Month: September 2021

Personal Branding Online Can Make A Difference

Here’s something I overheard one of my inside salespeople say when we ran a call center:

“My prospect won’t even give me the time of day. If he knew more about me and my offering, I’m sure he would be willing to talk.”

The internet gives us an unprecedented opportunity to get out in front of our prospects in a big way. But as sales reps, you have to show up before someone can ask you to dance.

Try this experiment on Google. Run a search of the name your customers know you by. For example, if your name is Robert Jones, but all of your customers call you Bob, search for Bob Jones.

Google will return 10 results on the first page. Look at the result and ask yourself, “Is this how I want my clients to see me online?” If you aren’t showing up, ask “Why not?”

In our coaching sessions, we tell sales reps that they typically have 5 to 7 seconds to get someone’s attention and make a good impression. In the last few years, attention spans seem to have gotten even shorter.

It’s the same when your prospects, customers, and clients search for you online.

SEO studies have shown that users rarely go beyond the first page returned. And of the 10 results on the first page, the top 3 get 80% of the clicks.

If someone is searching for your name online, you have to show up!

So take action now to manage your personal branding efforts and improve your online presence. Your prospects will have a better first impression after your first touch point.

I asked my director of technology for some ideas on using technology to improve personal branding online. Here are 6 quick ideas to improve your online appearance:

1. Determine Your Key Descriptive Words.

Keywords are terms that you want to show up for when someone searches for your services. They describe what you do and what your product does. And they help determine how you place in the search engine results pages when a prospect types them in. Start by determining the core theme of your expertise you bring to the table. Then select keywords that your customers use to describe the problems that you solve.

2. Include Your Name and Company Name In Your Keywords.

This is how you want to be known to your customers. As stated above, if your formal name is Robert Jones but you go by Bob, then you want to “show up” for Bob Jones. Remember, if you introduce yourself to someone in a sales call, in a face-to-face meeting, or on the phone, they will search for your name and company name online to determine your credibility. Make sure you are showing up.

3. Buy Your Own Domain.

Something that Google and Bing consider when pulling up relevant pages is the Internet name for your web page. For example, if someone searches for “Bob Jones”, Google considers a page with the name of www.bobjones.com/bobjones more relevant than www.aol.com/bobjones1245. If you want your prospects to find you easily, go to a hosting company, like Godaddy, and buy your name as a domain name. Not only is this relevant for Google and Bing searches, but it adds a level of credibility to your name.

4. Create Your Blog.

The search engines favor fresh content and a site with regular updates. A blog allows you to push new material onto the web regularly. Each post acts as a new page, giving you a new opportunity to rank for your keywords, your personal name, and your company name. Now, you don’t have to go the full technical route to create a blog. There are easier options using Google’s Blogger WordPress.com that make starting your blog free and easy.

5. Write Posts for Your Clients.

You’ll have to go through a vetting process before one of the major resource sites will publish your material. However, your clients and customers will probably welcome timely and informative material to inform their readers. If you can speak eloquently about your product or services, then talk to your clients and determine if you can write a guest post for them.

The other idea you’ll want to consider is leaving comments on your prospects and clients blog. Always make your comments professional, positive, and complimentary. They will leave your client with a favorable impression.

6. Complete your Profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Google and Bing now look at the social networking sites. This means your profile is included in the search results if they include relevant information. So if you haven’t done so already, take some time to complete your social media profiles. Ensure that you use the name your customers uses. Include your keywords in your headline, summary, and your job descriptions. And include a professional looking headshot photo. In addition to searching for you online, your prospects will look for you on social media sites to learn more about you and what you are promoting.

So if you find your prospects aren’t giving you the time of day, take some time to update your online profiles and increase your personal branding campaign today.

A Strong Sales Process is a Vital Tool for High Performing Sales Teams

Back in the early 2000s, we sold and trained a lot of people in the manufacturing industry: steel manufacturers, companies that manufactured parts for the aerospace industry, car manufacturers, etc. From that experience, I learned that the big focus in manufacturing is to create a repeatable process in order to have reproducible and consistent output.

That concept was something that I carried throughout my career in training and sales. If you wanted to have reproducible and consistent results in sales, then you needed to have a consistent and scalable Sales Process. A process that any member of your sales team could execute consistently and get reproducible and consistent results.

So what is a sales process? A Sales Process is nothing more than a series of repeatable and reproducible steps or stages that all of your salespeople can walk their prospects through to end up at a predetermined goal or outcome.

Now, will your sales process produce the results you want 100 percent of the time? No. Even manufacturing processes don’t produce the desired results 100 percent of the time. That’s why they target a certain percentage of their process output to occur within specified tolerances. Those process outputs that don’t make it within those tolerances are called waste. And the efficiency of the process is determined by minimizing the waste and maximizing the results that occur within those predetermined tolerances.

Your sales process is going to do the same thing with converting your leads into viable prospects, and eventually customers. And you want your process to do this as efficiently as possible.

Characteristics of a Good Sales Process

Here are a few other things to consider when creating and updating your sales process:

Flexible: Your sales process must be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the sales environment, the state of the prospects your sales reps are dealing with, and the sales reps themselves. For instance, if your sales rep is delivering a presentation to a prospect and the prospect gets up and says, “I’m ready. Let’s get started.” Does your sales rep say, “You can’t. We have to go through the objection stage first?” Or does she say, “Here’s the contract. Press hard. The third copy is yours.” Your sales process must be flexible enough to give the sales rep some room to maneuver.

Extensible: Sales processes aren’t static creations that exist in a bubble. They live and grow with the changes in the sales environment, your market, and your product line. You need to be able to adjust it by adding or removing steps as your market shifts and changes.

Modular: We talk about the steps or stages in a sales process. In my coaching, I often refer to processes within these modular steps, such as the process for opening a sales call, or the process for handling objections. Each stage inside your sales process is also a process with defined starting and ending points.

Replicable: Your process is no good if only the top 5 percent of your sales team understands it well enough to use it. Your sales process must be accepted and used by everyone on the sales team, not just the seasoned sales rep, the super brilliant, or those with the ‘gift of gab.’ Sure, all these things help the sales rep move prospects through the sales process. But your entire team needs to be able to use it and produce the desired results.

More Observations from the Olympic and Paralympic Games

As you know, I’ve been watching the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games this year. While inspiring, I saw a lot of parallels between the way athletes trained and competed at these games and the training and processes performed by salespeople.

This year, there were several new events in both Games. One that caught my attention was the Universal Relay in the Paralympic Games.

In a traditional relay, you have a team of four men or women move a baton around the track. The first team to carry the baton across the finish line wins. And the team that wins is the one in which each athlete runs the best race they can and then efficiently passes the baton to the next athlete. In a typical relay, the team members are similarly matched.

The Paralympic Games took the relay to a new level with the Universal Relay. First, they mixed it up by allowing men and women on the same team. In addition, the first leg of the relay had to be a visually impaired runner, the second had to be a runner with an upper body impairment, the third had to be a runner with a coordination impairment, and the final leg had to be a runner with a lower spine impairment and needed a wheelchair.

I watched the US team dominate the field as they moved the baton down the track with as little friction as possible. In this case the baton was a tap on the right shoulder within the allotted zone. Three rookies ran the first three legs of the relay with veteran racer Tatyana McFadden, 5-time winner of the New York City Marathon, running the anchor leg. They completed the race for a world record and a gold medal.

Insights on the Sales Process Taken from the Universal Relay

When I watched this performance, it hit me that this is a great metaphor for the sales process. Each runner took the baton from the previous runner and moved it to the next runner. And each runner was distinctly different from the others in the relay.

That’s what your sales process does. Each unique stage takes a prospect from the previous stage and carries them to the next stage with a minimum of friction to eventually get the prospect over the finish line as quickly as possible.

I also heard one of the sports commentators make an observation about the Universal Relay during the Paralympic Games’ closing ceremonies. He said that the Universal Relay highlighted the idea that each athlete in the relay was providing a foundation for the next athlete to stand on and perform to the best of their abilities.

As before, we can make a direct comparison to the sales process. Each stage of the sales process is providing the foundation for the next stage. If the sales rep executes each stage of the sales process with precision and integrity, they create a strong foundation for the next stage in the sales process, and the prospect can be carried through to the conclusion stage and the close.

That’s why at Tyson Group, we believe that how you open a sales call is more important than the close. If you open the call correctly and you follow your sales process, then the close will happen effortlessly.

Bottom line, review your sales process. Remove as much friction as possible and make sure it’s executable by all of your salespeople. If your entire team can move prospects through each stage efficiently, they can build on the foundation from the previous stages until they carry the prospect over the finish line in record time.

Sales leaders of high performing sales teams regularly review their sales process to ensure it’s aligned with their team. Take the Sales Team Science Assessment here and discover how well aligned your team is with your sales process.