Selling Advantage

People hate to change. If something works “good enough”, why bother learning something new? Take the banana for instance. You’ve been peeling it incorrectly. Did you know there is a better way to open and peel it that won’t give you strings and a mushy top from struggling with it?

It’s true.

Sales is a lot like that. In our Selling Advantage Video below, Skip delivers insight into the power of changing your mindset. One simple perspective adjustment will equal a great return.

You’ve likely heard the motivational phrase, “Fake it ‘til you make it!” I know I see it on Facebook every now and again. Likely one of my friends is about to try something bold, but has little to no training in whatever it is. While I applaud the enthusiasm behind it, what do you think the chances are that anyone who fakes something becomes successful at it?

The truth is, you don’t have to put on a false confidence when it comes to sales. You just have to learn how to sell, just like you learned to apply any other skill. It takes practice. If you think to any professional athlete or musician, they practice constantly, and will likely tell you that they’ve never stopped learning along the way.

How often do you practice getting better at selling?

Never? Don’t worry. That’s pretty common among the small business owners. You are so busy in the doing, practicing seems like a luxury. But it’s actually a necessity.

It’s Time To Buddy Up

It shouldn’t be too hard to find a new friend to practice with. You can look next door, join your Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, Toast Masters, or other group where small business owners are likely to hang out. Together, work through these three ways to practice and improve your confidence in selling:

1. Reveal Your Strengths & Weaknesses: Give each other examples of your typical sales cycle. By working through what frustrates you during your interactions with customers, you’ll each see areas where you naturally excel, and what you are challenged with. You may have similar strengths and weaknesses, or may differ entirely. Either way, you can position yourself towards success by identifying what you will need to do more of, and skills you may need to lean into in order to get the job done.
2. Consistency is King: Stay the course. When we have a buddy to partner with, we are being held accountable. You will be less likely to lose focus and will be geared more towards success. You and your practice partner should create short and long term goals, and hold each other accountable.
3. Make Learning Fun: Friendly competition is a great way to motivate and encourage one another. You will find that over time you and your practice buddy will want to out-perform each other, and that can only spell one thing: more success for both the of you!

To really make it (success), practice is the best way to achieve it. Take 15-30 minutes once a week. To be on the same wave length, using the same language and tools, you can both be students in the Selling Advantage Online Course, or grab one of Skip Miller’s ProActive Selling books.

Feeling shy, or can’t find a partner?  Video recording yourself with your phone while practicing is a great way to assess what you sound and look like when you are selling.  Give it a try and you’ll be amazed at what you find out.

“Good order is in the foundation of all things.” – Edumd Burke

The New Year is here. Time to get to work. What? You say you’re already working non-stop, and the holidays were just some celebration heaped on top of more work? Sounds about right. Welcome to the life of a small business owner, right?

Let’s stop spinning those wheels and put some traction underneath your selling effort. Here are three ways to increase your effectiveness, and build in a little breathing room in your already crazy schedule.

3-Step Action Plan To Attract High Quality Customers

1. Grab the Cause!
   Do you know what is causing your customer to seek out your product or service? Why are they trying something different, changing what they already have, or investigating something new? It’s not about what they want (the feature/benefit of your product), but the emotional driver that sits underneath that – the real reason they are making a change to the way they have been doing things to create a different outcome. What is causing them to seek a different outcome?
2. Get an Implementation Date (I-Date).
   What is the actual date the customer says they are going to start using your product or service? Not the day they plan to buy it. The day they plan to start using it. I-Dates are important to pin point when the customer is going to start using what you are selling them, so they can do the thing your product or service will allow them to do. When you know the date a product or service is going to be put to use, you have a real time line and can create urgency around it.
3. Assign some Homework.
   One of the common failures occurs when a small business owner believes in the myth that if they do everything a customer asks of them, they will be rewarded with the sale. Often times this leads to a lot of busy work and is not a good indicator of a customer’s actual intent to buy. There is a much more efficient way to qualify your customer, and that is with a homework assignment. It is a way to provide a Give/Get for both of you to show each other you are invested in the process to solve the customer’s problem. Give them a task to do, such as a red line agenda with their top 3 priorities. In turn, you can give them some information as well, such as putting them in touch with a customer that is currently using the product/service they are investigating to share stories about how they adopted the product successfully.

The goal of this exercise is to help you free up time by eliminating the customers that will not equal a sale. If they are not willing to give you solid answers to the three questions above, chances are high that the sale will not be successful.

Case Study

Karen owns a small graphic design agency. Her team has been spending hours upon hours each week chasing clients down trying to complete projects. Lack of approvals, responses, and commitments from her clients is resulting in a loss of revenue and time, and she is concerned she is going to have to start eliminating some positions from the team if things don’t pick up soon.

Karen quickly writes down her favorite clients. These clients are responsive, know what they want, pay on time, and engage in multiple projects. Using these ideal clients as her baseline, Emily uses the 3-Step Action Plan for 30 days, with a heavy emphasis on tip #3 – Homework assignments.

Instead of agreeing to accept any customer, Karen first requests a simple homework assignment. She may ask them to e-mail her a summary list of the problem they are trying to solve, or bring her team examples of what they are looking for. Because client responsiveness is so important, this action step helped Emily and her team see how engaged a potential customer was, thus helping them gauge the quality of the customer.

“We use these action steps as an immediate qualifier for a customer we want to work with. As a small agency, we used to say ‘We can’t afford to say no to anyone’… Until we realized that the difficult customers took up all our time and our work was suffering to all our clients. Now we are able to move quickly to a decision. Our time, revenue, and referrals have increased as a result.”

Learn how to “Kill the Maybes” with our action-packed whitepaper. Contact us here for a free copy!

3 Tactical Ways to Get Into The Buy/Think Mode

In Part One of “Think Like Your Buyer”, we identified the dual perspectives held by sales people and buyers and how they differ. Both the seller and buyer have a direction, but from the sales person’s perspective that trait may present itself as pushing information, while the buyer’s direction is about pulling information.

To execute the Buy/Think tool effectively, there are three tactical ways to increase your chances at reaching a decision quickly, preferably in your favor.

IQ: What’s on the buyer’s mind?

When your buyer wakes up first thing in the morning, what are they thinking about? What do you think their #1 priority is for the week? The Immediate Questions (IQ) Tool is a series of questions that help sales people find out what’s really important to the buyer and why they might be looking to make a change. How can anyone sell effectively if they can’t see things from the buyer’s perspective? We know the buyer came to you for a reason, but we are likely only seeing one component of their overall solution.  Immediate Questions will uncover more of those components.

Remember: It’s okay to be proactive. The goal is to have enough information where you can offer real world examples of scenarios similar to theirs, so they will be able to open up and give you more information about their entire solution. This positions your value strategically over your competition.

IQ Examples:

• What is a priority for you today or this week?
• What is taking up most of your time right now?
• What project / initiative are you working on that needs to be implemented?

The goal of asking IQ’s is to strategically place the buyer into the collaborative problem solving mode. They aren’t thinking about a purchase (quite yet), they are telling you about the challenges they are facing and what problems need to be solved.  Bonus IQ: Why?  Behind every challenge or problem that needs to be solved is a why.  Why is this a problem?  Why has this bubbled up as a priority right now?  Getting to the “why” gives you even more context.

DO: What Decision Options does your buyer have?

This exercise is a great way to strengthen the way you understand and communicate your value. Decision Options are three solutions you craft with your buyer. The trick here is that only one of the three solutions can include your product or service.

This is a good way to discover:

• What good non-competitive options might craft a solution
• The strengths and weaknesses of your own product / service

When you ask the buyer, “What are some other options you are investigating to address your problem?” you will be far more prepared and able to navigate the conversation in a positive way.

GAS: Great Action Steps

Now that your buyer has made a decision, how do we get them to step on the GAS? Great Action Steps are tangible ways for the buyer to adopt the new product or service. Technology is a great example because it is constantly evolving, so the learning curve can be steep. Just when you think you’ve learned how to use your smart phone, the operating system updates and you feel like you are learning all over again.

The CRM Software Story:

A small business owner named Dave had worked hard for the past five years to gain a solid database of customers and leads. He needed a solution that would help him automate messages to specific audiences within his database (e.g. some of them owned acoustic guitars, some electric… you get the idea).

Dave had tried some free email software, and had simply outgrown its capacity.

Doing an internet search brought Dave three different CRM platforms that looked like they could solve his problem.

Salesperson #1 had been with the company since its inception and was one of the engineers. He spent over an hour going deep into the details of email delivery rates, contacts, complicated campaign sequences, customer portals – it was a lot to digest and quickly became overwhelming.

Salesperson #2 didn’t ask a lot of questions and simply assumed that Dave was visiting her looking for the lowest price. She spent very little time listening, and most of her time talking about how much money Dave would save. While that may be true, Dave was looking for the best solution to solve for what he was trying to do, and he knew that may not mean the lowest price.

Salesperson #3 opened the conversation by asking some IQs: What problems are you facing this week? Using the system you have now, what is taking up most of your time? How has your current solution failed to provide you with what you need?

After listening intently to Dave and taking some notes, salesperson #3 gave him three options. One was to continue using the free software, but take a HTML coding class to get up to speed on how to customize his messages going out. There are limitations to this option, but after the training he could continue to use what he was already familiar with.

The second option would be to buy a cheaper solution, but at the expense of some key features that Dave knew he would need.

The third option was to engage with the new platform, and together they discussed how this would solve for most, if not all, of Dave’s problems as well as provide additional functionality as his business continued to grow.

Then Salesperson #3 stepped on the GAS, and offered Dave a 30-day free trial. Dave could migrate a small portion of his database over, familiarize himself with the platform, and jot down questions along the way. Dave went home feeling supported in finding a solution that was the perfect fit for his company. With this salesperson, Dave felt he had found a partner, not just someone looking to make a sale.