Blog from Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing
Being a great listener is not just about sitting back politely, providing appropriately timed head nods of encouragement, and taking in what another in a conversation is saying. If you can’t engage the person you are in a conversation with, then more often than not, you are not going to have to listen for very long, especially if you are just meeting this person.
By watching some of our connector clients at Red Zone Marketing in action, I’ve observed that being a great listener comes down to getting the other person talking.
How do I do that?
Ask great questions. If you ask quality questions it keeps a conversation rolling, even with someone you have just met, allowing you to learn more valuable information about that person, which, in turn, brings greater value to you for listening.
Asking questions that engage show that you have a sincere curiosity and desire to get to know the other person. If you are just going through the motions of generic question asking, the sincerity is lost, and the answers you receive will most likely be just as generic. If you are going to bother being a listener, why not make sure you have great things to listen to! In the end, you become more memorable because you cared enough to ask and then listen!
To start becoming a great listener, come up with a list of questions to ask of another businessperson that you don’t know. Here are a few that will drive your conversation away from the trite generic answers your conversationalist has stored away to use when meeting new people:
-How did you get into this business?
-What’s something you’ve done that has really changed your career?
-What has your greatest success story been this year?
-What’s your biggest challenge?
-What’s a good client for you?
-Have you read any good books lately?
-Where did you grow up? Do you still have family there?
-Do you have kids? How many, how old, what are they involved in, etc
-Did you hear that… (something from the Wall Street Journal, local newspaper, news website, or Industry publication that day)
These questions not only give you more rewarding information to listen to, they also allow you to discover connections between you and the other person. Connections are what form relationships. Just by listening you can find these connections. Finding out that the two of you grew up a town away from each other, started out working at the same company, or share a similar Ideal Client are all great things to find out.
Being a great listener with great questions allows you to find the connections with others and then use that info to build on that relationship. You will come to find that many great listeners are also great at forming and maintaining key relationships in business.
What are some questions you like to engage people with when first starting up a conversation?
Friday, March 12, 2010
Nine Easily Avoidable Selling Mistakes
Selling isn’t complicated. When quotas get missed, when opportunities are lost, and when careers go sour, most of the time it’s because the sales pro made a tiny mistake. A mistake that could have been easily avoided.
Here’s a list of the nine most common sales mistakes, and EXACTLY how to make sure you don’t make them.
Mistake #1: Failing to Keep Your Pipeline Primed
• Definition: Not having enough prospects (i.e. fully qualified leads) at the beginning of the sales cycle.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: Filling the pipeline often involves cold-calling (i.e. calling people you don’t already know personally) and often plenty of “rejection.”
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: If you don’t have enough prospects at the beginning of your pipeline, you’ll probably not have enough coming out the other end as real live customers.
• The Unintended Consequence: You may end up spending extra time on the accounts that you DO have in the pipeline and put unconscious pressure on those prospects to buy, thereby creating resistance and EVEN FEWER sales.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can easily schedule quality time for cold-calling, asking for referrals and other lead generation activities.
• Advanced Technique: Make sure that you make your first time calls on a day and time of day when they’re most likely to result in a qualified lead. For more info on this, see: “What’s the Best Time to Cold Call?“
Mistake #2: Failing to Research the Prospect
• Definition: Going on a cold call or go to a face-to-face without knowing much about the prospective customer.
• Why It’s Easy To Make: Your primary job is to sell, not to dig around and find out things, right?
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: You have a limited amount of time with each prospect. If you spend it finding out things that you could find out elsewhere, that’s less time you have to actually move the sale forward.
• The Unintended Consequence: The prospect will know you’re unprepared and (worse) take it as a sign of disrespect.
• Why It’s Easy To Avoid: You can use the web to discover where your offering fits (business need, organizational structure, etc.) before contacting the prospect.
• Advanced Technique: Purchase a sales intelligence tool like InsideView, which provides a wealth of background information for any prospect.
Mistake #3: Failing to Qualify the Lead
• Definition: Putting a sales lead into your pipeline without being certain that they have a need for your offering or the money to buy it.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: If you get some prospects in the pipeline, your manager will finally get off your back, right? And, who knows, maybe they’ll buy…
• What It’s a Big Mistake: Every second that you spend on a prospect that won’t and can’t buy is time you could be spending on prospects that will and can.
• The Unintended Consequence: You’ll make a few sales… but your numbers at the end of the quarter will look like crap compared to your peers who bothered to qualify their leads.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Have a list of qualification question and ask them early in the sales cycle.
• Advanced Technique: Try the Sales Machine tool: “The Ultimate Prospect Qualification Tool.“
Mistake #4: Failing to Discover the Buying Process
• Definition: Going through the sales cycle assuming that your sales activities will drive the sale from inception to closing.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: The illusion that you can control the sales through persuasion and manipulation is comforting in an essentially chaotic world.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Every firm has its own way to make buying decisions, with its own timetable for making them. When your sales activities get out of sync, you end up working a cross-purposes.
• The Unintended Consequence: Surprises at the end of the sales cycle… like contracts and P.O.s that get signed late, or never get signed at all.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: During your initial conversations, you can work with your customer contact to define the buying process. You then adapt your sales activity to match.
• Advanced Technique: Create a document defining the buying process, and what to do if something goes awry. Refer to it when needed.
Mistake #5: Giving a Generic Sales Pitch
• Definition: Pulling out your slides and going through a list of canned list of features and benefits.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: Marketing gave you this pitch and said it would WOW the customer. And rumor is that it does work sometimes. Or so you’ve heard.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Canned presentations are not only boring, they’re vaguely insulting. And they that you’re force-fitting whatever you’ve got to sell into something that the customer should buy, whether or not he really wants or needs it.
• The Unintended Consequence: Best case, this “spray and pray” behavior simple wastes the customer’s time, but the prospect will forgive you and move on and perhaps even buy. Worst case, you can antagonize the prospect to the point where he’s not going to buy from you, period.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Simple. Just remember that you should never fire up PowerPoint unless you’re presenting to a room full of people… and after you’ve customized the deck to match the prospect’s requirements.
• Advanced Technique: Use MyBrainShark to record your sales pitch and let the prospect view it at his or her convenience… if they’re interested in learning about extra features and functions.
Mistake #6: Trying to Close Too Soon
• Definition: Asking for the business before the prospect is convinced there is a real need or that your firm and offering is right for them.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re already counting your commission in your imagination, so you missread the cues that the prospect is giving.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: You end up looking hungry and like you’re really only trying to cut a deal - for your own reasons, not because you want to help the customer.
• The Unintended Consequence: The sale will take longer, because you’ll need to step back and work to re-establish trust. And if you flub it again, you can probably kiss the sale goodbye, because the prospect now sees you as a “used car salesman.”
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the customer’s answers carefully. If there’s still resistance, it’s too soon to close.
• Advanced Technique: Focus on the financial benefits of buying and financial disaster of not buying; eventually the close will become a foregone conclusion.
Mistake #7: Waiting Too Long to Close
• Definition: Letting the sales process go on and on, without ever asking for the business.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re afraid of getting a “NO!” and finding out that the customer doesn’t really like you, even though you’ve spent all this time on the account.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: The time you spend unnecessarily on one prospect is time that you’re not spending developing another. And that’s money out of your pocket.
• The Unintended Consequence: You’ll end up hustling like crazy at the end of the quarter to close… and you probably won’t the close because you missed the window of opportunity.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the customer’s answers. When you’re getting all green lights, ask for the business.
• Advanced Technique: Once you’ve qualified the prospect, assume that the deal will close… when the prospect has qualified YOU!
Mistake #8: Failure to Follow-up
• Definition: You make a commitment to a prospect, but don’t find the time to fulfill it; or you forget to check on a customer after you’ve made the sale.
• Why It’s Easy To Make: Hey, you’re busy, right? You’ve got lots of things that need doing. And there are always other deals in the pipeline, eh?
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: If it’s a prospect, you just proved that you’re unreliable and untrustworthy. If it’s a customer, you just proved that you were really just trying to make a sale and “so long, sucka…”
• The Unintended Consequence: You’re clobbering your reputation and making it impossible to sell to those people. And you can forget about ever getting a referral.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: With a little forethought, you can schedule follow-up activities immediately after the contact. And schedule a series of follow-up phone calls and email to check on each customer’s status. Then do it.
• Advanced Technique: Get a hardcopy day planner, either the Franklin-Covey classic or Tony Robbins’ RPM. (I’ve used both to great advantage during different period of my working life.) Why hardcopy? That way you can still make your calls when your computer is down or the Internet is not available.
Mistake #9: Forgetting to Get a Referral
• Definition: Not getting “warm leads” from your existing customers.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You were told that the best time to ask for a referral is when you close the deal. That seldom works, so you stopped bothering.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Referrals are the easiest leads to qualify and the easiest prospects to convert to customers because you enter the sales cycle without having to work as hard to establish trust.
• The Unintended Consequence: You end up starting from scratch on every sale, which takes time, which means that you’ll ultimately be making fewer sales than if you had some “warmer” prospects entering the pipeline.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can make it part of your regular routine. At closing, you can obtain a promise of a referral if, after delivery, the customer is delighted. Then, after delivery, you follow up, and ask for the referral.
• Advanced Technique: Have the (delighted) customer make the first contact with the referral. If possible have the customer set up the meeting between you and the prospect. Or, if you’re really serious… take a Joanne Black seminar!!
Here’s a list of the nine most common sales mistakes, and EXACTLY how to make sure you don’t make them.
Mistake #1: Failing to Keep Your Pipeline Primed
• Definition: Not having enough prospects (i.e. fully qualified leads) at the beginning of the sales cycle.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: Filling the pipeline often involves cold-calling (i.e. calling people you don’t already know personally) and often plenty of “rejection.”
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: If you don’t have enough prospects at the beginning of your pipeline, you’ll probably not have enough coming out the other end as real live customers.
• The Unintended Consequence: You may end up spending extra time on the accounts that you DO have in the pipeline and put unconscious pressure on those prospects to buy, thereby creating resistance and EVEN FEWER sales.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can easily schedule quality time for cold-calling, asking for referrals and other lead generation activities.
• Advanced Technique: Make sure that you make your first time calls on a day and time of day when they’re most likely to result in a qualified lead. For more info on this, see: “What’s the Best Time to Cold Call?“
Mistake #2: Failing to Research the Prospect
• Definition: Going on a cold call or go to a face-to-face without knowing much about the prospective customer.
• Why It’s Easy To Make: Your primary job is to sell, not to dig around and find out things, right?
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: You have a limited amount of time with each prospect. If you spend it finding out things that you could find out elsewhere, that’s less time you have to actually move the sale forward.
• The Unintended Consequence: The prospect will know you’re unprepared and (worse) take it as a sign of disrespect.
• Why It’s Easy To Avoid: You can use the web to discover where your offering fits (business need, organizational structure, etc.) before contacting the prospect.
• Advanced Technique: Purchase a sales intelligence tool like InsideView, which provides a wealth of background information for any prospect.
Mistake #3: Failing to Qualify the Lead
• Definition: Putting a sales lead into your pipeline without being certain that they have a need for your offering or the money to buy it.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: If you get some prospects in the pipeline, your manager will finally get off your back, right? And, who knows, maybe they’ll buy…
• What It’s a Big Mistake: Every second that you spend on a prospect that won’t and can’t buy is time you could be spending on prospects that will and can.
• The Unintended Consequence: You’ll make a few sales… but your numbers at the end of the quarter will look like crap compared to your peers who bothered to qualify their leads.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Have a list of qualification question and ask them early in the sales cycle.
• Advanced Technique: Try the Sales Machine tool: “The Ultimate Prospect Qualification Tool.“
Mistake #4: Failing to Discover the Buying Process
• Definition: Going through the sales cycle assuming that your sales activities will drive the sale from inception to closing.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: The illusion that you can control the sales through persuasion and manipulation is comforting in an essentially chaotic world.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Every firm has its own way to make buying decisions, with its own timetable for making them. When your sales activities get out of sync, you end up working a cross-purposes.
• The Unintended Consequence: Surprises at the end of the sales cycle… like contracts and P.O.s that get signed late, or never get signed at all.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: During your initial conversations, you can work with your customer contact to define the buying process. You then adapt your sales activity to match.
• Advanced Technique: Create a document defining the buying process, and what to do if something goes awry. Refer to it when needed.
Mistake #5: Giving a Generic Sales Pitch
• Definition: Pulling out your slides and going through a list of canned list of features and benefits.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: Marketing gave you this pitch and said it would WOW the customer. And rumor is that it does work sometimes. Or so you’ve heard.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Canned presentations are not only boring, they’re vaguely insulting. And they that you’re force-fitting whatever you’ve got to sell into something that the customer should buy, whether or not he really wants or needs it.
• The Unintended Consequence: Best case, this “spray and pray” behavior simple wastes the customer’s time, but the prospect will forgive you and move on and perhaps even buy. Worst case, you can antagonize the prospect to the point where he’s not going to buy from you, period.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Simple. Just remember that you should never fire up PowerPoint unless you’re presenting to a room full of people… and after you’ve customized the deck to match the prospect’s requirements.
• Advanced Technique: Use MyBrainShark to record your sales pitch and let the prospect view it at his or her convenience… if they’re interested in learning about extra features and functions.
Mistake #6: Trying to Close Too Soon
• Definition: Asking for the business before the prospect is convinced there is a real need or that your firm and offering is right for them.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re already counting your commission in your imagination, so you missread the cues that the prospect is giving.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: You end up looking hungry and like you’re really only trying to cut a deal - for your own reasons, not because you want to help the customer.
• The Unintended Consequence: The sale will take longer, because you’ll need to step back and work to re-establish trust. And if you flub it again, you can probably kiss the sale goodbye, because the prospect now sees you as a “used car salesman.”
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the customer’s answers carefully. If there’s still resistance, it’s too soon to close.
• Advanced Technique: Focus on the financial benefits of buying and financial disaster of not buying; eventually the close will become a foregone conclusion.
Mistake #7: Waiting Too Long to Close
• Definition: Letting the sales process go on and on, without ever asking for the business.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re afraid of getting a “NO!” and finding out that the customer doesn’t really like you, even though you’ve spent all this time on the account.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: The time you spend unnecessarily on one prospect is time that you’re not spending developing another. And that’s money out of your pocket.
• The Unintended Consequence: You’ll end up hustling like crazy at the end of the quarter to close… and you probably won’t the close because you missed the window of opportunity.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the customer’s answers. When you’re getting all green lights, ask for the business.
• Advanced Technique: Once you’ve qualified the prospect, assume that the deal will close… when the prospect has qualified YOU!
Mistake #8: Failure to Follow-up
• Definition: You make a commitment to a prospect, but don’t find the time to fulfill it; or you forget to check on a customer after you’ve made the sale.
• Why It’s Easy To Make: Hey, you’re busy, right? You’ve got lots of things that need doing. And there are always other deals in the pipeline, eh?
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: If it’s a prospect, you just proved that you’re unreliable and untrustworthy. If it’s a customer, you just proved that you were really just trying to make a sale and “so long, sucka…”
• The Unintended Consequence: You’re clobbering your reputation and making it impossible to sell to those people. And you can forget about ever getting a referral.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: With a little forethought, you can schedule follow-up activities immediately after the contact. And schedule a series of follow-up phone calls and email to check on each customer’s status. Then do it.
• Advanced Technique: Get a hardcopy day planner, either the Franklin-Covey classic or Tony Robbins’ RPM. (I’ve used both to great advantage during different period of my working life.) Why hardcopy? That way you can still make your calls when your computer is down or the Internet is not available.
Mistake #9: Forgetting to Get a Referral
• Definition: Not getting “warm leads” from your existing customers.
• Why It’s Easy to Make: You were told that the best time to ask for a referral is when you close the deal. That seldom works, so you stopped bothering.
• Why It’s a Big Mistake: Referrals are the easiest leads to qualify and the easiest prospects to convert to customers because you enter the sales cycle without having to work as hard to establish trust.
• The Unintended Consequence: You end up starting from scratch on every sale, which takes time, which means that you’ll ultimately be making fewer sales than if you had some “warmer” prospects entering the pipeline.
• Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can make it part of your regular routine. At closing, you can obtain a promise of a referral if, after delivery, the customer is delighted. Then, after delivery, you follow up, and ask for the referral.
• Advanced Technique: Have the (delighted) customer make the first contact with the referral. If possible have the customer set up the meeting between you and the prospect. Or, if you’re really serious… take a Joanne Black seminar!!
Strategy Before Tactics = Sales!
Blog from Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing
You have a strategy, right? You don’t just go from one tactic to another – depending on what is the next hot idea – do you? Well, actually we all do from time to time. And when business conditions are more difficult we often go into survival mode and think only of the tactics that will bring us more immediate sales. We may announce a promotion, advertise a sale, reduce the price, develop an alternative offering, etc. But, a business needs a “Marketing Reason.” Simply selling products or services to people is NOT a reason or a strategy, it is a result. Determine your Marketing Reason, layout your Marketing Strategy and then develop and implement your Marketing Tactics. In that order.
So, before implementing the tactic of the day, consider answering a few quick questions that can lead you to your clear and defined Marketing Reason. It is critical to keeping your business on track in the short and long run.
1. What do you want your target market to know about what you sell?
2. What do you want them to believe about you?
3. What do you want them to think about you?
4. What do you want them to say about you?
Then, plan your strategy focused around your Marketing Reason. An example of a great strategy (and one that is certainly more inexpensive than implementing the tactic of the day) is to develop and focus your efforts on a pre-determined and specific niche. Do you have a niche, a narrow market niche? Do you have offerings that they need and want? Do they know about you?
Your strategy should be behind every business and marketing decision that you make. Tactics can often take us away from our Marketing Reason and away from our strategy. When you create your strategy, your business and sales efforts will become much easier. We want to help you with both Strategy and Tactics. Here are two great options to get you started:
1. Access a free download of the business planning tool, The Red Zone Business Plan. It is designed with questions you can answer that will lead to your strategy. Usually it can be completed in just one hour and has been proven to affect long term, important change and results for your business! Planning your strategy is too important to ignore! (PS. Pass it along! Connect others to this free download!)
2. Plan to Get Connected! As a special CONNECTORS PROMOTION: If you buy a copy of the book The Connectors, we will send you a free, electronic copy of the Marketing Action Plan Template that will help you organize your individual marketing tactics for 2010. Just forward your order confirmation email or receipt from the bookstore to info@redzonemarketing.com. Even easier, just email your favorite idea from the book. We will immediately email you back a copy of the electronic Marketing Action Plan Template that you can begin using right away. The Marketing Action Plan will help to organize your marketing tactics including the details of each activity, when an activity should be started and completed, and a place to assign who's responsible. It will help you plan and keep your whole team accountable!
You have a strategy, right? You don’t just go from one tactic to another – depending on what is the next hot idea – do you? Well, actually we all do from time to time. And when business conditions are more difficult we often go into survival mode and think only of the tactics that will bring us more immediate sales. We may announce a promotion, advertise a sale, reduce the price, develop an alternative offering, etc. But, a business needs a “Marketing Reason.” Simply selling products or services to people is NOT a reason or a strategy, it is a result. Determine your Marketing Reason, layout your Marketing Strategy and then develop and implement your Marketing Tactics. In that order.
So, before implementing the tactic of the day, consider answering a few quick questions that can lead you to your clear and defined Marketing Reason. It is critical to keeping your business on track in the short and long run.
1. What do you want your target market to know about what you sell?
2. What do you want them to believe about you?
3. What do you want them to think about you?
4. What do you want them to say about you?
Then, plan your strategy focused around your Marketing Reason. An example of a great strategy (and one that is certainly more inexpensive than implementing the tactic of the day) is to develop and focus your efforts on a pre-determined and specific niche. Do you have a niche, a narrow market niche? Do you have offerings that they need and want? Do they know about you?
Your strategy should be behind every business and marketing decision that you make. Tactics can often take us away from our Marketing Reason and away from our strategy. When you create your strategy, your business and sales efforts will become much easier. We want to help you with both Strategy and Tactics. Here are two great options to get you started:
1. Access a free download of the business planning tool, The Red Zone Business Plan. It is designed with questions you can answer that will lead to your strategy. Usually it can be completed in just one hour and has been proven to affect long term, important change and results for your business! Planning your strategy is too important to ignore! (PS. Pass it along! Connect others to this free download!)
2. Plan to Get Connected! As a special CONNECTORS PROMOTION: If you buy a copy of the book The Connectors, we will send you a free, electronic copy of the Marketing Action Plan Template that will help you organize your individual marketing tactics for 2010. Just forward your order confirmation email or receipt from the bookstore to info@redzonemarketing.com. Even easier, just email your favorite idea from the book. We will immediately email you back a copy of the electronic Marketing Action Plan Template that you can begin using right away. The Marketing Action Plan will help to organize your marketing tactics including the details of each activity, when an activity should be started and completed, and a place to assign who's responsible. It will help you plan and keep your whole team accountable!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)