Rick Demko

What If You Were Great at Cold Calling?

ANOTHER GREAT REBLOG WRITTEN BY S. ANTHONY IANNARINO 

“I hate cold calling.”

“Cold calling is dead.”

“Cold calling doesn’t work.”

It’s interesting the effect a core set of beliefs can have on your sales results. Many of the salespeople I know that struggle to produce results prospecting have a very negative set of beliefs about cold calling.

The salespeople I know that produce the best results have a different set of beliefs about cold calling. Many of them know that they are good at it, and they prefer to pick up the telephone and call their prospects. Some don’t have any strong feelings for or against cold calling. All of them make calls.

You may want to believe that things have changed and that you no longer have to cold call. You may want to believe that you can gain enough prospects to make your number through social media and referrals. You may want to believe these things, but that doesn’t make them true.

Maybe you aren’t worried about cold calling.

But you should be worried about your competitors that are effective at cold calling and who are willing to pick up the phone and call your clients and dream clients. You know, the dream clients that you are waiting to develop through your drip campaign.

What if?

What if you were to change your beliefs about cold calling? What if, instead of convincing yourself that cold calling sucks, you told yourself that cold calling still works—as long as you approach is professional and it creates value?

What if, instead of resisting cold calling, you embraced it? What if you were really good at it?

What if you used cold calling along with all of the other prospecting methods available to you to build an effective prospecting plan, one that produces and develops enough opportunities for you to make and exceed your number?

What if you were really good at cold calling? What if you were able to open the relationships that open opportunities effectively on the telephone? What if instead of worrying about your competitors calling into your clients and dream clients effectively they had to worry about you calling into theirs?

What if you were such a tremendous value creator that you could cold call and build an unassailable pipeline?

 

The 5 Crucial Sales Questions You're Afraid to Ask

The five questions you're afraid to ask a buyer are actually the key to increasing sales and ramping up efficiency. Hey, no one ever said sales was easy.

By Tom Searcy |  Dec 5, 2011

If you want to increase your sales conversion rate dramatically, stop selling to people who can’t or won’t buy. Ok, sounds simple, but the next logical question is “How do I know whether a qualified prospect, who should buy from us, fits into the category of can’t or won’t buy?”

The first step in increasing your conversion rate is to have the courage to ask the questions that will give you the answers you need to know. Too often sales people don’t ask questions when they are afraid of the answers. Those answers may eliminate that prospect from their list, confirming that they are wasting their time.

Here are the questions you need to be asking a potential buyer:
 

1. In terms of time, money, and risk, what business problem will working with us solve for you? 
This answer will tell you whether the prospect has a real issue they are willing to pay to resolve or if they’re just curious. Companies tire-kick in the market for alternative vendors all the time. Sometimes their rules require them to do this, other times they are keeping their incumbent vendor “honest” on price and features and there is always the desire to stay current. Regardless, if there is not a sizable business problem that they are looking to solve, your prospect is just curious, not really interested. No interest, no engagement, no money.

2. How will you measure our success together 60 days after we start work?
Success measures, specific measures are a great determinant of sincerity and seriousness in the consideration process of a buyer. The reason that we limit our review period to 60 days is because we want to determine urgency and clarity. If you get urgency and clarity at the right level, you are talking to someone who is going to make a decision faster.

3. How much better does our “better” have to be for you to work with us?
I love threshold questions. Thresholds set a defined bar as to how good something has to be for there to be action taken. You can first find out if there is such a bar determined to assess sincerity of interest, then you can decide if you can make that bar. Both answers can keep you from wasting your time.

4. How soon does this problem need to show improvement for you to feel that our work together is successful?
Another type of threshold question, this focuses on urgency and one of the leverage points that smaller companies have- speed. If your client can see success way out in the future as being their goal, chances are that anyone can be their partner. When that is the case, you have lost an important advantage and your bigger branded competitors are the more likely winners.

5. What process will you follow in bringing us on as your provider?
Process questions let you know how far out your prospect has thought through bringing on a replacement solution provider. If they have no answer to this question, then you are probably talking to the wrong level of person, or they are not seriously considering a big change.

As a part of this process of asking better questions to increase all aspects of your sales performance, I encourage you to check out my article, 3 Ways to Get Better Information From Sales Prospects. 

Getting a higher conversion rate is about pitching fewer losers so you have more time for the winners- pick the high potential winners earlier by not leaving it to chance. Ask the hard questions and let the hard facts guide your path.

Will Science Make Selling Impossible in the Future?

This is another reminder of why you really need to think about how you're selling.  If you happen to be a devoted reader of my blog, far and few between I am sure, you would recall a post where I featured Simon Sienk from the TEDxPugetSound series.  People buy for their reasons, often on a gut feeling.  The emotion and the behavior of why we buy things comes from the limbic system.  The same lessons are applied and presented nicely here by  Geoffrey James.

Enter Mr. James:

Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system. It's a big deal in the academic world—and it could end up being a big deal in the business world, too. Here's why.

In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to examine how the brain behaves and changes when buying and selling is taking place.

For example, there's been research into brain activity suggesting that decision-making does not take place in the neocortex (where the brain processes language, abstraction, planning, and perception). Instead, it appears that people make decisions in the limbic system, the more-basic level of the brain that controls the hormones responsible for feeding, reproductive behavior, and parental behavior.  

Apparently, the limbic system is the source of the pleasure that people feel when they solve problems. And that's what happens when people buy things.

In other words, neuroscience is now proving what many sales professionals have long suspected: that decision-making, even among top executives, takes place mostly at a "gut" level.

Other neuroscientists are using brain scans to measure variations in electrical activity while people are buying and selling things.

It is now possible to scan the brains of people viewing sales presentations to see whether or not they’re being convinced. Don’t be surprised if some of this research proves that your much-loved “closing techniques” are actually annoying your customers.
 
Does that sound like science fiction? Well, it turns out that there are already companies using neuroscience to assess the emotional state of potential buyers.
 
For example, the start-up Affectiva is marketing a "wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance [which] grows higher during states such as excitement, attention, or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation."  
 
And Affectiva isn't some fly-by-night blue-sky company, either. I happen to have interviewed the CEO, David Berman, back when he was president of sales and service at Webex. He's a sales guy, through and through, and you can bet that he "gets" how this technology will change the world of sales and marketing.
 
But companies like Affectiva (which is based upon MIT research) are just the start of a huge wave of sales-oriented neuroscience.
 
For example, Meghana A. Bhatt, a fellow at Baylor College of Medicine's department of neuroscience, recently used brains scans to determine how people's minds work when they're trying to get somebody else to believe something that’s not true.

The study monitored the brains of 76 volunteers who took part in a "bargaining game" between a "buyer" and a "seller." Scans of the participants' brains during the game revealed that a "very significant difference in brain responses" between those who bluffed and those who didn't.

Now think about that for a second.

There now exists a device that can tell whether you are telling the truth when you're trying to sell something. Project that technology 30 years into the future.

It's not hard to imagine sales negotiations taking place in "BS-free" zones, where it's impossible to bluff without the other person knowing that you're bluffing.

What's hard to imagine is what "selling" would look like in that kind of business environment. Or, indeed, whether selling would be achievable at all. What do you think about that possibility?

Six Questions Your Client Needs You To Answer

NOVEMBER 1, 2011 BY S. ANTHONY IANNARINO

Who does your client need you to be? Answering these questions from your dream client’s perspective will help you?

What Are My Business Goals and Objectives?

Your dream client needs you to know and understand their business goals and objectives. They need you to ask the questions that help them to identify their own business goals and objectives, and they need you to connect those goals to the solution you build for—and with—them.

Do You Have the Business Acumen to Help Me?

Your prospect needs to know that you have the business acumen to help them. It isn’t enough to ask questions. You need to be able to ask the questions that get to the real issues, the issues that must be resolved in order to produce the results that they need. Business acumen means knowing how to help answer those questions. You must also know and understand how to help them get results.

Who Do We Need on Our Team?

Your prospective clients need you to know who you will need on your team to produce results. This team includes people from their organization, their stakeholders. It also includes members of your team that you will need to lead to produce results as your client’s partner. You need to know more than what is necessary—you also need to know who is necessary.

How Do You Help Me Make a Compelling Case?

Your dream client is going to need to make the case for your solution within his or her own organization. They need you to help provide them with the business case. They also need you to help them build the consensus for your solution. They need a compelling case, and they need you to help them make it.

What Are My Constraints?

Your prospect needs you to understand their constraints? What are the limitations when it comes to producing a business result? What can be done, and what will be more difficult to accomplish? How do they mitigate their constraints? What can be done to provide an improvement? What might be changed?

Will You Be Here?

Your client needs to know that you will be there. When the problems appear, when things get tough, your client needs to know that you are going to be there in the foxhole beside them. Your client needs to know that you are committed to more than selling them a solution; they need to know that you will own the outcome.

Questions

What does your client need from you?

Who does your client need you to be?

What questions do you need to be able to answer for your clients?

7 Reasons to Stop Emailing Your Pricing

October 20, 2011 By S. Anthony Iannarino;  Twitter: (@Iannarino)

Email has become the preferred method for all kinds of communication. In sales, our clients and prospective clients want us to deliver some communication and some information by email. But for most of us, including our clients, email is a graveyard for things other people need from us. Most of what goes into our inbox is useless, and even some of what is useful gets ignored anyway.

Why, then, would you ever email pricing?

You are taking yourself out of the sale: By emailing pricing, you have taken yourself out of the sale. You have eliminated your ability to influence or control the sale process by providing your prospective client with pricing. Now that they have your price, they believe that the process is complete and they can make a decision. 

It eliminates the possibility of a discussion: Providing pricing by email eliminates the opportunity to have a discussion about the pricing. It eliminates the chance to clear up any misconceptions, and it eliminates the potential to capture and deal with your prospective client’s immediate feedback or questions.

It screams that you are a commodity: Emailing pricing screams that you are a commodity. It indicates that there is no real value creation—least of all by the salesperson—and that pricing should be used a deciding factor. Here’s why . . .

It’s disconnected from the value that you are creating: When you email pricing, you are disconnecting the pricing from the value that you create and that your company creates as a result of it’s pricing. Without reviewing the dissatisfaction that your solutions resolves, and without reminding your prospective client what it is they are paying you to do, the pricing is going be compared to other pricing—not the value created.

It eliminates any potential sense of urgency: Emailing pricing eliminates any sense of urgency. It can sit in your dream client’s inbox for days, or weeks, or months. In fact, they never have to look at if they don’t want to. If you were helping your dream client with their dissatisfaction, emailing the pricing and waiting will kill your momentum.

It destroys your ability capture an advance: The key to keeping the sales process moving forward is to move from advance to advance, always confirming the next commitment that moves you closer to a deal. You may have put some call to action at the end of your email, but if you have ever tried this, you know that obtaining that commitment on an email with pricing is unlikely. You have brought your own sales process to a screeching halt.

It eliminates communication: After you have emailed pricing, you will find it exponentially more difficult to get your client on the telephone. Your calls and voice mails will go unanswered. Your emails will not be returned. It’s like your prospect with the urgent need has entered the witness protection program.

With today’s technology, even inside salespeople making a transactional, low value sale can still do better than emailing pricing. With tools like GoToMeeting or Glance, you can easily schedule a meeting to review pricing and eliminate the problems you create by emailing the pricing.

For more information on how to improve your sales team, Give Anthony Iannarino a call (614) 212-4729 or subscribe to the Sales Blog, http://thesalesblog.com/2010/08/feed/

Social Media is a Waste of Time

But an online marketing expert explains how you can make Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon, among others, work for your small business.

Post Written By Malcolm Faulds | Please Follow @mfaulds

If you are like most small businesses, you and your team are stretched thin. If you even have a team. All day long you are servicing customers, delivering products, managing finances and doing whatever it takes to keep your business up and running. The last thing you need is to waste time. But for many small businesses, that’s exactly what they are doing when it comes to marketing with social media.

The typical small business Facebook page is a ghost town. It might have some pictures of the business, a few posts about an event six months ago, and a handful of followers who joined when the page launched. On Twitter, there might be a couple posts a month and none of them are related to any customer question. The same is true for Foursquare. Groupon is like going to the casino: there’s a good chance you’ll come home with empty pockets.

It’s hard to resist the promise of marketing in social media. It’s personal, efficient, and it is growing at a remarkable rate. Your customers spend most of their media time on these sites and they are discussing product experiences and researching purchase decisions. But that doesn’t mean that every business should drop everything and start a Facebook page or a Twitter account. This isn’t like buying an ad in the newspaper or the Yellow Pages; You don’t just set it up and walk away.

To make the most of your social media marketing, you need to have a plan. Social media is about having an ongoing conversation with your customers, not droning on about your business while they ignore you. You have to put in the time to cultivate your existing customers and attract new ones. Yes, this will take a little more time and thought, but that’s why it works. If you “set it and forget it,” you are wasting your time. Guaranteed.

Here are six steps to make sure you don’t waste time in social media:

1. Pick the right channels.

You know that location is everything in business, so make sure you are in the right place. What social media sites do your customers use? How do they use them? Where do they turn to research your product? You need to be where they are and where they are talking to each other. For example, if you run a restaurant, you should pay attention to Yelp. If you have a jogging-goods store, you may want to engage with folks on RunKeeper. If you offer laser hair removal you should know all about Groupon (if you don’t already).

2. Write posts for your customers, not you.

You can’t have a meaningful dialogue with customers if you don’t know what they want to talk about. Think about the questions you hear every day from customers. Look at what people are talking about on discussion boards, in blog comments, on competitor sites, and on review sites. Engage with active customers individually by answering their questions and asking for feedback. Their responses will give you ideas for new blog posts and places to engage folks, and may even lead to new promotions or offerings. Remember, social media marketing is about your customers; it’s not about you.  

3. Give to Get: What offers can you make to drive loyalty?

Everyone loves a deal, and they love to share it when they find one. Access to offers is one of the biggest reasons people follow brands in social media. Give them something exclusive. Make them feel special and encourage them to share it with their friends on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a great way to get people buzzing about you. It will build your following fast, and it’s a heck of a lot less expensive than what you pay sites like Living Social or Groupon to distribute your offer.

4. Mix it up. Dull content is like Spam.

You’ve heard it before, but it’s worth repeating. Social media is a conversation. Conversations can be insanely boring if you say the same thing over and over again. Add variety to your posts. Ask for feedback and questions. Run a contest or a sweepstakes. Try humor, and candor. Invite people to submit photos of their family and friends using your products. Share the stories of your best customers. This is your community online, make it fun.

5. Budget enough time to engage, or else hire someone.

You are making a commitment to your customers and you have to follow through. Make it a daily routine. Schedule reminders in your Google calendar. Cover your desk with yellow stickies. Do whatever it takes. This is an important task that is part of your job. If you don’t have the time for it, find someone who does. Make sure that person understands your business completely, has the authority to solve customer problems, and can communicate with the public in a professional way.

6. Use the right tools.

Like any project, the right tools can make the job a lot easier. The Internet has many free tools you can use to monitor discussion and measure the impact of your efforts. Some of my favorites are Tweetdeck to manage Twitter, Topsy for trending discussion volume over time, and Socialmention for evaluating the sentiment of conversations surrounding your industry. To make your update posting easier, check out Posterous for distributing updates to all your networks and communities, and Cinch.fm for recording voice messages on the phone that can be shared with your social network followers. You can see a more complete list of the popular tools here. 

 

Use Your Business Card as a Selling Tool

  Just about everybody has one. Your desk has probably is littered with little piles of them. I would be willing to bet good money, that right now you have a few of your own in your wallet or purse. In the past year you have probably handed out and received literally hundreds of these tiny leaflets – an ongoing marketing effort that we don’t often think of as marketing.

Small businesses can spend tens of thousands of dollars with direct marketing efforts that might include mailers, trade show handouts, brochures, door-hangers, coupons, product spec sheets and more. But what we don’t do is treat that little 2″x3.5″ slip of paper with our name and contact info as what it is: the best opportunity you have to market yourself or your business to a truly targeted and captive audience: the person to whom you hand it.

It is time to think of your business card as not just a handy way to share your email address, but as a selling opportunity. Approach the design and content of your business card differently – stop right now to consider what other messaging, information, or purpose your card might include. Here are seven ways you can leverage those tiny slips of paper to spread the word, stand out from the crowd, and make the most of each and every opportunity to market your company.

1. Multitask.  Your business card can serve purposes other than just sharing your info. Creative business people are using theirs to offer discounts, include coupons, and serve as event tickets, note cards, or appointment cards. Clever and fun uses like scratch cards or stickers can be memorable and can encourage the recipient to hold onto that card and jog their memory about you at an opportune moment. Oh, I know – make your card a bookmark so that they will see a reminder of you every time they put down their Jacqueline Susann!

2. Drill-down.  Your card can include your own QR code or SKU and can encourage the other person to come have a look at your site. This way potential leads can view additional information or even receive discounts or other incentives. This is also a great way to track the efficacy of the card – you will know that every user who comes to the URL via that code was someone whom you met at a given event. Not a bad way to measure conversions of a very different sort.

3. Testify.  Another great marketing strategy is to show a potential customer how others like them have benefitted by using your product or service. We do this in other marketing materials; why not use the back of your business card for a short testimonial from a happy customer? Quotes, photos, and links can help to illustrate how others have used your business successfully and can provide the confirmation that a potential customer needs.

4. Educate.  Use your card to teach them something. Little facts, statistics, or other information can make your card fun, engaging, and memorable. Think about how much fun those little Trivial Pursuit cards are and how you can get a bit of that going with yours!

5. Fundraise.  Business cards can have a more meaningful life than just sharing your digits. I have seen cards from several folks that promote something more than just their own business, but also provide information about a favored cause or charity. Good feelings are remembered, and selfless acts admired. Let the person you hand your card to know that you are passionate and caring and they will be more likely to dig out your card when they’re ready to buy.

6. Network.  The exchanging of business cards id probably the most effective networking method there is. Your challenge is to make your card sticky and give it the best chance of converting a prospect into a customer. One effective tactic is to include your photo on your card; this is a great way to help someone remember you as a person. Encourage or even incentivize others to hand out your card for you.

7. Incentivize.  What if you gave each person you meet 5 cards, each with a coupon code? Tell the recipient that if all five coupons are redeemed, they too will receive a discount or something else of value. Heck, if they hand out 100 cards for you, give them a television set! Finally, perhaps it is time for you to be the first on your block to embed a GPS chip in your biz card so you can track how far it travels. Hey if your pet can have one, why not your biz card?

Article pulled from Mike and our friends at CrowdSpring.

What An Orange Has To Do With Sales And Marketing

Up until recently I had never really peeled and eaten my own fruit.  I was the kid on the soccer field that was all about sucking the juice out of an orange peel but not actually eating it.  My recent nutritional experiment has lead me to happily enjoy diving into an array of fruit, specifically oranges!

While peeling my snack today, I had a thought.  Sometimes the most primitive method can actually be the most effective.  I recalled seeing friends in the past plop on the couch and tear through an orange with their bare hands, a unique experience for me.  Not being one to recreate the wheel, naturally when I began my nutritional quest, I mimicked what I had already seen.  Today, I tried to get a little fancy with my orange, and since I was working from home, I decided to use a knife.  Not only was it not as effective, it took me twice as long since I apparently didn't cut deep enough.

So what’s the Sales and Marketing lesson?  The KISS principle really.  Think about the activities you engage in that aren't affective for your industry.  It could be attending BNI events or Chamber meetings hoping to make new connections.  If you're a recruiter, it could be spending half the day on LinkedIn trying to find new candidates.  Whatever your industry, reflect on where you're spending your time, and think ROI.  Spend the most time on the areas that are the most productive and actually yield results.

Sometimes you may get a little sticky in the process, but you'll be through it before you know it, enjoying the fruits of your labor.  ;-)

People Buy What They Believe In..

Not what you believe in.  It is biologically true, so change the way you present to be more effective.

Building Honest but Intended Rapport

I love watching the reaction people have when I respond to their question regarding my occupation.  Let me come back to that statement later in this post..  But first, I want to let you in on a secret.  No one likes to prospect or be prospected.  The alternative?  Build rapport with everyone.

No one likes to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.  Even in Dale Carnegie's words, let them believe that the idea was their own.  I'm not one to teach about techniques, but rather I prefer enlightenment to be practiced.  Understand the 'why' and internalize the process, adopting it into who you are.  Especially when it comes to the topic of rapport building in networking.  What do I mean?  

If you look like your using a technique, a system, or a strategy not only have you lost their attention, you've lost their trust.  And we just met them..  I like to associate this idea to playing cards in a casino.  If the pit boss thinks something is awkward, or you are running a system, you likely won't be playing long.  No more "Winner winner, chicken dinner" for you my friend.  You can't fake rapport, you need to believe in the process and have a genuine interest in helping the other person.

Ever been on an awkward date where your conversations didn't seam to be going well, but you really couldn't figure out why?  Maybe it was the topic, but you would have noticed the conversation going in an odd or uncomfortable direction..  What I'm talking about are the subtle things that people don't notice when they are interacting, such as body position or even more simply the rhythm or back and forth dialogue.  With most people we interact with, our non-verbal cues are in sync; hence, why we enjoy communicating with those people.  When we first meet someone, we don't have the background of information about the person we have with our friends. Mastering what we are doing, without speaking, is the first key.  Listening is the second key, so stop thinking about what your reply will be and engage the person.

Ever have someone that keeps jumping in to finish your statements, most the time they are wrong and take it in an unintended direction leaving you to have to explain the whole thing again?  Don't be that guy.

Back to why I like when people ask my occupation..  Being a student of sales I don't offer a pitch to someone, well let me rephrase that.  I don't offer a sales pitch to anyone.  When someone asks 'what do you do', I simply hover at 30 thousand feet and defect, I return the attention back to them.  After all, when someone asks what you 'do', that is what they are looking for.  They are waiting for you to ask what line of work they are in so they can give you their pitch.  Let them, they will be glowing that you fell into their trap.

When I mention that I experiment in sales and marketing they either give me one of a number of different responses.  The most typical one is a look of confusion and then a response looking for clarity leading with a question like, "tell me more about that".  Often I get a gaze saying what does that mean or "wait, you are a sales person?".  Either way it gives me a chance to mention what I may be working on at that particular time and position it again to finding more commonality.  I do not have a prepared elevator speech, even though I can offer a very good one at any BNI meeting that ties directly into what other people do in that meeting.  It is about connecting, and it has nothing to do with you.

Most of us are taught that when we've met someone and the conversation is going pretty well, look for the earliest opportunity to tell people what we do.  Skip that part.  Remember, no one likes to be sold and often shy away from sales people.  Networking and rapport building is all about building value for the other person.  The best way I have found doing this is finding out who I can introduce the person to that would instantly create more value for them.  Then leave and let them talk, for the first 10 minutes the biggest thing they have in common is me, so they talk about me.  If that conversation isn't a positive one, you probably shouldn't have introduced them.

I know I have mentioned this before but I get a great bit of humor out of it so I like to reference it when I can.  I have had women who wouldn't date me simply because I have a sales background.  The most widely accepted and negative perception when it relates to sales is the slick, fact-talking used car guy.  Nice way to start out a date right?  "You should see this baby take the corners on the back roads, here take it for a spin!"  I heard a car salesperson say once, "There is an ass for every seat!"  How you break that stigma is by gracefully forging a bond through interests you share with the other person.

In Saint Louis, it always begins with discussing the high school you went to and the people you share in common.  There is no inherent gift in building rapport, it is just understanding where it comes from and putting that wisdom into practice.  The reason why new acquaintances so commonly talk about the weather is that it is something that affects everyone.  That's the essence of what we are talking about.  Ask questions until you find something you both like and discuss that common bond.  You will always have something in common, shoot, you're at the same event  People love to talk about what they are passionate about so just figure out what that is.

Interview two people after a first date..  Ask one of them how the date went and their answer could be, "It was fantastic, we shared so much in common and the conversation was fantastic!"  Ask the other person their impressions of the date.  "It was horrible, they kept talking about themselves the whole time and what they liked.  I hardly said a word."

In sales we remember to let them speak 90% of the time.  There is no proposing, pitching, or educating in the rapport building stage.

Now get out there and sell with integrity, appreciation, acknowledgment, wisdom, attention and care.  Break the mold of the stereotype.  Please, a younger sales person my be looking for a date.