What you do between now and the end of the year will impact your 1st quarter of 2008 greatly.

What are you going to do between now and the end of the year?

Here are some questions for you to ponder, reflect and hopefully act on

1. How many prospects do you want to contact between now and Dec. 31st?
2. Based on your closing percentages how many 1st time conversations will you need to have to hit your production goals? How many do you need per week?
3. How many names do you have on your written prospect list TODAY? (Hint – you need to have more than the answer to question number 2).
4. If you do not have enough names on your prospect list when will you sit down and work on your list?
5. What is your prospecting plan? You do have a written prospecting plan for the 4th quarter don’t you? Is it broken down into measurable, weekly activity?
6. How will you track and keep score of your activity?
7. Have you made daily appointments with yourself to prospect? Are they written in your calendar?

I urge you to sit down and devote some quality time to answer these questions and make a plan. After all In the absence of clearly defined goals and objectives anything becomes acceptable.

You are better than that.

Good Selling

Steve

PS Want to join the ranks of the elite?

Why Don’t Sales People Prospect Enough?

Virtually every business owner or sales manager I have ever coached or consulted has listed lack of consistent prospecting by their sales organization as one of the most damaging issues facing their company. This pervasive issue has a long term, crippling financial impact on both companies and their sales people.

While few managers would disagree that this is a major problem, most of them have little understanding of why this is a problem or how to solve it.

Why don’t salespeople consistently prospect?

Fear of rejection. Most prospecting behaviors produce a different result than the positive response sales people were hoping or expecting to get? This experience is internalized by the salesperson as some kind of personal failure. This internalization by the sales person makes no sense and only occurs because the sales person has confused external validation by the buyer with personal worth.

Solution: Help your sales person psychologically reframe their expectation of prospecting and instead of being the rejectee teach them to become the rejector.

Lack of organization and planning. Most sales people, because of their extroverted personalities, do not have natural organizational and self management skills. They tend to “cock and fire” instead of taking time to develop plans, organize, schedule and execute. The result of their scattered approach is that they waste many hours which could be used to prospect for new business.

Solution: Teach and require all of your sales people to submit written plans and schedules of their activities each week.

Not held accountable by management. Most sales mangers have not developed an effective process that holds their sales people accountable to do the necessary prospecting behaviors. They don’t know how or are too busy or disinterested to provide the proper coaching and supervision needed by their sales people.

Solution: Implement a sales management process that teaches and requires sales managers to plan and schedule one on one coaching each week with each sales person.

Lack of knowledge or lack of skill. Most companies don’t offer proper training or coaching on the importance of prospecting, how to develop a prospecting plan, improving personal effectiveness, creative visioning, developing a template of ideal clients, etc.

Solution: Develop a culture and philosophy of continuous, never ending improvement and invest the time and money to make that a reality.

And the biggest one of all is the absence of clearly defined, personally compelling goals. All the other things pale in comparison to this one.

The person who has a passionate goal will not be side tracked by rejection, will not need to be held accountable and will succeed in spite of a lack of organizational skills or knowledge. While all of these things will facilitate success they are not requirements for success.

A sales person who is passionate, focused and committed will go out and
beat on enough doors until they make it happen. More than anything else when you see call reluctance on a sales person’s part it’s because they’re not passionate about going to the next level or achieving the next goal. They have somehow gotten comfortable with the results that their current behavior is producing for them. And as long as they’re satisfied with the results of their current prospecting activities and can live off of the income that’s generated from those activities they won’t increase their prospecting behaviors.

Solution: Spend time helping your sales people answer this question.

Do you have a clearly defined, specific goal that requires you to make more money than you are currently making? Are you absolutely passionate about it? Are you committed enough to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal as long as it’s legal, moral and honest? How can I help you achieve that goal?

Until they can answer WHY the how is unimportant.

Ask any successful salesperson about their early days of prospecting, and you’ll almost feel their armpits itch with anxiety and dread. The real truth is that most prospecting methods fail yet most prospectors rush out and make the same mistakes time and again. Learn new skills and obtain the most valuable tool in a seller’s toolkit by downloading a new, free, 25 page report on prospecting.

This report will help you open business with the ease of a veteran, and you’ll transfer even more confidence to your prospects by learning proven systems and methods that will:

Turn Gatekeepers into Friends
Increase Confidence and Prevent Rejection
Help You Gain More Credibility and Influence

When you download and read to this hard-hitting, authentic report you will learn true nuggets of wisdom to help you Prospect to Fill the Pipeline.

My friend Steve Rae makes some good points in his post about voice mail. His post details how to leave a proper voice mail with someone that you have had some previous contact.

But what about how to leave a voice mail with a prospect that you have never spoken with? That’s a horse of a different color.

If, as Steve says and I believe, most voice mails are deleted in 20 seconds or less, what do you say to get people, who don’t know you, to call you back?

First let’s look at the typical message left by a sales rep:

What is the problem with this approach?

It gives the listener too much information. The second the listener hears the name of your company and what you do they form a premature opinion about whether they need what you are selling and they hit the delete button.

RULE: The chances of getting a return call are directly proportional to how much information you leave.

If you want to increase your odds of a prospect calling you back leave this message:

This works for several reasons:

• It is hard to ignore because it doesn’t provide the listener with excess information.
• It also piques their curiosity
• It gets the listener‘s attention because they don’t know if you are a prospect, vendor, referral or customer and there is a bit of fear about not returning that type of call.

When leaving this message tonality is the key. You will want to slow down your rate of speech, lower your voice and project a confident business like tone.

Will this approach work every time? Absolutely not.

Will it work most of the time? Absolutely not?

Will it work a lot better than what you now do? You bet your sweet bippy.

Good Selling

Steve Clark

PS Read More of Steve’s posts at American Small Business

If you like these posts give each of them a thumbs up.

According to Dave Kurlan, author of Mindless Selling and developer of the Dave Kurlan Sales Profile, there are five major weaknesses that impact success in selling. The most powerful of those is Buy Cycle.

According to Kurlan, “Buy Cycle refers to the process by which salespeople make purchases for themselves. Because salespeople use the same paradigm for buying and selling they will tolerate behavior from their prospects when it is similar and consistent to their own. A buy cycle that fails to align itself with an ideal selling process causes many of the obstacles that salespeople are unable to handle effectively.

For instance a sales person who is a “comparison shopper” when it comes to spending their money will tolerate the same behavior from their prospect because subconsciously it makes sense to do so. Same thing with “I Want To Think It Over”. A non-supportive buy cycle also makes salespeople more vulnerable to stalls, put offs, lies, excuses, sob stories, procrastinators, price shoppers, and researchers.

Salespeople with this weakness agree with the prospect’s reasons for wishing to think things over. Therefore, the prospect’s wish is granted, business is either lost or delayed, and the salesperson wastes a tremendous amount of time performing unnecessary follow-up”.

Despite attempts to tell or train salespeople what they should do in these situations, they continue to say or do things that don’t achieve the desired outcome. Why? Because they cannot escape their own internal programming.

The only solution to this problem is for salespeople to change the way they make purchases. This is not some technique to be learned in any class. This is about personal CHANGE. When salespeople change their buy cycles to support the selling process, the stalls and put-offs that used to derail their process will become momentary delays in a single sales call.

One of the most successful characteristics of high performance individuals is their ability to make decisions. Learn to become a decision maker because “only decision makers can get others to make decisions”. Your role as a sales person is to get the prospect to say either “Yes I do or No I don’t. You can only do this if you BECOME that kind of person yourself.

Face the facts. You know that most “Think It Overs” are really “nos”. That being the case why not gets the no early instead of late in the process. To do this you must get rid of the “head trash”, that says you’ve got to try to sell everybody. That is not going to happen. You and I both know that.

Let’s look at the problems with “Think It Overs”. It wastes your time. It allows your prospect to steal your valuable information and “shop it around”. It allows the prospect to control the sales process. It results in unrealistic pipeline and forecasting. (how much of your current forecast is bogus?) It gives you a false sense of security and when it becomes apparent that there will not be a deal, it’s devastating emotionally. What’s the answer?

Here are two suggestions.

First make sure your initial agreement covers the fact that at the end of the first meeting that there needs to be mutual agreement between you and the prospect about specifically what happens next, when it is going to happen and what decisions will be made at the next meeting.

Second develop the mindset that your prospect must convince you that there is a reason for your continued involvement in the sales process. In other words, if you’re having any doubts that the two of you should continue the process tell the prospect. Then let him convince you why you should stay involved. The prospect must convince you not vice versa. This takes courage. Unfortunately, most salespeople don’t have it.

MOST of the people who are in need of what you sell don’t even know they have a need. Therefore, they will not seek help on their own. If you are to be successful you must identify your target market and then begin to contact those people.

The most effective way is to pick up the phone and call these people to see if they have any interest in talking with someone who does what you do. This approach is not complicated or difficult. The key to being successful in this approach is to have an effective 30 second commercial that identifies 3 to 5 “pains” that you help people fix or improve.

“My name is _________. May I take 30 seconds and tell you why I called and you can tell me if you want to talk any further?” (Most people will say OK. Some will not. Don’t worry about it. Just hang up and call someone else.)

“I work with clients who are

Frustrated…
Upset…
Concerned…
Angry…

Once you have completed this ask them “Are any of these things important enough for you to spend two minutes talking about ?” (If they say yes continue by asking “Which of these issues is the most important?”

Get them talking and you will help them discover for themselves that they may need what you have.

If you will use this approach you can make 35 dials per hour, contact 5 to 7 people, and make a least one appointment. The beauty of this approach is that it is quick and inexpensive

You know the drill. You meet with a prospect and immediately they want you to spill your guts about what you do, how you do it, whom you do it with and how much you do it for. They want you to do this and yet they are unwilling to share with you what their problems are, how much money they have budgeted and how they go about making decisions.

Why does this happen and more importantly how do you prevent it from happening to begin with? The why parties is easy to explain. Ignorant managers have taught salespeople that “sales is a numbers game” and that the more proposals they give the more sales they make. Consequently, they run all over the planet puking, vomiting and pitching product information to anyone who will fog a mirror. The result of this is that prospects have been conditioned that they should receive and are entitled to a “free education” from salespeople. So when you show up they expect you to jump through hoops and spill your guts like the last incompetent peddler.

How do you stop this? First you must make a decision to stop doing it. Secondly, when you meet with a prospect establish some Rules of Engagement. This amounts to setting an agreed to agenda as to what will be discussed and in what order it will be discussed. As part of this process you must tell your prospect that you are not there to pitch product, give a quote or give a demo or presentation.

You tell them that you are there to conduct an evaluation of their situation much like what a physician would do and that like a physician you don’t make diaganosis or write prescriptions until you have done a thorough examination. If your prospect resists letting you conduct an evaluation and insists that you give them a “quote or proposal’ you politely get up and leave. That way you avoid wasting your time and theirs. It takes guts to do this but in the long run you will be better off.

A large majority of salespeople struggle to get in front of enough prospects to keep their pipeline full. As a result, they feel desperate, have a difficult time dealing with rejection, and often avoid asking the tough questions to find out if they really should be spending their time with someone. This leads to a long selling cycle, inefficient time management, and ultimately, failure.

The solution: Make prospecting a game. Here’s a great idea to prime your pipeline and put the fun back in prospecting!

The 20 Point Daily Activity System

• 1 point for a telephone contact with a decision maker.
• 1 point for a “customer service” call on an existing client.
• 2 points for forcing a decision to a “NO”.
• 2 points for setting an appointment.
• 3 points for getting a referral.
• 4 points for a face-to-face meeting.
• 5 points for a sale.

What makes this work is a management principal that says, “What gets tracked gets done.” Earning points gives you a target that lets you a reward. You can modify this system to fit your situation if you want, but don’t quit until you get your 20 points daily. Your goal becomes getting your 20 points not making sales. This takes all the pressure off of you. When you get your 20 points daily reward yourself. If you do this you will make more sales and feel better about yourself because you know you are doing the right activities.

(Thanks to our old friend John Condry, Career Success Seminars, for this idea.)

What keeps you from Prospecting regularly? A student in one of my classes once answered that question with “just about everything” and there was a loud laughter of recognition from the rest of the students in the class. I mean, they said things like laundry or dishes might even come first. If prospecting is something you’d rather not do, then you must not be having fun with it.

There are two types of prospecting. You can make cold calls or you can call people you know. The highest and best use of your time prospecting is with the people who already trust, know and like you. Yet, I find, most salespeople are not fully leveraging these contacts because they don’t want to be seen as pushy. Most of us abhor telemarketers and we think when we are calling to build our business we fall into that category.

Call the people you know and just check in with them. Call to connect, to deepen your relationship. They may not be ready to buy again but they likely have 250 people in their sphere of influence. Staying top-of-mind is the way for them to mention you when they hear of someone thinking of making purchase.

For fun, just try calling fifteen (15) people a day and have an authentic, friendly conversation. This is even a better exercise to do on one of those days when things aren’t going your way and you have crotchety unreasonable people you are dealing with. It will give you an attitude adjustment.

It’s the magnetic Principle of Attraction: When you enjoy what you are doing, you attract others by your energy and people want to be around you and refer their friends and family to you. When you are working to do the numbers and are serious about needing business, you repulse and turn people off.

Sometimes, it’s time to crank up business we need to stir up the cosmic dust BIG TIME. When that occurs, the more fun you can put in it, the easier it will be to focus and kick some serious butt. Let’s take a look at how you are going to approach it.

How about next time you prospect make it your goal to get 15 “no’s”. Just keep calling until you get those 15 “no’s”. Do you think if you did that with no attachment to how many “yeses”, you should be getting that you might actually get some “yeses”? Now, I don’t mean be sloppy about it. What I mean is let go of the outcome and don’t take it personally.

If they say “no” don’t internalize it as personal rejection. It is more about them and where they are at that moment. Your job is just to listen to what they really say and then give it your best shot rather than having your self-worth based on whether or not they agreed to see you. The other useful part of this exercise is honing your skill. So after each call, note in a journal what worked and what didn’t. Then on the next call, tweak your approach. Play this game today and realize you win when you get 15 no’s??

As Jimmy Buffet says,” Fun is about the best habit there is.”