask others around you to help you improve it. Independence Declare your independence from fear and from trolls. Go out and share amazing content that impacts people’s lives. I want you to succeed and it’s why I do what I do. I want you to find more ideal customers and build stronger value in your conversations. I want you to close more deals and declare your independence. Mostly, I want you to go out and do big things. “TSE Certified Sales Training Program” episode resources Connect with me at [email protected]. Try the first module of the TSE Certified Sales Training Program for free. This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance. TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only t

Instead of pushing your message out to your prospects in hopes that they’ll latch on, sellers can make their message magnetic and practice better selling through storytelling. John Livesay is known as the “pitch whisperer” because he helps people become compelling storytellers. Plato said stories rule the world, and it’s still true, except 2,600 years later, we have many distractions that he didn’t have. Push and pull Pushing your message out to sell a product or service just doesn’t work anymore. The new technique is to pull people in with great stories. John’s work as a storyteller began at an ad agency where he was tasked with creating 30-second commercials for movies. He discovered the need to tell a concise story that made people want to see the movie. During a stint in Silicon Valley, he competed against IBM and other massive companies to sell technical products. He realized that if you confuse people, they say no. But you can pull people in by telling the story of what the technology does. His work culminated in a career selling ads for Conde Nast magazine, where he had to bring to life the vision of a particular brand to a particular advertiser so they could see why their brand would resonate with the stories being told in the magazine. Self-esteem roller coaster John points to the fact that sellers tend to feel good about themselves only when their numbers are up. When they’re down, self-esteem suffers. He recognized his sense that he had to constantly push information out, which was exhausting. Even worse, if you’re pushing and trying without getting anything in return, you end up feeling bad about the whole process. Good storytellers allow people to see themselves in the story, which makes the message magnetic. When you become a better storyteller, people want to take your calls and open your emails. #MagneticMessage Campfires The glow of PowerPoint has replaced the glow of campfires, and we often sit in meetings where someone reads to us from a slide. Don’t do that. Nobody wants to be read to. John suggests using a series of images from which you can tell a story. Stories work because of our right-brain, left-brain way of processing information. If you’re buying a car, when the seller shares how many miles-per-gallon it gets, you cross your arms and prepare to negotiate on price. But if you say, “Donald, let me tell you a story of someone like you who bought this car and how it changed his life,” you’ll pull the buyer into the story. People buy emotionally and then back their decision up with logic. Sellers who deal in Ferraris don’t talk about miles-per-gallon. They sell the emotion of driving a sexy car. People buy emotionally, and storytelling is the best way to tap into people’s emotions. If you tug at people’s heartstrings, they open their purse strings. Sales outreach John recently worked with Honeywell on the sales of technical products that keep the air clean inside operating rooms. The team talked a lot about the technology and the specifications and how it was better than what the competition had to offer. The real story is what happens if the air isn’t clean in the operating room. The patient gets an infection and has to be readmitted for additional surgeries. Just about every seller has a case study or testimonial of some sort that can form the basis of a good story. Paint a picture Some sellers use before-and-after pictures to sell their product or service, accompanied by a bunch of facts. There’s no emotion or story. A good story has exposition and it paints a picture of the work you did with a previous client. It marries the who, what, when, where, and why of a client with the problem you were solving. It demonstrates how much better life is for your client after he works with you. But you are never the hero in the story. Tell your story so that the client can see himself in your story. It will make your closing very different because the client will want to take that journey with you. Tell a story with specifics, and be sure to include the drama that happened along the way. Presentations Most sellers make the mistake of having too many words in their PowerPoint presentations, and failing to think about what their opening will be. Thanking them for the opportunity to be there isn’t memorable because everyone does it. The fact that you’re excited isn’t what excites your clients. Whether you’re pitching to fund a startup, to get hired, or to tell people why they want to work with you, use an opening that pulls people in. It’s the most important part of any presentation. Sellers often rely on ploys like presenting last in hopes that their presentation will be the most memorable, but the best story is going to get the sale. It doesn’t matter what order you present in. Sell yourself first, then sell your company, and then sell your product or service. Most people skip the first two. Tell a story about yourself, then about the company and its culture, and then how you help other people.

The most financially profitable way to do business is to shift your focus from getting to giving, and by developing a Go-Giver strategy, you’ll constantly provide value and good things will begin to happen. Bob Burg is a salesman who has written a series of books about the Go-Giver, a parable about the principles behind the kind of success most sellers are hoping to achieve. Through encounters with a series of different people, the main character, Joe, discovers that his focus has been in the wrong place. Giving too much Giving means providing value to others. Though it’s typically not possible to provide too much value, begin by determining whether your focus on providing value will set you up to be taken advantage of. There are plenty of people who are takers and who focus only on themselves. They feel entitled to take without giving anything back. If you’re providing value to someone like that, there’s a good chance things won’t work out. Realize, though, that there’s no natural connection between being a go-giver and being taken advantage of. Understand, too, that if you’re being taken advantage of, it isn’t because you’re too nice; it’s because you’re allowing it to happen. Being a go-giver doesn’t mean being a martyr or a doormat. It simply means your focus is on bringing value to the marketplace and to others. No one will buy from you because you need the money or you have a quota to meet. They’ll buy because they will be better off buying from you. Focus on value The only reason people should buy from you is because they’ll be better off after they do. That truth allows the salesperson or entrepreneur to focus on bringing immense value to the marketplace and to the prospect’s life. When that happens, the prospect will prosper greatly. Money is simply an echo of value. Focus on the value rather than the money. Value comes first and the money you receive is a natural result of the value you provided. Money is the thunder to lightning’s value. The value comes first. #thunderandlightning Human nature is self-interested. It allows us to create more human beings. Successful people deal in truth. They don’t deny inconvenient things, but rather they acknowledge truth and then work within it to make things better. Start by acknowledging and understanding self-interest. Then put it aside with the understanding that we’re better off dealing with others when we suspend our self-interest. The other person is only going to buy because of their own needs. Value without attachment Although people often suggest you should give without expecting anything in return, Bob doesn’t exactly agree with that. Instead, give value without attachment to the result. We want people to expect good things. If you’re in business serving other people, you should expect to profit greatly because you’re bringing value to the marketplace. Just don’t be attached to that result. Give value because it’s who you are and what you do. When that happens you create a benevolent context for success. You develop great relationships with people who feel good about you. They know you, they like you, and they trust you, and they want to be part of your business. Develop an army of personal walking ambassadors who will refer business to you. Starting point Imagine you decide at this point to change your ways. Start by asking who the people are in your network and what you can provide to them that will help them by bringing value to their lives. Then make a plan for meeting other people that you can develop know-like-and-trust relationships with. We’re human beings and we’re different types of people. The reason the Go-Giver took off is because it allows you to be yourself. You can be the person who wants to bring value to the marketplace. Most people choose a certain line of work because they believe in the mission. They believe in what they’re doing. We’re happy when we’re living congruently with our values. Go-Giver origins Bob recalls his parents working to make people’s lives better. Then, when he started in sales, he found himself selling a product that offered great value, but he was focused largely on the sales process. Like Joe in the book, he was a seller who wasn’t living up to his potential. He returned from a non-selling appointment one day to hear advice from a guy in his organization. The typically-silent guy told him that if he wanted to make a lot of money in business, he should establish a target outside of making money. Target serving others, so that when you hit your target, you’ll get a reward in the form of money. Great salesmanship is about the other person and how he’ll benefit from your product or service. Economic downturn Bob heard from a roofer during an economic crisis who recognized that his approach had been wrong. He was trying to save money during the downturn, but he realized that instead of trying to give the least he could for the money, he needed to focus on giving more value. It didn’t necessarily mean spending mo

Sometimes sellers trust too much of our sales process to autopilot, and we lose sight of the fact that even the best sales tools can’t replace you. We get distracted from the things that matter most and we miss out on opportunities or ruin relationships because we forget the importance of the most important component of the sales process. Sales tools Sales tools help us promote or sell a product. They could include CRM, which helps us sell by allowing us to track information. These tools may help us understand more about the prospects who are working in the organizations we’re pursuing. Tools might include your email account, your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, your BombBomb account, your cell phone, or your Hubspot tools. There are countless tools you can take advantage of that will help you promote or sell your products more effectively. Sometimes I rely so heavily on those tools that I effectively take myself out of the cockpit. I’m unable to guide the sales process because I’ve trusted my tools to automate it. Where to automate Automation without oversight can leave room for errors. While it’s good to use tools like prospect.io to automate your outreach, the problem emerges when we fail to personalize the process. If we set up generic emails and then blast them to hundreds of different people, you won’t get the results you’re seeking. People can immediately sniff out bulk outreach. If you rely on it, you’ll discover that very few people read your emails and even fewer responded. You may even discover that some unsubscribed from your communications. On the other hand, if you use merge tags to personalize your messages and you focus on a specific industry and you address a specific problem that this industry faces, you can create a message that speaks directly to that industry. Reaching out While I’m emailing these prospects, I’ll also reach out to them on LInkedIn via an invite, and I’ll comment on some of their relevant content. I’ll also use personal phone calls as well as text messages or possibly even Twitter. Unlike the generic situation which was devoid of my personal involvement, this option leaves room for my own personality. The prospects have a chance to interact with me in different settings because I’m actively involved. I’m present, and I’m overseeing the process. People want to be treated personally. Don’t lose focus on the human side of your connections. Make sure to differentiate yourself from the competition. “Sales Tools Can’t Replace You” episode resources You’re a savvy salesperson who wants to learn and grow. Check out audible for thousands of titles, plus a free 30-day trial, plus a free book. If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing there. I’m fairly easy to connect with. Just comment on something about my podcast. Send me an email. You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561) 578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. When you share your experiences with the show, others will read the reviews and give us a listen. I truly appreciate you and appreciate your reviews and your subscription, and your willingness to tell your friends and anyone you know that's in sales about the podcast. Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.Mentioned in this episode:HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOSHubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com

The sales landscape is always changing but by gathering insights from other sellers we can determine how to handle major challenges when selling. Brandon Bruce is co-founder of Cirrus Insight and he’s going to address how to we can get out of our own zone, where we focus exclusively on ourselves and our companies, and seek opportunities to interact with other people. Evolving sales The world of sales is constantly evolving. One of the challenges Brandon sees with sales right now is an unspoken push that exists. Because there are a bunch of companies at the growth stage, and a bunch of companies just starting out, there’s a tremendous amount of energy in the sales industry. There’s a premium on hitting numbers. Everyone is hustling and trying to find a way to build a better mousetrap. On the negative side, sellers might be hyperfocused on closing deals so that they forget to prioritize the personal connection. Because connections take time, and sales reps get antsy, we sometimes try to speed things along. We don’t want to close a deal next month; we want to close it this month. Brandon believes there’s a happy medium to be found. We must work to focus on building sustainable relationships even while we focus on making our numbers. Long-term success Companies that focus too narrowly on numbers will likely struggle to achieve long-term customer success. The customers won’t stay as long because the deals were one-time kinds of relationships. It’s easier for customers to walk away when the customer doesn’t know us well. Brandon remembers buying a countertop, a one-time purchase, from a company that worked to develop a relationship with him. They were struggling to find exactly what he wanted, until they discovered an unused countertop in a storage area. It was exactly what he needed, and it was something a previous customer decided against using. And the company sold it to him for 50 percent off. He calls it a great selling experience because they listened to his needs and they thought about how they could best help him. And even when they had a chance to make more money off the deal, they sold it to him at a great price. Even though he won’t be in the market for a countertop anytime soon, they created an evangelist in him. If anyone should ask where to buy a countertop, he’ll absolutely recommend that company. They closed a deal, they moved product, and they build a sustainable relationship. Evangelizing We should probably remind ourselves to focus on doing the right thing, and sometimes allowing ourselves to take the easy option. We’re tempted to feel like we should push a little harder, but sometimes we can take the easy deal that leaves the customer feeling satisfied. Every now and then, take the deal that the customer can say yes to immediately. You might leave a little on the table, but everyone feels good moving forward. #Evangelizers Your customer will become an evangelist for your company. You might have missed a chance to get a little more from them, but because you gave them more, you’ll have the opportunity to earn more from them. Building customer relationships benefits your long-run philosophy. Raving fan I joined an organization that gave its sellers to the book, Raving Fans, as part of its onboarding process. It helped us understand the value of customers who bought our solution and then stayed with us to upgrade and buy more later. It’s valuable to have a customer who likes your product and who will promote you on social media and leave you reviews. A raving fan might take you to their next three jobs, or mention you on their podcast. It has less to do with building a predictable sales machine and more to do with building a fan base who is passionate and who might do unpredictable things. Reaching out to prospects It’s getting harder and harder to reach prospects, and sellers use a variety of tactics to do it. Ecommerce has gotten huge, and statistics show that buyers have done a tremendous amount of research before they engage in the sales process. Despite that, there’s still room for a lot of outreach and prospecting. But how can we bridge that gap if we have buyers who are already doing a lot of the work themselves? Begin by making it really easy for your customers to have a conversation. Brandon’s company puts its calendars on the website so that customers who want to schedule time with them can immediately see what is available. Once they schedule a time, it will automatically appear on the company’s calendar. It’s buyer-driven versus seller-driven. Prospects come to them more often now asking for a demo. Meeting them part-way helps to bridge that gap. Another option they use is the ability to place bulky slides in a web portal and then provide a link to it instead of putting the slide in an email. It’s useful because they can click on it and view it online. They don’t have to worry about malware or about a bulky attachment loading too slowly. They also get real-time analytics about their s

If you’re not already harnessing LinkedIn to develop a consistent stream of quality leads, you’re missing out on more referrals, possible testimonies, and a powerful prospecting tool. Mike Jones owns and operates a local Sandler Training franchise where he works with sales leaders and salespeople in those cultures to develop nontraditional ways of prospecting and selling. He has the privilege of seeing best practices and working intimately with sales culture. He loves the experience of moving between industries and geographies to see what the consistent themes of success are. Utilizing LinkedIn Sellers must take advantage of LinkedIn, but many people use it wrong. They often don’t understand LinkedIn’s power to get to the right person. It’s difficult to connect with the right person, but LinkedIn gives people the ability to determine who they need to be talking to. There is power in connections. If you aren’t using it to find the right people in the organizations you’re connecting with, you aren’t using it to its full capabilities. There’s two kinds of prospecting. Active prospecting, which includes developing daily behavioral metrics about how many conversations you want to have, how many appointments you want to have, and how many existing clients you should be reaching out to. Activity always precedes outcome. If I can dial in my activity and monitor it and compare it to a monthly revenue goal, that allows me to make strategic behavioral changes. Whatever outcome you’re seeking, you have a system perfectly designed to give you that outcome. If you want a better outcome, analyze what you’re doing from a behavioral standpoint in order to achieve that outcome. It’s a form of prospecting that provides real-time decisions, and it gets immediate results. Passive prospecting doesn’t provide immediate results. If, for example, you work 250 days a year and your prospecting system requires you to send out 10 emails, either directly to a prospect or a contact in LinkedIn, asking for an introduction. Over a year, that’s 2,500 prospecting attempts every year. In today’s business culture, it works and you’re missing an opportunity if you aren’t seizing it. Thinking about now Sometimes, as sellers, we get so focused on the now that we forget to focus on the future. In the early days of my sales career, I was guilty of it, too. Every phone call you make doesn’t have to result in an immediate close. We may even make the mistake of prospecting to convince people, and that creates a lot of pressure. Instead, identify what kind of prospect is in front of you. There are four distinct mindsets that prospects have. They have a need they know about. They’re comfortable and they aren’t making any changes. They are willing to make changes in order to have a better return on investment. They’re arrogant. We can only help number one and number three. Numbers two and four will communicate with a salesperson differently. Instead of trying to convince, try to determine which of the four you’re dealing with. It will help you understand whether they’re open-minded about it. Prospect’s mindset Don’t give up too early. When a salesperson reaches out to a prospect, they’re trying to change the prospect’s mindset and alter what they believe. Be consistently persistent. Develop a cadence that falls somewhere between “I’m bugging someone” and “I’m ineffective.” Prospecting takes time and sellers must stop looking at their monthly revenue as the barometer for success. We do it because we think that’s how the game needs to be played. Realize that your individual metrics and your revenue are important, but you don’t get a pass on your prospecting simply because you hit your revenue. Failure to prospect will impact you months from now. You must manage your calendar to make sure you can service the people you're selling as well as your future prospects. LinkedIn content LinkedIn is a huge tool for marketing and it’s designed to help people think and share different ideas and insights. You must give to get, and you must be a giver. Life is an open book test and we should be cheating off each other. #give When we look to give back, we’ll get stuff in return. The more you give, the more the people who want your help will come to you. If you’re a giver and you’re prospecting, you’re giving so much great information. They’ll keep coming back to you. Introductions Many salespeople don’t do enough to leverage their connections in order to get introductions, which is probably a better word than referral. Probably 20 percent of your clients will provide an introduction without being prompted to. They like to connect people. At the same time, there are probably the same number who don’t like doing it. The 60 percent in the middle will do it if someone asks them to. We just have to become proactive and make it part of our process. The best time to ask for an introduction is when the prospect realizes that he got his value and he’s happy. If you’ve already fo

Many sellers have a tough time with outbound sales, so we’re spending the month of June focused on the topic, and today we’re specifically addressing the fundamentals of sales outreach. Wes Schaeffer entered sales in 1997, covering stocks, bonds, retail, real estate, and high tech. He decided that, since sales was crazy and uncertain, he’d bet on himself. He laid the foundation for The Sales Whisperer, where he helps people with sales training. Outbound struggles Too many sellers mistakenly believe that outbound is dead. That cold calling and email are dead. The truth is you simply have to do a little bit of homework. You have to choose who to lose. You can’t help everybody. #IdealCustomers Some people would say that because everybody drinks water, if you sell water, everyone is your prospect. But some people are content drinking water out of a hose. Not everyone will spend money on your stuff. Client selection is important. You have to figure out who’s going to buy your stuff and who isn’t. The number of people who are ready, willing, and able to buy what you sell right now is in the single digits. If, for example, you just bought four brand new tires for your car, it doesn’t matter that you’re having a 50-percent-off sale. Follow a script Now that you know who you’re going after, what will you say? Will you fall into the trap of not following a script because it feels unnatural? The Rock has made over $60 million a year by regurgitating scripts. He makes it his own and he makes it believable. The truth for all of us is that we’re living on a script. I once talked in a presentation about seeing the band Chicago and about the fact that they play the same 20 songs in the same order at every single show. What would happen if they decided to just wing it every now and then? That’s not what professionals do. Professionals practice things until they can’t get them wrong. You could wake them out of a stupor, hand them a guitar or keyboard, and they could play any song perfectly. Practicing skills Look at Tom Brady or Lebron James or Tiger Woods. I guarantee you they are still practicing. Are you willing to practice the little bitty things? How do you open? What do you say? How do you title your emails? How do you build interest? If you sound like everybody else, I’m going to treat you like everybody else. The only way I can differentiate between you and everyone else that sounds like you is on price. Think of the phone calls you get from an autodialer. They’re nice because they streamline things, but when people hear the long pause while it’s connecting to the first available person, they are completely uninterested. Then they mispronounce your name and you’re done. Diagnose the problem Wes recommends at least five emails in any outbound process. He also pointed out the distinction between frequently-asked questions and should-ask questions. FAQs can be written out and sent in an email. The should-ask questions allow you to differentiate yourself. These are the things the prospect doesn’t know. Understand your product and the situation of your prospects well enough to know what issues might arise. Our goal in prospecting is to ask a question that our prospect can’t answer. Doctors do the same, and it’s why we trust them. When they take the time to diagnose the problem, we trust their prescription. Ask questions How are you generating leads? What trends are you seeing? Is it becoming more expensive to run ads? How is your team performing? Do you experience ups and downs? Spend some time on your should-ask questions. We’re all too close to our own offerings. There’s an adage that says you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Outreaching sequences Timing matters in outreach, and that’s why you need multimedia multi-step followup sequences. You need a success story about a prospect in your niche. You need a case study or a video testimonial. And then you’re off and running. Dripping a prospect is a little like dating. When you continue coming back to your prospects, they eventually decide that there must be something good about your offering. You have your target market or your dream 100. It’s worth persisting because eventually something is going to happen: a machine will break or the competition will miss a delivery. Maybe an employee will quit or they will have their own quality issues. Start early, stay late Remember that whatever you can measure you can improve. Jeffrey Gitomer speaks about gold calling because he says there isn’t such thing as pure cold calling in B2B. You’re most likely to reach people by phone. You can do direct mail and other things, and they may work. Executives and decision-makers get to the office early and they stay late. Since I’m a west coast guy, I start calling the east coast about 2 p.m. when the assistants and receptionists have gone home. Same with the lunch hour. The hourly people take their breaks while the boss keeps working. Be strategic about your calls. Use LinkedIn

Many sellers assume that experience makes them good at building valuable relationships, but there’s an art to tactically leveraging relationships to land your biggest customers. Zvi Band is the co-founder and CEO of Contactually, a relationship-oriented CRM designed to help businesses build and maintain relationships with their networks. He was an introvert in college who hardly ever left his room, but that was before he discovered that relationships would be his best asset. He is the author of the book Success is in Your Sphere. Sharpen your tools Zvi recognized the need for Contactually because he would connect with people and then lose track of them and miss the opportunity. It wasn’t that he was doing a bad job. He was simply so focused on working hard for his existing clients that he lost touch. To measure the strength of your network, he recommends opening any social media tool and considering whether your network would come to your side if you asked for something simple like $20. Then, if you truly believe your relationships are your most important asset, what are you actually doing to nurture those relationships those won’t pay dividends next week but might in the coming months or years? For most people, the answer is, “Not too much.” Tactically leverage relationships The goal should be to build and nurture personal, authentic relationships without any necessary plan or intent. Then, they’ll call us when they’re ready to buy. Or if we call them, they’ll pick up the phone. The problem is that sometimes, we aren’t necessarily sure who is important in our relationships or what our goals are. We must begin by figuring out what we’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to increase the number of referrals? Increase your close rate or your repeat business? Looking for an entirely different job or different career steps? Clearly identify your goals and then develop everything else to ladder up to those goals. Always take a step back and ask what you’re really trying to do. Nurture opportunities If you’re going to conferences and meetings, you’re likely trying to nurture the opportunities that emerge there. But rather than connecting with everyone there, determine who is there and who you should be working with. For Zvi, that intentional decision shifted who he engaged with when he went to those events. The worst thing we can do is walk in with a set of business cards and have conversations that will never turn into anything real for either party. Those business cards get lost in the washer and you’ve wasted time that could have gone to people you could truly serve. Once you’ve identified who you want to connect with, develop a cadence to make sure you’re staying top of mind. Follow their social media and watch for news about their company. Don’t be afraid to tell your connections that you’re simply working to stay in touch. Value and service Don’t assume follow-up is most important. Focus on value and being of service to someone. The best way we can get what we want in life is by helping others get what they want. That way, as soon as the moment comes where your contact needs what you have, he’ll immediately think of you. When Zvi was nurturing sales opportunities with large brokerages, he wasn’t necessarily trying to pitch them on the value of software. Understand more about the prospect’s business. Work to understand challenges and identify other existing customers who experienced the same issues. Work to show your prospect that you aren’t simply trying to get a dollar. You’re trying to build a successful relationship that will ultimately benefit both of you. “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” -- Zig Ziglar Technological age Technology allows us to connect with so many different people, but the problem is that it does the same for everyone else. That means your customers are being flooded with other ideas and messages. We have to find a way to build personal, authentic relationships. Realize that being a nice guy isn’t enough to produce business opportunities for you. People have to know what you’re looking for. Zvi recalls that he was looking for a CPA recently and one of his friends mentioned that a guy they know well was a CPA. Though he knew the guy well, he wasn’t aware that he was a CPA. Make sure your audience understands the skills you bring to the table. Relationships assets What strategies are you willing to put in place to grow this relationship asset? After all, these assets are just like the dollars in our bank account. We can invest in the asset. It can go up or down. We have to put strategies in place to make sure we’re growing that asset. There was a time when “always be closing” was the mantra. Now, though, our role has switched to a subscription based business so it isn’t just about selling. It’s about building and nurturing a relationship. Reputation matters and referrals matter. If a company brings on a customer that won’

Sellers are programmed to take advantage of outreach to generate opportunities, but it’s important that we don’t forget to ask for the referral. We understand the importance of cold calling and cold outreach, but that’s doing things the hard way. We do it over and over again without ever considering whether it’s the best way. This is a reboot of an earlier episode of The Sales Evangelist, but it's an evergreen topic. Asking for referrals always makes sense for motivated sales professionals. Cold calling I would never suggest you shouldn’t use cold outreach or cold calling to connect with your prospects. I do it myself and I’ve generated great opportunities that way. But it isn’t the only way to generate them. Sometimes we forget to ask for referrals. So as a sales pro, how can you remember? What else can you do to remind yourself to take the easy route to generating business? Put it on your calendar. Just as you block off time on your calendar for prospecting and cold outreach, set reminders to ask for referrals. Create a habit Create a weekly goal to generate three referrals per week. If your goal is to get three referrals per week, even closing one of those referrals will change your results. Once you institute the habit of generating referrals, you’ll establish a pattern of one deal per week that closes. And that’s if you’re not particularly good at it. If you’ve taken our TSE Certified Sales Training, you could possibly do even better. You can build on that habit and that improvement. That will amount to more money for you and your organization. If each of those deals amounts to $10,000, you’ll generate $40,000 a month. If you’re responsible for $80,000 a month, then half of your business will come from referrals. If you’re currently not generating any, that’s a pretty great increase. Accountability Salespeople don’t necessarily like accountability. Do it anyway. Tell a coworker or sales leader your goal. Join our Facebook group and tell someone your goal. Accountability is important. When I worked as a sales rep, I shared my current projects with my sales manager. She saw that I was motivated and proactive and I eventually got better opportunities than other people on the team. If you share your goal with your leader, he or she will certainly follow up to help you stay accountable. If you’re an entrepreneur working internally at an organization, you can benefit from the same kind of accountability. Set calendar invites Establish specific times in your schedule when you’ll pursue referrals. Just as you set time to prospect and pursue inbound leads, set time for referral prospecting. Set 30 minutes each day to reach out to your clients for referrals. It’s such an easy task that most of us won’t do it. We’re programmed to do things the hard way; to pick up the phone and dial. These simple projects can gain us business, but referrals don’t always happen naturally. You must ask for the referral. “Don’t Forget to Ask” episode resources Connect with me at [email protected]. Try the first module of the TSE Certified Sales Training Program for free. This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance. TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us. Tools for sellers This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It's super easy, it's helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You can see when people open your email, or when they click on the link you sent. Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. If you haven't already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a single episode. Share it with your friends who would benefit from learning more. Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.Mentioned in this episode:HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOSHubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com

We’ve all encountered price wars against the lowest bidder, but today we’re going to talk about how you can stand your ground, protect your margins, and earn the price that you’re worth and how that will help you grow your business. Chris Perry works with Market Sense, a Sandler Training franchise, that helps business attrackt, assess, hire, and on-board world class sales people. Great ideas There are lots of great ideas in the world. Many businesses have built things that they are excited about and proud of, and eventually others notice that they are making a lot of money doing it. So they jump into the game. Suddenly options exist where they didn’t before, and consumers, whether they are B2B or B2C, don’t know how to differentiate between them. Many of them fall back to the cheapest option. If we fall into that trap, the buying process becomes all about price, and we’re forced to trade dollars for deals. We must cut our prices, and that’s a slippery slope. It’s also a great way to go out of business. Consumers will treat you like a commodity if you allow them to. Money mindset Attitude makes a big difference in this scenario, because the salesperson’s mindset plays a huge part in price. Human beings are trained to seek deals and discounts. Chris’ company runs a lot of assessments on salespeople and they’ve discovered a lot of what they call money tolerance issues. We all grow up with different relationships to money, with some of us believing it’s rude to talk about it. Others are taught to pinch every penny, while still others believe there is always more money available. Whether it’s conscious or not, we have a bunch of recordings playing in our heads. Those recordings impact our money conversations. If, for example, a seller grows up believing it’s rude to discuss money, he’ll be less comfortable talking about it. He’ll likely wait until the last possible moment to address cost, because he assumes the prospects are uncomfortable talking about it, too. Waiting until the presentation to discuss price can be a recipe for disaster for sellers. Sellers who believe that $500 is a huge purchasing decision, but who are selling $50,000 solutions, will be nervous about the price discussion. They’ll sweat a little extra, and the prospects will see that anxiety and they’ll assume the seller doesn’t believe in the product. They might also perceive that there’s room to negotiate price. Recognizing value The key is to change the way you perceive your value so you don’t undersell yourself or your product. If you do, you’ve already lost before you even get started. You must believe in yourself and your product. The truth is that it’s hard to change someone’s mindset. People won’t generally understand their worth simply by listening to a podcast, no matter how good it is. Chris recommends that you begin by acknowledging your mindset. Figure out which relationship you have with money and then leave it in the car. When you go on a sales call, your relationship with money shouldn’t matter. Focus instead on the prospect and figure out her relationship with money. That’s the conversation that matters. Behaviors There are many aspects to behavior: having a goal, developing a plan to accomplish the goal, and establishing activities that get you to those goals. But with regard to budget discussions, we must be more consistent in knowing when and where to discuss pricing. We’re typically mentioning it too early, before we’ve helped the prospects understand the value, or too late, when they’ve already got some idea of what they should be paying. Many sellers are winging this aspect of their sales process. Have a plan. Develop milestones for your sales process. Have an idea of things you have to check off before you move to the next step. If you could establish just a bit of organization, if you could figure out the key steps in your sales process, you could map it out and figure out where the budget discussion should fall. Then stick to your guns. Don’t allow the prospect to pull you into a discussion you aren’t ready to have yet. Many people routinely argue that the prospect is always right, so we must follow where they lead. Your role is to help your prospect, so you have to explain that it’s irresponsible to sell something or provide a quote without understanding what he needs. Sales conversations In a world where prospects see all alternatives as basically the same, with price as the only differentiator, the one thing that remains within our control is how we sell. Our sales conversations make a huge difference. If we’re doing like many reps and choosing the “showing up and throwing up,” option, dumping features and benefits and then giving a price, we’re missing an opportunity. Differentiate by slowing down and asking good questions. When the prospect asks for price, push back a bit in a compassionate, professional way. Ensure that you want to make sure you’re both a fit before moving forward to price. The prospect will appr

Every sales professional and entrepreneur needs a profitable brand, and the key is to build a brand online and leverage it for rapid sales growth. Corey Blake is the CEO at MWI, an international digital marketing agency. His background is in sales and business development and he has managed great sales teams over the years. Validate your brand When it comes to building a brand and then leveraging it for growth, you must begin by validating your brand. You basically want to turn off any sirens that the potential customer has about you as a seller. We all know that a stigma exists around sellers, and you likely even experience it when someone gets on the phone with you to sell you something, despite the fact that you're in sales yourself. The biggest challenge often originates from the fact that we build great brands and we know we have value to offer, but we don't know how to convince people to pay for it. How you validate your brand is critical in that process. It's simply legitimizing your brand, service, or product. You must find a third party or another way to validate it. You could share that your brand has been featured on certain sites or that you've been invited to certain events. When you're starting out, go to your customer. Offer to give a customer your product or service in exchange for their use of it. Explain that you think it will make his life better and that you'd like to ask for his testimonial. Now you've got validation and social proof to use in your next sales conversation. Personal confidence Seeing someone use your product provides you, as the seller, a certain amount of confidence as well. If you prefer, you can create great case studies or build a social media presence that includes amazing content. For MWI, for example, they can validate themselves as great content creators by creating great content. As a bonus, TSE has used those product giveaways as an opportunity to gain feedback during our initial launches so we can figure out where we need to tweak our training or our products. It also helps us build a case study. Through all of this, you'll build your own excitement and you'll develop even more confidence, which is the key to success. Begin your entrepreneur journey by selling yourself on the value you're providing to the world. [Tweet "If you can't sell yourself, you'll never sell to anyone else. Become the greatest ambassador for the value you're going to provide. #ValueAmbassador"] Linking value Once you've established confidence in your value, use your marketing to communicate it to your potential customers. It's not enough to be sold on your own value, but you must find someone else who is sold on your value as well. Find a publication that will tell its audience how legit you are. Once you've built this validation, you'll have an amazing ability to sell your product or service with exclusivity. You'll find yourself in the driver's seat and gives you leverage in your communication and makes your sale more exclusive. If you establish exclusivity, you almost won't have to sell your customers as much. You'll simply have to educate them and move them along the sales process. Exclusivity is priceless. Finding balance No one wants to be perceived as the typical used car salesman. Don't come across as gimmicky, selfish, or ignorant. Instead, strive for confident, competent, professional, and controlled. There's a balance to it. Assume your customer has never heard of your validation and mention it to him. Within the first 20 seconds, provide that validation to establish confidence and control. Find a way to organically share it without being perceived as cocky. The alarms about whether you're legit will shut down. Then you can offer the idea that you only work with a certain kind of brand, and that allows you to operate with a lot more control. Close early, close often Make sure you're asking for the business. Develop specific strategies to close deals. Beautiful branding and validation won't matter if you can't close. Consistently think strategically about how you'll move this sale to the place you want it. Provide the customer with the right information and the right details so that she'll be ready to close. Closing amounts to more than the way you speak, the speed of your speech, and the tone of your voice. These things do constantly lead to close, but you have to figure out how to move to the specific points along the process. Many sellers are fearful of the conversion side so they hold off too long. Or they get anxious and they ask for the sale way too soon. If you follow the process, that's where you'll see the difference. Sales process You can have all the right components in place, but without a repeatable sales process, you'll struggle to support your sales. If your process isn't organized in a way that leads to close at all times, you won't succeed. Determine how to leverage all the components you've gathered to move your customers toward a deal. Leverage your value, y

We consume information from a variety of platforms, so we have to connect with prospects from different angles using **omnichannel outreach**. We have to find our audience where they happen to be listening. Mark Kasoglow is the VP of Sales at Outreach, a sales engagement channel, and he’s explaining today how sales reps can include omnichannel outreach in their efforts. His passion is developing people and creating a winning, fun, positive atmosphere where people are inspired to do their best. He said if you are going to have a hard worker, they have to enjoy work. That doesn’t mean you have to enjoy what you do. It means you enjoy working and you’re likely always tinkering around the house. His dad taught him that if you make people’s work easy, they’ll work hard for you. To that end, he tries to make people’s work easier so they’ll work harder. ##What is omnichannel? Consider the following questions as you’re considering what omnichannel is. Do you answer the phone when someone calls? Do you reply to every email you receive? Will you sometimes engage with people who contact you on social media? Will you sometimes talk with people who stop by your home or office to sell something? That’s omnichannel. As humans, we engage with people in many different ways depending on our mood or their approach or the channel. The point of omnichannel outreach is to meet people where they are. People have preferred methods of communication, and by limiting yourself to a single channel you’re excluding a large number of people. You’re missing out on a growing audience. Because your audience is all over the place and they communicate in different ways, you have to do the same. #omnichannel ##Overthinking omnichannel Many people don’t understand how to use omnichannel. With social, for example, if I’m targeting you on [social media](https://thesalesevangelist.com/episode846/), I’d begin by following you. Then I’d read your posts and engage in activity to let you know that I’m interested in you as a human and in the things you’re doing. After I’ve built an online social relationship, the person I’m targeting should understand a little bit of why I’m interacting with them. At that point, you can reach out with a value pitch or something that helps people understand what you’re offering. As humans and nonsellers, we do this kind of stuff all the time very naturally, but then when we bring it to our careers and the way we make money, we get weird about it. We do stupid stuff that we would never do as a normal human. But the truth is that if you engage professionally on social media the same way you engage on your personal pages, you’ll be a great social seller. ##Beginning with omnichannel Sales managers who hear this may wonder how to introduce these concepts without disrupting the success their team members are already having. Admittedly it’s difficult to introduce change while trying to avoid disrupting the status quo. At Outreach, the teams begin with a hypothesis like, “I believe that by engaging with our top 10 accounts that we can create more meetings.” It’s specific and measurable. Then they create a plan to go do that. Maybe set up a strike team of your best reps or a cross-section of different kinds of reps and have them run the same process. Then, using KPIs, measure their results against the control results. If there’s a lift, then people will be happy to move to the new techniques. Realize that you cannot have people who conduct activities in different ways. There must be a workflow and process in place to ensure that you’re measuring the process rather than the ability of the individual. In the end, you must have the guts to make a decision. The only sellers who should balk at this kind of change are those that live in the exact house that they want, who are driving the exact car that they want, and they are happy coming into work. If a seller fits that description, he’s likely already making $10 million a year or he is lying to himself. ##Tracking results Sometimes our tracking processes do a fantastic job of motivating our activities, but they produce such a heavy cognitive load that teams spend more time managing them than they do in their sales activities. Mark equates sales to plate spinning, where you spin up a couple of people on Monday, and then spin a couple more on Tuesday and then again on Wednesday, but you have to return to the Monday people to keep them spinning. The problem is that you can only spin so many plates at a time. Technology allows you to add a motor to the stick that will keep the plate spinning until the motor runs out of gas. Technology helps you administer and run the system, and Outreach does exactly the same thing. ##Personalize Even if you’re automating a system, you can build out processes that allow you to be personable. Include a first step that involves research to discover two or three specific things about your prospect. Then include those in your CRM and write an email based o

In order to succeed in business long-term, choose a market with room to grow, and consider these 5 things to look for when choosing your market. Ryan Levesque recently landed on Inc.’s list of 500 fastest growing companies, and his company just passed the $10 million mark for annual revenue. He admits that he has made a lot of mistakes along the way and learned a lot as well. Finding a niche Ryan said many business owners and entrepreneurs make the common mistake of following conventional wisdom in the early days of the venture. They focus on what they will sell or create rather than focusing on who they will serve. Who is your market? Who is your niche? He has engaged in more than 23 niche markets, from making jewelry out of Scrabble tiles to weight loss and satellite television. Through the process, he has learned the importance of focusing on people rather than things. He points to choosing the right market as the most important factor of all. You can be the most charistmatic salesperson with the best closer, but if you have chosen a bad market, none of that will matter. Wrong product and people I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to sell the wrong product to the wrong people. I discovered a product that I liked and I thought other people would like it, too. But it didn’t make money because it wasn’t a good fit. There wasn’t a market for it. Ryan outlines the indicators you should look for in his book, Choose. He said though, that writing a book invites communication from two different camps: those who love what they read and those who claim it didn’t work. He said it leaves you wondering whether you gave bad information. Niche markets In his first book, Ask, Ryan revealed the methodology he used to successfully enter niche markets. They figured out how to warm up prospects and how to determine what people want. It includes a specific set of questions designed to help you understand your audience at a deep emotional level so you can better sell and serve. In an online environment, you ask questions on your website so you can funnel people into different “buckets” based on their situations. Ryan focused on uncovering commonalities. For example, what did the people who didn’t succeed have in common? What were they doing wrong? He discovered that he didn’t teach people how he chose the 23 markets he engaged with. Of the millions of niche markets a business could engage with, what did these 23 have in common? He engaged in what he called the biggest research project of his life. He sought to figure out why the 23 markets had succeeded where others had not. Then he looked at his most successful clients and tried to figure out what separates the successful ones from the unsuccessful ones. He uncovered seven factor that will make or break your business’ success. The seven factors that Ryan uncovered are universal, foundational pieces that will help you find green markets, or those markets that are a “go” versus yellow which aren’t quite ready and red, which you should stay away from. Evergreen markets Consider the following study in contrasts on the topic of evergreen markets, which are relevant now and will still be relevant 20 years from now. Ryan engaged in the Scrabble tile jewelry market about the time Etsy was coming online. Jewelry combining Scrabble tiles and origami paper was extremely popular at the same time he and his family were living in Asia. They discovered a woman who was teaching people how to make the jewelry on Etsy and making about $10,000 a month selling the tutorials. There was no overhead, and her homemade version of a tutorial was selling like crazy. Ryan and his wife decided to make a go of it, so she learned to make the jewelry while he worked on selling it. They built a better mousetrap, and before they knew it they were picking up steam. Before they knew it they were making $10,000 a month. The ending wasn’t a happy one. The jewelry was completely a fad so sales dropped off almost overnight. Ryan had quit his job and his wife was in grad school so she wasn’t making any money. Avoid fad markets as you’re choosing your niche. Ryan then engaged in the oldest hobby in America: gardening. He researched niches within the gardening market and he discovered orchid care. He started a business teaching people how to care for orchids and they took the business from zero to $25,000 a month. The tiny little niche business still pays their mortgage and their living expenses. Consider the example of fidget spinners and bitcoin as a study in evergreen markets. Enthusiast market The enthusiast market is in contrast with a problem solution market. The problem solution market involves solving problems for the people around you. Once you’ve solved the problem, people move on with their lives. Consider the example of flood removal. If your basement floods, once the water is removed, you never engage with them again. You won’t sign up for newsletters or Facebook groups. If you own a dog, you will

We’ve all encountered the guy who attends events just to see what he can get for himself, but there are ways to effectively use networking events in your sales outreach efforts. You know the type: his conversations are one-sided because he’s only focused on his next big opportunity, and he has no time to learn about your business. His pitch kicks in when he finds out you’re a business owner. But he could have fixed his approach. And you can make sure you’re not like him in your outreach. New clients No matter what type of sales you’re in, you need to get clients in the hopper. The way you get new leads varies based upon your industry. Some demand door-to-door while others require phone calls. Today, we at The Sales Evangelist use social media and other efforts as well as networking events. Typically, at networking events, I encounter potential clients or people who can connect me with other people who are potential clients. Outreach done well can be very rewarding. But as we mentioned in the teaser, you can’t become the obnoxious guy that others avoid. He may not even realize he’s coming across that way. He has likely had just enough random success to believe that he’s effective. But he could perform a lot better and gain more leads and opportunities if he changed his approach. Plan Before you attend a networking event, do your best to find out who will be there. Will the people there tie in with your demographic? Will they represent your ideal customer? It may be impossible to find out who will be there, but it’s worth the effort to try. If you know the organizers, ask them about the top companies that will be represented there. If they give you names, research them before the actual event. Use tools like LinkedIn to gather data about those companies. Plan who you want to connect with at the event. Develop a short list. The spray-and-pray mentality that involves giving out 10,000 business cards doesn’t look good. Instead, be intentional about the cards you give out. Broaden your reach Identify people you’d like to do business with as well as those who can become potential partners for you. Then, consider those who may not purchase directly from you but who can introduce you to other complementary partners. You could even consider connecting with those you consider competition. I’ve had a good working relationship with companies I compete with, and we were able to help each other out. Whether we’re pursuing the same customers or different ones, it doesn’t make sense to burn bridges unnecessarily. It’s also good to identify people that you could potentially help. Be genuinely interested People don’t necessarily care about you but everyone cares about their own problems. We’re all trying to solve problems, so the obnoxious seller might do well to understand our challenges. Perhaps he should have been curious about our business and asked additional questions. Be sincere. You’ll never have enough information to prescribe a solution if you don’t listen. Ask questions. Then ask followup questions. We did a great episode with Bob Burg who gave us great insights on this issue. It’s worth mentioning, too, that we’re having a local sales meetup where Bob will be the guest speaker. We’ll be talking about his book, The Go Giver. Bob recommends having a list of questions you can ask. Why did you get involved in this business? What’s the biggest challenge you are seeing? This leads to deeper discussions that will help you identify issues. Simple message Be prepared for their questions. Don’t begin by telling them what you have to offer, but be prepared for them to ask. Give a simple clean message that’s no more than 30 seconds. Let him know what you do. Consider something like this: “We help small businesses who are interested in growth, build out a sales process that's actually going to help them increase revenue. We do this through consulting as well as through sales training.” This will lead to further discussion and it will open opportunities for you to talk more. It may even provide more time for you to pitch in front of the group. Jason Lynette, who appeared on episode 1081, gave a masterful message about situations where you have more time to share your message. Draw in the room Jason told a story of a murder. A woman came into his office with a horrible fear of bugs. She was a high-powered attorney who backed out of the case of a lifetime because she saw a cockroach in the courtroom. Within 10 days after their first meeting, she killed a housefly with her bare hands. Draw in the room. While everyone else shares what they have to offer, you demonstrate that you’re a human. Entertain them. Share a story. Prove that you’re someone they could work with. Connection Then you can ask whether or not they know others who might benefit from what you offer. Consider, too, whether you might be able to help them by identifying people who can benefit from their product or services. After the event, connect with all of those sa

Ethan Beute from BombBomb equates good marketing to selling by teaching, and he explains how you can generate a lift in cold email responses with video. Cold email response BombBomb recently conducted a study with a large international tech company that revealed the power that video has in improving cold email responses. The company offers a freemium service but they weren’t sure how to convert the freemium users into revenue opportunities. The company has teams in countries around the world and they were reaching out to create conversation and generate appointments. They contacted customers who had been using the free service for a while and asked for the opportunity to share some other ways they might be able to help. BombBomb conducted a pilot program with them that included an AB test of video emails vs. plain text emails. They increased replies from these people by 56 percent. Imagine, then, if you can turn a percentage of those responses into scheduled appointments and then a percentage of those appointments into paid opportunities, that’s a tremendous impact. BombBomb also found that the video emails created better appointments because the prospects felt as though they knew the seller better, which is a powerful dynamic. The effort was voluntary, so there was no requirement to send a specific number of videos each day. The company sent about 1,000 videos in a three-and-a-half week period, and the people who sent the most videos were already the highest performers. Cultural shift Rollouts like this one represent a cultural shift to your sales team. This isn’t simply a new tool to add to the stack. This video effort allows sellers to communicate more clearly with their prospects and to increase conversion because the interaction takes on a more human characteristic. If you’re considering deploying video into your team, consider the following: Find people on your team who are already excited by the idea. Roll the video concept out to them and accumulate some early wins. Share what they learned and what you learned with the rest of the team as you roll the concept into the larger group. Ethan theorizes that the connection between the high performers and the willingness to use video traces back to their constant desire to become better. They likely listen to podcasts or read books. They invest in themselves and are open to new ideas and new practices. People who adopt new practices tend to have a growth mindset. Because they are open to new ways of doing things, they generally find success, and they often have fun doing it. #GrowthMindset Voicemail with personality The pilot project involved initial touch emails, so it amounted to basically a voicemail with a face and a voice and a personality. It wasn’t simply an email signature. The sender was no longer faceless but instead became a real human being with real value to offer. If you find yourself thinking you have far too many leads to manage this kind of outreach, first acknowledge what a great problem that is to have. Recognize that you don’t have to send personal videos. You can send out a triggered video that delivers the third time a user interacts with your product. By using a trigger-point, you can capitalize on moments in your relationship with a prospect. Even if you don’t greet them by name, you’re acknowledging their presence and valuing their time. Face-to-Face meeting There are many elements that make video a winning play for sellers. To start, most sellers are far better in person than in other arenas. Most sales process drive toward a face-to-face meeting whether it’s in person or online. Human contact is extremely valuable, so you should get face-to-face as early in the process as possible. That allows people to feel as though they know you before they ever meet you. You can save time by skipping the awkward slow-start questions about the weather. You’ll help put your prospects more at ease. Hesitation This style of video works because it’s casual, it’s not scripted or polished, and it’s honest. It isn’t over-produced, but rather it involves just a webcam or a smartphone. You would send it in place of the email you typically send. Although you can send nicer, more produced videos, that isn’t what we’re discussing. Those videos often feel as though someone is trying to sell you something, because they generally are. It’s a different style of communication. Ethan hears all the time that the videos that earn the best responses are the simple ones. But as humans, we have a natural fear of rejection. We wonder if the video is good enough. We might even re-record it multiple times, which can lead to us spending 30 minutes to recording a 30-second video. It’s a waste of time in this scenario because the video doesn't have to do all the work. It simply has to introduce you and express your sincerity and enthusiasm. If you find yourself thinking you don’t know what to say, that’s not true. What would you say if you were typing out an email? What w

Sellers often seek the path of least resistance, and if your programs aren’t designed to incentivize them to sell, your sellers may game the system and engage in activities that won’t help themselves or the company. If you design your commission plans and your structures effectively, you’ll create more effective sellers who feel like they’ve actually earned something and who will achieve wins more often. Happy sellers As a sales leader, you know that your sales reps will make outbound calls and try to close deals. Your goal is to incentivize them to do their jobs. You want them to be happy. You also know that if they are earning something, they will feel good. In the natural order of things, if they are doing well, they’ll love working for you and the company will prosper as well. Flawed incentives In her book, The Sales Development Playbook, Trish Bertuzzi lays out different concepts to help organizations develop the proper incentives. Sometimes companies design their incentives poorly so that reps are only encouraged to make phone calls. Many reps will game that system because it doesn’t measure anything meaningful to the company. If you’re only counting activities, they’ll figure out that all they have to do is make phone calls. You know, though, that appointments lead to more deals. So if you’re expecting an appointment every 20 phone calls, but your reps are simply calling and hanging up without having meaningful conversations, you won’t likely achieve those appointments. Commissions Trish points out that many companies promise great incentives but we neglect to clarify the actual process were seeking. We make promises about being able to “earn more than the CEO” without explaining our expectations. We fail to tell them, for example, that the sales cycle is seven months long, so it will likely take them about three months to really get established. They probably won’t make any real money until about 10 months into the process. Then it will take about 30 days beyond the close date for them to get their payout. You can help them survive the long cycle by offering ways for the rep to win. Perhaps you’ll provide a more competitive base because you realize it will take them a while to build a commission. Set up for success Without a meaningful way to win, your sales reps may stick around for a few months and then move on to something else. Instead, set them up to succeed. If you’re talking about your BDRs, how can you give them an opportunity to make money? If your AEs earn 10 percent for a closed deal because you know it will be a while before they close a deal, they’ll be eating pretty well. Your BDRs, on the other hand, earn only 1 percent, they’ll have to wait a long cycle before they get their piece. How excited do you think your people will be to work hard in the cycle? What if you pay them per appointment set, but they get part at the beginning of the process and part at the back end of the process. If you offer $10 for each appointment, they can earn $5 at the front and $5 at the back. If your reps set quality appointments with qualified prospects, they’ll earn $5 at the beginning and $5 at the end. If the prospect isn’t a quality one, they’ll get the initial money but not the money at the end. Then, if you realize that your sellers have a lot of rejected opportunities, you can determine that either the AE is doing something wrong or the BDR is. Once you determine which is the case, you can coach them to close those deals. Hoarding appointments Here’s the other challenge. Some sales reps will realize that they’ve already earned what they needed for a certain month and they make the decision to sit on other opportunities for the following month. They hang on to them to make sure they’ll hit their numbers the next time. Again, you can incentivize this. You can set an expectation of 20 leads per month, or five per week. If your reps hit that number, they will earn the full amount for those appointments. If your reps only land 16 appointments, their earnings will be pro-rated to reflect the shortfall. If, on the other hand, some of your sellers exceed the 20 appointments, you can raise the amount they’ll earn for quality appointments. They’ll still get half at the front and half at the back. Now everyone is happy because they are earning money throughout the process instead of starving until the deals close. It’s easier to keep a good seller than to start over again searching for new ones. Make sure they eat Make sure your sellers have an opportunity to eat. I’m a strong believer that if hire the right people, pay people right, coach them, and train them, they’ll perform for you. But you also have to make sure they don’t game the system. Make sure that everyone walks away with the sense that the process is fair. "Incentivize them to sell" episode resources You can check out Trish Bertuzzi’s book, The Sales Development Playbook, with a free trial of Audible. Check out the 30-day free trial to listen to t

Asking questions and learning about the client is an accepted part of sales, but the key is assessing curiosity to optimize the performance of outbound sales reps. Alex Burg, who has a consultancy in curiosity quotient selling, focuses on leveraging mutual curiosity. He said isn’t so much the case that sellers aren’t thinking about curiosity, but rather that they are thinking about it too tactically. Learning about clients Most sales methodologies are a bit too complicated and don’t really require that much detail. Sellers don’t need to write down 27 questions before they sit down with clients. They simply need to learn enough to ask intelligent, informed questions. By demonstrating your curiosity, you built rapport much more quickly. Stephen M.R. Covey wrote a book called Speed of Trust that reports a significant correlation between the development of trust and the pace of decision making. In other words, if you really want to accelerate your sales cycle, build trust. And the fastest way to build trust is to demonstrate curiosity. Types of curiosity Alex distinguishes between social curiosity, which is about people, and technical curiosity, which is about how things work. If you’re in a transactional sales environment, you must focus on getting a decision made quickly. So too much open-ended curiosity could be detrimental. Begin by assessing what kind of sales organization and what kind of sales process you’re engaged in. You also must know what sort of clients you’re selling to. Then, assess your individuals and your organizations to determine whether you have the right characteristics to thrive in a particular sales environment. From there, you can assign or hire people based on their ability to deliver on those requirements. Assessments As an individual, a certain degree of introspection will help you determine whether sales even makes sense for you as a career. There are many assessments available that can help you determine whether you’re epistemically curious with a general thirst for knowledge or perceptually curious with a desire to solve problems and fix things. If you’re epistemically curious, you’re well suited for long sales cycles, complex selling, and larger deal size. If you’re more focused on getting it done today, you’ll benefit more from a transactional sales environment. You’ll get more satisfaction from quick decisions Leverage strengths Once we understand where people’s strengths lie, leverage this information in the sales environment and then coach your team accordingly. The most important part of the sales process is the initial discovery. That’s where you’re qualifying the prospect. The thing you have the most control over is how you spend your time. Determine whether you even have a solution that makes sense for the prospect. If we can get a little better at driving rapport and a little better at collecting information, we can reduce the sales cycle. Imagine what it would do to your bottom line if you could shorten it from 6 months to 3. Creating questions You must begin by learning enough about the client to ask intelligent questions. Your leadership must also have a mindset that encourages curiosity. Make appropriate risk-taking acceptable. Many companies will say they want to develop a curious organization, but then they don’t act that way. They focus more on mitigating risk than on allowing reasonable risk. Ask the tough questions that aren’t always comfortable. Don’t necessarily show up with a list of 15 questions. Instead, develop a list of the five most important questions and then focus your attention on those. Mindfulness Before you get on the phone with your clients, eliminate all distractions. Turn off your notifications on your phone so you can really listen to what the other person is saying. Don’t simply go through the checklist. Focus on asking better questions. Realize, too, that if you learn from situations that you view as a mistake, then they aren’t truly mistakes. They are learning journeys, and they aren’t negative experiences. By demonstrating your interest in your prospect, you develop rapport, make the sales cycle more efficient, and hopefully shorten Injecting curiosity Individual sellers can begin by learning the tools to become more curious. The big win, though, is when companies try to inject more curiosity into their organizations. Companies that are too internally focused and not client-centric make poor decisions. Alex recalls working for a company who sent a rep to get a deal signed by a prospect who was in the hospital following a heart attack. The key to long-term success is delivering great value to your clients. In order to do that, you must conduct yourself in a way that communicates your intent to deliver the best possible outcomes. Arm your people with tools to conduct themselves that way. Leverage technology to make sure your reps have the information they need at their fingertips. Judging intelligence People judge our intelligence and empath

Sales is equal parts art and science and one of the keys to success is leveraging sales incentive data to increase performance and ROI. Jason Atkins is the founder of 360 Insights, a software platform that enables large brands to execute all of their channel incentive strategies. Jason’s company works with tens of thousands of salespeople who work for major brands and helps them get smarter and make data-driven decisions. Critical data Many people believe that sellers must be born with the skillset to succeed. We believe that anyone with a desire to sell can succeed and get the proper training. Understanding data will help tremendously. The art of sales deals with the relationships, the conversation handling, and dealing with objections. The science of sales revolves around data and activities. Jason recalled hearing that we’ve created more data in the last year than in all of mankind combined. That kind of growth is exponential. Think about how much data that represents. So how do you mine through the data and leverage the insights contained within it? How do you make the data actionable? Leveraging data Many companies believe that consumers buy products become of promotions or rebates. Jason’s company doesn’t believe that’s always accurate. Their response to these situations is that they’ll track the data and the consumer purchase information, and they’ll figure out why the consumers bought what they did. What they found was that the promotion was the fourth reason the consumer purchased. The number one reason was “because the sales guy told me to buy it.” The question becomes why are you so focused on the promotion when you should be focused on the key drivers to the relationship? Consider how you’re educating the buyer about your product? How are they ensured that you’re the trusted advisor? Purchases are a big decision, and people often buy based upon advice from others. How are you leveraging that to ensure that you provide great advice? Status quo Many of us make choices based upon the status quo. Zig Ziglar tells a story that his wife always cut the ends off of the meatloaf without really knowing why. Turns out the meatloaf was always too big for the pan she had, but no one knew that’s why she did it. Zig’s wife just always cut the ends off. In sales, we often do things because that’s how our company has always done it. Instead, we should look at the data and determine what is actually most effective. Jason’s company always deals in context for the data. In the case of the meatloaf, no one had context for why the ends were cut off. Determine the context for decisions that were made in the past, then look at the hypothesis of what we should be doing in the future. Then we can execute against that and then measure it. Executing sales incentives One of the first keys is to understand why people sell what they sell. Jason’s company started by interviewing 1,500 sales reps to determine why they sell what they sell. They determined that sellers do so because of quality, because of price point, because of brand, because they’ve been educated, to ensure happy customers, because they want to know what’s in it for them, and because they of the relationship they have with the brand. People don’t want to sell something that isn’t great. They like to buy something they’ve heard of before, so new brands often struggle. Creating sales incentive Focus on building data around the data you have, and building context so you can get to better decisions. Start by understanding the customer journey and the decisions that are made throughout that journey. Then align the incentives across the journey. At the end of the day, an incentive is just a motivation tactic to get to a specific action. Incentives might include rebates that are perceived as price discounts, sales incentives that motivate a seller to keep a specific brand top of mind, or volume incentives to drive sales into locations. If you want to run an incentive program, don’t think about the incentive. Instead, think about the customer journey and identify opportunities to use incentives to drive actions. Customer journey Many silos exist in larger companies. Certain teams in the company understand different components of the buyer’s journey. It’s really important to bring all those silos together to understand the complete journey. In the early days of incentives, many companies intentionally made rebates difficult to submit in hopes that consumers wouldn’t actually send them in. But in a digital and social age, that kind of program is problematic. Brands realized that this kind of program could backfire. Jason’s company saw a huge opportunity to step in and create an unbelievable experience for the consumer. Instead of a rebate being the last touch point a brand had with its consumers, the rebate should now be the basis of the next journey they have with you. Many organizations have people now that understand all of the customer touch points so they can actual

You’ve likely heard the scenario before where an interviewer asks a seller to “Sell me this pen,” but how much value does this approach offer?? It’s bad enough that you’re already nervous about the interview, but if you’re thrown into a situation where the director of sales asks you to sell him a pen when you really have very little information to start from, you may find yourself fumbling for something to say. Features and benefits Sellers who don’t know much about the product they are selling or the audience they are selling to usually revert to features and benefits. They sell the aspects of the product that they can see. “It’s comfortable.” “It has a good grip.” “It has a clicky thing and even a laser pointer. That’s great for folks who do presentations.” “It writes smoothly and it isn’t too expensive. In fact, it’s cheaper than many of the pens on the market. And if you buy it today, I can throw in a notepad and a pocket protector.” Why would people even do this test in the first place? Quick thinking People often conduct this test to see how well you think on your feet and how you perform under pressure. And though I can understand those motivations, this test won’t truly work unless you’re selling something that might be a consumer sale. Typically, sellers aren’t selling simple products like pens. Rather they are selling something like a software solution that is much more expensive and has a much longer sales cycle. In those cases, it won’t matter as much how good you are with your words. You won’t be able to persuade someone within one minute to buy your expensive product. If you’re selling inexpensive trinkets on the side of the road, it might just work. But if you’re selling something with a significant price value, it won’t. Reviews This idea might have provided a good judge of a seller’s abilities in the 80s and 90s, but today’s buyers rely on reviews. They are researching and asking friends and family for insights and input. Today’s buyers will prepare before they enter the arena. So as a sales leader, what if you stopped using this unrealistic test and offered a better one? What if you gave your sellers a scenario and ask them to prepare for it? Test your sellers to see whether they can find true problems or interesting facts, figures, or statistics that will help you win the deal. Determine whether the sellers will try to “wing it” instead of coming prepared. Sales scenario You want a sales rep who is prepared, so use your interview opportunity to determine their ability to prepare. Ask your receptionist to send a scenario to the interviewees. Let them know they will be asked to role play a selling scenario like this. Present a scenario in which a particular business owner has a certain set of challenges. He is already working with a particular vendor. The sellers’ job is to show up prepared to understand the product and services and have a meaningful conversation selling this service to the business owner. If the sales rep shows up with information about the company in-hand and prepared to have a meaningful discussion, you’ve likely found a good seller. If the seller shows up with the intention to “wing it,” you’ll know what you’re up against. Selling pens The secret to successful selling lies with asking appropriate questions, even in the case of selling a pen. If you do use the pen test, expect your sellers to begin by finding out whether the buyer even needs a pen.It doesn’t matter how much ink it will hold or how great the cap is if the seller doesn’t need it. Instead of spending the time pressuring the buyer to spend money on a pen, expect your sellers to begin by asking questions. Meaningful questions about the buyer’s situation will either qualify or disqualify the buyer. It will also communicate that the seller understands the buyer’s actual situation. The seller will demonstrate a desire to identify the pain point and solve the problem. Maybe the customer needs a computer more than a pen. Don’t waste your time pitching a product the customer doesn’t need. Consultants Seek sellers who will serve as consultants rather than those who will try to trick the customers. Help the buyer feel like he is making a buying decision rather than being sold to. Jeffrey Gitomer said that people love to buy but they hate to be sold to. Help your customers understand the true pain that exists and then help them solve it. If you do this, they’ll evangelize about you and ultimately help you get more business. Empower your sales reps to sell on their own. Teach them to become consultants who ask meaningful questions to identify challenges that the buyers may not even realize they have. He’ll be successful and he’ll have great clients who love him. If you create a meaningful scenario for your interviews, you’ll have more meaningful discussions and dialogues and both parties will enjoy the process more. Besides, we probably already have enough pens. "Sell me this pen" episode resources If you haven't conne

We're talking about key metrics this month, and today Shawn Finder talks about the key metrics to track in your outbound strategy that will help you be successful. Shawn was a professional tennis player before he launched into entrepreneurship in the form of Autoklose, a company that automates the top of the sales funnels for sales representatives. Cold calling Shawn divides outbound into three different categories: cold-calling, emailing, and database because your database is the engine that keeps that car moving. You must have at least two of those inside your outbound strategy. Within those three categories, you'll have different metrics. Cold calling will include dial-to-connection percentage, dials-to-appointment ratio, dials-to-opportunity, and dials-to-deal. When you're cold calling, if you're dialing 100 people but you're only reaching 5, that isn't very successful. Maybe you're dialing 100 and reaching 10 knowing that 3 of those will turn into prospects and one of those will close. If you don't know those analytics, you're going to fail because the analytics keep you moving forward toward the right strategy. Frustration Beyond simply tracking numbers, metrics can help you avoid frustration as a sales rep. Many sellers get frustrated if they send five emails but the person never responds or if they make 15 calls but never reach anyone. If you know that every 50 calls you should be getting three opportunities, you'll benchmark your success to those numbers. As an SDR or a sales rep, unless you know your metrics ahead of time, you're going to get frustrated if you think you're not getting results. Knowing the analytics before you start will help you approach your calls differently. Statistics Shawn has found over time that most people, to include account managers, don't look enough at the stats. As a result, they don't know what is good versus what is bad, or what is terrible versus what is great. His company lists the weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals for each rep. They track forecast versus actual numbers. The goal is to make sure they know whether they are on par to hit quota, outperform quota, or underperform. They use a whiteboard in addition to digital tracking because reps don't always visit the spreadsheets. When the reps see their names with their metrics on the board every time they walk into the office, it keeps them accountable. It helps them know what they have to do in order to achieve their numbers. Important metrics The dials-to-appointment ratio is important to Shawn because if he's paying a dialer, and he knows how much each appointment can be worth, and he knows how many appointments he has to have in order to close a deal, he can then determine the ROI on his expense. If he's spending $4,000 on a dialer and earning $9,000, that $5,000 profit is the biggest ratio for him. [Tweet "There's nothing wrong with trying new things, but if the concept isn't making you money, you must pivot and try something new. #pivot"] Email statistics For email statistics, consider open rates, click rates, and reply rates. Open rates rely on your ability to convince someone to open your email. Most people spend a lot of time on the body of the email. Shawn suggests spending more time on the subject line and your first three seconds of the email. The number one reason is that 72 percent of people are opening emails on mobile phones. They only see your subject line and opening line. Make your subject line three to five words, and do not talk about yourself in the first line of the email. If you want a high open rate, have a good subject line. Keep everything personalized. Try "Hi, first name." Another one he has used successfully is, "Hey Donald, Let's Have Coffee?" Coffee works well because you're not selling. It's more casual. Opening lines Consider what will make your prospects want to open the email you've sent. If I can save your sales team five hours a day in prospecting would you give me 15 minutes? If I could fill your calendar with appointments, would you give me 15 minutes? Don't lead with information about you that the reader can find in your signature block. Your first email should be a little longer, but the second and third emails should be shorter, no longer than four sentences. If they're longer, no one is reading them. Keep it short and precise. Give value. Share case studies and stories and testimonials. Tell them how you'll solve their challenges. Email success There's a difference between click rates and reply rates. When you send emails, have your CTA goal in your head. If your goal is to get a reply, make your reply rate a priority. If your goal is to get a click, then make that your priority. Make it very simple for your end user. Many people don't consider database part of the outbound effort but it corresponds well with your email and your phone. If you have inaccurate information in your database, you'll waste a lot of time. For cold calling, if you have the wrong phone numbers

Many people get sales enablement wrong because they have different concepts and ideas about what it actually is. Roderick Jefferson began his sales career as a BDR, then an AEE, and finally moved into sales management. He discovered that he enjoyed sales more than he enjoyed closing deals. So he stepped into sales training. Now, through his company Roderick Jefferson and Associates, he breaks the complexity of sales into practical ideas through scalable and repeatable practices. SALES ENABLEMENT MISTAKES Sales enablement helps develop the right conversations the right way with the right tools. Ultimately, it seeks to decrease time to ramp or increase productivity and revenue. Many companies make mistakes implementing their sales enablement. They fail to establish consistency and parameters. Many wait too long to hire sales enablement consultants. They assume they need a consultant or a resource without realizing they need both. One can help you lay the groundwork that you can hand off to another. Many companies aren’t really sure what they need. They know what isn’t working and they treat enablement like IT. But those who do sales enablement aren’t the fixers of broken things. They aren’t sales scribes or sales support. They must be sales partners. TRAINING VS. ENABLEMENT A difference exists between training and enablement. Roderick believes that training applies to animals while enablement applies to humans. Enablement is woven into the fabric of the company. It literally has to be one of the top five initiatives of the overall success of the company. It also must have specific time-bound and measurable deliverables, metrics, and KPIs. MEASUREMENTS Some of the sales enablement measurements have changed. We used to talk about butts in seats, headcount, and NPS scores, but those things don’t carry water. Sales enablement now focuses on different questions. What’s the completion percentage of certification or accreditation? What’s the average deal size? Collateral use infrequency? How much new pipeline is being created? What’s the number of closed deals? What’s the product mix? What’s the quota attainment percentage? What’s the time to revenue? What’s the win rate? Many of the old measurements aren’t definitions of success and they won’t help move the needle forward for sales. BIGGEST MISTAKE Companies aren’t tying their goals, their sales processes, or their sales methodology to figure out where they fit into their buyer’s journey. They are trying to make their buyer fit into their processes, methodologies, sales stages, and CRM. They must step back and reverse engineer their process and document what the buyer’s journey looks like. They must also figure out where to fit in multiple touch points in the buyer’s journey. Sales enablement must be in place before you need it. By the time you need it, it’s already too late. If, for example, you’re planning to hire more people over the next year, you must have the content ready for them. You must have a process for onboarding. Without these processes in place, you’ve essentially planned to fail rather than ensuring success. RETHINK ICP Rethink the ideal customer profile. Start thinking instead about the ideal employee profile. From an enablement perspective, you start to get a feel for new hires and who is going to be a rock star. Instead of doing that after the hire, Roderick focused on working with HR resources around talent acquisition. Consider what a rock star looks like especially in the context of where the company is going. Then take that job description to HR and explain what you’re hiring toward. Sometimes sellers do well by accident because the prospect happened to need their product or service. In that case, they become simply order-takers. When we fail to measure, plan, or structure our efforts, we don’t optimize. Imagine if every organization operated that way. It’s the detriment of the sales industry. Supply chain ensures that you hit your markers and that sales leaders don’t move the goalposts. If you’re in the red zone about to score, you don’t want anyone to move the goal post. RESOURCE VS. CONSULTANT Many companies don’t want to pay for consultants but they want help connecting the dots. It’s important to use resources and consultants because what one lacks, the other brings. Roderick’s team brings templates to their clients so they don’t have to recreate the wheel. The process includes four stages. Infrastructure build and augmentation. Established sales enablement team. Sales leadership and coaching. Sales-focused metrics. HOPE Instead of hoping that marketing does its job and that the customer buys, institute a clear process instead. Remove hope at every stage and rely on the process that focuses on your buyer’s journey. Enablement is an ongoing conference rather than a single event. “SALES ENABLEMENT” EPISODE RESOURCES You can connect with Roderick on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, or you can email him directly with questions at roderickje

It seems counterintuitive in sales, but leading with your flaws can shorten the sales cycle and disarm your customers, ultimately leading you to better metrics. Todd Caponi was the chief revenue officer for a company called Power Reviews which helps retailers and brands collect and display ratings and reviews on their website. His time there caused him to rethink the way he leads sales organizations because he discovered that consumers were more likely to buy a product that had a 4.2 to 4.5 rating than a 5-star rating. Statistics show that 95 percent of consumers in the B2C world are looking at reviews before they buy. Of those, 82 percent are looking for negative reviews before buying. Todd wondered what might happen if the same notion could be applied to the B2B world. Pros and cons Todd embraced the idea of embracing the pros and cons and leading with them. He discovered that his first deal, which previously had a sales cycle of 6 months, closed within 4 weeks. They discovered that when you lead with your flaws, your sales cycle speeds up dramatically. You’ll qualify deals faster and eliminate those deals that you probably weren’t going to win anyway. Todd was in New York when his VP of sales called him to say the company had an inbound lead from an apparel brand that wanted to initiate an evaluation. The brand happened to be headquartered in NY, so Todd scheduled coffee with the senior vice president of e-commerce. The coffee meeting became a presentation instead, and the SVP got right to the point. Competitor is better He said that his company had been talking to Todd’s competitor, and he wanted to know why Todd’s company was better than the competitor. Todd figured he had nothing to lose, so he asked an unexpected question. “Do you mind if I tell you why the competitor is better?” He explained that the competitor had offerings that his own company didn’t, so if he wasn’t going to be able to meet their needs, he wanted to determine that quickly so both parties could move on. The room deflated. The guy clearly thought Todd was crazy, but he agreed to the idea. Todd talked about an add-on that the other company had but explained that his own company was focused on certain core beliefs. The SVP acknowledged that the add-on the competitor was offering wasn’t a necessity for his company, so they moved on. Transparency Within 20 minutes, the SVP kicked everyone else out of the meeting and grabbed a folder that includes the company’s budget for ratings and review software. He pointed to a number inside and asked Todd if he could hit that figure. The two engaged in a collaborative process that culminated in a deal a few weeks later. The company didn’t initiate an evaluation. It simply chose Todd’s company. He recounted that he had called Todd’s competitor, who quickly went on a rant about the add-on that distinguished the two companies. Every time they led with their flaws, it completely disarmed their prospects. The company built its sales cycle on a foundation of trust and all of its metrics moved in a dramatically positive direction. Wired to resist Todd said that we’re all wired to resist being sold to. As a buyer, he simply wants to be able to predict what his experience with a certain product will be like, and then to get the best deal he can. He said that a salesperson will demonstrate within the first five minutes whether he will be a great resource or push toward a sale even if it isn’t what the buyer wants. People believe in authenticity and honesty. Many of them believe that there’s a trade-off required so that in order to have authenticity and honesty, you will sacrifice results. But the data suggests otherwise. The data says that when you provide authenticity and honesty to your customers, you’ll maximize your sales results. Truthfully, the era of hiding your flaws from your prospects is over. The proliferation of ratings and reviews has moved into the B2B area and it has become the way of the world. B2B buying behavior A company called Trust Radius just published a study of B2B buying behavior. The data demonstrated that B2B buyers are using reviews 56 percent of the time and analyst ratings only 24 percent of the time. Every year, reviews are climbing and independent studies are going down. Marketing is becoming less trustworthy and reviews are becoming the core that brings buyers to the table. Sellers must embrace that. It’s counter-intuitive to most people to show weakness. Many sellers will listen to this and wonder why this works. Todd dug into the neuroscience of this and discovered that buyers make decisions using feeling and then back them up with logic. Logic is the justifying mechanism to emotional decisions. We are also wired to disbelieve anything that looks perfect. We are taught to seek the negative. A recent study reported that buyers in a typical purchase cycle spend 39 percent of their time talking to sellers and 61 percent of their time doing other homework. This includes resear

Humor takes away tension and sellers who use humor in the sales process can increase efficiency and improve effectiveness. Andrew Tarvin realized over the course of his career that you can't be efficient with humans. Instead, you must be effective. His experience in stand-up comedy revealed that improv demands the same skills necessary to be an effective leader. He explored the intersection of humor in the workplace and fell in love with the subject. He observed that it's strange to think that companies pay him to teach employees to have more fun. He notes, though, that it's missing from the workplace, and he addresses the issue in his book, Humor That Works. Strategic humor We know that humor relieves stress and that it's overall a good thing. We do not seem to know how to deploy humor strategically. Rather than simply using it for the sake of fun. we must use it to achieve a specific result. How do I use humor in the sales process to build rapport?Can I get people to pay attention to what I'm saying with humor? Will humor relieve my own stress in the sales process? We tend to think work must be strictly business. In actuality, though, you're still dealing with humans. Humor inspires people to connect and let their guard down. Would you rather? Andrew calls it a stupid question, but he wonders whether people would rather do something fun or not fun? Of course, people will say they'd rather do something fun. And if work is a little more fun, they'd probably be more likely to do the work. If you could make interactions a little more enjoyable, people would be more willing to engage in them. Even if the work you're doing is serious in nature, like the Red Cross, you're still working with humans. Humor happens to be one of the most effective means of engaging people. It's something different that people enjoy. Working with the FBI The FBI has a group called the office of private sector where agents work to build relationships with senior leaders at private companies. If the FBI can develop strong relationships before there are problems within companies, they can more readily identify problems when they emerge. They want to set meetings with people but you can imagine how people respond when they hear from the FBI. Andrew worked to teach them how to use humor to build rapport. The agents learned to build rapport despite the intimidation factor. Boring meetings If you hold an initial meeting that bores your attendees, they won't want to attend the next time you invite them. If people get value out of your meetings and enjoy attending, they'll be more likely to attend future meetings. Humor isn't what you do. It doesn't replace the work. It's simply a matter of presenting information that someone needs in a way they enjoy consuming it. Engaging strangers Sales reps face many different hurdles when engaging prospects or new people. One of the greatest difficulties is making a great first impression and building rapport when they meet people for the first time. Within existing sales processes, a number of challenges exist. The average person sends and receives more than 100 emails per day, with many spending up to 80 percent of their time in active communication. Many sellers present information to help the buyer purchase rather than sharing information that will help develop a relationship. Asking questions Andrew points to a sales presenter named Phil Jones who says that sales is simply earning the right to make a recommendation. Think of it as a visit to the doctor. Before the doctor gives a diagnosis, he asks questions and ultimately gives a prescription. Imagine if you went to a doctor who gave you pills before you even told him what was wrong. You'd assume he was a quack and you wouldn't trust him with your health. The same scenario is true in sales. If the seller doesn't even know anything about you, how will he address your challenges? Enjoyable process Since the seller and the buyer are both humans, see if you can make the process a bit enjoyable. Then, discover whether you can be on the same side. Ian Altman wrote a great book called Same Side Selling that encourages sellers to solve problems without trying to trick buyers into buying something. Understand that humor is broader than comedy. Make the process a bit more fun to get people to pay attention. In your outreach, what are you doing to introduce a bit of humor? If it's true that people buy from the first person who provides them value, recognize that humor adds value. Fun Andrew got a cold email from a guy with a regular pitch. He ignored it like he does most cold emails. About a week later, the guy followed up with a gif of John Travolta from Pulp Fiction with his coat over his arm looking confused. There was no text with the email because it wasn't necessary. He didn't need to point out that he had emailed just the week before. Another seller started each cold call by acknowledging that this was a cold call and the person on the other end of the

Sellers who want to succeed must ask themselves a vitally important question: Are you ready and prepared to have a value-rich conversation? I recently took a camping trip with my buddies to St. Louis, and though many of us were excited about the trip, we realized that being prepared was something completely different. Being ready for it suggests that you believe in your ability to get it done. Being prepared means having the proper equipment and gear to succeed. Sales pitch My friend Doug shared recently that many different sellers pitch his company, and though many of them are ready, most are not prepared. Sellers often feel excited about the sales pitch and the possibility that it could lead to great opportunities for their company. If, however, they arrive unprepared, they'll be unable to identify the problem their prospects are facing. They won't have any idea about how to solve the problem for the client. If our crew didn't prepare for our camping trip, we wouldn't have enough food and water to sustain our group. If we can't communicate with the folks who are scheduled to pick us up, we could quickly find ourselves in the midst of a disaster. Understanding problems Imagine I sell office furniture and I'm excited to pitch our new sofas and standing desks to my prospects. I must be ready and prepared to address the person's business, how it operates, how it makes money, and the changes that exist within the industry. If my client is facing higher prices because of the trade war with China, I have to understand that business problem and then offer ways to solve it. It's the same as going camping without enough drinking water. You're going to land yourself in a tough situation, and ultimately, you'll sound like every other sales rep. Be prepared The same friend was working with a prospect when he discovered that he didn't understand enough about the prospect's industry. He started by researching the people who were going to attend his upcoming meeting. He researched each person on LinkedIn so he was prepared to have good conversations. Next, he Googled the company's history so the prospect wouldn't have to educate him on it. And when the prospect asked him what he knew about the company, he was able to share the history. He also observed that many of the company's employees changed position from one department or role to another. That helped him have more meaningful conversations about the changes the company was facing. His preparation set him apart from his competitors, many of whom show up expecting the prospect to provide this information for them. Buying cycle "Research repeatedly shows that buyers are 50 to 60 percent through the buying cycle before they ever meet with you. The buyers are more prepared than ever, which means that sellers must do the same. These buyers come to the table with more understanding. They want to have meaningful conversations with companies that can solve their problems and offer great deals. If you find yourself being dismissed often, it's likely that you didn't provide a value-rich conversation. If your prospects frequently offer to "follow up with you," you didn't provide compelling reasons for the prospect to engage with your company. Competition Go a step further and research your main competition. Who is your prospect working with now? Who have they done business with in the past? Uncover your competition's shortcomings and leverage that information to show how you can be the ideal solution. Sometimes companies are in contracts with vendors but if you can create reasonable doubt, you can help the prospect realize that the current partner isn't the greatest fit. "Ready and Prepared" episode resources If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing there. You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561)578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.Mentioned in this episode:HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOSHubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com

Value is in the eye of the buyer, and because assessing value is not as simple as it sounds, companies often get this wrong. Ken Rutsky specializes in helping companies tell their story in a way that connects it to the customer. He says that value is all connected to the stories we tell. Defining value We're trying to sell something. Essentially what we're doing is making a trade of the two things they value the most in order of least to more. Money is the thing everybody values, but often buyers value their time even more. They value the time they spend understanding, evaluating, and implementing a solution or a product. We're asking our buyers for two rare commodities, so we have to deliver something that is equal to or hopefully greater in value. As a result, the simple definition of value is what will the customer open his wallet and pay for? Many sales reps perceive that they are creating value but that may not be the case because assessing value is not as simple as it seems. Perceived value Ken said that the biggest mistake sales reps make is overvaluing value. Seems strange to say in a discussion all about value, but it's true. If we're sitting next to each other on an airplane and I'm showing you pictures of my four kids, by the third kid you've probably seen enough. We tend to get excited about our goods and services just like we do about our kids. Many times, we want to show the client thousands of pictures of it. We overvalue what they'll see in it. Instead, we really need to relate our product to our customers. Sales doesn't work the way it once did. Your customer doesn't need you to tell him about your product. They'll go to your website and find out everything they ever wanted to know. In the book Launching to Leading, Ken talks about how salespeople should succeed today. Start by creating that shared context with the customer. Realize, too, that it's the customer's context, not yours. Viewpoint You have to start the conversation about your customer's world. Come in educated about how you can transform your customer's world. In a recent survey of B2B buyers, business buyers ranked product knowledge as the 8th most important factor in the process. They ranked the seller's ability to understand the buyer's business as the number one priority. Number 2 was the ability to teach the customer something he didn't already know. Don't enter the relationship with the intent to sell something. Instead, have a conversation about their business, and then teach them something. Teaching is critical to establishing your value as a salesperson. If the customer isn't learning from you, he could just as easily go to your website instead. In fact, most customers are 60 percent through the process before they ever want to speak to a salesperson. Find a teaching opportunity. Stories Realistically, it is marketing's job to create the stories, but the sellers are the ones who must deliver them and create context around them. Marketing is a one-to-many art. Great sales reps show up and contextualize the stories. Understand the story of your product and how it transforms your customers' business. You have to do the hard work of understanding all these things. There is no magic shortcut. Empathy Sales leaders must operate with a sense of empathy. Understand that marketing is working hard to provide the stories and the materials. If marketing feels like they aren't getting the things they need, there's a shared responsibility to make that connection. Marketers must have empathy for the pressures and difficulties of selling. Great marketers have empathy for sellers. They understand the need to work as a team. Leaders must create that environment of empathy across the organization. Confidence Sales reps have to be competent and courageous enough to show the product very early in the sales cycle. Whether it's a true demonstration or a case study, sellers have to demonstrate value if they want customers to believe it. Don't wait six weeks into the sales cycle. Demonstrate early and often. Sellers must have the ability to create and demonstrate their own contexts. Teach your customer something and then show them how the product can enable the thing you taught him. It can happen in the first call and then it should happen again and again through the process. The teaching diminishes as the process goes along because the customer already understands the possibility. Your competition may be showing the products sooner because prospects don't have the patience they used to have. [Tweet "You can lose the sales you don't even know if you're shy about your value. Your customers may assume you're hiding something. #Value"] Do the homework and understand your customer and everything follows from there. Assessing value is not as simple as it sounds. "Assessing Value is Not As Simple As It Sounds" episode resources You can connect with Ken at kenrutsky.com. You can find information about him and his clients, and grab a copy of his book,

During our time at the Florida State Minority Supplier Development Council's expo, we've met a number of people who understand the secrets behind growing your business and creating value. Felix Bratslavsky works at Tampa General Hospital, a very large level-one trauma center that is number one in Florida for transplants. The organization has more than 8,000 employees but they still contract out much of their workload. Gilda Rosenberg started a vending machine company 35 years ago in Miami and she slowly grew it to include major clients like universities, schools, and hospitals. She calls her relationship with the NMSDC a love affair that resulted in referrals, connections, and mentorship that helped her to grow her business. Partnerships Tampa General has a minority business program that breaks out the four procurement categories from construction and professional services to general goods and services, and medical services and supplies. The hospital has a lot of contracting opportunities and a lot of partners within the state of Florida and even nationwide. The Minority Business Enterprise program administered by the NMSDC recognizes for-profit businesses in the U.S. that are 51 percent owned, operated, capitalized, and controlled by minorities. Felix says that MBEs that want to stand out should strive to be a partner. Add value, be cost-efficient, and know about the customer. Understand the customers' goals, their missions, and where they're headed. Bring the solution to wherever your prospective customer is going. In the case of Tampa General, the hospital recently got a new CEO that is leading the organization down a different path. MBEs that want to engage should recognize that the business has changed paths and they should offer solutions that relate to the path the company is on. Be an expert in your own business. Instead of coming to the prospect with a variety of items, they should know the situation well enough to narrow the solution down the best possible option and lead with that one. Homework MBEs must do their homework and focus on preparation if they that want to get noticed. Organizations receive hundreds of emails every day, so generic outreach will generally get deleted. Learn the process to get on the vendor application and then build a relationship. Finally, come with solutions. Understand your business and their business well enough that you can have meaningful conversations about each. If you want to be the next partner, you should already know who your competitors are, and who your prospect is currently using and why they are using that company. You should know whether a contract exists, and whether it's up for renewal. Companies that do those things win opportunities. Differentiate Differentiate yourself by being prepared. When there are so many companies doing the same thing and offering the same service, you have to stand out. Maybe you stand out on price or on value or even additional services. Whatever it is, make sure that the corporations you're pursuing know what sets you apart. Finding the right people Gilda recalls asking a bank for a $5 million loan for vending machines and being treated as though she was crazy. She said that her connections through NMSDC helped her learn how to negotiate the loan process as she interacted with banking people and how to create bids from connecting with hospital CEOs. Her biggest challenge in the vending industry has been the labor force. Her first route driver stole from her, so she learned that she had to control inventories differently. As the industry grew into a technological one, she had to bring in geek squads. She also learned how to find the human resources that support your mission and your vision. She said that finding the right manpower still poses one of her greatest challenges even today. The company struggles to find loyal employees who stick around because small companies struggle to sustain high turnover. The cost of training is simply too high. NMSDC She experienced a huge lift when she was introduced to the minority certification program. Then, she slowly grew her network and interacted with larger organizations where she landed contracts. You must prove yourself to the client. She says the most incredible satisfaction comes from helping minorities nationwide. Her suppliers and equipment originate from minorities. And now newer companies want her to introduce them to other contacts. Gilda calls her mission a mission to help other minorities. She also calls NMSDC the best college she ever went to. Although she studied economics in college, she grew professionally among the members of the NMSDC. She learned to nurture others. [Tweet "The product and service aren't so important anymore. It's your personality and how you take care of your clients that matter most. #Differentiate"] Don't think twice about joining the council because there's nowhere better to network. The council's handholding helps businesses by taking extra st

The same secret scale up success strategies that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses to the next level will benefit individual sellers who recognize their territories as their own business. Lauren Cohen works with foreign investors to find the right business opportunities, make the right investments, and get and keep their visas. She discovered along the way that many of these people didn't pay a lot of attention to their business structures and that the same was true of American business people. 7 Steps Scale Up Success Strategy Lauren characterizes her role as creating a GPS for your business, but you have to have a destination. You can't tell your GPS that you don't know where you're going. These 7 areas of a business' foundation can result in disaster if they are overlooked. Funding in capitalization. Without the right capital, or if you're under-funded or under-capitalized, it doesn't matter how great your business idea is, you're going to fall apart. Business planning. If you don't have a business plan and an exit strategy, you don't begin with the end in mind. Branding and marketing. Building your brand is part of your foundation but it doesn't exist independent of all these other elements, and marketing is part of branding. Legal and compliance. Without a legal structure in place, which so many business owners don't have, you're risking your family and everything you have. Financial and taxes. Everyone knows what that is all about. Operations and systems. Without systems, you can't repeat your success. Insurance and licensing. If you don't have insurance and someone sues you, you've got nothing to protect you. Without the right licenses, you can be shut down. Know your area You cannot be an expert in every area, so Lauren's number one tip is to stay in your lane. You don't know what you don't know. Figure out where your gaps are and then allow someone who is an expert to oversee the process. She suggests a 3-step process to assess your company. Assess Diagnose Deliver Diagnose the issues and then fill the gaps you identified in the process. Exit strategy Lauren related the story of a client who wanted to exit her business within five years so she needed an exit strategy. She needed a strategy to get from where she is to where she needs to be. She wants to sell to one of four parties but she doesn't want to sell at a discount on her dollar. Rather, she wants to sell at the highest possible dollar amount. In order to do that, she needs to increase the profits. That's where the various elements of branding, compliance, taxes, operations, and all these other components become important because they will help the business owner get more value at the time of exit. [Tweet "Begin with the end in mind when developing your business plan. Develop an end game and then create a strategic plan to ultimately get you there. #BusinessPlan"] Funding and capitalization It sounds crazy, but if you ask someone to invest $100,000 in your business, they are going to laugh at you. If, on the other hand, you ask for $5 million, they'll suddenly believe that you're serious. The problem is that there's no ROI for $100K. The cost of obtaining the money is so high that it's not even worth it for them to pursue it. Financial and taxes This one is easy. If the IRS is after you because you haven't paid your taxes, get them filed. You may pay penalties but at least you'll be up-to-date. Legal and compliance Legal and compliance include your corporate record books, which everyone should have. Some companies don't even have the corporate entity which is a whole other story. Make sure you have a corporate record book that's affiliated or associated with that entity. Hold a meeting each year and record the minutes in that record book. Reflect all the changes to shareholders and bank accounts in your records. She estimates that 70 percent of businesses don't keep their record books up to date. If you try to sell your business or you end up in litigation, you'll need that book. Building and scaling It's vitally important to have all of these considerations in mind as you're building and scaling your business. If you find a potential strategic partner who wants to help you build your business but he discovers that you don't have all your contracts in place, the deal will fall apart. If you have the wrong documents, you're potentially setting yourself up for liability. Don't try to do this alone. Consult with a professional. Everybody avoids hiring a lawyer or a professional for fear of getting the bill at the end. But it's better to get the bill now than to get a larger bill later. "Scale UP Success Strategies" episode resources Grab a copy of Lauren's book Finding Your Silver Lining In the Business Immigration. You can take a copy of her quiz at showmethemoneyquiz.com. It's quick, free, and fun and it will give you access to schedule a call with her. You can also find her on Facebook @scaleupcheckup or on LinkedIn @scaleupcheckup. Y

Every seller should create good content as a tool to gain leads, grow their business, and increase overall success. Kyle Burt first heard The Sales Evangelist podcast two years ago when we interviewed Alex Berman about using video in sales. Kyle, who once chose business school over film school, went home and started making videos. Massive success Kyle quickly turned his video capability into massive success for himself. Before video, he was using cold calls, email, and "screaming from the tops of mountains," knocking on every door and delivering cookies. When you're starting out, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes. He realized that video provided a good strategy to get leads. But he shifted his focus to making videos because he wanted to make videos. He realized he had a level of value and a perspective that wasn't being shared. Kyle recognized, too, that only the people in his bubble would understand the content he was posting because it was niche content. Coca-Cola He established a weekly schedule because he knew he had to post consistently, and he introduced Whiteboard Wednesdays. It was a chance to introduce different technologies. Maybe 20 videos later, he was on vacation in Cancun in 2017 when he got a LinkedIn message from the VP of technology for Coca-Cola. He assumed someone was pranking him, but in fact, the gig turned into a consulting opportunity with the company. When Kyle realized the VP had seen the very first video he ever posted, the most awkward of the bunch, he knew that he was on to something with video. Objections In the case of objections, sellers often face their own objections to appearing in or creating videos. "I don't look good enough for the camera." "I don't have the right equipment." "There isn't enough time to create videos." The important parts of the content are good audio and good content. [Tweet "When you see something that looks like a commercial, smells like a commercial, and feels like a commercial, most people run. Instead, be relatable in your videos and focus on the message. #VideoContent"] Fear of the comments In my own case, I've been slow to take advantage of YouTube because I'm a little bit afraid of the comments I might get. People can be nasty sometimes. The point is that there will always be the possibility of those comments. Someone once told Kyle he sounded like a little baby. He wasn't even entirely sure what they meant by it, but he had to let it roll right off. You have to be ready to take it on the chin when you put yourself out there. You're going to get some good and some bad. Internalize the fact that nobody has it all figured out, and then realize that people are genuinely good. Most people don't want to tear you down, so don't spend your time on the small number of people who have something negative to say. It's worth noting, too, that stories only survive for 24 hours, so they won't live forever. If you create a bad one, it won't be around for long. Even with LinkedIn, the feed algorithm means that it might technically always be there, but it will be harder to find. Persistence We spent two years trying to get Kyle on the show but we couldn't make it work out because of different schedules. Our recording day is Monday because it's what works best for my team, and sometimes we have to bypass opportunities if they don't fit with that schedule. In Kyle's case, he was persistent. He got early access to LinkedIn Live, which as of this writing is only available to a few people, and he invited me to connect with him. After 18 months of no real interaction, he reconnected with me and we made it work. He grabbed my attention and we ended up recording with him on a day outside of our normal schedule. Disrupt the norm. Create good content that stands out. LinkedIn reach My good friend Stephen A. Hart from the Trailblazers Podcast pointed out recently that there are 9 billion impressions on LinkedIn every week, which amounts to 468 billion impressions annually. Of those, only about 3 million users are creating content. That means there is a lot of space to create more free content. You can't find that kind of visibility on YouTube, Facebook, or any other platform. Basically, there are a small number of creators and a huge number of impressions, so it behooves you to grab a piece of the video market. I happened to get into podcasting early when there were only a few sales podcasts. Now I'm a grandfather in the podcasting world. Much innovation seems to happen with consumers first. The business world moves more slowly because there are more considerations to think about. The marketplace dictates what it wants. Coffee With Kyles Kyle previously collaborated with another guy named Kyle to launch a video podcast called Coffee With Kyles. Now he's working on a solo style show that will primarily involve live video. It will allow him to eliminate a lot of the editing and create more interactive experiences. In the case of this podcast interview, our audie

It can be frustrating for prospects to ask to speak to your current customers, and it can leave you wondering, "Should I Give Client References?" It can be tricky to balance this need, because you don't want your current customers, the ones you've developed into raving fans, to be constantly bombarded by prospects. Root cause Throughout the process, your prospects are trying to determine whether you're a good fit and whether you can truly help solve their problem. I recommend that you develop a wide base of people that can give you good support. But let's address the root cause of how your prospects got to this point. In my experience, it's because they don't have confidence in you as an organization, so they are seeking third-party validation. They don't want to make a bad decision. Put yourself in your buyer's shoes. His job or his reputation may be on the line. His company may not have a lot of money, so they can't waste it on buying the wrong product or service. Diffuse risk This issue usually traces back to a fear of risk, so you must diffuse this fear. [Tweet "If you're getting the request for references early on in your sales process, somehow you're failing to address their fears. #Objections"] It's not bad to give customer references, but client testimonials might work better. You can collect them in video form or as case studies. In last week's episode, we discussed the importance of leave-behinds, and testimonials might be a great option for you, especially if you're in a high-risk industry. Leave behind video testimonials of your current customers addressing some of the common questions or the challenging objections you routinely hear. You can leave them information about your past customers' pain and how you've addressed it. You can also indicate that you'll discuss these topics more on your next interaction. Your prospects simply don't want to be guinea pigs. Value You know your product or service is fantastic, but your prospects don't know that yet. Give value in order to help them understand. Use videos, case studies, and client testimonials on your website to communicate value. You can also create YouTube videos to help your client when he does the research you know he's planning to do. They'll establish a level of comfort with your product or service. If I'm your customer, I've got my own business to run. I'm too busy to answer all your customers' questions and to do all your selling for you. Referral phone calls interrupt my day. Compromise Perhaps the best option, then, is to offer to provide testimonials and case studies first to see if they can address the most frequent questions. Then, if the customer still has a level of uncertainty, you can consider providing referrals. You can even explain that you're trying to be considerate of your current customers just as you would do for this prospect someday when they've become your customer, too. Make sure you minimize the prospects' risk. Give them an opportunity to alleviate. Use leave-behind to help you accomplish that. Tell stories of clients that had similar challenges. "Should I Give Client References?" episode resources You can connect with Ebony at her website, www.ebenumequationcoaching.com, or on LinkedIn @EbonySmithCoach. You can connect with Abdullah at [email protected]. Connect with me at [email protected]. Try the first module of the TSE Certified Sales Training Program for free. This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance. TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us. Tools for sellers This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It's super easy, it's helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You can see when people open your email, or when they click on the link you sent. Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. If you haven't already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a single episod

Your brand tells your story when you're not in the room, and today Lindsay Pedersen shares tips for forging an ironclad brand with sales reps, entrepreneurs, and other business professionals. Lindsay is a brand strategist who helps professionals identify the single idea that their business stands for. She's passionate about working with leaders to harness the power of brand every day. Branding Brand is what you stand for in the mind of your audience. If your audience is a group of customers, it's the thing you mean to your customers. If it's future employers, it's what you mean to them. It's a crystallized meaning of what you uniquely bring to your audience. [Tweet "When you stand for one idea, it's easier for your audience to grasp it than if you stand for multiple ideas. It's easier for a person to let one idea in. #branding"] When you spray a bunch of ideas out, it's harder for your audience to understand. It's in our interest for our audience to be able to understand because they'll be more like to remember us, like us, and talk about us. It's up to us to make it easy by distilling it for them. Empathy We want to empathize and understand what it's like to be our customer. You and your company are not the center of the universe for that customer. They have many other things going on besides your value proposition. When you crystallize it into something specific, it uses their worldview rather than their worldview. It makes it easier for them to buy what you're selling. Sometimes as businesses, we forget that we're not selling to a machine or an inanimate object. We're selling to humans with joys, sorrows, scarcities, worries, and pride. When they feel seen they are more likely to bond with you and want to do business with you. Deconstructing brand One of Lindsay's motives for writing her book was people's widely varying definitions of brand. For some people, it's the name of the business. For others, it's the logo. Others assume it's related to marketing budget or television advertising. She concluded that the concept was becoming problematic, and she wanted to demystify it. There's some merit to all of those ideas, but she needed to bust the myths about what brand isn't. Otherwise, we'll keep having puzzling conversations where people aren't speaking the same language. 9 Criteria of ironclad brand Not all brand is created equally. You have a brand whether you deliberately created it or allowed it to be passively created. If you aren't actively choosing the meaning, you won't have the brand position you want to have. A brand needs to be big enough to matter to your customer. A brand must be narrow enough that you own it. Your brand must be asymmetrical so it uses your lopsided advantage to position you with your customer. Your brand must be empathetic enough to address a deeply relevant human need. It must be optimally distinct so it strikes a balance between being a familiar promise while also being novel. It's a balance between functional and emotional so that it's rationally meaningful to your customer but also emotionally resonant. Your brand must be a sharp-edged promise that is simple and singular. It must have teeth and be demonstrably true. Your brand must deliver on time, consistently, every time. Vision When you think of sharp objects as they relate to your vision, those things are easier to see. Your eyes have to do less work. Ease is good because when you ask less of your audience they are more likely to learn and remember. An example of this is the fact that people around the world associate the Volvo brand with safety. Same thing with Prius, because people think of fuel-efficient cars. Buick doesn't have this sharp edge in its branding. If you're the CEO of Buick, how do you feel when your audience doesn't know what your brand means? Who even is the audience? The Buick salespeople have to do much more work than the Volvo or Prius salespeople. Wide net We assume that if we can keep the door open without narrowing our message to a target customer that we'll appeal to everyone. The reality is that it's an illusion of an opportunity. The more an entity puts a stake in the ground, the more authentic they are perceived to be. Customers won't trust companies who won't take a stand on anything. People respect you more when you demonstrate what you're optimizing for. The other thing is that developing a specific message might turn away the people you shouldn't be serving anyway, but that's ok because it's time and money you could devote to the people who are your target customers. Mystique Remove the mystique of branding. You don't have to have a good handle on branding in order to intentionally craft your own brand. Choose with crystal clarity who your target customer is, but don't just rely on demographic observations. What are they like? What keeps them up at night? What do they value in life? This doesn't mean you don't sell to other people. It just means that you optimize with humility on your

Growing a small business requires you to think like an entrepreneur, and we can avoid reinventing the wheel if we engage with experienced entrepreneurs to learn more about hyper-growing small businesses. The Florida State Minority Supply Development Council connects us with successful entrepreneurs from a variety of industries, and many of them are using the council to grow their businesses. Every business, regardless of size, struggles with some kind of difficulty. Today, we'll hear from Ebony and Abdullah about how they've overcome the big challenges of entrepreneurship. Accidental entrepreneur Ebony started her career in oil and gas until she found herself facing an ultimatum from her management team. She was being moved to an office that she didn't want to occupy. She took it as a sign to take time for herself. And because of a non-compete clause built into her contract, she took a year off from work and went to coaching school to improve herself and become a better leader. She quickly realized that the idea of coaching had some legs when a friend of hers called her in need of a coach. Although she only had a weekend of training under her belt, the friend recognized that Ebony had more coaching experience than she did. She helped her friend return to the workforce after maternity leave and then moved forward from there. The transition was difficult but she made the decision to invest in herself. She had great savings and knew how to be frugal. She also sold her house in a hot market, which gave her a cushion and time to learn her new profession. Next level She found herself at a business development conference trying to figure out how to get to the next level. Ebony knew that she wouldn't make the same money she had made in her trading career until she became a great coach. She focused on becoming a good practitioner rather than scaling the business. She said she needed to know what she didn't know. She wanted to become the coach that she needed when she was in corporate America. She and other women at the conference decided to create a mastermind, and through that relationship, she discovered the value of certifications for coaches. Ebony also discovered that there were corporations out there that wanted to spend more than a billion dollars annually with small business. Since then, she acquired all the necessary certifications for coaching and she said that people recognize her at events now. The key is to tell people what you do. And then tell them again and again. Eventually, they'll hire you for a small contract and then they'll get bigger. Community Ebony points to her mastermind as one of the drivers of her growth and success. She also said that her four years with the NMSDC have helped her learn things she didn't know she didn't know. [Tweet "Business owners are resourced beyond their imaginations, and it's up to them to have a seat at the table with other people who want to share knowledge. #BuildCommunity"] Change of trade Abdullah Tharoo operates in the credit card payment processing technology industry and he helps companies protect against the credit card breaches that often occur. People often assume that companies like his gained their success overnight. He said he doesn't have a scientific answer to explain his growth, but rather he keeps things simple. About four years ago, he discovered a need to move into a different trade that would allow him to spend more time with his kids and his wife. He stepped back from the family business operating high-end jewelry stores. He had previously thought that he wanted to really find a way to make a difference in people's lives and save them money and help them grow. Abdullah recognized that technology was where everything was headed. Great support He knew he wanted to be involved in technology, so he did research and he engaged mentors. His family's support played a huge role in his move forward, as did the mentors. You need intelligent people outside your situation who can guide you to where you want to go. He said that although he has been attending the NMSDC since he launched his business, there are some deals he hasn't been able to close. Despite that, many of those companies have referred him to other people. Your network decides your net worth. You must have a strong network because the people you walk with are the ones you're going to become. NMSDC Abdullah said he continually returns to the NMSDC to do community service because he meets people there. He meets people who may not be able to directly give him business but who can guide him to the companies that need his service. Warm introductions are so much better than cold calls. He said he doesn't make cold calls anymore because he doesn't have to. He consciously makes the decision to give something back to the community that gives so much to him. He said people go out of their way to help each other. A lot of people don't want to join the NMSDC because they think they can't reach these big

Business owners and sales reps who try to sell to everyone will struggle to succeed until they decide to focus their efforts on the ideal customer. Today, Dr. Frances Richards, whose company helps people reclaim their wealth by transforming their health, talks about the journey of finding her ideal customer. Sales From The Street allows us to connect with a sales professional and hear about the biggest professional struggles that person faced. Dr. Frances is the host of a podcast called Black Entrepreneur Experience, where she interviews CEOs, innovative thinkers, thought leaders, and black entrepreneurs across the globe. Finding a tribe Her biggest struggle was finding her ideal customer, and connecting with the people that her message would resonate with. When you're building an internet business, there are so many different ways to connect with people that it can sometimes be overwhelming for businesses that are trying to find their tribe. She points to the fact that there are plenty of people telling you what you should do to connect with your ideal client, so it's tough to know what to do. She said that people told her, "It's all in the email list," or "It's all in social media," or "It's all in Facebook advertising," or "It's all in the messaging." Changing landscape The hardest part, she said, is trying to determine what's really relevant. And with the internet constantly changing things, the way you build a company in 2019 is different than the steps you might have taken in 2014. The steps to find your ideal customer have changed. And when you talk about sales, certain steps are appropriate whether you're online or offline. Building rapport, and building quality relationships, matters in every situation. Authenticity Dr. Frances said that in order to find her ideal customer, she had to block out all the noise and focus on authenticity. She started by deprogramming herself from the idea of working for someone else. She said she had to adjust to the idea of working for herself and to lose all of the things she was accustomed to, like listening to the bosses tell her what she needed to do. Because she had done many different kinds of sales, she was able to change her mindset from employee mode to employer mode. Then she had to be true to who she really wanted to serve. When she was an employee, she had to serve anyone. Once she started to define who to serve, then she started to attract her ideal customer as opposed to just doing cold calling. To-do lists She had an extensive to-do list of doing 10 posts a day, doing a Facebook live, doing a Periscope, posting on LinkedIn, and all of those other things. She was busy working on the business instead of in the business, which actually brings in income. Once she prioritized how she would get sales and how she would bring value, she got out of the mode of being desperate. She was listening to her clients' pain points and she set out to serve them. She went into the mode of serving and helping her clients, her fan base, her tribe. Dr. Frances has turned down consulting contracts because she wanted to make it a win-win for all parties involved. She operates from a position of making sure both parties are a good fit. Qualified clients The shift to serving her clients resulted in more qualified clients. Previously she connected with clients who really couldn't afford her service so it would have been a disservice to try to work together. She started asking her prospects what they hoped to accomplish and if someone said, "I want to lose 50 pounds in 5 days," she wouldn't even try to convince the person to work with her since the goals were unrealistic. She has found that when she gets qualified, bonafide clients, the two enjoy working together. The clients are getting results and she is building testimonies. [Tweet "Avoid the temptation to work with everyone because everyone is not your ideal client. #IdealCustomer"] Ideal client Just serve the people who really need what you have to offer. Be who you authentically are. There will be plenty of voices telling you what you should do. Instead of following them, dig deep into yourself and discover what you're really passionate about. What makes you sing? What makes you get out of bed every morning? That's half the battle because your attitude dictates your altitude. If you love what you do, you'll do what you love. Dr. Frances uses the acronym DANCE to remind her to be authentic: Determine Action Now Creates Energy. Dancers dance because they want to, not because someone forces them to. Instead of doing things you don't like, do the things you authentically enjoy. Find your passion. "Ideal Customer" episode resources You can connect with Frances at drfrancesrichards.com and you can find her on Facebook and Instagram as Dr. Frances Richards. You can also find her podcast at Black Entrepreneur Experience. If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing

I often learn from entrepreneurs and I discovered a lot about storytelling and leadership recently during the Florida State Minority Development Council's expo. On today's episode of The Sales Evangelist, we'll hear from two of the entrepreneurs I met there. The best leaders learn from past leaders, whether the leadership was good or bad. CJ Latimore and Gustavo Hermida work in two different industries, but the things they share here apply no matter what industry you're selling in. Urban development CJ Latimore is a public art specialist who characterizes his work as "telling stories through architecture and urban development. He says it's about hanging on to cultural icons even after certain buildings have been torn down. He boils it down to adding a soul to buildings. It's one thing to have a building that's structurally sound but CJ believes it's vital to track the communities and demographics that existed in the building before it was torn down. Very often, when a building is torn down to make way for something new, the previous demographic is forgotten. So is their story. Storytelling CJ says it's possible to tell a story without saying a single word, and he points to art as the mechanism. [Tweet "The art of your legacy is bringing people together. #StoryArt"] We must bring people together more efficiently and create a sense of timelessness along the way. Begin by getting people to hear your story. Sales reps often try to add value to the company without even knowing anything about you or developing rapport with you. Business etiquette Consider this situation from a business etiquette perspective. If you don't know me and you don't know what my story is about, how can you act to help me? How can you add value? CJ's mission is to build images to help people get what they want in a prestigious way. When he shares that with people, they often ask to hear more. And when you can get people to say they want to hear more, they're ready for your story. Survival thinking He said his biggest challenge was lack of awareness. Because the human brain is hard-wired to think about food, shelter, and clothing, stories that don't incorporate those ideas can get lost. The answer, he said, is to be creative. Tell a story that will make people focus on something else even briefly. In this case, many people don't readily know what they can do with art. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to them. They don't go to shows or museums. The trick is to incorporate your uniqueness and associate it with food, shelter, and clothing. Survival and storytelling Everyone has pain and the quickest way to get someone to listen to you is to provide a solution to help their pain go away. You'll have their immediate attention because no one wants to be in pain. If you can share a way to save money, save time, or educate your prospect about saving money or time, that's what everyone wants. People want more time with their family and more time for vacation. Your job is to stop people in their tracks with the solutions you offer. People will remember you more if you're unique and if there's something about you that's meaningful. If it's true that the brain has as many as 300 impulses per minute, you have to find a way to engage three or four of those with your story. Other people telling your story When you can get other people to tell your story for you, that's an indication that you have a great story and that you've told your story well. People love to spread a good story. Since the beginning of time, people have shared the greatest historical events through story. Start with your story and turn it into a community story. Own your story. Compile multiple stories that work and make them your own. Make them exceptional. Give people the results that they need. Company values Gustavo Hermida said that his biggest struggle has always been aligning his company with the right people who will carry the company's values forward. His goal is to find people with integrity who make a promise and then deliver on it. It's important because people often distrust salespeople automatically. But people are people, and buying people are people. He has built a career on putting himself in other people's shoes to understand what will help the other person feel comfortable making a decision or able to move a partnership forward. Finding the right people He expanded his search to include looking elsewhere for the right people. Although previous experience was a welcome factor, it wasn't the main qualifier he was looking for. He discovered that he preferred hiring the right person and then forming that person. [Tweet "You hire people with character, not characters. #HireWell"] Company growth Gustavo started the company with zero base and limited financial resources. Over the last two years, the company has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America. He caters to small startup companies because when it comes to multifunction equipment, sometimes leas

If you find that your deals are falling through the cracks or you're losing your prospects to your competition, perhaps the problem is that you're not leaving anything behind. You might be thinking of brochures and other leave-behinds, but that's not what we're talking about here. Instead, we're talking about the things you should be leaving behind any why these things are so critical to moving your deal forward. Research phase Unless you're dealing with a referral, when you're dealing with a prospect, that person is probably considering other people as well. Even if the prospect reached out to you and seems completely interested, that person is ultimately looking for the best deal. You must stay top of mind. Ensure that you stay relevant and always present without being annoying. You must give the prospect something valuable. Content Consider leaving content behind that ties directly to what you've already discussed. Or leave content that helps the prospect prepare for the next scheduled meeting. Once you've done this a time or two, you'll understand why it's so important. Imagine IT companies in this situation that are evaluating service companies. You won't be the only company they are considering, but you want them to forget those other companies and focus on yours. One option is to determine which other companies the prospect is considering. Create landmines Create landmines for the competitor. For instance, when I sold document management services, I had a competitor whose services were only good for one department. The competitor served that department very well, but the other departments hated their services. I planted the idea in our prospects' minds that a tool that only benefits one department isn't really a valuable tool for the entire company. My leave-behind was the idea that the competitor would only benefit a small portion of the company. If it wasn't a good fit, certain departments wouldn't use it, which would result in wasted money because no one used the software. I suggested to the prospect that a solution that benefits everyone would be a better fit. Format In the past, that kind of content might have appeared in the form of a white paper. Now, however, your prospects are busy and many things are grabbing at their attention. Instead, consider a LinkedIn post or article, or a podcast, or a video addressing the issue. Identify the top things that make your company a favorable choice. Highlight the challenges that your company can solve better than the competition. Educate your buyer before you return for the next meeting or demonstration. That way, when the prospect meets with the competition, they'll know what issues to ask questions about. If you're not leaving anything behind, the prospect may simply respond to the flashy, cool presentation. Notifications Make this tool even more powerful by using tools that notify you when the prospect opens the message or clicks on the video. Consider, for example, that you send a video for your prospect to watch prior to the next meeting. Maybe it answers questions that frequently occur during the second meeting. If you send it with BombBomb, you'll know when the prospect watched it, and whether they watched the entire video. It helps you know when and how the prospect is engaging with your content. Do something different Everyone is leaving a business card, so you must do something that helps you stand out from the crowd. Make your company the obvious choice. Position yourself as the trusted advisor and the one who is helping the prospect understand all the important considerations before making a decision. If you're not leaving anything behind, your promising deal may disappear. "You’re Not Leaving Anything Behind" episode resources If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing there. You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. The program includes 65 videos altogether, and we just completed a beta group that helped us improve the program and maximize the information in it. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561)578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by Mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and im

Sometimes we lose out on promising deals because our prospects are giving us indications that all is not well but we're failing to listen to what the prospect isn't saying. Oscar Trimboli is a deep listening expert who is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world, and he starts by helping us understand what we should be listening for when we interact with our prospects. Taught to speak We all learned to speak, to do math, and to study literature, but none of us can remember our listening teacher. As sales reps, we spend a minimum of 55 percent of our day listening, but only about 2 percent of us have been taught how to listen. [Tweet "The productivity hack for the sales rep of the 21st century is learning how to listen. #ListenToLearn"] Remember these two bits of statistics as you listen to the information in today's podcast. The 125/400 rule. I can speak 125 words per minute, but you can listen at 400 words per minute. You're programmed to be distracted and filling in 300 words. You're contemplating what to have for dinner or what to do over the weekend when you realize you have to get back into the conversations. The 125/900 rule. Your prospect can speak at 125 words per minute but you can think at 900 words per minute. The likelihood that the first thing your prospect says is actually the thing he means is about 1 in 9 or 11 percent. If you had 11 percent chance of a successful surgery, you probably wouldn't proceed without a second opinion. Most likely, your prospect is well-rehearsed and is speaking like a well-oiled machine. The most powerful thing we can do is explore the other 800 words per minute that are stuck in their heads. Unblocking pipeline When we grab on to those unspoken words, we can unblock pipeline and begin to understand our prospects. We must be mindful to ask our prospects what they are thinking and to listen for the things the prospects aren't saying. Oscar spends his days teaching people to be obsessed about the cost of not listening. We often don't do this because we assume our competition is those people we normally compete against. Many of us are listening for code words that a prospect might say that would link to a product or benefit. The really skillful sales reps focus on the customer's customer's problem. Instead of thinking about the person in front of you, think about the customer that this person must go speak to. The pipeline becomes shorter and more qualified, and you avoid unexpected surprises. Change the question We should consider the power of asking the question, "How does a business case like this get approved in your organization?" We're good at asking who approves deals without asking how they get approved. Once we ask how it gets approved we will understand who else we're being compared against. Many large organizations have a project management office that filters the funding for all new projects. If you don't know when that group meets or who participates or what other projects you're being evaluated against, you may find your deal slipping away. Understand the 125/900 rule. Help the prospect sell the business case rather than what you're actually selling. Help your prospect orient on the customer rather than on your offering. If you do these things, your pipeline will look very different. Help your team Build some muscle around listening for what isn't said. Find the organization's website and determine what matters to them. Use the words the company uses in your selling process. Don't use your language rather than their language. If the CFO can't read and understand the first page of your proposal, you've failed. Help your reps become fixated on their customers' customers' problems. It's the difference between good and great. Teach in a way that can't be misunderstood and figure out how your clients make money. Listen in color Many of us listen in black and white. Oscar is trying to teach the world to listen in color. How do we notice the energy of the person across from us? Oscar also asks his client, "If this organization was a movie or an actor or a book, which one would it be?" Many people listening might call it Titanic. The question gives them a permission slip to tell the truth in a different way. Use a metaphor to figure out what the prospect is thinking in a different way. You can carry the metaphor forward and discover who the villain of the movie is. If we talk in this colorful metaphorical language we can quickly get much more from our prospects. Listen to what your prospect isn't saying. Get to the truth Your prospects will tell you as many lies as you think they will. They aren't doing it intentionally. It's just that your questioning isn't helping them get to the truth. You can help them bring their truth to life using these techniques. Make it as conversational as possible. If the person you're talking to is a jock, ask which sporting team the organization would be. If he's a nerd, ask him what character on The Big Bang Th

Jordan Ray has endured more challenge in her 21 years than most people experience in a lifetime, so when she goes into a large hospital to share the product she has developed, many people believe that she is too young and they fail to understand that she is making a difference and helping others. It's a common challenge that many people face, and I faced it in the early days of The Sales Evangelist when I was 30 years old and advising people who were twice my age. Generations When Jordan's health failed at 17, she discovered a need for patients with chronic health conditions to accurately track their pain and symptoms. The log helps patients track their own experiences as a way to improve their treatment plans. Jordan isn't offended when people discount her because she's young. As a softball coach for 15- to 18-year-old girls, she recognizes that she's only three years older than her players, and she remembers what it's like to be immature. She said she doesn't get frustrated by the fact that people assume she'll waste their time because she's too young. In fact, she attributes some of it to the fact that people make assumptions about her generation. First impression Though you only get one chance at a first impression, it's possible to change the impression people have. Jordan points to the story and relationships as the keys to overcoming people's assumptions about her. She's very big on building relationships because she understands that people who aren't sold on her product won't buy it no matter how hard she pushes. If they aren't interested in her product after she shares her story and the value she offers, pushing won't change that. [Tweet "Focus on building relationships instead of selling because even if people don't buy, they might refer you to someone who will buy. #BuildingRelationships"] She considers herself good with people and she said that's key to owning a sales company. Building relationships Jordan goes to a breakfast networking event every Tuesday where she's the youngest person by about 25 years. She estimates that she has shared a sit-down with all 50 members of the group despite being too young. Many of them like her story because she only shares a 30-second brief. She tells them enough of her story to leave them intrigued so that they want to have a follow-on meeting with her. She begins the relationship by looking for ways to refer business to her prospects. Her goal is to serve them by helping them. Biggest challenge She admits that sometimes she feels like she doesn't have enough to offer in terms of referrals because she has only been doing this for seven months. Compared to people who have been working for 40 years, her connections don't feel very significant. Jordan said that her years playing sports taught her to have very high expectations for herself so she struggles when she can't match the referrals that others can. While other people are helping her and giving referrals, she finds herself wishing she could do more to return the favor. Business friends Jordan laughs about the fact that her personal friends are in their 20s and her business friends are in their 50s. She said she loves keeping up with those people. Though the sales are obviously nice, she understands that the relationships are going to last beyond one sale or one year. If she makes one sale, that can't compare to a relationship with someone at a nonprofit who knows countless people and who will support her even as she supports them. Persistence She calls herself big on persistence. She got lots of no's before she launched the company. Many people were convinced she should stay in school. She recommends staying persistent and refusing to give up on your vision. You'll get a hundred no's, but you'll get that one yes. "Too Young" episode resources You can connect with Jordan at www.limitlessmedicallogs.com. You can also email her at [email protected] and share your story with her or you can find her on social media @JordanRay. If you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I'm sharing there. You've heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we're offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. The program includes 65 videos altogether, and we just completed a beta group that helped us improve the program and maximize the information in it. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we'd love to have you join us. Call (561)578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. I hope you enjoyed the show toda

Sellers have built up tension and fears which prevent us from reaching our true potential, but if we create a replacement picture of what success will look like, we'll move toward positive change. Mark Panciera is a third-generation funeral director, so he says he has a caregiver's heart, but he has grown into being a sales maven. He's a partner of the Pacific Institute, a performance consulting firm with an international footprint, where he helps leaders tap into their potential to drive greater personal and professional performance. Meaningful change All meaningful, lasting change starts within ourselves and then works its way out. That equates to mindset or habits, attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. It's focusing on the beliefs that are propelling us to our greater good or our higher purpose. It's about the pictures that we hold in our mind. Sometimes as sales reps we get focused only on closing the deal. Even before that, we may routinely tell ourselves garbage that keeps us from reaching our potential. What grows naturally Think about what grows naturally in a garden: weeds. Likewise, we have a natural inclination. We've got this chatterbox in our minds that acts as a little committee telling us what we can and can't accomplish. Don't try new things. Don't leave your comfort zone. You'll be ridiculed if you fail. Mark was full of trepidation when he moved from the caregiving role to transacting business with leaders around the globe. He realized that his self-talk was holding him back. Mark couldn't imagine that he could teach them anything that they didn't already know. He had to feel the fear and then move anyway. Mark needed to run toward the roar. It's more easily said than done, but he realized that he had a choice to become more transactionally oriented or to stay where he was. He could either do it or not. Adult choices have adult consequences. You will have consequences to your choice to make a solicitation or do an outreach or dial just one more time despite a bunch of "no" answers. Higher purpose Mark knows that ultimately his higher purpose is served because he will be a caregiver to a larger audience when he transacts business. He chooses to say yes to that purpose because beyond the fear or resistance or limiting beliefs or self-talk is the replacement picture that emerges when he serves his higher purpose. [Tweet "We move toward and become like the things we think about. So replace the negative self-talk with positivity and focus on what it's going to look like, smell like, or taste like when you succeed. #Success"] When you're helping people and giving them the tools to think and perform differently, create a "want to" mentality instead of a "have to" mentality. When people are forced to do something, they subconsciously push back on those efforts. It's even true when you're forcing yourself to do something. So don't push yourself. Create a "want to" mentality. Have some fun doing it. Most importantly, move toward that replacement picture of what success is going to look like. Burning the boats If Mark hadn't moved toward a replacement picture, he wouldn't have a new career. He stretched himself out of a major comfort zone. His replacement picture was stronger in this new realm. He had to rebrand himself to do outreach because in funeral services people come to you. Performance consulting was a different story. He had to create a "want to" mentality for himself so he could create a different mindset. Mark had to recast his habits and attitudes toward selling. He had to feel the fear of something he had never done before and run toward the roar. Imposter syndrome Mark wrestled with imposter syndrome because he moved from caring for the dead to breathing life into leaders around the globe. He felt like a poser. He worked feverishly once he painted the replacement picture to garner the knowledge necessary to built a skill set of competency in this realm. Mark surrounded himself with the right consultants, coaches, and leaders and poured himself into reading, listening, and going to conferences. Because we think in pictures, he had to see himself in a new picture and then move toward it. Armor Make sure you've got your armor around you and don't take it personally when you hear a "no." Even if the people around you like family or friends don't understand what you're doing, be convicted based upon your own mindset. You're going to deal with cognitive dissonance which will cause you to feel like you're out of order. But just as your muscles will feel fatigued and tired when you exercise, you're going to feel fatigued if you move to a higher level of performance. Moving through fear Imagine going to a networking event. Some folks have resistance in their minds to interacting with strangers and possibly being rejected. We worry about forgetting people's names or not being invited in. We might be a little clunky with our conversations. If you think about the negative things, that's where you'l

Even if we have the right process or the best mindset, every seller is going to encounter difficulties, so we must figure out how we'll stick to our mission and achieve greatness in the face of adversity. Weldon Long has plenty of personal experience dealing with adversity in the form of 13 years in the penitentiary, homelessness, and dropping out of high school. He had what he calls a dysfunctional life, but he learned the ability to thrive in the face of difficulty. Difficulties are coming The truth is that difficulties are coming. It's easy in personal life or in sales life to feel overwhelmed and tempted to wave the white flag of surrender. Weldon was in federal prison when his dad died. He got a note to call home from one of the prison guards. He remembers realizing that his dad died with him in prison again. He had a three-year-old son that he fathered while he was out on parole. He realized that he wasn't being a very good father or son. He made the decision to change the course of his life but he had no idea where to start. He still had seven years left in prison, so he started reading. Copy successful people His master plan was to figure out what successful people were doing and copy that. Seven years later, he walked out of prison and lived in a homeless shelter at 39 years old. He learned how to sell reading books and he started knocking on doors looking for a sales job. It took about six months to find a job because he was a convicted felon living in a homeless shelter. He got a job selling air conditioners and had a great first year. The next year, he used his earnings to open his own air conditioning company. Though he knew nothing about air conditioning, he knew how to sell air conditioners. He hired the operations people and grew the company to $20 million in five years. In 2009, his company was selected as one of America's fastest growing privately held companies. His life has been a study in overcoming adversity, and the lessons are useful for anyone because everyone will eventually face challenges. Learning to face them is the key to achieving greatness in the face of adversity. Sales process Weldon points to the sales process as the secret to building a successful business. The prospects are 100 percent in control of the result. They get to decide whether they will write us a check or not. The sellers are 100 percent in control of the process. Far too many sales professionals focus on the outcome rather than focusing on what they actually control, which is the process. Weldon quickly learned all the difficulties of selling and he said he was amazed by the number of honest people who would promise to call him to follow up but who never did. Buyers will say one thing and do something else, perhaps largely because they fear getting ripped off or misled. They put a lot of protective mechanisms in place. Sales hallway In his book Consistency Selling, Weldon introduces a concept he calls the sales hallway. He and the prospect are at the beginning of the hallway together. At the other end of the hallway is the door he's hoping to get the prospect through. As they walk together, the prospects have a lot of questions about products, services, and guarantees. Most importantly, prospects have questions about price. When they have all the information, they tend to want to postpone the decision. They try to leave little trap doors or escape routes along the hallway. "I'll think about it." "I'll call you next Tuesday." "You're too expensive." When Weldon learned to address those obstacles before they came up, it was the turning point in his sales career. Influence and persuasion Weldon read an article by Robert Cialdini, author of the book Influence. It was all about the consistency principle, which says that public declarations dictate future actions. The idea is that if you can get someone to make a public declaration, he becomes more likely to take actions that are consistent with that statement. He determined which objections he was facing most often, and he structured his conversation so that the prospect didn't struggle with those fears. When he did that, he found way less resistance at the end of the sales process. When he started selling, it was "kitchen-table selling." It was residential air conditioning to families who were mad that they were having to spend the money. He was on their turf and they had other bids that were half his price. Weldon learned to prosper in that situation. Price objection How do I deal with price objection? The problem is that most people don't bring up price until the prospect does at the end of the process. Once the prospect brings it up, he's in a super defensive posture. They know you're going to try to sell them on why you're worth the extra price. The heartbeat of his whole process is addressing those concerns. When he helped Farmer's Insurance address the price objection, he recommended looking on the Internet for considerations when purchasing insurance. He

Sellers who discover how to be successful without a marketing department, in a crowded marketplace, and when the customer isn't even looking will be successful in almost any circumstances. I got a question from a listener named Jon Billings who wanted to know how he could teach people who "don't know what they don't know." For instance, if the customer isn't looking because he doesn't know he has a problem, how do I communicate that? Especially in the case of sellers who don't have access to a marketing department, how is that even possible? Educate Your goal is to educate your prospects so that they will look to you instead of your competition when they need help solving a problem. Educating is the new sales. Regardless of the industry, you're in, your marketplace is likely crowded. How do you stand out from the competition? How do you help customers recognize you as a differentiator? You have to challenge the status quo, especially when many of your prospects already have solutions or they don't realize the existence of a problem. Build Community [Tweet "You must create content consistently and then share it so that you build a community. That way, when someone is ready, they'll come to you first. #ContentCreation"] Become a content producer. Even if you have a marketing department, you should have your own individual brand. Take that brand with you wherever you go. Even if you change industries, your brand goes with you. Answer questions Write down the top 10 questions that customers ask you or that prospects bring up in conversation. Whether they center around cost or service, answer those questions in the form of sharable content. You can write a blog or produce a podcast. Even better, you can create a LinkedIn article or video. Focus on the problem while you're answering the question. For example, what other issues could your prospect focus on if he outsourced his IT services to your company? What opportunity costs exist? Differentiate My friend Kyle invited me to do a LinkedIn Live with him recently and we recorded an episode with him for our show as well. Kyle told us about how he started sharing videos on YouTube answering questions, and though the videos weren't very fancy in his estimation, someone reached out to him from Coca Cola with an opportunity for him. He's in the tech industry, and though there are countless other tech firms out there that are sending out RFPs. Kyle decided to be different, and it grabbed people's attention. Tap into brains You won't want to pitch your prospects right away. Instead, connect with them and ask for their assistance. Maybe you're looking to write a LinkedIn article about things that the directors of large companies dislike and you'd like input from people who are filling those roles. Get one tip from 10 people, and then when you post the article, tag all of the people who contributed. They'll see your post, they'll likely see your profile, and they'll likely see your website. Now, when you ask for a chance to introduce yourself in the future, they'll be more likely to at least give you a chance since you connected on LinkedIn. Potential ideas Even if you don't have the benefit of written case studies, you may have some client testimonials or some stories you can tell. Talk about the problems your clients once had and highlight how you helped them solve those problems. Now that you've written an article about the 10 things that directors of large companies dislike, you could also pitch podcast hosts with the idea. You'll be educating more people and becoming a thought leader. But you must create content around the things that people want to hear. If you're doing the same things every week and you're seeing a diminishing return, put a little more effort in. You'll be on your way to building interest in something when the customer isn’t looking. "When The Customer Isn’t Looking" episode resources Connect with me at [email protected]. Try the first module of the TSE Certified Sales Training Program for free. This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. I developed this training course because I struggled early on as a seller. Once I had the chance to go through my own training, I noticed a hockey-stick improvement in my performance. TSE Certified Sales Training Program can help you out of your slump. If you gave a lot of great presentations and did a lot of hard work, only to watch your prospects choose to work with your competitors, we can help you fix that. The new semester of TSE Certified Sales Training Program begins in April and it would be an absolute honor to have you join us. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It's super easy, it's helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You'll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. Mailtag.io allows you to see around the corners. You c

[smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/thesalesevangelist/TSE_1091.mp3" background="blurred_logo" ] When you're looking to grow your business or your brand, it's important that you recognize the three things small businesses get wrong when marketing. We're at the Florida State Minority Development Council expo visiting with my friend Stephen A. Hart. He's a brand alignment strategist who helps entrepreneurs grow an amazing brand that is authentic, relatable, and profitable. Mistake #1: Overlooking messaging Many people hear the word branding and they think of logos or designs. But pretty websites don't sell things. Words do. People get unnecessarily caught up on design but what they need to focus on is clear messaging. You have to clarify your message so that customers will listen. Be deliberate about articulating what you do. In order to do that, you must understand who you're serving. Too many people think they are serving everyone with their product or service but that isn't the case. If I'm speaking to grandma and I'm speaking to my niece, we're not having the same conversation. The language is different. If you understand that you're speaking to a particular group of people, there is a language that connects to that person. When you understand their pain points and their demographics, you can communicate your message about how your product or service solves a problem. Dialing in Stephen recalled a realtor who focused on selling to millennials and young couples. That's who she was serving, but her message didn't reach those people. She was trying to serve everyone. Dial your message in. Understand who you're truly serving. When you do, your message doesn't have to be pitchy about your product or service. Your content can create a connection between you and your community. Then your community will share it with others in the space. Messaging isn't a static process. It's dynamic. You'll constantly be optimizing your message. Your brain We lack trust in those we connect and do business with. Understand that your brain is trying to survive and thrive. Within that, there are three things it's trying to accomplish. You want to make money or save money. You want to gain status. You want to associate with a tribe. Your brain is also trying to conserve calories. So if your website or your collateral is too busy, your audience will tune it out. For example, how many emails do you receive in a day? Most of them get deleted because the messaging didn't appeal to you. It isn't a design or branding that gets your attention. It's the message. Mistake #2: Neglecting web presence Your website is your digital home, and first impressions last. It allows you to redirect traffic to your products or services or other online avenues. Studies show that 57 percent of people are afraid to recommend a business because of its website. Decisions are emotional so if your website doesn't inspire confidence, you won't be able to convert the people who show up there. You must take care of your website, and specifically your home page. Get a good solid web design. Mistake #3: Lacking content You must have a presence on social media specifically for businesses. You also have to be on LinkedIn. Sharing content on LinkedIn generates so much more organic traffic than other platforms. It's a business-related social channel. As a result, the income and quality of the people you're engaging with there. There are more than 9 billion impressions on LinkedIn every week, which amounts to 468 billion impressions annually. Of those, only about 3 million users are actually sharing content, which means there's a lot of room available. And it's all free. Don't worry as much about buying ads on Facebook. Worry about who your audience is. Realize, too, that about 98 percent of your leads will come from LinkedIn. Video and long-form content are your friends on LinkedIn. Write longer posts. The sweet spot is 1,900. Also, write how-to and list posts to bring awareness to your brand. Be creative If no one is looking at your business, you'll never thrive. You must create content of value and place it where the customers are. Put it in front of their eyeballs where they can't dismiss it. Have a solid brand presence online. Avoid the three things small businesses get wrong when marketing. Branding course Stephen created an online course called Brand You Academy that allows him to serve people and help with branding. It's a 6-week online course that walks people through Stephen's 15-years experience in branding. When people Google you in 2019, whatever appears in your result will either leave people more or less inclined to do business with you. People who sign up for the course are getting lifetime access to the course. You can also connect with Stephen on his website and everywhere on social at Stephen A. Hart. Isolation [Tweet "You cannot grow in business in isolation. You must network and connect with other like-minded professionals. #Network"] T

Hearing from other sellers can help us improve our own techniques, and today Troy Rackley shares his own killer message and how he communicates that he's selling more than water. Troy grabbed my friend Steven Hart's attention and Steven told me I had to interview him. Big shoutout to the Florida State Minority Supplier Development Council for connecting us with entrepreneurs like Troy. Water problems Troy's company, The Next Level of Performance, operates everywhere water flows: residential, commercial, or agricultural. He always begins by asking people what problem they are having with their water. They usually say it tastes bad or smells like chlorine. Troy customizes his solution for the problem the prospect is having. He then asks, "Do you drink out of the tap?" to which most of his customers say no. Troy challenges that answer by pointing out that because our skin is the largest organ of our bodies, taking a 15-minute shower is the equivalent of drinking 8 glasses of water out of the tap. The water is absorbed into your skin. So whatever you're avoiding out of your tap is being absorbed into your body anyway. Educating customers Troy educates his customers through a questioning process. It pulls the customer in and they naturally want to close the story loop. They want to know how they can fix this problem. Troy starts by administering a third-party test to the customer's water. He insists on a third-party test for integrity purposes. He figures if he's the one providing the solution, he can't also be the one telling you what the problem is. When water companies claim to have tested water for their clients, it's akin to the fox guarding the henhouse. They can literally tell you anything. Troy offers an independent, third-party assessment of what's wrong with the customer's water. Custom filtration Troy educates his customers about the undesirable things in their water and then describes the custom filtration system that will address those problems. Troy calls it water math. The municipalities add all kinds of chemicals into the water to kill bacteria. Troy's company works to subtract those things so it doesn't get to the customer. Troy personalizes the message. Unlike big box companies who want to push a single idea or product, Troy offers unique solutions to his customers. He's selling more than water. Not only does it help the customers, it helps his business. He hasn't done any marketing in his business since he started. All of his growth has resulted from word-of-mouth growth. His attention to detail has built a great reputation for him. Selling more than water Troy's focus isn't simply on customer service; he strives for customer success. If he can make his customers more successful in their health and finances because they aren't having to buy bottled water, the service becomes secondary. By making sure that the customer is educated moving forward, he distinguishes between customer service and customer success. Troy eliminates the number of problems that families have to worry about. If, for example, a customer falls under a boil water advisory, the system eliminates the need to actually boil the water. The company designs the system to create minimal disruption because he says you never know what will happen with municipalities. His ultimate goal is to make sure that your family never has a disruption to its water supply. Company growth Troy's company operates in about 15 states as well as Canada, Amsterdam, Sweden, and Australia, because water is a global issue. Water touches everything in life. The company installed its system in a fish farm it owns and they reduced the harvest time by three to five months. The water is so clean that the food is more bioavailable for the fish. Troy is doing something the industry hasn't even seen. It's an example of disruptive technology. They moved into residential work because the consumer must be educated. Municipalities will say that your water is clean when it leaves their plants. As a result, it's the customer's responsibility to address any water problems that exist. Troy wants to help the customer make an educated decision. Clear or clean Troy is fond of the phrase, "Just because it's clear doesn't mean it's clean." There are things in water that you can't see that can hurt you. Often, the things you can't see are the greatest threat. Cruise ships are notoriously dealing with norovirus, which originates from the water. Troy said they have answers to every water issue because they study it and design amazing solutions. He points to the fact that only one man made minerals, and those are the natural minerals they leave in the water. He's selling more than water. [Tweet "Understand what you're buying. Be educated in your decision. #EducatedBuyers"] Sell on value, not expense. "Selling More Than Water" episode resources Connect with Troy at nlpaqua.com. There's a contact form you can use to initiate the water testing process on your way to restoring your w

I get a lot of requests to appear on The Sales Evangelist, but Jason Bay set himself apart from the crowd by sending a video email and changing the email game. Jason started his sales career while he was in college, and he and his wife now run a company called Blissful Prospecting, where they remove the stress of prospecting by doing it for their clients. He quickly discovered that the smaller midsize business was overlooked in the existing offerings, and he wanted to provide a less robust service that still produced the same type of results. Mom and pop Jason discovered there weren't a whole lot of companies that were willing to work with smaller organizations. Those companies that don't really have any SDRs and maybe they don't even know the lingo. Jason wanted to help those business owners who are already multitasking with some of their business development. They don't have time to list build and personalize emails. We've discovered the same dynamic at The Sales Evangelist. Many of the companies that need help are smaller companies whose sales reps have no training and no real process. The company expects the rep to thrive but they have no basis for it. It becomes a vicious cycle of reps who wash out or leave to go to another company. The business hires another rep with no real training or process, and the cycle begins again. Video prospecting Jason's company prospects for itself, too, so the company does what it sells. Part of prospecting and selling is explaining to people what you do. People assume when he refers to video that it's YouTube and other content creation. Video prospecting is similar to writing an email. It's common knowledge now that your emails must be personalized beyond a first name. You must actually include something in the email that's personal to the reader. Many people take this approach: Hey Donald, I listened to one of your recent podcasts about this topic and I discovered... (fill in the blank.) While it's personalized, it's a little redundant. We have to work to empathize with the prospect, and they may prove to be a little more difficult for men. Video allows you to put a face to an email. It allows the recipient to see a human being instead of reading an email, so you're changing the email game. You can still send an email or a LinkedIn message. You can't fake video. Everything in prospecting demands that you do it the right way if you want to succeed. Think about the type and quality of clients you want to attract. Changing the email game If you're engaging in the "murder by numbers approach" of sending 1,000 emails in order to land 5 appointments, think about the quality of customer you're attracting. It won't be really good. If you want to work with a specific group of customers, you must show them that you're their peer. You aren't a guy sending tons of spam and praying that it succeeds. Video takes a little more work, but if it produces more responses, it's worth the investment of time. I'd rather my sales team spend a few minutes researching and sending out 10 to 15 videos if I'll get responses from eight of them. They'll be much richer opportunities. Your numbers may not be as high with video, but the return will be better. It's the account-based approach. Instead of getting a big list of people, do research to come up with a list of companies that will be a good fit. Think of it as going to the gym. If you go to the gym with a plan for the session, you'll be much more efficient than if you go in and just wing it. Without a plan, you'll take twice as long and be half as effective. Do all the prospecting preparation on the front end so that you aren't spending your time with prospects who aren't a good fit. Focus your prospecting attention on companies you can actually help and serve. Video tips Many people avoid video because they worry about how they'll appear. You must work around that fear because there isn't a single scenario where video isn't a good option. Make sure to look directly into the camera so the person on the other end feels as though he is actually talking to a person instead of a screen. Use quality equipment. Most laptops and phones now have quality cameras. Video where you have good light. Smile. Don't be so serious. Create the sense that working with you is enjoyable. If you're at a small company, you're likely the person that the prospect will be working with. You're a reflection of the business. Limit your video to 30 seconds or less. Prepare bullet points of what you'd like to say. Don't be too scripted but plan for what you'd like to say. Your pitch shouldn't be more than 1-2 sentences. Connecting with video Video is easier to consume and it stands out in a crowded email inbox. [Tweet "Don't prospect to make a sale. Prospect to start a conversation. #Prospecting"] You're not going to sell a prospect over the phone or through email or LinkedIn. Your job is to simply sell them on the appointment. Your call to action isn't, "We can help you." It'

You may believe that social selling won't work for your company or industry, but if you take advantage of the 4 pillars to leveraging LinkedIn for business development, you'll be surprised at how it can help you expand your reach. Brynne Tillman is the CEO and "LinkedIn Whisperer" of Social Sales Link and the author of The LinkedInSales Playbook and she has spent more than a decade coaching people to unlock the power of the platform. LinkedIn profile LinkedIn has its own social selling index so if you visit getmyssiscore.com you get your personal score, out of 100, that will rate your social selling acumen. Your LinkedIn profile is where that lies. Sellers make the mistake of using their LinkedIn profile as a resume when, in fact, it should be a resource. Corporate Visions reports that 74 percent of buyers choose the sales rep that provided value and insight early in the buyer journey. Your profile is their first impression of us, so do it right. Value Prospects don't care about your mission, your passion, or your years in business when they first visit your profile. That may matter down the road, but initially, they care about value. They care about how relevant you are. Write your summary almost like a blog post. What kind of value can you bring from the first time they read about you? Identify the challenges that your buyers are facing. Provide three to five insights that will make an immediate impact. Strive to make a "vendor agnostic" impact, meaning that you share insights they can use even if they never buy from you. Sellers often create this as a pitch and we tell them how to buy from us. What we should do instead is attract them to us. We want them to ask themselves how they can work with us. This level of value will increase your credibility and move you much more quickly through the sales cycle. Challenges If you sell office furniture, determine who your buyer is and what her biggest challenge is right now. Maybe many companies are expanding and the big challenge is the inability to trade in old furniture to get new stuff. Determine what helps you stand out and then educate your buyer. Teach your customer how to buy office furniture in a way that leans toward you as the solution, but provide insights that can help them make better decisions for the company as a whole. Take advantage of the 4 pillars to leveraging LinkedIn for business development in order to move your prospects toward doing business with you. Pillar 1: Establish your professional brand Your professional brand is your profile. By positioning your profile to provide insight and value to your buyers, you are gaining credibility and creating curiosity. You're getting them excited to take your phone call. If they can learn something just by visiting your profile, they imagine that a conversation with you will be even more valuable. Position yourself as the subject matter expert and thought leader. Pillar 2: Find the right people How are you leveraging LinkedIn to find your buyers and your influencers? If it's true that there are 6.8 people who are involved in every large buying decision, how are we identifying all the right people within an organization? Instead of limiting our efforts to just the champion, who else do we want to touch? How are we finding these people and engaging them? The prospecting piece and the relationship building piece are the same. It's a combination of providing great value and leveraging our network to get introductions to our targeted prospects and buyers. Develop search strings which are literally the title of your buyers in whatever geographic location or industry you choose. Pillar 3: Engage with insights How are we sharing content, commenting, and engaging with content? How are we using hashtags to find the right content? Are we feeding our network with really valuable information that moves them closer to our solution? It's more than just liking or sharing. LinkedIn wants to see you engaging and sharing and commenting. Avoid "random acts of social." Anything we do without intention or purpose is rarely going to see success. Certainly, it won't succeed on a consistent basis. Pillar 4: Build relationships Connecting and forgetting is the equivalent of collecting business cards in a stack on the corner of your desk. How valuable is it? That's not a network. There's more value in truly connecting with a few people at a networking event and having meaningful conversations than there is in collecting a business card from everyone present. Bring that same thoughtfulness online. [Tweet "There's no reason to network differently online than you do in person. #SocialSelling"] Start a conversation. Learn about people. Ask questions. Get to know people a little bit. When you do, LinkedIn will be your most valuable networking tool. Strategy Establish what your goals are for social selling. How will you measure success? If your goal is to have one new client a month, you need four proposals a month. In order to have

Sellers who interact with and provide value to prospects using social media must understand the characteristics that turn this into the kind of social selling your customers want. We're tackling this topic all month, and even if you aren't a big social media person, we're providing an actionable plan to help you get in front of your prospects. It isn't enough to "set it and forget it" or generate large amounts of content in hopes that people will click through to find you. It's thoughtful preparation that gives buyers what they want and need right now. Trying to close I discovered the idea of using social media to sell when I was in college. I was seeking an internship with people who were in Chicago and our college professor told us that we needed a LinkedIn profile. He told us that we had to maintain that profile because that's where business professionals interacted. I thought it was a great idea because I was suddenly connected to millions of other professionals. I also thought it was great that I could pitch to all of those people. My professor knew a woman in Chicago so he introduced us with the intention that I would seek insights from her. In my mind, though, she was going to provide me with an internship or connect me with someone who had one. Instead of approaching it as an information-gathering phase, I was trying to close the deal. I think many of us make that mistake with social media. Instant access Sellers are often like kids in a candy store because social media gives them instant access to millions of potential customers. Why in the heck wouldn't we go ahead and pitch them all? Let's tell every single person what we're doing. And then social media turns into a pitch-fest. Because we can copy and share messages with groups of people quickly, we have access to millions of new prospects at our fingertips. Very quickly, though, prospects recognize that every seller is engaging in the same kind of social selling. Prospects are overwhelmed with the same messages from multiple sellers, so we have quickly realized that we can't continue using the same methods. Liking content In response, we settled on thoughtful interactions with people. We settled on the idea of liking everything they posted on social media and commenting on their content, sometimes arbitrarily. We didn't necessarily have a growth plan or a strategy. We just assumed that if we liked a bunch of their stuff now, when we eventually sent them a message, they would instantly want to work with us. The idea might have worked well initially, but again, sellers adopted the same strategy across the board and failed to stand out from one another. Curating content Next, we moved to curating content. That meant sharing content that others were sharing, so if I found a good blog post about technology, I would share it with my prospects who were interested in that industry. Our strategy was to be top-of-mind because of our content. We engaged with different platforms and pumped content everywhere, which ultimately became a bunch of junk floating around on the Internet. Again, every competitor was doing the same. The platforms realized that the content was taking their users away to other sites and they took steps to prevent people from being diverted away. Algorithms Social media platforms don't want you to send their users to other sites. As a result, you must adjust your social selling efforts so that you're linking to content on that same platform. LinkedIn wants its users to see the ads that its customers are paying to promote. If its users leave LinkedIn, they won't see the ads. The algorithm will penalize you for sharing content outside of LinkedIn. Sellers responded with LinkedIn articles, long-form posts, and videos. We moved to original content in our next iteration of social selling, and within the next year, we'll likely move to something different. Human interaction Despite all this change, there is one takeaway. Be a person. Be human and care about other people. The definition we shared from Hubspot is this: Social selling is when salespeople use social media to interact directly with their prospects. Salespeople will provide value by answering the prospect's questions and offering thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy. Do things in moderation. Use direct messages. Set a goal to connect with five new prospects each day on LinkedIn. Try something like this: Donald, It's always great to learn from sales leaders in the industry. Permission to connect? Once we're connected, they'll see the content I've curated over time. Aligned content An article on PostFunnel reported that marketers who align their content with specific points in the buyer's journey yielded 73 percent higher conversion rates. Think about that. If you're able to produce content based on where your buyers are in that particular phase, it will be relevant to them. Your buyers want posts that showcase your new products or services and they want to learn so

Social selling is the new sales because it utilizes all the techniques and tools that we've always enjoyed as sellers in order to help us build better relationships. Although nothing will ever replace the face-to-face relationships that sellers have with their clients, social selling is a valuable tool. Today Carson Heady shares what he has learned over a 17-year sales career about prospecting and relationship building and how social selling helps with it. Social selling Social media can help you find the right person to talk to that can help you connect with the right people, get a meeting, and stay top of mind. It's a great compliment to the business relationships we should already be forming. Social selling isn't a replacement for the things we're already doing. It's the application of the tools that enable us to get insights or see what customers and their organizations are thinking, doing, and talking about. When I first started using social selling, I was guilty of blasting a bunch of messages on LinkedIn and pitching people there. I quickly realized that wasn't social selling. Social selling equates to brokering relationships but you're doing it online. It isn't sending mass emails to people sharing everything that you have to offer. Results Salespeople are interested in results, and Carson said that after studying reports about social selling, he has determined that it amounts to standing apart, being unique, and finding a way to differentiate. Social selling is a very targeted and specific effort to cast a wide wide net to reach maybe 30 people in a single organization in hopes that you'll land a single meeting. That effort resulted in one of the larger deals in Microsoft. Relationships Carson suggests following business journals and using Sales Navigator to help in your efforts. Following the trades to stay aware of new C-levels that join the organization. Last year, Carson was the first to the table when a new C-level joined a company he was connected to and now Microsoft is helping to drive change within that organization because of the relationship. The relationships drive the deals forward, and those relationships wouldn't exist without the strategic utilization of social selling. Innovate We're all just trying to do something different. We're trying to get a response or a meeting by setting ourselves apart from the others who came before us and failed. We aren't just sitting on the phone reaching out to people. We have so much technology at our disposal that we have to be careful to be focused and tailor our efforts. If we don't, we'll likely suffer from diminishing returns. Our past approach of "spray and pray" doesn't work anymore. You have to embrace the probability of success. In the past, people were willing to send out hundreds of notes with the understanding that they wouldn't get a whole lot of reception. Consistent If you want to connect with a C-level at an organization, you don't just go after them. You've got to start a few levels below where you'd like to end up. Once you're able to talk to someone who is receptive, you can use that momentum internally to get in front of the right audience. But you must be consistent in your approach. Prospecting never ends. You must revisit those prospects. Not surprisingly, many clients don't reply immediately like you'd like them to. Be persistent and reach out to the same folks, but change your messaging. Offer a compelling reason for your prospects to respond. Be aware, too, that you may catch someone on an off day. The prospect may be sick or he may have missed the email. He may be busy. Be adaptable with your process. There are a lot of things that we believe are good philosophies as sellers, but when we try them for a bit they don't work the way they want to. So we discard them. We tweak things a bit and we adapt. Concise Sometimes we send long elaborate emails in hopes that we'll get a reply. Truthfully, sometimes we get the best responses from emails with only one sentence. People are busy and they don't have time to read a 3-paragraph message. If you're specific and you offer a single task, they can more likely respond. Emails are not intended to close the sale. It helps you grab attention. Don't try to sell an enterprise solution within a few sentences of an email. Trying to sell in an email amounts to skipping steps in the sales process. You're jumping straight into the second or third date without wining and dining the prospect. Connection When you're seeking to connect with multiple people in an organization, your approach will depend on what you're looking to accomplish. It will also depend on your unique connection to that person. If you're searching for a job, don't reach out with questions about a job or an opportunity within the organization. Instead, try this: "I saw that we have mutual synergies and I'm looking to parlay my experience into your industry. I'd love to sit down for 10 minutes to pick your brain and get some adv

There’s a huge prospecting opportunity right under your nose, and it’s a LinkedIn gold rush that can help you generate more leads and connect with more people. Even if you have been on LinkedIn since 2016 like I have, it’s possible that you aren’t even scratching the surface of what it’s capable of doing. LinkedIn isn’t paying me to say any of this. I’m telling you because I know how much you can do with LinkedIn and I want you to do big things. STATISTICS My friend Stephen Hart, host of the Trailblazers.FM podcast, shared some statistics with me that made my eyeballs pop. When he appeared on The Sales Evangelist, he shared with us the importance of creating content that connects with your audience. He also emphasized the need to incorporate social selling into your existing efforts. LinkedIn is designed to be more than a host for your resume. It’s created to be a community where people interact. CONTENT The article 48 Eye-Opening LinkedIn Statistics for B2B Marketers in 2019 reports that there are 9 billion content impressions in the LinkedIn feed every week. Every single week, the content on LinkedIn is seen 9 billion times, which leads to about 36 billion impressions per month and 468 billion per year. If you consistently take advantage of LinkedIn by producing content, you can take advantage of these statistics. You can even repurpose things you’ve previously created into LinkedIn content. The article also reports that only 3 million people share content weekly. There are 500 million total LinkedIn users, and maybe half of those are active. Only 3 million of them share content weekly. That’s about 1 percent of the monthly users sharing content. Three million users are getting 9 billion impressions per week on LinkedIn. Try finding that kind of ratio on Instagram or Facebook. PUBLISHING As you contemplate what to create, think about this. LinkedIn doesn’t want you to publish an article that has a link going back to your website. Like any social platform, LinkedIn wants your eyeballs to stay on the platform so you’ll see more ads and they’ll get more money from advertisers. Post your stuff natively on LinkedIn. Publish a LinkedIn article, and make sure to include a picture. Then share it. Long-form content gets more shares on LinkedIn. Dennis Brown mentioned this when he was on the podcast based upon research that showed that 1,900-word articles get the most shares. Aim to publish between 1,900 and 2,100 words in order to get more traction. CONSISTENCY You must consistently produce content if you’re going to be seen as the subject-matter expert in your field. #contentmarketing CLICK TO TWEET If you’re thinking that you can’t write 1,900 words, I understand. Neither can I. Instead, dictate your thoughts and hire a virtual assistant or someone from Fiverr to do the work for you. Or, use Temi to transcribe your audio into a written transcript that you can tweak and publish. Don’t include links away from LinkedIn. Instead, trust that your website appears on your profile and as you appear in their feed, you’ll become the subject-matter expert. VIDEO LinkedIn also has video capability now and I did my first LinkedIn Live last week with my friend Kyle who is involved in the Beta testing. Because it’s new, the engagement was amazing. Many people will talk themselves out of using this tool because they don’t like the way they look on camera or they believe they won’t know what to say. But someone else in that 3 million will take advantage of it and they’ll see results. Start. Right. Now. You can record video directly to LinkedIn using the camera in the app. Our friend Tiffany Southerland who recently appeared on the podcast shared that she creates video content every week without doing any fancy editing using LinkedIn. Nine billion impressions and 3 million people. It’s a gold rush. “LINKEDIN GOLD RUSH” EPISODE RESOURCES Check out the article 48 Eye-Opening LinkedIn Statistics for B2B Marketers in 2019. If you haven’t connected with me on LinkedIn already, do that at Donald C. Kelly and watch the things I’m sharing there. You’ve heard us talk about the TSE Certified Sales Training Program, and we’re offering the first module free as a gift to you. Preview it. Check it out. If it makes sense for you to join, you can be part of our upcoming semester in April. You can take it on your own or as part of the semester group. The program includes 65 videos altogether, and we just completed a beta group that helped us improve the program and maximize the information in it. If you and your team are interested in learning more, we’d love to have you join us. Call (561)578-1729 to speak directly to me or one of our team members about the program. This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. You’ll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please

When we convince ourselves that we have nothing more to learn, we fail to ask enough questions and we sometimes even commit sales malpractice. Brian Robinson has been in sales for more than 20 years, but he said that he only thought he knew how to sell while he was in corporate America. He calls his plunge into entrepreneurialism the hardest thing he has ever done, and while it was successful, he said his eyes were opened when he entered the world of "you don't sell, you don't eat." Brian is the author of the book The Selling Formula, which codifies the steps he used to succeed in that venture. Intentional questions Many salespeople do the old "show up and throw up." We're so anxious to get to the presentation that we neglect to ask the very best questions we can ask to uncover the needs. We're seeking sincere engagement from our prospect, so this is the most critical component. Brian noticed that the best physicians diagnose illness with a list of carefully-crafted questions. That information became especially important when he worked for Johnson and Johnson selling internal devices for laparoscopy. Though the device was clinically superior to anything on the market, he wasn't getting any responses for trial evaluations. He knew the device was superior, so he combed through the features and benefits and put together a list of questions related to them. He structured them in a specific order and the wording of each was intentional as well. Asking questions He tested the questions, and within about 30 days his trial evaluations doubled because of that list of questions. When word got out that he had produced those kinds of results, people started asking for his list of questions. He passed it along and found that when people followed the questions exactly, they got the exact same results: they doubled their results. Brian grew fascinated with the whole idea of going deep on questions. He even developed a personal mantra that questions are the key to life. Although it took several iterations for Brian to get the list and order of questions exactly right, he stuck with it and he achieved success. There's still an opportunity to make it even better, but it's working very consistently now. Malpractice Brian defines sales malpractice as providing a diagnosis before you really understand the underlying issues. You won't be able to give your prospect the best possible answer, and until you've uncovered a need, you won't be able to proceed to the sales conversation. You have to earn the right to have that conversation. If you rush too quickly into the presentation, your sales presentation won't be nearly what it could have been. The key to all of it is how you create your questions. Get started Begin by making a spreadsheet with three columns. The first is your features, the second is the benefits related to the feature, and in the third column write down every question you can think of related to those features. Then take an 80/20 approach. Of the questions you've written, which 20% of questions will elicit 80% of the most critical benefits of your product? Start with general fact-finding questions and move into those 80/20 in the most appropriate order to identify the needs. Imagine you're selling premade home-cooked meals. What are two benefits to that service? One is that you're saving about 60 minutes per meal on grocery shopping, food prep, and cooking time. The other is simplicity. Now generate questions from those benefits. On a weekly basis, how many dinners do you cook for your family? How much time does it typically take you to make dinner? If all you had to do was move something from the freezer to the oven, how would that affect the frequency of your family meals? Now order the questions from general fact-finding to more specific. Then place the most compelling ones at the top 20 percent of the questions you ask. Emotional level Get down to an emotional level. We, unfortunately, avoid this, often because we aren't comfortable going that deep into our conversations. We also tend to approach these conversations with a transactional mindset instead of realizing these are human beings with deep emotional and physical needs. Go the levels that can motivate us to change. We're trying to make a difference as salespeople. Approach each situation with the mindset that you want to go deeper and ask heart-level questions. Strive to be seen as a trusted advisor instead of as a sales rep. You'll have a connection at the human level. Selling the concept If someone is willing to grab this idea and test it in their own sales conversations, the proof is in the doing. People have been shocked at the effectiveness of this practice because, shockingly, people don't think this way. Brian said he camped out on the questions because that's where the gold is. Sometimes management and metrics prompt us to rush the sales process. That causes us to focus on the wrong things. As a result, we end up working twice as hard with less

Sometimes as sales reps we don’t bring enough value to the table and there are 3 crucial signs you need to add more value so you won’t be judged only on price. Dion Travagliante runs Madison One Consulting, a consulting practice where he solves problems for SAS businesses. He said he loves the fact that sellers have latitude in their careers and he loves the chase of finding the potential customer and then uncovering the issue and working to solve it. People have a preconceived notion that sales is just talking with no science, rhyme, or reason behind it, but he calls it a challenging world that you can train yourself to succeed in. COMMODITY Sellers often struggle to stand out against other competitors and they struggle against being viewed as simply a commodity. The key is to become the winner of the account. Dion defines value as improvement in a client or prospect’s individual situation. That centers on solving problems. Any company that is selling something originated around the idea of solving someone else’s problem. That means as a sales rep, you’re a steward of your company’s solution in the marketplace. That should free you to talk to anyone about the challenges they are facing. Flip the script. There will always be people who perceive salespeople as slick operators who try to jam products down people’s throats. No one wants to have that persona. Instead, approach every customer as someone with a pain point whose problem you’d like to solve. If you do, you’ll be better than 95 percent of the sellers out there because you’ll be thinking about someone else. Talk about benefits and not features. If you can solve the customer’s problem, move forward and have a conversation. If you can’t, you’re saving both of you time by moving on. #ValueProposition CLICK TO TWEET Watch for these 3 crucial signs you need to add more value. 1. NEGOTIATING PRICE When you’re talking with a prospect and they start negotiating price during the sales cycle. Do not go down the rabbit hole of arguing price. The worst position you can be in as a sales rep is negotiating against yourself. If the prospect wants to lower the price, it becomes a game of limbo: how low can you go? Instead of just acquiescing, you want to push back on that. They are telling you that they don’t see the inherent value in the price you’ve determined for your product. You can never negotiate against your own price, but you can flip the script. If, for example, a single client averages $60,000 and your product costs $20,000, the purchase pays for itself three times over. If your product can speed up the process, the relevant issue is how much money they’ll derive from using your solution. If the person you’re dealing with is an intermediary and they insist on dropping the price, what they are saying is that they don’t feel confident taking this solution at this price point to the decision makers. The quicker path is to lower the price. Instead, arm them with more things so they look like the hero when they show up to present it. 2. SEEKING REFERRALS When your prospect asks you for a referral, what he’s really saying is that he’s interested in what you’re selling and he wants to continue down the path, but he wants external validation. Mike Brooks, who calls himself Mr. Inside Sales, wrote a book called The Ultimate Book of Phone Scripts where he shares 500 scripts that you can use to address objections. He suggests acknowledging that you’d be happy to connect the customer with a host of satisfied customers but then asking what sticking points still exist. They want someone else to verify that they should buy this because we’re all somewhat tribal in nature. Get out in front of it. Your own self-limiting beliefs can prompt you to negotiate with a client instead of seeking to provide enough value to get them across the finish line. Practice saying that phrase so that it becomes second-nature. Because 90 percent of decisions are made with the subconscious mind, you should train your mind to respond this way automatically. Courage isn’t the absence of anxiety or fear; it’s acting in spite of it. The people who improve are those that put themselves in uncomfortable scenarios. Human beings learn by pain. 3. STATUS QUO When you’ve done the discovery call and you’re in the demo and the prospect says, “You know, I think we’re going to stay with our current solution,” that’s an indicator that you haven’t provided enough value. The prospect is telling you that it seems like a lot of work to transition to your option, so they are going to stay where they are. They are telling you that you haven’t exhibited enough value to drive them to switch. Sales decisions are made emotionally and then justified logically. Todd Caponi, in his book The Transparency Sale, talks about the psychology of sales and the fact that if your customer’s logic is preventing them from closing the deal, you need to stoke some emotional flames. You must provide enough value to make switching wort