salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

Came across a neat piece of best-practice from one of my customers in N Wales.  They sell handtools for the pro, to electrical wholesalers, engineers merchants and the like.  A new product was launched earlier this year that all the reps seemed to be impressed with.  They duly went out selling it in the promotional packs designed by Marketing.

Without going into too much unnecessary detail, the starter level intro pack was 6 products of 6 lines.  One guy was surprised that not many people were taking up what he thought was a fantastic product at a ridiculously attractive promotion.  So he tried a new angle.

Next time out, he offered 2 entry-level packages.  The first was the original 6 6s, then he talked about having 3 of 12.  All of a sudden, his sales started to soar.

Simple idea, but great one.  And what was particularly noteworthy, was that although he’d been at the company ‘man and boy’, he’d only been selling for just 7 months.  Just shows what a new perspective can bring.  Any time you can think of an alternative close option, giving a choice, it always seems to work.  ‘which would you like, the red or blue?’

I’m not referring to littering your speech with expletives, but painting pictures with your words.  Eloquence is often bashed out of sales people, with language often ‘dumbed down’, with the accepted wisdom being clever big long words alienate any audience.

I was quite chuffed to be praised by one of my prospects Friday afternoon.  We were talking about how to get what I offer on the table given their internal politics.  He mentioned it would need to go on ‘the runway’ as an idea in a certain way.  I then considered what he’d said for a second, and asked “what do we need to do to make it catch the eye on the catwalk?”.

He laughed at this and replied it was a brilliant line.  All I’d done was make an association in my mind between a runway being something models walk down, rather than planes land on and simply thought I’d be a bit colourful, hoping it would be memorable.

It made me realise rep-speech is often too conservative, which leads to it being too bland.  Without using words that make it sound like you’ve swallowed a thesaurus, think more about painting pictures with your words and phrases.

What can you talk about when you face the brick wall of prospects saying they don’t need any help.  Especially when you’re cold calling for a meeting or the like.  In the specific instance they say things like:

• “We’re doing fine as it is thanks”
• “We’re doing so well maybe we can teach you something”
• “We’ve no problems all is good”
• “We don’t want to change or add to what we do at the moment because it’s working well for us”

I have a friend called Adrian Ciccone, he’s doing really well at them moment selling tiling and stone masonry in Stratford-upon-Avon.  Every time you ask him how he is, he says “if I was any better they’d make it illegal”.  I can imagine him brushing off a cold-caller in these ways quite easily.  Funnily enough, one of my salesguys is from Oklahoma, and he reckons people there always say “better than a hand job!” He also thinks you should do the the Spike Milligan line “what, are you a doctor?”  Anyway, I digress…

My Boiler Room guys sell to sales people, so they often encounter highly positive people, just like my mate Aidey.  When things are buzzing. A person at the helm of a sales force may well be inclined to say they need nothing, and please let me get back on with my job.

Yet business life is Chinese-villagingly littered with examples of where winning people got ‘fat, dumb & happy’ and lost their leadership and/or success position. 

Indeed, just last night I saw a decent documentary on why London-based retailer M&S went from being worth £19bn to under £5bn almost overnight. (One of the talking heads was a terrific journo and former beeb business editor Jeff Randall, he also lately writes for The Telegraph)

It was because they thought they could simply do the same things and continue growth.  After all, they’d just posted (c1997) the first ever British company £1bn profits.  One incredible stat was that in 97, 16% of all UK clothing was bought in their stores.  Wow.  Yet it all went pear-shaped; too slow into out-of-town stores, persisting with spurious other ventures like financial services, not knowing how to expand overseas effectively, not moving with the times quick enough and getting clothing produced overseas, and worst of all, producing a year’s stock of clothes so strangely boring and never-before unattractive it became known as the ‘grey range’.

The message is clear, when you are ahead, you need to plan to stay ahead.  And not let competitors steal share back from you that you worked so hard to gain the first place. 

So, one of the things you can ask in this case is simply “who are your Tescos, Asda (owned by Wal-Mart), Sainsburys and foreign fashion chains like Zara, Massimo Dutti, Gap, Mango, coming to try and steal your business?  And wouldn’t you like help in seeing them off

A few years ago I was on a BA flight to Cape Town, in the good old days when they at least had a decent radio channel on pop-business stuff and stewards without attitude, and I think it was some bloke called Bill McFarlan talking about the need to avoid Pink Elephants.  It was essentially avoiding using ‘nots’, negative scenarios or associating yourself alongside anything bad, even by saying you’re not like that horrid wotnot.  It was quite entertaining, and it actually helped me alter one of my business’ key pillars from a negative, to a positive perspective.

Anyhow, one of my winning Boiler Roomers in London, Nathalie is impressing me by doing a load of cold calling at the desk next to me.  She tried to call a prospect for a meeting (Vincent) who has a brother-in-law (Phil) that has met us already.

Her opening line was a shocker (relax, she knew it was!) along the lines of “Phil’s decided to rather go with telemarketing at this stage, so now I want to come and meet you instead”.  Oooops.  That’s a big-time Pink Elephant, and possibly more beyond.

The real situation is simply “Phil’s looking forward to maximising his current telemarketing initiative and in just a few short weeks we’re straight on the agenda as the next important item”.  You get the picture.

Had a thoroughly enjoyable meeting in the sunshine in the back garden of one of my customers Friday afternoon. Luckily we had silence as his kids were hooked to the live feeds of Big Brother inside. We were discussing motivating sales people who claim they’re highly money-orientated, yet their actions belie such statements. Mainly as they don’t seem to care about missing commissions. Paul said he always used ‘future pacing’ and in a live situation he wanted everyone to sell a particular product, and if they did, they could earn an extra £50 each time. Might not sound much, but fifty quid every time a specific product is sold adds up and could pay for a holiday in its entirety.

His future pacing was simply, “what y’gonna spend the money on?” And made sure he got them thinking about positive undertones to the commission up for grabs and initiative in general.

I used this technique once myself as a rep, selling software that should have added squillions in new sales for people, I often joked about ‘buying that yacht in Monte Carlo or paying for the missus’ must-have extension to the house’ and it seemed to jolly buyers along a touch.

Here’s another insight I gained this week.  I don’t know who this gys is, but he was name-checked in a presentation I saw to fairly good affect.  A chap called Jim Morgan from ‘Purchasing’ back in 96 and the tantalisingly entitled “the best sales reps will take on their bosses for you”. It seems he’d conducted research showing what buyers liked and disliked from a rep.  Here are the findings:

I saw a presentation by one of my customers from Greece this week, demonstrating how they’d won a big order to supply something to fulfil an Olympics need back in 2004 for Athens.  One of the slides was on dealing with ‘electronic media communication’.  Interestingly, it was thought many people were ‘hiding’ behind such capability.

I saw a 5-point slide along these lines:

1. accept the need to communicate through emails and websites, but do not be lulled into thinking this has the same intimacy as other comms
2. learn the customer’s preferences about means of communications
3. make the communication meaningful
4. impress customers by speed
5. don’t deliver bad news by email

There are sixth and seventh points to add, namely,

• email is merely for confirmation and passing on detail, the phone and face-to-face is the way to progress your ambitions, and
• just ‘cos you sent something, doesn’t mean it’s had any impact, so follow-up via phone etc to progress