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For Every Excuse a New Strategy

January 4, 2011 By Bill Rice

For Every Excuse a Strategy - BetterCloser.com

It’s only a couple of days into the new year and the excuses have probably already started. Excuses always happen. However, I’m suggesting that the next time to use one two things happen:

A red flag goes up that reminds you that it’s your FEAR that’s chirping in your ear.
You realize that it’s an opportunity to create a new (and better) STRATEGY.

Here’s my thoughts on excuses–the problems and the solutions:

Nothing is Quite as Frustrating as a Whiner

Excuses are often delivered in a whiny voice. And that voice is always shrill and annoying. So let’s set aside, for just a moment, what it does to your own psyche and think about your audience (your potential customers). Behind the part about being shrill and annoying, it is negative. Have you ever been in a room with someone complaining. Maybe behind someone talking about their life problems in the check-out line in the grocery. Really uncomfortable, right?

No one likes to be in that negative energy. They will exit.

Now, just to dispel any belief that your excuses only happen in private, in your own head. Wrong! They seep into everything you do–your conversations, your phone calls, your blog, and your sales copy.

We need to get rid of the excuse, ASAP! Let’s figure out how to turn it positive.

Resistance is Often Your Problem

I already put it out there, but fear is at the core of every excuse. Excuses are the mind’s natural resistance.

If an excuse pops up its because you are resisting something. Think about your last excuse. Be honest, it was probably only moments ago.

Did you have an excuse not to go to the gym this morning? Resisting a little hard work.
Did you have an excuse why you didn’t call a prospect yesterday? Resisting the possibility of rejection.
Did you have an excuse for not hitting your sales quota? Resisting expected failure or learning.

The trick to beating this resistance is to change the strategy.

Workout by making it fun or setting more immediate/achievable goals. Walk before you run.
Change your perspective on rejection. More is better. Record why and tweak the next call.
Stop working with the big number. Create a system that helps you nail smaller ones, more often.

Rarely Does the Competition Really Beat You

Holy crap this is important to get! Your competition never really beats you.

Do you think that sound ridiculous? Okay, think through this with me. Think about your last sale.

Did you just list the features?
Did your customer just line up the options in a comparison table?
Did you close the deal without any small talk?
Do you feel like you made a personal connection at some point?

The last question is the moneymaker. They bought you! Not the product, not the feature set.

Logically that leads to only one conclusion: If they didn’t buy you then the competition didn’t beat you. You failed yourself. There was something in your process, your attitude, or your personality that didn’t win.

Learn and adjust. I find this has a lot to do with researching your prospects. Do a little more research on the prospect, helping you can connect earlier. Figure who is important in the decision and find the people/path to their ear.

Don’t ever use the competition as an excuse. It’s too easy and leads to long-term sales paralysis.

Use the loss as a case study. Use the hindsight to create a strategy for the future. What were the early signs of the deal going South? What could have turned the tables in your favor?

Excuses Set You Up for Failure, Every Time!

Excuses are just that–excuses. By nature they give you reasons to be okay with failure. If you’re okay with it, it will become you.

In the immortal words of Vince Lombardi: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

Acknowledgement: This post is inspired by Chris Brogan’s hugely helpful 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write. I recommend you bookmarking this and grabbing a topic the next time you are short of blogging ideas. Even cooler he has started a weekly newsletter that will feed you fresh ideas and writing tips: Blog Topics for You.

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Are you subscribed to the Better Closer newsletter yet? I can guarantee you’re missing something!

Filed Under: Quick Sales Tips, Social Selling Tagged With: business, excuses, social selling, strategy, whining

Warning: Too Many Friends Can Reduce Sales

July 12, 2010 By Bill Rice

Bettercloser.com - Too Many (Social Media) Friends

Is it possible for a huge database of contacts or thousands of friends or followers to actually reduce your sales output? Yes!

This isn’t another rant on quality over quantity in lead generation. Or a diatribe on how critical lead management is to sales. It’s an important sales discussion about focus, discipline, and misplaced hope.

In sales we often pride ourselves in our ability to hunt. Collecting names, numbers, emails, business cards, and friends make us feel secure. We know it’s a numbers games with lots of No’s for the occasional Yes.

Although all true, it’s exactly this programming that can lead sales people into a dangerous rut.

Collecting without Sales Process

There are packrats and there are curators. You can clearly see the difference.

If you walk into the office or home of a packrat there are arbitrary stacks and piles of stuff–old newspapers, magazines, pieces and parts, trinkets and toys. All these things landing where they may and there they stay. There is little in the way of organization or movement.

Contrast that with a curator. Every item is carefully and quickly reviewed, characterized, and categorized. Put in its proper place for later use. Things flow in and things flow out. There is movement.

A carefully developed sales process is the difference between us being packrats of leads to carefully curating and nurturing leads to deals. A sales person without a disciplined process that moves leads forward is a graveyard for good leads.

The worst part…those without a good sales process often hoard like a packrat–collecting, taking, or requesting the most leads!

Collecting without Engaging Leads

The other danger with incessant collecting is focusing the easy and avoiding the scary.

Face it getting lots of arbitrary followers and filling a database with random names is simple. In some cases you can even automate or buy this gathering of prospects. However, engaging these folks in a conversation, connecting with them in a meaningful way, even taking the risk to introduce yourself makes even the most seasoned sales professional anxious.

It’s much more comfortable (and misleading) to measure success by collections of leads, avoiding the true measure of sales progress–how many scary, new conversations did you have this week?

Collecting without Cleaning House

Kicking a lead out of your sales pipeline is another scary, but necessary process.

Letting a lead go is like peeling your fingers off that soft childhood security blanket. You’re afraid you won’t get another lead to replace it or your letting go of future opportunity. But hanging on means you are wasting precious sales activity on something that’s not ready to close–there are other, more productive ways to manage that lead.

The secret to avoiding this bad sales habit is to carefully observe and define the characteristics of a good lead. This makes it much easier to sort the good for the bad and the hot from the cold. It also gives you the confidence to kick it lose, to another process, and the motivation to work harder on the ones you know are the best opportunities.

Keeping a clean sales pipeline is the best way to “narrow” your sales pipeline and squeeze out more sales.

Collecting without Closing Sales!

Are you on this dangerous path? Have you developed these avoidance behaviors? It’s easy to find out–look at your sales numbers. Up or down? Are you letting whole days go by without a good conversation?

Don’t get trapped in the collection trap–process and close!

Filed Under: Lead Management Tagged With: Advertising and Marketing, business, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Sales process, Salesmanship

10 Secrets to Blogging for Sales

June 14, 2010 By Bill Rice

Bettercloser.com - Blogging for Sales

One of the hottest topics in the sales community right now is lead generation. Not just the big marketing programs that your company runs (and you rarely get any good leads from), but personal lead generation. Marketing efforts that you can start, manage, and see results from without any significant investment of time or money.

One of the best forms of personal lead generation is blogging. It can be, and probably should be, the anchor point of all your sales lead generation tactics.

You may be under the false impression that a great lead generation blog is all about being a great writer. That’s wrong. Of course with practice you will become a better writer, but there are a few steps that will connecting with you compelling enough to overcome the fact you’re not an award-winning author (yet).

1. Get Started

There is a reason Get Started is number one on this list. This simple point can’t be overemphasized. You won’t generate a single lead thinking about blogging, imagining a perfect logo or theme, or wishing for all the fancy gadgets on bigger websites.

Your customers don’t care anyway. They came there for one thing–information. If they wanted beautiful design they would have gone to a marketing blog.

2. Keep Going

Starting is half the battle. Keeping your blog going is the only way to win. Put blogging into your schedule. Make it a necessary element of your sales process and routine. Determine a good rhythm and stick to it.

Frequency isn’t all that important as long as you’re consistent. You can blog once a day or once a week. Just find a pace that works well in your schedule and stick to it.

3. Write to Prospects

One of the biggest mistake I see lots of bloggers making is writing to their industry peers. Unless you selling products and services to these people…knock it off! Write to your prospects.

When you sit down to write visualize your customer. Write the conversation you want to have if you get that appointment you so desperately seek. You might be surprised how many prospects call you to have that conversation–in person.

4. Write About Customers

(Hopefully) you work with customers everyday. Share these stories. They’re references and give your readers, your prospects confidence that you can help with their problem too.

Customers often feel like they have a unique and complex need. In reality, that is rarely the case. Chances are you’ve seen the problem and solved it many times.

The really neat thing about this misaligned reality is that when your prospect reads or hears your perfect representation of their problem, they often assume you must be the only one that can solve it.

How cool? Your blogging probably just remove some competition.

5. Answers Customers

How many questions do you get from prospects, customers, partners, and friends everyday? Take a second and stroll through your email inbox. How many of those unanswered emails are asking the same question? How many of them would make a great blog post?

One of my favorite tricks is to take an email and answer it, in great detail, on my blog. Then I can point this and all future emails like it to my new blog post.

This yields two benefits: First, your customers get a far more thorough answer than you whave time to give in an email. Second, you’re going to attract several people that have the same question, but would never know to ask you.

6. Be a Storyteller

How-to writing is usually boring. First this, then this, step one, step two, and if all goes well you get this. Yawn! Learn to tell stories.

People are captivated by reality. People love to hear war stories. People often internalize these stories into their own vision of the future. Stories get you calls like, “I read your article. Can you do that for me? I have this similar situation…”

7. Bring them Value

This is another secret that often gets mangled in translation. I will try to be really clear about what value is to a blog reader or online community member:

Value is educating people about things you are an expert in
Value is bringing your readers special offers
Value is introducing your readers to complimentary products
Value is asking them to buy things that will improve their life, business, paycheck

Value is not equal to free. Sure you might give away free advise or stuff from time to time. However, real value is bringing your readers a distinct advantage because they know and read you–even if they have to pay for it.

8. Be Direct!

This secret flows directly from number seven above. Don’t be shy about telling your prospects what you want them to do. Be direct. Tell them what websites to visit. Tell them what products to buy. Tell them when you are bringing them the best deals and exclusives.

9. Be Brief

No one has extra time. And even great authors like Hemingway knew the magic of brevity. Part of the value of your blogging should be to deliver what your customers need to know clearly and quickly.

10. Leave the Ending to Readers (Customers)

Your ultimate goal in blogging for sales is to engage your readers. Maybe even engage them in a sales conversation. That means drawing them into the conversation.

Try this by leaving the ending to them. Like this…

Do you blog for customers? What are your tips and tricks for bringing in prospects? How would you end this blog post?

Filed Under: blogging, Lead Generation Tagged With: Advertising and Marketing, Blog, business, FAQs Help and Tutorials, marketing, Money, Sales lead, social selling

What’s in My Sales Stack?

June 1, 2010 By Bill Rice

: Image via Wikipedia

Glance, one of the software tools in my Sales Stack, introduced a very interesting Sales 2.0 concept in their post on Building a Custom Sales 2.0 Toolkit. They framed it in the analogy of the more traditional software stack. My simple definition: the combination of multiple software to create a full-featured, consistent, and stable platform on which you can build solutions.

I think they created a very useful analogy. It structures our thinking on how to enable our sales objectives, not just chase hope-filled sales tools. Using this framework you can quickly identify and setup your sales 2.0 platform and get to selling, confident you have the tools and the platform you need to win.

Here’s a peek into my Sales Stack:

1. Lead Generation: It’s always nice to have a steady flow of new conversations coming into your sales pipeline. Online lead generation is a great way to automate that consistent flow. For me I use a tight combination of blogs (Sales, Lead Buying, Lead Generation), eBooks, and email marketing for demand generation.

Specifically, I use the following software tools:

WordPress – Some still think WordPress is simply blogging software. I submit that it is a feature-rich, but easy to use and maintain content management system. Don’t just run your blog on it run your entire website on it. Make it your lead generation foundation and home base.
Thesis (WordPress Template) - Thesis is the WordPress theme that I use [affiliate link] on all my lead generation websites. Again, it is more than a theme. It’s a foundation for good design and SEO. A simple, unmodified base install will get you ahead of 90% of the websites out there in terms of clean design and traffic generating search engine optimization. It gets your lead generation game started with good fundamentals.
AWeber – I’m continually amazed at how many people neglect this critical component of traffic generation and lead generation. Email marketing is still, hands-down, the most responsive Internet marketing technique. If you don’t have a mailing list start one today. If you start one use AWeber [affiliate link].

2. Prospecting & Sales Intelligence: Attracting sales prospects and generating demand is one channel of opportunities. However, I think you also need to actively engage your market. This means seeking out those prospects that need your products and services, but simply don’t know it yet. That’s right, cold calling. This part of the sales stack also prepares you with better pre-call/pre-appointment preparation.

These are the tools I use:

Google - Surprised? You shouldn’t be Google is probably the most incredible advance in sales prospect since the telephone. I think of Google as my interface to an enormous database of sales prospects [grab my PDF on Google prospecting] just waiting to be discovered. My clients are continually providing data and information about themselves, their preferences, their needs, and their wants. Selling to them is as simple as segmenting their data and engaging in their own dialogue.
Linkedin – A big part of any sales person’s success is networking. Linkedin is the de facto giant in networking business people and is my default database for B2B sales prospecting. It allows me to find and analyze companies and individuals I want to engage. It also does a fair job of generating new leads, with a few special Linkedin tricks I use.
Gist - This is one of the latest tools I’ve added to my sales stack. Gist is a simple way to keep me aware of what my relationships are doing in pursuing their own interests and goals. Using their direct interface and the plug-in for my email I never go into a conversation with a lead or contact without a quick snapshot of their latest activities in social media. As an extra bonus it gives me the opportunity to help them more efficiently, if I see them promoting or requesting something I can assist with on the spot.
Twitter - People needing immediate help are turning to their social networks. This provides great “targets of opportunity” for sales. And there is nowhere better to find these than on Twitter. I continually jump into discussions and conversations that net new relationships and sales via Twitter. Twitter is always a great place to gather a little intel on the personality of people you are planning to call or meet with–making breaking the ice much easier on cold calls and meetings.

3. Sale Enablement & Execution: At this point in your sales process you have a few prospects on the hook. Now you have to convince them to move forward. This is where the good conversation happens–telephone calls, face-to-face meetings, web demonstrations or webinars. In my business, I do a lot of showing, helping, and teaching. That means making contact and sharing.

Here is how I share:

Glance - I mentioned Glance at the top of this article, but they need a prominent mention in my Sales Stack as well. I’ve used all the regulars WebEx and GoToMeeting, but most have failed me regularly. Demonstrations are so critical to the Web 2.0 sales process and I often find myself giving impromptu demos. Doing a quick on-the-spot demos really shows off how well you know your stuff or have a software product that immediately adds value. Glance makes this simple. It works in all browsers, on all operating systems, and its simple URLs make it easy to give over the phone–getting my prospect and me quickly into a sale demo.
Skype - This is an old stand-by that I find creeping back into a more significant role again. Much of my company is virtual (we hire where the talent is–sort of silly to do it any other way, right?) so this is our primary means of communication. However, as our business grows I find myself engaging more internationally and Skype is really the simplest and most universal way to do this.
Google Voice – Much of my time is spent with clients and traveling. I certainly don’t want to have prospects waiting on me to get back to a desk phone in my office. So, I long-ago abandoned that relic and replaced it with Google Voice. Now my leads and prospects come to me wherever I am and get my live voice, not a voicemail. This is a powerful sales converter in this world of voicemail roulette.
Twitter – Again, Twitter pops into the stack. Twitter has become an increasingly primary means of communication, fitting in with email and phone. I am just as responsive to a prospect or client here as I would be in these more tradition modes of communication. However, I like the advantage of being able to share valuable (and lead generating) discussions beyond just one person. If I’m giving free advice or counsel away, which often the initial contact involves, I want as big an audience as possible–that’s lead generation! This is why I try to have much of my initial conversations with suspects on Twitter.
iPhone - This has become my communication command center. Since I spend as much time as possible away from the office. This is the nerve center for email, telephone, Twitter, Linkedin, and Gist. I can manage it all from this little workhorse.

4. Lead Management & Nurturing: Not every lead or even contact turns into a sale (at least not immediately) that where lead management is a secret weapon. Getting every one of your leads into a lead management system and learning to automate the nurturing process is a huge competitive edge.

This is even more significant when you generate many of your leads online. These leads are generally new suspects–they rarely close quickly. In addition, these leads will be at all stages of the buying cycle. Without lead management it will be impossible to manage any reasonable amount of these diverse prospects.

I use (of course) Kaleidico’s Sales Manager. It was one of those “scratch your own itch” projects and has become even more powerful with a strong, serious sales customer base.

Building a solid Sales Stack is critical in a Web 2.o sales world. There is so much data and the prospects coming from online sources are so diverse–you need help. Take some time today and carefully evaluate your Sales Stack–cut what you don’t need and integrate what you have into a seamless sales process.

What’s in your Sales Stack? Can you help me improve mine? I would appreciate the feedback.

Filed Under: Sales Management, Social Selling Tagged With: Advertising and Marketing, business, Customer relationship management, Google, Lead Generation, linkedin, marketing, Social network