Once upon a time there was this salesman…

Wait a minute.

Do you know the difference between story telling in the North vs. the South?

In the North they start their stories with, “Once upon a time…”

In the South we start our stories with, “You ain’t gonna believe this!”

So let’s try this again.

You ain’t gonna believe this. There was this salesman who well known around the office because he closed every prospect he met.

He would brag about how easy sales was for him and how he expected to set company records this year and then just scoff as he walked out the door to go close some more prospects.

Then, out of the blue, on the first day of the second month after this miracle-closing salesman started at the company he was fired.

AURGH?

Why would a salesman who closes every prospect he met get fired?

Because he only closed one prospect on his 5th day on the job, which was how long it took to get his dad to take him to lunch and buy the least expensive item his company sold…and he offered him a payment plan even though his company didn’t offer payment plans.

The rest of the month he checked into the office, acted tough, talked big then walked out the door in his scuffed up penny loafers and too-tight Dockers® to go sip on a McDonald’s coffee (free refills) and read the company brochure until he went home for the day.

And he, and every other sales rep that believed him, lived miserably ever after.

The End.

I tell you this fairy tale to help dispel the myth about batting 1.000 in the world of sales.

While it’s great to improve your closing percentages by developing better lists, creating a referral program, bringing on affiliates and improving your marketing skills, to be successful in sales you must be willing to get out and interact with your prospects face to face and open yourself up to NOT be rejected but to have YOUR OFFER rejected, at least temporarily.

So tell the blowhards in the office to pipe down so you can get some real selling done. If you’d like a little boost give me a shout and let’s see if I can help.

One of the perks of being online and in the sales and marketing training/consulting world is I get to correspond with other professionals in the same field that are out there helping other sales professionals and entrepreneurs make things happen faster, with less stress, higher margins and more fun.

Jill Konrath’s assistant was gracious enough to contact me a couple of weeks ago about reviewing Jill’s new book, “SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business With Today’s Frazzled Customers.”

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be studying it with pen, highlighter and note pad (as I always do) and I’ll let you know what I think about it.

It’s a thick 297 pages but if I am going to judge a book by its cover my initial impression is quite positive.

Good Selling.

Set Mutually Agreed Upon Agendas – 1

Once your prospect agrees to invite you to his place of work the real work begins. At that point you say to the prospect, “In the interest of time and to make sure we cover the key points would you mind if we set a quick agenda for our time together?”

At that point the prospect will say something elegant such as, “Ahhh, well, yeah. Ok.”

You immediately set the tone by replying with Step 1 of The Agenda, which goes something like this:

“Mr. Prospect, the main objective for us getting together is not to discuss speeds and feeds and specs and details of my widget but to see if there is a fit between our two companies to work together.”

Far too often, especially in technical sales, sales people let the prospect take control of the meeting and turn it into a one-way free education for the prospect consisting solely of the sales person explaining every feature and function, every bell and whistle, every option and add-on only to be told

“Thank you very much. You’ve been very helpful. We’ll take your information and give it serious consideration. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. NEXT!”

We’ll cover how to prevent that from happening in more detail with the next several posts but the following steps all depend on your setting the tone by setting the agenda.

This little nugget and more are covered in great detail in the Inner Circle Silver. You can enroll in the Inner Circle Silver for just $37 for the first month if you take action now.

The Great Lies of Sales & Marketing

“Pick up the phone and bang out more calls today than you did yesterday.”

~~~

If you can still make money banging out calls then knock yourself out. But in my 14+ years of selling I am seeing this form of client development really diminish as an effective use of a sales person’s time.

And if the return on your time investment is diminishing, the answer is NOT to spend more time doing it. That’s just dumb. Besides, unsolicited phone calls performed by product-pushing, commission-hungry sales people is just plain annoying!

Today, when you hear a “rah-rah” guy on stage getting you pumped up to pound out phone calls, get thick skin, ignore rejection, “they’re not saying no to you but to your offering,” picture this: your son’s 7th grade flag football team lining up against the Dallas Cowboys with a great attitude and screaming as they plunge into the pile of 300 pound men.

A handful of little ones will survive by quick-footed, focused, intelligent luck but the odds aren’t in their favor. Even if they do survive is that the goal? To survive? Or is the goal to prosper?

If your thick skin and positive attitude when dialing for dollars are your only weapons in sales you’re running into a painful game that will end ugly. And as this next decade unfolds, the problem’s going to get worse, not better.

Look at it this way: 30 years ago factory workers began facing competition from machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $22 per hour but the robot only cost $1.75 per hour but could work 24 hours a day, didn’t take breaks, have babies, hurt its back or steal toilet paper from the men’s room.

Are you willing to work for $1.75 per hour?

Lots of you in sales are doing just that when you add up all of the time you spend preparing and following up and cold calling and chasing leads and preparing proposals and sending literature and hoping and praying your ship comes in.

Websites and Marketing Automation and Salesforce Automation and drip campaigns are displacing old school sales people. (When was the last time an Encylopedia Brittanica sales person came to your door? They were quite common just 40 years ago. How can they compete with Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble?)

The answer, of course, is they can’t. That’s why they are a thing of the past. My kids will never meet a door to door encyclopedia sales person because they can’t compete and provide their customers with the level of service or selection we’ve come to demand.

A person selling books door to door is not much different from an insurance or telecommunications or computer sales man today.

But there’s HOPE: IF you carve out a niche (I’ll cover that in later installments) and IF you use automated tools like your website and Infusionsoft and direct mail, you CAN become more efficient, more competitive and more profitable, which means you will win.

As an added bonus you won’t pester and annoy your prospect base in the process and it’s amazing how motivated you’ll become!

I’ll say it again for you hard-headed types: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use communication tools to deliver relevant content in a timely manner with the cunning and planning of a fox.

Most of your competitors will not do this. Most websites not only have no particular purpose in mind, most are just static brochure sites that just sit there and inform – barely – those unfortunate enough to stumble upon them. Most people don’t have a clue how to create a direct mail piece that will make the phone ring. (That’s why they think direct mail doesn’t work.)

BOTTOM LINE:

1) You MUST have automated marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.

2) You must adjust, modify, tweak, measure and test those tools until they’re effective.

There is no silver bullet. A lot of what you try won’t work the first time.

But the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.

That’s why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make – IF you’re educated about what truly works and what doesn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll another big Lie in the realm of Sales and Marketing:

“You’re not giving enough presentations!”

Free Sales Training seems to be the magical buzz word during these tight economic times. People are always asking me if I have any “complimentary” training (I tell them they look nice when they’re riding public transit) or if I can discount my training (what kind of sales trainer would I be if I couldn’t negotiate my own training?) or if I can recommend any good books for sales so at least they get cheap sales training vs. free sales training.

What I finally end up telling them is that the source of the best free sales training on the planet is their kids. You can both learn from them and practice on them.

“How so?” I can hear you asking.

You can learn from them in their consistency and persistence when they want something. Now I’m not saying to go begging for stuff but kids know how to position their request and how to offer something of value first before they ask. For example, I got my 11 year old son to mow the yard each week in return for prepaying for an online game for him at a whopping $5 a month. (He hasn’t mastered negotiation, yet, but he’s still a work in progress.)

Conversely, you can master the skill of “close first, then present” with your kids and you probably already have. For example, my 4 year old daughter wanted a cookie last night but she was filthy from playing outside. As she was reaching for a cookie I told her, “Take a bath first then you may have a cookie.”

I got what I wanted – a clean kid with no fighting – and she got what she wanted – a cookie.

You must do the same in your own sales position. Once you master the skill of “Closing First. Then Presenting” your sales life will improve dramatically.

How’s that for some excellent free sales training advice? Don’t say I never gave you anything “fer” free.