The latest form of political incorrectness is positive thinking. Politicians and the media both would have you believe that the economy is going to hell in a hand basket. That kind of thinking is utter rubbish when you analyze and study the economic data.

The mental attitude of a large portion of the population thinks things are awful, terrible, horrible or worse. The data would indicate that they are wrong.

The Data

Unemployment is at 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down but the typical house is still worth 30% more than it was worth in 2000; 94% of Americans are paying their mortgages on time and most of the other 6% will find ways to keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but for the last 16 years it has been low or almost non existent. Living standards for all economic classes, including the middle class and the low income group, is at an all time high.

All forms of pollution, other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease, stroke incidence are declining; crime is in decline and education levels are at an all time high.

Sure gas prices are up, the dollar is weak and credit is tight but these are minor issues in an otherwise healthy economy.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s there was double digit interest rates, unemployment and runaway inflation. Personal income, as adjusted for inflation is up 20% since the 1960s. While there are still racial issues they are nothing like they were in the 1950’s. When you compare those issues to the issues of today there is no comparison.

Why All the Pessimism

In order to understand what is going on you have to take a really hard look at who the purveyors of negativity are and then drill down to understand their agenda. Without a doubt the purveyors of negativity are the media - both electronic and print. The volume of their message and the size of their audience make it easy for them to influence, persuade and downright “brainwash” the uneducated, intellectually lazy, mass of humanity.

When one drills down on the stories that appear on the nightly news and the front pages of morning newspapers there is an unmistakable trend and it is all negative. Why the negative you might ask.

Good question

The simple answer is that negative news sells newspapers and network airtime. And newspapers and networks make their money from advertising. The more viewers or readers the more the cost of the advertising space. The media knows all too well that the best way to drawn a crowd is to promote negative by showing natural disasters of epic proportion, gruesome murders, rapes, kidnappings, celebrity misfortunes, etc.

Politicians of all stripes know, just as well, that when people are stirred up and fearful they are more easily controlled. They then capitalize on this fear by promoting themselves as some sort of hero with a magic solution to a multitude of societal ills. It is in their best interest to do so. It is not in their best interest - unless they are in power- to promote optimism. All of this is very carefully controlled and orchestrated. If you think otherwise you are indeed naïve.

I realize that my personality and style will not appeal to many. In fact, I know that I will repel at least as many people as I will attract. That is done intentionally by design because I am looking for a certain type of psychographic profile as my audience. So, I don’t normally respond to emails that are whiny or complaining because I see no value in wasting my time with someone who will probably never become a client. Time is precious and must be ruthlessly protected.  

 That being said, I did get an email from a subscriber and thought that all of you would benefit from reading the email and most importantly my response to it.  The name has been changed to protect the misinformed.  

Hi Steve,

Maybe your email newsletters were always the way they are now, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find the meaty content instead of the fluff to sell yourself and your products.  If it was truly a great blog I wouldn’t mind paying a small amount to receive it but instead it just seems like ads to sell your other stuff.  If you’re blog’s this focused on selling your other stuff, it is only reasonable to expect that your stuff, such as Prospecting to fill the Pipeline would be just as focused on trying to sell other stuff.  I’m hoping there’s a real person back there who is actually trying to help people become better sales people but I suspect it’s just another creation trying to turn a buck without supplying any real effort. 

So I guess in answer to your question, yes, I will be relevant in the future but I’m not so sure about you.  

XXXXXX

My Response  

Dear XXXX,  

Thanks for taking the time to write and share your thoughts.

Since you have been so blunt in your comments I will do the same. Seems as though I struck a sensitive nerve with you - that’s good - at least I got you think - which is the purpose of my ezine.

As far as free “Prospecting to Fill the Pipeline” CD, I show no evidence of you having ever ordered it. So how can you make a judgment about the contents of a CD you have never listened to? You are guilty of committing Sin # 2 of the 10 Cardinal Sins of Selling - NO ASSUMPTIONS!!

You are right about the change in format of my ezine. It does contain content that is designed to sell my products and services AND at the same time offer my best content in the form of each week’s Featured Article. This is intentional and I make no apologies for it.

As far as my personal motives for conducting business you should refrain from making judgments about mine or anyone else’s values who happen to be different than yours.  

Lastly and most importantly, you and I are in sales and our primary focus and objective should be to maximize profits for our companies. We can only do this by offering quality products and services to as many buyers as we can. Failure to do that in the competitive marketplace makes us irrelevant to our company. That’s just the way it is in a highly competitive global marketplace.

If, as a producer of profits for your company, you are put off by having to perform and justify your employment in sales by relentlessly and aggressively closing more sales perhaps you should seek a job in teaching or counseling or some other similar helping profession.

I have done both and will tell you, that while it may make you feel warm and toasty inside and satisfy your need to feel that you are making the world a better place, you won’t make the kind of money you will make in sales. You have to decide why you are in sales. If it is for any other reason than to make as much money as you can, while honestly and ethically providing products and services that enhance people’s lives, then perhaps you should do yourself, your company and your prospects a favor and go do something else. 

If this sounds harsh that is because it is the reality of the business world. I didn’t create this economic reality and I would be a fool to ignore it or pretend it didn’t exist. We can lament and wring our hands about how horrible these Capitalistic, money grubbing pigs are as we sit around the campfire holding hands and singing Kumbaya like Joan Baez or we can roll up our sleeves and get with the program of closing more sales. The choice is ours and ours alone.

End of my Response

In a study done at Columbia University, it was determined that the top 20% of sales reps earn 16 times more income than bottom 80%, and the top 4% of sales reps earn 54 times more income than the bottom 80%.

Additional data confirms that 65% of everything that is sold in North America is sold by 15% of the sales people.

These numbers should be a wakeup call for owners, managers and sales reps.

Why Should You Care About Any of This?

That is a fair but naïve question to ask. If you are a manager you should realize that about one - third of your sales force is actually a profit center. The other two - thirds, while somewhat productive, are barely covering their cost.

If, as predicted by some, employee cost will more than double in the next forty-eight months this should scare the living hell out of YOU. 

When this happens, I predict that companies will have a significant reduction in force of their sales teams, and that only the sales people who are determined to be a profit center will be retained. If you are a mediocre or marginal producer this should scare the hell out of YOU.

The End of the Company Gravy Train Is Insight

For too long companies and managers have tolerated mediocrity and provided what amounts to corporate well fare to non productive sales people. Because of shrinking margins, increased competition, and the need to increase productivity, companies can no longer do this and remain competitive and profitable. In the future, every employee from receptionist to CEO will have to prove their profitability. If they can’t they will be sacked and rightly so.

Many employees somehow think that it is their birth right to be provided with a good paying job which doesn’t require a great deal from them other than showing up and putting in their time. They have forgotten or never learned that in a Capitalistic Society rewards only come to those who provide value in the market place. No value no pay. Not a hard lesson to learn but one that the liberal do gooders of this world avoid talking about. Instead they pander to the lazy masses that willingly lap up their message, “that the government will take care of you”, like a cat laps up warm milk.

What Can You Do to Prepare For This

Accept one - hundred percent responsibility for your own future. It is not your company’s, or the country’s responsibility to provide you with the skills and talents you need to excel.

Invest YOUR time and money in competent training and education that will make you more competitive and more skilled than your competitors both within and outside of your company.

Become a voracious reader, attend seminars and events and associate with the top performers in your industry, turn your vehicle into a rolling university and listen to audio training materials, stop hanging around time and energy vampires that suck life from you, and seek expert coaching. If you will do these things consistently you will be well positioned to weather the coming storm.

Does the price you paid for that expensive wine at dinner influence your satisfaction with that wine? The answer to this question may reside in the folds of your medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. In what should be music to the ears of marketers, the old adage that you get what you pay for really is true when it comes to that most ephemeral of products: bottled wine.

The Research

A recent study by Baba Shiv, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a group of researchers at California Institute of Technology concludes that people will experience an increase in activity and pleasure within the brain when they consume wine that they perceive to be expensive even though the part of the brain that interprets taste is not affected.

While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain. In an article, co-authored by Baba Shiv, titled “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” published online Jan. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, students were placed in a MRI and given sips of red wine-including the same one twice, with different price tags: $5.00 (the actual price) and $45.00 (a fictional price). The subjects reported that they liked the expensive wine more than the cheaper wine even though it was the same wine - a preference that was mirrored by an increased activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex of their brains as measured by the MRI.

The Marketing Implications

According to Shiv, the traditional assumption in economics is that a person’s “experienced pleasantness” (EP) from consuming a product depends only on its intrinsic properties and the individual’s thirst. Contrary to this basic assumption, several studies have shown that marketing can influence how people value goods. For example, Shiv has shown that people who paid a higher price for an energy drink, such as Red Bull, were able to solve more brain teasers than those who paid a discounted price for the same product.

Despite the pervasive influence of marketing, very little is known about how neural mechanisms affect decision-making, the researchers said. “Here, we propose a mechanism though which marketing actions can affect decision-making,” they write. “We hypothesized that changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with EP.” Because perceptions about quality are positively correlated with price, the scholars argued that someone might expect an expensive wine to taste better than a cheaper one.

Says Baba Shiv, “What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality. So, in essence, [price] is changing people’s experiences with a product and, therefore, the outcomes from consuming this product.”

The lesson says Baba Shiva is that: “there’s a temptation among marketers to keep reducing prices. We’re saying be careful before you embark on that strategy.”

In keeping with this research marketers would do well to position themselves as the most expensive product or service in their market category. I realize this positioning is counterintuitive to the prevailing thought that most marketers have, and that many readers of this newsletter will have difficulty with this concept.

A Personal Experience

My study of marketing has demonstrated that most marketers want to position themselves somewhere in the middle of the price range in their marketplace. This positioning eliminates any competitive advantage by creating a “me too” perception in the marketplace.

Several years ago, I experimented with this concept by running a year long radio campaign that stated in every ad that “our training is expensive and difficult”. Instead of turning buyers away it actually attracted more of my ideal clients.

Interestingly, when prospects became clients their training experience was enhanced because they paid a handsome sum to participate and they would often brag to others about how “expensive and difficult” this training was.

Sure I lost some potential clients, but I repelled a far greater number of wimps, weasels and yahoos that I had no interest in working with. The clients I attracted were among the elite in their sales profession. They were committed sponges who soaked up every thing they could and they were a pleasure to work with. Since then, I have raised my prices several times, and every time I do so I get more clients and better quality clients.

As a side note, two years after the radio campaign finished I spoke at a local Rotary Club meeting. I gave the president, who was to introduce me, a written introduction for him to read. When he got up to introduce me he said, “well I had an introduction to read to you about our guest but I can’t find it. All I can remember about him is that his name is Steve Clark and you have probably heard his radio ads that talk about how expensive he is. So give a big Rotary welcome to Steve Clark.” That is the power of positioning.

A Military Application

Positioning is not lost on the United States Marine Corps. They are well aware of this concept and position themselves as the elite branch of military service. Their campaign for “a few good men” and “we don’t accept applications only commitments” is a practical application of positioning to attract the best. And while other branches of service struggle to meet their recruiting goals the Marine Corps does just fine.

How about you? Are you positioned as the elite in your industry or are you just a little bit better than most of your competitors? If you are anywhere in the middle of the pack, remember that only the lead dog ever gets a change of scenery.

While you may not be able to implement all of these ten strategies, read each of them carefully and ponder how you might creatively use them in your business or practice.

1. Raise your current prices and fees

This is a no brainer and requires little skill. However, it does require a lot of  courage. The reality is that people will pay you more than you are currently  asking. Maybe not 50% or 100% more but certainly 10% - 30% more. All you  have to do is convince yourself of this and transfer this conviction and  confidence to your buyers. 

2. Change your target market

Start going after the type of clients who are not price shoppers. While price is a  consideration in most buying decisions, research shows that less than 10% of  buyers buy strictly on price. You must retrain yourself that price is not the reason  most people don’t buy from you. It may be that they don’t trust you or they don’t  see you as an expert or they don’t see the value in what you offer. Whatever the  reason, it isn’t price.

3. Stop giving stuff away for free

Sales people are notorious for giving away products and services for free. Some  where in their head they have the idea that if they will be nice and give “more  value” (that usually means the company’s resources) they will be elevated and  achieve exalted status in the eyes of the buyer. That’s rubbish. The reality is that  the more you give away the more they want for free and the harder it becomes to  get them to pay for future products or services. The solution: Charge for everything.

4. Bundle products and services together

 Instead of selling individual items, start selling packages by bundling various  products and services together into one sale. It is much easier to sell three items as  a package deal than it is to make three individual sales.

5. Sell a deluxe version of your product and service

Offer a premium or deluxe version of what you sell. At least 20% of your buyers  will upgrade and by the “platinum” version of your product or service. This is  easy money that you are leaving on the table. The more affluent the buyer the  more likely they are to want the “upscale” version. 

6. Upsell with the current sale

Once you make a sale give the buyer an irresistible offer to buy an additional  product or service or add on as part of the original order. Present this as a one  time offer and have the guts to stick to it. You will be amazed at how many  people will buy it because they don’t want to let the opportunity pass them by. 

7. Upsell immediately after the sale

Immediately after the sale offer the buyer an opportunity to purchase an additional  product or service within a very limited time frame. This offer can be made via  the phone or mail or in person.

8. Build in a renewal program

Offer an automatic renewal program that will lock your customers into future  purchases unless they opt out of the program. This eliminates the need to sell  them every time your current contract expires.

9. Develop a continuity program

Develop and offer a continuity program so that you get ongoing, residual, monthly income from each account or customer. Examples of this might include  newsletter subscriptions, service contracts, etc. Sell once and get paid  repeatedly.

10. Change what you sell and how you sell it

The fastest growing segment of the North American market is the affluent  market. Every 8 minutes a new Millionaire is created. At present there are 8.4  new middle class millionaires in the US alone.

While the middle class struggles, this class continues to amass wealth. They have  plenty of disposable income and are not price sensitive when it comes to  indulging their preferences. Seek them out.  If you don’t have a high end product  or service that targets the affluent you are missing the runaway economic freight  train.

By Mike Dandridge

It was a joke, really. A sheet of eight and a half by eleven paper, probably a photocopy made at a customer’s office, that hung behind the sales counter for years. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a black-and-white sketch of three generic cartoon characters, their mouths wide open, doubled over, expressing hysterical comic-book-style laughter. Below the trio of chuckleheads the caption reads, You want it when?

Then one day, an overheard casual remark made by a customer waiting for his order, changed everything. He said, to anyone listening, “Did you ever notice, the places that have those signs that joke about the service, are the same places where the service is a joke?”

I took the sign down, crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. Maybe that sounds extreme. I mean I know that a comment by one customer doesn’t speak for all customers.  And I also know those so-called jokes are supposed to be a light-hearted jab at procrastinating customers, a figurative wink and a nod to over demanding clients who expect a supplier to have everything in stock. After all, failure to plan on their part doesn’t constitute an emergency on our part. Yes, I get it. It’s funny. But the implications run much deeper. It’s as if we’re saying to the customer, You want us to do what? Did you just wake up this morning and decide you had to have this part? What do you think we are – magicians? Are we supposed to drop what we’re doing because you’re in a hurry?”

“Well, yes,” replies the customer. “Yes, you are.”

First Impressions Last
Fifteen seconds. That’s all you get to make your first impression. According to Jan Carlzon, president of Scandinavian Airlines, those precious first seconds are your moment of truth – the length of time it takes for a customer to read a sign, or to form an image of you and your company. That decisive moment may remain in your client’s mind forever. It’s difficult for customers to believe a company that claims, “Our customers are our top priority,” when the first thing they see is a sign that says otherwise.

Of course, a sign isn’t always literally a sign. But, there’s a simple sign you can keep in front of you that’s a paraphrase of the Golden Rule and it’s the foundation for providing great customer service: Treat the customer as you want to be treated when you’re the customer.

Of course, we’re not just talking about a placard with a clever saying or funny picture that hangs on the wall. There are other “signs” that communicate to the customer how you feel about their business. Your appearance, your voice, your language, and even your vehicle transmit “signs” to your customer about whether or not the words you speak are in alignment with the actions you take. What are the signs your customer first sees in at the beginning of a business transaction with you or your company?

Mike Dandridge is author of the book, “One-Year Business Turnaround.” He is a professional speaker and consultant to the electrical equipment industry. Sign up for his blog at www.wonderselling.com.

Each year there are over 1,000,000 small businesses started in North America. 800,000 of these fail in the first five years. Of those 200,000 that make it past five years, 160,000 fail in the next five years says, Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, one of my favorite business books, and one of the top 5 best selling business books of all time.

Recently, I participated in a conference call with Michael Gerber who said, “I know more about small business than any human on the planet”. It would be hard to disagree with a man who has consulted with over 10,000 small businesses since 1977.

In this conference call, Gerber said the biggest problem small business owners have is that they are too busy “doing it, doing it, doing it” to really develop the systems that are necessary to run their businesses without them. He went on to say that owners of businesses who don’t have systems to run their businesses without them don’t really own a business. They own a job. He further stated that in this scenario the owner is not really building an asset to sell because no investor wants to buy a job.

He mentioned that McDonald’s is the classic and perhaps best example of a business that is run entirely on systems. These systems allow them to run a worldwide business that does hundreds of billions of dollars per year even though they have a 400% annual turnover rate and employee primarily teenage labor. Their secret? SYSTEMS RUN THE BUSINESS NOT PEOPLE. This reliance to systems is hugely successful and requires no day to day involvement from the franchise owner.

When questioned why small businesses fail he mentioned several reasons:

1. In most cases the owner got their start as a really good “doer of the thing” they are now in business to do.

 He mentioned that most small business owners lack the full range of business skills necessary to effectively manage and run a high level organization. As owners, they still think like technicians or sales people, and as a result have not elevated their business management skills beyond that of a “doer”.

2. Arrogance and Ignorance.

Because the owners are technically good at what they do, they think they know how to run a business. However, most of them have had little if any formal business education other than running their own business, attending industry trade shows, and modeling whatever is considered accepted “industry business practices”. They suffer from the myopic “herd” mentality and lack innovation or imagination, which is the currency of 21st century business leadership.

3. They don’t realize that they are the primary obstacle to their business growth.

 Instead of being open minded, they think they have the answers. The reality is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

4. They mistaken think that whatever business strategies and practices that worked in the past will work in the future.

As a result, they make faulty business decisions about the future, fail to implement effective systems, and their business falls further and further behind the change curve until one day they wake up and realize that the world has changed and passed them by. By then it is usually too late.

Because of changing market conditions, increased competition and technology, the lack of systematic processes and methodologies that allowed a business to succeed previously will not be good enough to sustain it at its current level long term, much less take it to the next level.

As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, change will happen in business. The only question is will a business owner proactively choose to embrace change or will they be forced to change by external circumstances?

To quote Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, “when the change outside your business is greater than the change inside your business the end is in site”.

Good Selling

 Steve

PS Want a FREE copy of Prospecting To Fill the Pipeline?

PPS If you know someone who could benefit from this message or the FREE CD please forward this  message to them. It could change their life.

   

By Dan S. Kennedy

Entrepreneurs, by nature, instinct, conditioning, competitive spirit are very into “more”. So are sales professionals. More gross revenues. More sales. More customers or clients. More web site traffic. More leads.  Even more square footage, more employees.  But more is not necessarily better, not necessarily more profitable or even proportionately profitable. The unbridled lust for growth of any kind at any cost gets a lot of business owners into a lot of trouble. For salespeople, it can lead to burn-out. For both, their best clientele being poorly served and neglected as quality thins to accommodate quantity.

Few business owners take the time and trouble to carefully and analytically study their present customers or clients, account by account, for contribution to net profit.  Few entrepreneurs analyze their own activities and time useage the same way, in terms of contribution to net profit. When they do, they discover the classic 80/20, 20/80 Rule is alive and well, and further, that there’s a 95/5, 5/95 Rule too. In brief, 80% of profits tend to come from 20% of clients and time. Usually about 5% of clients and 5% of time use prove infinitely more valuable than the other 95%.  The results of this rarely done analysis are often: getting rid of the least profitable clients, stopping or delegating or otherwise altering the least profitable time use. In many instances where I’ve come in as consultant to a business, coach to an entrepreneur, I’ve made less into more, by pruning away the clientele consuming 80% of the resources but contributing only 20% of the profits, creating fewer customers rather than more, and enhancing the relationships with the 20% who contribute 80% of the profits. Most business owners are being supported by a relatively small, often shockingly small number of “best” customers; all the rest, the bigger number are illusion.  Most entrepreneurs are also producing 95% of their income and wealth from only 5% of their time. Even a slight re-adjustment in time investment can multiply income.

In my NO B.S. TIME MANAGEMENT BOOK FOR ENTREPRENEURS, we begin in Chapter 1 with some math exercises, to accurately determine what your time is worth, what it must be worth to achieve your goals. Together, we shift your thinking about time to investing, to allocating, managing and measuring results in terms of investment and return on investment. The business operation changes and behavioral changes this provokes are frequently radical, dramatic, exciting and extremely beneficial. I promise, you’ll do some very serious thinking about the ways you invest your time if you read that Chapter.

The big questions are these – do you actually know what your hour must be worth, in order to reach your desired income goal for the year?  Do you accept and prioritize responsibilities, projects, opportunities, reject, delegate away, based on that number? Do you have good ‘future banking’ statistics so you can judge the value of what you just did with the last hour?  In short, are you doing your best to consciously, deliberate, mathematically, financially hold yourself accountable for the ways you invest your time?

I hate the near extinction of full serve gas stations. In the ten minutes required to pump gas and wipe windshield and windows myself, I could have sat comfortably in the car and listened to an informative tape, jotted an answer to a memo, read an item from a newsletter or magazine or just thought about a business matter – any one of which infinitely more valuable than the minimum wage job of pumping gas. It is example of the fact that we let ourselves do low wage work much too frequently.  You wouldn’t take it as a part-time job and go pump gas or clean your house or mow your grass for $8.00 an hour, would you? 

If you mow your lawn as recreation, as exercise, as a hobby that you genuinely enjoy, that’s one thing. But if you do it because you’re too cheap to find and pay a kid to do it, that’s another.

Add to this the “more problem”, the piling on of “more” that produces on more low wage work and low value consumption of time for you. This you must be very, very careful of. The more successful you become, the more your entire approach to opportunity and to time must evolve.

Consider something as simple as the client who requires an excessive amount of time, access, coddling. As your time and your staff’s time grows more valuable, he becomes less valuable. If, to reach your goals, your hour must be worth $1,000.00 and your staff’s $100.00, and he consumes 10 hours a year of each more than the next client, he costs you an extra $11,000.00.  But if your time has to be worth $2,000.00, your staff’s $200.00, the same 10 hours of your time plus 10 hours of staff time leaps to $22,000.00. If his contribution to income stays the same, he’s instantly worth $11,000.00 less. At what point does he cost more than he’s worth?  At what point are you better off without his revenue altogether?  Your gross might dip, but your net might improve. And/or that vacuum fill with a more profitable account.

The all-time champion worst idea for doubling your income is to double your work.

You’ll be a rich corpse.

This is also the most unimaginative, uncreative, non-analytical approach. Consider farmers. At one time they all plowed with mules. They tried to get the mules to pull harder, move faster. They hitched two, three or four mules together. Then tractors. Then faster tractors. All the same brute force multiplied.  One of my earliest consulting clients in the 1970’s was a company that did very complex, detailed soil analysis of farms. Their sales rep collected soil samples in test tubes from every part of the farm. In the lab, they analyzed each sample.  On a color-coded map, they depicted nutrient and mineral deficiencies — different in soil only a few feet away from another hunk of ground. They prescribed different fertilizers for different parts of the farm. The soil’s ability to produce was greatly multiplied. Not by the farmer working longer hours, not by more mules pulling harder, not by a bigger tractor. By scientifically, strategically, cleverly leveraging the real asset: the soil.

Now consider salespeople. To increase income, they will try to generate more leads, squeeze in more presentations, run more appointments, work longer hours, talk on the cellphone while driving, eating, even while peeing!  But that’s not leveraging the real assets: time and sales skill.

Consider the business owner. Same approach. More advertising, more leads, more customers, more products, longer hours.

It is all too common to attempt reaching bigger financial goals simplistically, by adding more customers to beget more sales even if you must personally work more hours and juggle more responsibility and absorb more stress, and add more overhead. But this IS simplistic. Almost unthinking. Certainly uncreative. A more creative, cerebral, interesting approach is to search for ways to achieve more with less.

About The Author: Dan Kennedy is the author of nine business books, including his newest, NO B.S. TIME MANAGEMENT FOR ENTREPRENEURS, available in bookstores or from online booksellers. Additional information and free chapter previews at www.nobsbooks.com. Included with the book, a coupon for a free kit of peak personal productivity tools.  Kennedy is also a busy entrepreneur, consultant, speaker and direct-response advertising copywriter. Info at www.dankennedy.com.

A recent study conducted by Development Dimensions International, a human resources company,  found that 41 percent of consumers surveyed rated the sales profession below mediocre. And one in five consumers surveyed said they believe salespeople’s expertise is getting worse.

Not only do consumers see salespeople as incompetent they see sales as an undesireable profession. Survey results reported that 46 percent of those surveyed say they would be ashamed to call themselves a salesperson. (I wonder how many salespeople feel the same way)

The good news in all of this is that buyers still rank salespeople as their number two source of product information. Second to only the internet but ahead of family and friends. Says Bradford Thomas, the company’s sales practice team manager, “In a given week, people make dozens or hundreds of purchase decisions but see the process as a necessary evil. It’s something people have to do but they are not always that jazzed about it. They’re dealing with salespeople way more that they want to.”

How about you? Are you perceived in your maketplace as a welcomed guest or an unwanted pest?

“Do or do not. There is no try.” 

              -Yoda, Jedi Master

How do you react when you are unsuccessful in your attempt to make a sale? Do you blame external factors or do you accept personal responsibility for your lack of success?  In selling you can either make sales or you can make excuses but you can’t make both. Here are the top 25 excuses sales people make for poor performance. How many of them are you guilty of?

1.  My quota is too high.
2.  My territory is too small.
3.  My company doesn’t advertise enough.
4.  Our marketing material is out of date.
5.  Our price is too high.
6.  We don’t get enough leads.
7.  I got undercut on price..
8.  The gatekeeper won’t let me through.
9.  Money is tight.
10.  The economy is slow.
11.  Businesses are not spending money.
12.  My prospects lie to me.
13.  We have a long sales cycle.
14.  Prospects need time to think about it.
15.  I don’t like making cold calls.
16.  They are happy with their current supplier.
17.  Rejection wipes me out.
18.  We’re not competitive.
19.  They’re comparing us to the competition.
20.  They just signed a new contract.
21.  I can’t get through voice mail.
22.  They won’t return my call.
23.  They have to take it to the committee.
24.  They were just shopping price.
25.  They used my proposal to get competitive pricing.

 In this modern era of increased competitive pressure, globalization and technology old school selling methods and processes are not good enough. If you want to join the ranks of the sales elite quit making excuses for poor performance and accept the fact that your sales skills are not good enough; not nearly good enough. When you accept this truth you can begin to make real progress.

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