Month: March 2019

The Challenge for Salespeople When Assessing Buying Signals
Here’s the pitfall. As salespeople, we have a tendency to have what’s called attribution bias. We look for those contributing factors that would cause bias to what we’re selling, and ultimately ignore reality. In other words, we look for facts that support our beliefs.

Chip Heath said it best in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard: “The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are, rather than to the situation they are in.”

And this is where salespeople have to get out of their head and put their “stuff” aside. Typically, salespeople don’t like to see and challenge warning signs. And we don’t like asking a prospect to verify possible buying signals. We simply want to set up the conversation in a way that we’re moving forward with the deal.

But in reality, anytime anyone makes a decision on anything, they mentally create a pros and cons list. Then, they weigh out all the reasons for making the purchase against all the reasons against it. It’s those cons that we must identify and portray in such a way that they support moving forward with the deal.

Establish Your Credibility Before Assessing Buying Signals
Salespeople are blind to this many times because we just want to get in the mix and start selling. We measure our success by reaching the sales close and our efficiency by how quickly we get there. We don’t want to hear anything that might get in the way and decrease our efficiency. And that causes us to lose the high ground when we get to the closing stage.

That’s why it’s crucial to establish your credibility throughout the sales process through how you look, how you act, what you say, and how you say it. When you can establish yourself as a credible person they can do business with, then you can verify those buying signals and challenge the cons with confidence as you lead your prospect into the dialogue stage.

You’ll find more ideas on identifying buying signals in your sales process in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

Sales prospecting is not dead, and cold calling is not the boogeyman everyone has made it out to be.

Don’t get me wrong. I think picking up the phone and calling people you don’t know so you can sell them something that they don’t want is a colossal waste of time. And it generates a lot of bad blood to boot. But that doesn’t mean you should simply forego picking up the phone and communicating with people.

Same with sales prospecting. With all of the customer relationship management platforms and marketing automation platforms out there, you’d think salespeople can simply skip the act of prospecting and immediately start selling. But the simple fact is that prospecting still requires a personal touch. It still needs that creative spark that only a real, live salesperson can bring to the table.

Social media and inbound marketing techniques have reinvented cold calling and sales prospecting in this age of digital marketing. And a big part of prospecting now is how you present yourself online.  Here are 10 creative ways to use the online platforms to improve your credibility and boost your prospecting effort.

10 Tips for Creative Sales Prospecting

Oh, and One More Prospecting Nugget

get into the prospect’s mind and answer 5 questions. We must also supply evidence to back up our claims. And we must provide third-party validation to ease the prospect’s concerns. For more ideas on presenting your ideas, download our Dynamic Sales Presentation manual. Give copies to your sales team and coach them to improve their sales presentation skills in your next sales meeting.All the content that we present to the prospect is important. However, just as important are 4 factors we need to monitor when presenting our ideas. They are how we look, how we act, what we say, and how we say it.

Sales Presentation Factor – Consider How You Look and How You Act
When presenting our ideas or our prescription, we must consider the visual impact of our presence and ask if it supports what we are trying to accomplish. How we look and how we act are instrumental in building our credibility and believability. If you sell face-to-face, people are going to judge you on how you look and behave. This includes how you dress, how you move, how you present yourself, how you communicate, and how you deal with people. Like it or not, it’s the way the world works.

Your enthusiasm is also on trial. Some salespeople just aren’t good at being enthusiastic. They’re like crypt keepers, bound by the restrictions of their own making. The root word of enthusiasm is entheos, which means “God from within” in Greek. It’s not about being a cheerleader or projecting phony excitement. Your prospects see through that. Rather, it’s about being totally congruent between your intentions and internal feelings, and your external behavior.

The last four letters in enthusiasm are I-A-S-M. When we deliver the solution, this means: “I Am Sold, Myself.”

This is where many salespeople fail when they present their prescription. They aren’t sold themselves on what they do. And on top of that, they don’t know enough about the prospect. So, instead of speaking in specifics, they mindlessly spew off cold statistics and general facts. They’re not good storytellers and they don’t know how to use visuals and props. Instead, they lean too much on a PowerPoint, thinking that the slide deck is their sales presentation. Remember, we’re the presentation, the messenger, and the message. If it could all be done with a PowerPoint presentation, our sales managers would let the web administrator publish the slide deck and the website would do the selling.

Sales Presentation Factor – Organizing Your Message
There are other factors that help us become a powerful communicator. We already talked briefly about how we look and how we act. But what we say, even the order we say things, will help persuade a prospect when we prescribe a solution.

Say I was trying to convince a township’s city council to control the deer population. I could say:

“You know, we should really think about killing at least 20% of the deer population. I say that because right now, in our city, deer have caused at least five near-death experiences, and countless dollars of damage to property, cars, and homes alike. We’re teetering on the brink of losing human lives because the deer population is out of control. I think we should actually kill deer to save lives.”
That’s one way to pitch it. That might appeal to the hunters in the room. But I’ve got to think of my entire audience.

An Alternative Presentation
Another way to present the same argument is to open like this:

“Two of my sons and I were a little south of Cleveland toward end of fall. It was right around dusk, just about 6:15 in the evening. So, the cars were just starting to turn their lights on. I was heading south, when suddenly a deer vaulted from woods on the passenger side, right in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes. In the back, my younger son was leaning forward. He had his seat belt on. But as I hit my brakes, he slammed his face into the front seat, screamed, and started to cry. I swerved into oncoming traffic and was lucky enough to get back in my own lane. What I’m suggesting to the City Council is we seriously look at some ways to control this deer population, maybe with a controlled hunt, or something like that.”
Ask yourself about those two examples. In the first one, I start with the prescription and supply some evidence in the form of facts and statistics. In the second one, I start with a personal anecdote to convince and offer the prescription after. Which one’s a more convincing sales presentation of a prescription to a broader audience?

What we say and the order of what we say, are critical.

Sales Presentation Tip – How We Say Our Message
This last factor deals with how we say our message. Consider the simple sentence “I never said he stole the money” with vocal emphasis on the italicized words:

Sales Training Exercise – Defining and Explaining a Sales Objection

Here’s your exercise this week.  Get with your sales team. Coach them to come up with 5 or more statements to cushion a prospect’s objection. These are generic statements that simply acknowledge you heard their concern.

For example, “your price is too high” is a common sales objection salespeople hear.  Members of your sales team can then respond:

1. I can appreciate that…
2. I hear what you’re saying…
3. I know how you feel…

Simple statements of acknowledgement like these allow you to keep the conversation neutral. Your salespeople can then ask a simple question, like: “When you say price, how do you mean?”

Remember, your task, under these circumstances, is to keep the conversation consultational. You want them to define and explain their objection without being confrontational. If your prospect feels their position is threatened or there’s a battle brewing, they will dig in for the coming battle and you won’t get an accurate response in your discovery.

You can find the entire process for getting your prospect to define, defend, and explain their objection here in our Resolving Sales Objections manual. Download copies for your team before your next sales meeting. Review the process with them and begin creating a sales process that produces consistent and steady results.

Presenting Relevant Evidence
Back in a previous post, I outlined a sales call where the sales rep, after performing his diagnostic session, removed all documentation off the table, presented relevant evidence, and focused on the one solution that was going to address my challenge.

I emphasize the fact that he removed all documentation off the table because it highlights one important fact: More information is not better. We want to get the need or the issue right and give them enough relevant information. Too much irrelevant information causes confusion. And confusion leads to doubt.

Here’s the challenge – most salespeople don’t follow a process. They don’t do a good job of making sure they are on target during the diagnosis. They don’t say, “If I understand things right, you’re looking to reduce the amount of time it takes you to determine the ROI on this advertising, at the same time making decisions about what the best one to use is. Is that right?”  As a result, they don’t have a systematic method of using trial closes effectively. And without these trial closes during the diagnosis, they don’t nail the right need or issue.

Most salespeople speak in generalities. And those generalities drive doubt in your buyer.

Consider this. How does a lawyer support their argument when they are presenting their argument before a jury or judge? They present relevant evidence in various forms. And most salespeople have a tendency not to use relevant evidence in the right way, leading to too much irrelevant information.

The 5 Questions You Need to Answer to Identify Relevant Evidence
If I were to prescribe a drug to you, I would tell you about the pill, when to take it, how to take it, give you the instructions with it, even tell you how it’s helped other people in similar situations.  As a patient, you would start to feel more comfortable about using it. Because if we can communicate the right way and we can communicate about our product or service the right way, we answer 5 pertinent questions in the buyer’s mind to help convince them that we have the right solution or the right opportunity.

Remember, sales is an away game – it takes place in the mind of your buyer. So, if you get into any buyer’s mind, you’ll find those five specific questions you need to resolve:

Sales Training Exercise – Coach Your Salespeople to Close the Sale Through Sales Momentum

Back in the day, the art of sales was all about closing the deal. In fact, corporate sales teams had manuals stocked with various phrases and tactics their salespeople could use to close the sale. They had the Ben Franklin close, the Puppy Dog close, the Assumptive close, the Columbo close, the Now or Never close…

However, in today’s environment, closing the sale should be thought of as a natural progression of your sales process. It is not a separate entity that gets tacked on at the end of your sales process. You use the momentum you build throughout your sales process to reach a point where you can ask your prospect, “are you ready to begin? in total confidence.

Here’s a tip: Ask your prospect permission to move forward in your sales process before transitioning between stages.  Use these trial closes to build momentum towards a logical decision.

Sales Training Exercise – Coach Your Salespeople to Close the Sale Through Sales Momentum

Here’s your exercise this week.  In five of your sales calls, ask your manager to join you if possible. If your calls are on the phone, make them conference calls and invite your manager to listen in. The goal is to get someone to give you an objective review of your sales call.

In these calls, your sales manager will be listening to and observing trial closes in your sales process. These closes take the temperature of your prospect, determining if they have enough attention, interest, and trust to move forward in your sales process.  For example, if near the beginning of the sales process when I’m getting the prospect’s attention, I’ll ask, “Do you have time for a few questions? before moving to the questioning stage in the sales process.  In the diagnosis stage, I’ll review the challenge as both of us have explored and ask the prospect if the review is a fair assessment before prescribing a solution.

At every stage, you want to gauge your prospect’s interest and discover if they are with you. Because if you aren’t bringing them along in the process, then you don’t have sales momentum and haven’t earned the right to close the sale. What you have is a prospect who is a drag on the sales process, and it slows everything down.

After the call, meet with your sales manager for a debrief. Review the number of times you used trial closes to bring your prospect along in the sales call. At the end of the five calls, review them all for call quality and results. I think you’ll find that regularly checking in with your prospects will build sales momentum and drive your results.

forms of evidence to help convince, persuade, and influence the buyer. Remember, everything from here on out relies on the three elements of our Specific Interest Statement: presenting our solution, referencing the primary interests, and appealing to their buying motive. Now that we have that foundation, we need to climb our way to the top of the mountain over obstacles using evidence, practical applications, and showing the benefits of our prescription.

Overcoming Doubt and Resistance to Change
At this stage, the inherent obstacle is doubt. I don’t mean the doubt they may have in the salesperson’s abilities or the solution, although that certainly is a real factor. But right now, I’m referring to the buyer or prospect doubting if they even have an issue. Often, they’re wrestling with the question: “Do I really need to do anything?”

Here’s a tip to keep in mind. Change is hard. And at the end of the day, salespeople sell change.

When I’m teaching in a classroom, I’ll ask my participants to conduct a simple exercise.  I’ll ask them all to fold their hands naturally, like in a praying position. When I ask them how it feels, they all agree that it feels good – which usually means they don’t even notice it.

Then I’ll tell them to move their fingers up a rung or down a rung, so that the thumb that was on top is now under the thumb on the opposing hand. And then I’ll ask them how that feels. They always remark that it feels strange, different, that it feels like somebody else’s hand. I had one person remark that it felt ugly!

Like the folding hands exercise, we’re often selling people a way to do something differently. We’re trying to get them to change. Now, if we go back to buying motives, we have to revisit Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Most motives fall under those needs. And they exist at a corporate and individual level.

So if we’re selling change, it is imperative that we leverage the motivational factors to ease that transition.

Target the Challenge with a Specific Solution
When selling change, there are two things we have to consider to ease this transition and move the sale forward.

First, the solution has to deal with the specific situation. Just like a doctor isn’t going to prescribe every medicine ever invented to solve your medical condition, you shouldn’t pitch everything in your product arsenal. Yet most salespeople have a tendency to throw a bunch of solutions up on the wall and hope something sticks. We call that they “spray and pray” method.

Realize when you just spit out a bunch of benefits or opportunities, or you say something vague like, “Hey, here are some of the outcomes that you can achieve,” it actually causes more doubt. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is give somebody specific information, and just enough of it, to help them make a buying decision. More is not always better.

Leveraging the Power of Evidence
The second thing we have to consider is incorporating evidence into our prescription.

Over the last few years, we’ve done business with over sixty pro-sports clients and fifteen clients from the insurance industry. We’ve trained nearly two thousand salespeople and found one thing to be consistent – they all rely heavily on two types of evidence: statistics and examples. They rarely used any other form of evidence.

Well, there are a number of ways to present evidence. Check out your options:

Increasing your Powers of Influence using Evidence and Specificity
If we go back to our medical conversation, there are probably a lot of things a doctor can do to make somebody better. But at some point, doing more only causes confusion and doubt. When possible, a doctor is going to keep their prescription simple, straightforward, and convincing.

A salesperson needs to do the same thing.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens all the time. Salespeople have a bad habit of overwhelming their prospects with details, hoping that they will find something that will stick.

Don’t be like the typical salesperson. Don’t  fall into the “show up and throw up” habit. Hold to resolving a specific challenge and offer a specific solution. And use a variety of forms of evidence to support your solution. You’ll easily overcome doubt and move the sale forward.

You’ll find more ideas on using evidence in your sales process in Lance Tyson’s book, Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business and Compete in a Complex World available on Amazon. Get your copy today!

Sales Training Exercise – Using Analogies in your Visual Presentation
Here’s a training exercise we do in our Persuasive Presentation Skills program that can help you assemble visual information for your prospect. During the session where we help participants discover ways to convey complex information, we teach them how to use analogies. They take a physical characteristic of an object in the room or something that the audience can visualize, and relate that characteristic to the idea or concept that they are trying to convey.

For example, while explaining just how important the opening of a presentation is, the trainer heard a plane flying overhead and ran with this analogy:

As take-offs and landings are critical to a pilot flying a plane,  so are the openings and closings when you are delivering your presentation.
So here’s your exercise this week. Get with a member of your team or your sales manager. Then, identify the product or service that you want to promote. When you’re ready, have your teammate identify an object in the room.

Once you have the object, take an aspect, quality, or characteristic of that object and relate it to an aspect, quality, or characteristic of your product or service, making it easier to understand, much like the owner of the moving company in this post did when he used a balloon to highlight the ride quality of his trucks.

Remember, telling is not selling. Show your prospects what your product or service can do. Relate it to something that they already know and remove the friction that’s keeping your sale from moving forward.