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Archive for the ‘Presentations’ Category

A Proposal: To Send Or Not To Send

By Carol Rosdobutko

Clients and prospects tell on a regular basis about how they spend 5 – 20 hours a week preparing proposals for business they are “hoping to get;” however, most of the time their efforts are unsuccessful. Why are we compelled to provide proposals when our ‘gut’ tells us we are wasting our time?

Let’s explore some of the reasons we feel inclined to provide proposals:
1. The prospect asked for it.
2. ‘If I don’t provide the proposal I definitely won’t have a chance at getting the business.’
3. ‘I can show the prospect all the other things that I or my company can do for them.’
4. My proposal will give all the details of how I would solve their problems.
5. ‘I’m not great at asking questions – the proposal will cover the things that I’ve missed.’ (more…)

Posted in Behavior + Attitude, Closing, Customer Relationships, Presentations, Prospecting | 1 Comment »

Don’t Let Your Seagull Become an Albatross

By Hamish Knox

Have you ever killed a sale by bringing up an irrelevant feature to your prospect? Something you, or probably your marketing department, thought you prospect should know about before they signed up?

At Sandler, this is known as “painting seagulls in your prospect’s picture.” Unfortunately, your seagull can quickly turn into an albatross.

(more…)

Posted in Adapting Sales Techniques, Behavior + Attitude, Closing, Customer Relationships, Presentations, Product Positioning | Comments Off

Sales Tips: Sandler Rule #16: Never Ask For The Order, Make The Prospect Give Up.

Posted in Behavior + Attitude, Closing, Customer Relationships, Presentations, Prospecting | Comments Off

Have You Earned the Right to Close?

By Bill Bartlett

There are a lot of great movies that have been written about selling. In fact, Amazon lists the top ten sales movies when you search the site, and, unfortunately, none of them present the sales profession is a very favorable light. Movies like Boiler Room, Used Cars, Tommy Boy, Wall Street, Tin Men and even The Godfather come to my mind when I do a quick scan. Yes, The Godfather! Who can forget the memorable sales pitch from the movie, “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” (more…)

Posted in Adapting Sales Techniques, Behavior + Attitude, Closing, Customer Relationships, Presentations, Sales Development | Comments Off

Video: Sandler Rule #3: No Mutual Mystification

Sales isn’t for the faint of heart. You don’t just encounter negativity on a fairly frequent basis. In many cases, it is your job to sniff it out and address it immediately.

Sandler Rule #3, “No Mutual Mystification,” deals with an issue that often plagues sales professionals–“happy ears.”

When a salesperson has happy ears, it means that they only hear what they want to hear. While this may allow the salesperson to leave almost every meeting with a good feeling, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will close the sale. As a salesperson, your job isn’t just to pick up on the positive cues; your job is to reveal and address potential roadblocks, conflicts and ambiguities with the prospect before they become a larger problem later in the sales cycle.

Listen to Mike Crandall in the above video, and take a minute to reflect on your last few sales meetings. Have your happy ears kept you from completely clearing up the situation for you and the prospect? Have you been adequately recapping conversations? If not, pick up that phone and clear things up. Otherwise, your happy ears will have made an unhappy customer down the line.

Posted in Behavior + Attitude, Customer Relationships, Presentations | Comments Off

Why Do People Have a Hard Time with the Word “No”?

By Carol Rosdobutko

You may not recall the first time you heard the word NO; however, that first time and the many times you heard it after all happened when you were a toddler. You continued to hear the word NO through your childhood years and eventually it became ingrained in your psyche.

Let’s fast forward to you now as an adult. Are you comfortable saying NO to someone? It may be NO because you’re not interested in their product or service. It may be NO that you don’t want to do something, go somewhere, or any number of other reasons. For some reason we don’t like to say NO, however we sure are good at saying things like “let me think about it,” “I’ll get back to you,” “ sounds good but I want to talk to my spouse” or “ I need to talk to the committee.” There are infinite excuses. Why are we so uncomfortable with being honest and just saying NO?

We don’t like rejection–plain and simple. Let’s look at it from a salesperson’s perspective. How often have you heard from a prospect who said they loved your product or service and could see how it would benefit them or their company, but they gave you an excuse as to why they couldn’t buy right then? What if you were assertive–in a gentle way–and let your prospect know that telling you NO was perfectly alright. In fact you’d be happy if they told you NO they weren’t interested rather than give you one of the many excuses that salespeople always hear. Wouldn’t you feel better today knowing the file was closed rather than thinking you were getting the business even though your intuition was telling you otherwise?

Let’s look at it away from the work environment. We’ve all done it – made some kind of excuse rather than say NO. We might give an excuse because we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings by being honest. Isn’t that an odd way of conducting our life? We know we’re not interested; however we feel that we have to protect our family and friends from telling them how we really feel. It’s interesting how we think we need to spare our family and friends from being hurt. Is it the fact that we have such a strong desire to be liked the reason why we don’t want to “rock the boat”?

How do we overcome this aversion to saying NO? First off, we have to figure out why we are so uncomfortable, which can take some coaching and self-study. The next thing is to learn to say NO to the little things that may not have a big impact. A good place to practice this is with those calls we all get at 6pm, just when we’re sitting down to dinner. We don’t know the people calling and they don’t know us, so why not be brave and just say NO?

One of the most interesting things about not wanting to say NO is that we are the one who ends up getting hurt in the end. How many times have you walked away from a meeting with a “call me next week” line and yet when you call, the person has completely disappeared? They won’t answer your emails or return your voicemails. And think about your personal life. Have you ever tried planning a dinner party where it’s important for you to know if someone will be attending or not and you get a “maybe” or “I’ll let you know.” What you didn’t know was that they had no intention of coming for dinner but they just didn’t have the guts to tell you NO. Wouldn’t it be nice if people were just more comfortable with the word NO? Letting people know they can tell you NO helps immensely because it puts both of you at ease. Make it light-hearted by telling them “you’ll still love them even if they say NO.” This is sure to illicit a chuckle.

Here’s the challenge for you in the next 30 days – every time you want to come up with an excuse rather than say NO, take a deep breath and “just say NO”. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?

Carol is a Sandler Trainer with Sandler Training Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Illustration by Rob Green

Posted in Behavior + Attitude, Customer Relationships, Overcoming Obstacles, Presentations | Comments Off

Want to Stand Out in Sales? Work on Your 30-second Pain Pitch

By Jim Dunn

Why should we buy from you? What makes you different than my current _______? Why should I invite you in to see me? We are already doing business with you so why should we look at this new product /service?

Sound familiar? A bit tired of hearing this? Get used to it. This is simply what customers and prospects say to sales people. And we can’t fault the prospect/ customer for asking the question. They don’t have time to waste, and they need a good reason to spend time with salespeople who know how to sell value–whether through a meeting or to view a new product or service.

We also know that people buy emotionally. In fact, we know that people are motivated to action by moving towards what they want, or they move away from what they perceive as pain (something that can hurt).

Here is the problem: sales people try to get appointments by discussing features and benefits (intellectual not emotional), or use “I’ll be in the area, can you see me?” The outcome? Lack of new appointments. Or if a prospect is interested in the product/service the objection often is “your price is higher than your competitor.” Most everyone (your competition) has basically the same features and benefits or with slight differences. Thus, we have become a commodity.

So what is the remedy? Sound different, be different and influence towards what we know about human behavior. We need to know our customers and prospects so well that we can tell them in 30 seconds what we do, what problems we solve and why they would want to invest more time to hear if we can be a good fit.

How do we do this? Let’s structure a good pain pitch with three elements.

1: Make it personal to whom you are speaking (is it a CEO, CFO, what decision maker?).

2: Use emotional words (frustrated, concerned, difficulty with, excited about); remember people are motivated by gain or moving from a problem (pain). Use these words either in a 3rd party story, such as “some of my clients have made a change to our product because they were frustrated by the amount of times they had to slow down production or even shut it down to change the current part.”

3: Take it away. Ask a question in the negative, such as, “I’m not sure this is an issue for you?” or “you’re probably going to tell me that this isn’t an issue for you?”

Watch what happens. Prospects are not accustomed to sales people asking questions in the negative. People hate to be sold or have sales people sound so positive; this approach is different. What’s the goal? Get the prospect to “admit” to an issue. That’s all, or disqualify early without wasting a lot of time with someone. If the prospect says they have a problem, then we’ll discuss the next strategy later, if not, then perhaps we need more bonding, trust, whatever to enhance the relationship.

Jim Dunn is a Sandler Trainer located in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Posted in Overcoming Obstacles, Presentations, Product Positioning | 1 Comment »

Are You Financially Independent?: Change Your Attitude Towards Price Negotiations

By Paul Lanigan

“How and when you discuss money during your sales process has a greater impact on selling success than your price”

A few years ago, I engaged the serivces of a Dublin based PR company to help me promote an event I was organising. I found the two partners of the firm to be pleasant hosts and experts in their field. After a few minutes our conversation moved from small talk to the business matter at hand. It was a fairly straight forward deal so we had almost concluded our meeting within an hour. There was just one important matter we hadn’t yet discussed – money. It didn’t look like they were going to bring the topic up, so I looked the two partners in the eye and said “we should probably talk about money now!”

Their response was intriguing. One of the partners shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the other went bright red, turned to her colleague and tellingly stuttered, “this is where I leave you guys to fight it out” and she left the room.

Both were clearly uncomfortable discussing money. Their attitude towards money was undoubtedly hurting their pocket and doing nothing to inspire confidence in me.

We all grow up with a conceptual view on money. Think about how money was discussed in your home. Perhaps it was rude to talk about money? Maybe you grew up with a belief that money was scarce (“money doesn’t grow on trees you know”).

If, like me, you studied The Merchant of Venice in school, perhaps you’ll recall the dark, money lending character Shylock who wanted his ‘pound of flesh’?

Recall the imagery from Yeat’s September 1913…..

“But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence”

Consider some biblical references to money…..

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”……..

and my favourite……….“The love of money is the root of all evil”

It’s no wonder that we look forward to discussing money as much as a visit to the dentist.

The problem is that if you are uncomfortable because of these ‘hidden’ money messages, you will without doubt communicate your feelings to your prospect. The real problem is that your prospective customer doesn’t automatically associate the discomfort he observes with your childhood messages! It’s much more likely that he will interpret your discomfort as a lack of conviction and confidence. The minutest hesitency, sideways glance or voice inflection is liekly to trigger your prospects unconscious defense system resulting in stalls, think it overs and delays.

None of these options helps you close the sale.

Worse still, because we avoid discussing money, we fail to set the ground rules on how and when we are going to get paid. Merely putting your terms in an email or referring to them in your proposal or quotation, does not establish an agreed set of mutually acceptable ground rules.

The result is that we may end up putting ourselves under financial pressure and find ourselves chasing customers for payment. This invariably means we’ll incur avoidable overdraft fees and the overhead of credit controllers.

Far better to look your prospect in the eye and say “John, one of the conditions attached to my offer is that I get paid on time, in full, every time. I never want to have to chase you for payment. If you can’t make that commitment to me now, we can shake hands and part on friendly terms, but let’s not do business. Are you comfortable with that?”

You may of course fear that having such a frank money conversation may cause your prospective customer to back off?

Not if you have sold him on doing business with you. Let’s face it, if a prospect isn’t willing to commit to paying you on time, every time, when do you want to find that out?

So, if you want to avoid price pressure, discounting and tighter margins and you want to get paid on time, every time, adopt a different attitude towards money. Imagine you believed that you were ‘financially independent and you didn’t need the money’ what would you say and how would you sound?

Paul Lanigan is a Sandler Trainer based in Dublin, Ireland.

Illustration by Rob Green

Posted in Closing, Customer Relationships, Overcoming Obstacles, Presentations, Product Positioning | 4 Comments »

Video: Sandler Rule #24: Product Knowledge Used at the Wrong Time Can Be Intimidating

Acronyms, industry buzz-words, technical jargon–we’ve all used them at one point or another in our jobs. But if you’ve been using them when you’re first getting to know your prospect, you may have made a big mistake.

As Sandler Training’s Jody Williamson explains in the video above, product knowledge used at the wrong time can be intimidating. Every decent sales professional should know their product and their industry top-to-bottom, inside and out. However, it is overwhelming for the prospect if you make it your objective to show off just how knowledgeable you are–especially if you do it when you are first becoming acquainted with the prospect and their business. Once the prospect becomes uncomfortable or feels like they’re simply a spectator to a lecture they don’t understand, you run the risk of forming an association of confusion and discomfort with you and your product/service.

It is up to you to pick up on cues from the prospect to see what level of detail is most comfortable for them, and a safe strategy is to move from general points to more specific details. If you simply try to “show off” your expertise, the prospect may “show off” the door to their office.

Posted in Adapting Sales Techniques, Presentations, Product Positioning, Qualifying | Comments Off

Video: Sandler Rule #39: When All Else Fails, Become a Consultant

“No.”

You heard it. The prospect said no. After all of your hard work, your probing questions, the fight to get the meeting in the first place, the prospect said no. That’s the end of the sales process, and you’ve somewhat succeeded in a sense that you at least got an answer. It’s not a “yes,” but your job is technically done now, right?

According to John Rosso in the video above, you should think again. The post-decision selling process is something that most sales training methodologies do not adequately address. When you hear “no,” that doesn’t mean the window is completely shut on your opportunity. Simply ask the prospect “Now that it’s over, is it okay if I ask you a few questions?” They view this as a non-threatening request, their guard is down, and you have another shot at describing everything they’ve told you and essentially playing the role of a consultant who was hired by them to find a problem. You’ve found the problem, and (hopefully) you have the solution. Spell it out for them, and it may be that your window is just opening–not closing.

Posted in Adapting Sales Techniques, Closing, Overcoming Obstacles, Presentations, Prospecting | Comments Off