Bill Rice Internet Marketing > Salesmanship

Negative Words Kill Sales. Stop Using Them!

August 20, 2010 By

Kill Negativity in Sales Conversations

Kill Negativity in Sales Conversations

Negative words kill sales.

My guess is that you have enough objections to deflect without introducing new challenges. Of course you’re not doing it on purpose, but they have a tendency to slip into our sales discussions all the same.

Surprisingly, most negative words come from your own mindset. And the last thing you want is negativity entering into the mix when you are trying to open the door with new prospects.

Striking negative words from sales discussions probably means restructuring your mind, your behavior, and how you respond to the prospect’s own negative vibe.

Have Confidence in Yourself

Nothing is more important to crushing negative words than your own self-confidence. Sales people that are comfortable and confident in themselves, their products, their services, and their company are the most likely to deliver sales.

You need to be committed to the fact that you are the reason your product or service will sell.

Product development and marketing has taken you as far as they can. Now it is all about you and you should be excited you have the ball. When you look around your sales floor you need to be thinking like the star of the basketball team–if we need to hit a goal, I need to be the one with “the rock.”

If you have confidence that you can get the sale it will be very hard to turn your conversation negative.

Visualize Positive Results

Most star athletes talk about the positive effects of visualize on their amazing performances.

Sales is no different. If you practice and visualize what it takes to get results, then it’s guaranteed to happen more frequently.

Go into every sales conversation with a clear visual of path you need to take to get the sale. Again, this will make it hard to throwing up negative barriers with this picture in your head. Even with the prospects throws objections and negativity at you it will be much easier to overcome them and get back on track.

Smile When You Present

This may sound like a silly trick, but it works. Pause from reading this for a moment and try it. Smile. Now, try to have a negative conversation. Both your tone and your words will adjust with a smile on your face.

And don’t think this is just for face-to-face sales encounters. Your smile plays through very powerfully on the phone as well.

Avoid Negative Influences

In my experience, this is the top killer of a good sales person–a negative entourage. They don’t just introduce a negative mindset and vocabulary, they drag down your whole outlook. You can’t see hope or positive outcomes.

Rid yourself of these people and you will see an immediate increase in your sales–guaranteed.

Negative words kill sales. The good thing is that negative words are most likely more the result of your mind and environment, not any weakness in your vocabulary.

Get positive and your words will follow. (So will sales!)

Filed Under: Social Selling Tagged With: marketing, Salesmanship, Social Selling

How to Win Over and Over Again

August 10, 2010 By

Too often we get trapped in the illusion that selling is an art form. This can be a dangerous notion if you let it become the fundamental premise of your sales philosophy.

This has become even more dangerous with the advent of social media and networking. These new and potentially fertile grounds for sales leads can literally become distracting siren songs that can keep you trapped and bouncing around from one attractive, but futile suspected opportunity to the next.

In this presentation, I’m going to try to focus your attention on process, efficiency, and developing sales routines that will lead you into more “natural closes.”

How to Win Over and Over Again – Social Selling from Bill Rice on Vimeo.

Get it on Slideshare: http://bit.ly/winsales

What do you think?

Are you doing anything like this in your sales process? Please share your social selling tips.

Filed Under: Social Media, Social Selling Tagged With: business, Salesmanship, Social Media, social selling

Warning: Too Many Friends Can Reduce Sales

July 12, 2010 By

Bettercloser.com - Too Many (Social Media) Friends

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

5 Tips for Sales Improvement This Week

October 19, 2009 By

100_3052 Often we are looking for silver bullet systems or recipes for success, while ignoring the basics. In my experience 90% of big sales improvement comes from getting back to the basics. These basics will have an immediate, measurable impact on your sales numbers.

Let’s put it to the test. Here are five fundamentals of sales. If you focus on them they will increase your sales this week.

Breakthrough the Fear of Failure

Jeffrey Gitomer, a sales guru and best-selling author, is famous for saying “fail faster.” This is a critical concept for a sales person to grasp early in their career. Like any professional athlete or best-selling author will testify to, you will swing and miss, shoot and miss, write and miss far more often than not. But, that’s okay because it’s the big ones that make them millions.

Sales has the same odds and the same big rewards. You have to kill the fear of rejection. You will hear “no” far more than “yes.” Embrace it. Know that it only means that you are that much closer to a sale.

Stop Getting Ready to Call, and Call

This is the top failure in sales performance–failure to call. Cold calling has become a pariah. However, the truth is that cold calling is the backbone of sales. Fundamentally you have to make contact and get your message out. That usually means calling a few people, setting up some appointments, and introducing yourself.

Sitting back and waiting for someone to find you and discover how you can help them is really making the buying process hard. And that, of course, is not good for your sales numbers.

Stop Picking Leads, Just Grab One

Here is another real sales quota killer–picking leads. Better known as cherry picking.

The thing about trying to constantly find the “best lead”–it doesn’t work and it wastes time. Ultimately, sales leads are often little more than a name, telephone number, and email. What are you going to make your, “this is a killer sale lead” decision based on?

Much like my advice to pick-up the phone and call, just grabbing a lead is about forward motion. Creating momentum has a far greater impact than getting the right lead.

Start Doing a Little Lead Nurturing

Regardless of how effective your sales pitch and charm might be, most buyers don’t immediately pull the trigger. That’s okay. Assuming you have a good lead nurturing program. In fact, studies show that lead nurturing not only keeps that sales lead active and viable, but may also creates a trust relationship that will actually increase the size of the transaction.

Think about it. You can build a strong feeling of reciprocity with lead nurturing. If you have a good system of touch points and you are giving away valuable content you are building buying pressure on that prospect.

Start Measuring Your Sales Process

One big mantra at a high performance sales organization I used to work at was: “What gets measured gets improved.”

If you’re not breaking down your sales process into measurable elements you might as well be “shooting BBs at the moon”–you’re never going to hit your target. Measuring helps you observe and make timely adjustments, before it’s too late. Do you need to make more calls? Is a certain objection eating you up? Are you losing deals in the proposal phase? If you aren’t measuring you won’t know.

Most importantly, do something with those improvement prompts. Work on increasing your leads and call volume. Tweak that sales script. Improve the value in that proposal.

Hopefully you are seeing a theme. So often, whether it is sales, sports, or any other competitive endeavor improvement is often best achieved by getting back to the basics. Try these back to basics tips and tell me how they go.

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Filed Under: Sales Training Tagged With: cold calling, Jeffrey Gitomer, Sales lead, Sales process, Salesmanship, Social Selling

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