Previously as part of the “Strategic Sales Master Plan” you defined your mission.  As you recall your mission describes how you will move your hands and feet.  While your vision is long-term in nature something you work toward over several years your mission is what you absolutely must accomplish this year.

Your Mission is Your Line in the Sand

Your mission represents the line in the sand defining what you will accomplish within the next year no matter what because it’s that important.

You can’t achieve your mission without successfully accomplishing the 5 critical factors.  And you can’t fulfill the critical factors without the goals you’ve written down.  In combination each piece provides the foundation required for a successful service business.

Goals represent the actions you will take to fulfill the critical factors.  You have a list of goals.  If you’ve done a thorough job you probably have at least 5 goals listed in relation to each critical factor.  Doing the math that means you have a goal list with at least 25 goals.

Now that could feel a little overwhelming.

Goal Playoffs

If you’re a sports fan this next step will be an easy one.  You can’t focus on so many goals at once because it is just too overwhelming.  So we need to whittle your list down to your top 3 most important sales goals, and put all your focus on those goals first.  Once one goal is completed you can then move another goal into your top 3 list.  So here’s how to play the goal playoff game.

Get all your goals on one list.  Now compare the first goal on your list to the last goal on your list and choose which goal is more important right now.

Place an asterisk next to the more important goal between the two.  Keep working your way to the middle of your page putting an asterisk next to the more important of the two goals.

photo credit: Sweet One

The last one may not have another goal to compare it against so that goal gets an asterisk by default.

Next start at the top of your list and compare with first goal with an asterisk to the next goal with an asterisk and decide which of those two goals is most important and place a star next to that goal.  Continue until you run out of goals.

photo credit: Lummmy

Now rank order the goals marked with a star from most important (1) to least important.

At this point you now have your 3 most important sales goals.

Making Progress

You really need to accomplish most of your goals to accomplish your mission so simply completing these 3 goals is not enough.  You must continue to make progress throughout the year.  So when you’ve successfully completed a goal you mark that goal as completed, and select a new goal from your goal list to put in your top 3 most important sales goals list.

Some of your goals are never actually completed because you will always need to take that action.  For those goals accomplishment is defined by your ability to successfully take those actions, and produce the intended result.  When you get to that point you continue the action and add a new goal to your top 3 most important sales goals because those actions are now just part of your normal behaviors.

Okay, get to work and pick your top 3 most important sales goals.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

It can be extremely frustrating when you see other business owners doing the same things you are getting clients when you aren’t.  It can be downright maddening, in fact.  You begin to wonder if the problem is you?

Well, if you have a pleasant personality and you sell a service that produces outcomes people are willing to pay for it isn’t just YOU.

It isn’t so much what the people who excel at sales prospecting do that empowers them to get clients.  It’s in the way they approach it including the order they do things.

Lots of service professionals offer a free coaching session or consultation as a first step in their sales prospecting process.  Once upon a time when no one else did this it was a successful prospecting tool.  That is, as long as you understood how to handle that free session and didn’t make the mistake of just giving away an hour of work getting nothing in return.  Ian Brodie shares my sentiments that giving away free coaching sessions or consultations no longer works.

Here’s why those “free” sessions aren’t working.

First, those free sessions have become so common prospects immediately recognize them for what they are… sales appointments.  It’s no different than your insurance agent offering you a “free” insurance review.

So, that free session does one thing.  It triggers your prospects defenses.

Once you trigger a prospects defenses it’s very difficult to overcome that defensiveness and gain their trust.

The second reason those sessions aren’t working is they are used in the wrong order.  Just think about it.  If you use a free session as the first step in your sales prospecting process you are making this offer to a complete stranger at the point they are most skeptical.  A “free” consultation or coaching session should only be offered after you’ve established a certain level of trust with the sales prospect.

Those who excel at sales prospecting develop these skills:

1. Research - They do their homework on their sales prospects
2. Science - They develop a sales prospecting process that respects the natural science of the relationship building process
3. Processes - They develop and automate the relationship building process
4. Listening - They listen and respond accordingly
5. Attraction - They pull their sales prospects toward what they are already looking to buy rather than trying to push them in a direction they don’t want to go

Increase your sales prospecting effectiveness by improving your skills.  Then if you want include a “free” session in your sales prospecting process rethink where you put it in the sales prospecting process and how you use it.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

If my clients in the insurance and financial services industries are any indicator then I would have to say every sales manager in the insurance industry must tell every rookie that sales prospecting is something you have to hit hard when you are getting started.  However, they also tell those insurance rookies that once you have a client base you won’t have to prospect hardly ever.

REALLY???

If that makes sense then I suppose you believe that if you eat a really great meal on Thanksgiving you won’t have to eat again until the next big holiday meal…

If that were true I wouldn’t have people 15-18 years in the industry begging me to help them get sales prospects because they’ve found buying leads, sending out pre-approach letters, begging for referrals, cold calling, etc. just isn’t cutting the muster and paying the bills.  Here they are at a point in their business when they should have financial security with an eye on retirement.  Instead they see their revenues falling with little hope for increasing their sales.

Sales prospecting is a necessary process in EVERY business just like the other processes required to operate your business.  You either develop an effective process that produces the results you want, or continue to deal with sales prospecting problems.  You wouldn’t keep patching the tire on your delivery van if you ran a distribution business hoping it won’t go flat.  So, why would you accept an ineffective sales prospecting process?

Sales Prospecting Problems Don’t Go Away Unless You Make Them Go Away

Even if you work REALLY hard in the beginning.  You gut it out playing the insane numbers game.  Somehow you manage to build a business yet you will always need a sales prospecting process that produces new highly qualified prospects for you without having to work that hard to get them.  Once you have a client base you simply won’t be able to work harder at sales prospecting because there won’t be enough hours in the day.

Facts are Facts

Even if you have a huge client base now you will always lose clients through natural attrition:

• Some will move away
• Some businesses will close, some clients will even die
• Plus the needs of others will change

That means if you struggle to attract sales prospects now… the problem won’t go away.

Rather than having good prospects coming to you, you will have to go out and hunt those prospects down.

So, if you think sales prospecting is time consuming when you are starting out and only have a few clients, how will you feel when you have enough clients to keep you busy?

My clients tell me they feel like they are at the end of their rope.  They already have a lot of work to do: managing employees, taking care of clients, keeping up with their training and certification, etc.  Plus it’s been so long the thought of getting out there again and sales prospecting literally makes their stomachs churn.  They don’t want to do what they did to get where they are now the way they did it in the beginning.

Sales prospects don’t magically appear the only way to make them appear is to develop processes and systems that make them appear.  And does it in a way that doesn’t require you doing all the work.

I talk about this in “The Blueprint for Increased Sales” and go into the exact details for how to make it happen with my clients.

If getting sales prospects is a challenge then make the commitment to do what you need to do to develop an effective sales prospecting system as soon as possible.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

photo credit: Svadilfari
Many entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals invest a lot of time, energy, and dollars developing a brand.

The idea is your brand is supposed to attract the right buyers to you. However, if the brand you’re working under lacks one thing it’s worthless perhaps even worse than worthless.

A brand is supposed to create a mental image and communicate meaning to a specific audience. It’s intended to communicate something important to the right potential buyers about your business and what you offer. Ideally you want your best potential buyers to only think of you when it comes to your brand.

So you want to be the Kleenex of facial tissue or the Hertz of rental cars. Great. The top brands own a market for a specific thing.

To get to that level of market dominance requires the ability to saturate your market and that only happens through the frequency of your message and the prominence of your message. Of course, if you aren’t already a top contender that also means investing enormous sums of money. And that’s just not realistic for most entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals.

To dominate your corner of the market you must carve that market down into smaller more specific slices. Then you must focus on making sure your brand message contains the one thing so many brands lack that make them nothing more than expensive failures.

That one thing is relevance.

Now the thing is relevance changes. Relevance changes because of changes in the external environment and brand saturation. So if you’re just formulating and developing a brand you absolutely must focus your brand on the number one most important thing to your best future buyers right now.

If your brand fails the relevance test it’s like you’re riding around on an old nag trying to sell what you have to offer. You and what you have to offer look old, tired, uninteresting, and unimportant. No one voluntarily responds to you or your message.

When you get the relevance test right you and what you offer look interesting and people do respond to your message. Here are some things to check your brand against to ensure relevance:

• It reflects my best potential buyer’s current environment
• It communicates answers to my best potential buyer’s most pressing questions
• It communicates expertise producing my best potential buyer’s most desired results

Is your brand relevant?

==================================================================================

Where is Your Revenue Growth to Come From?

In these challenging times, sales executives and managers tend to spend more time with strategic questions. They often try to find answers to these questions by using models designed to define growth strategies on a company level. These models have proven to be ill-suited for the purpose of defining sales growth strategies. A customer centric sales growth strategy model is therefore proposed as a framework on how to define sales growth strategies and identify the challenges linked to those strategies. The findings of this model can then be reconciled with the corporate growth strategies. The model also defines the type of resources (people) needed to execute those growth strategies.  Webinar April 30 1:00 EDT  Sign-up here to register at a discount

photo credit: rq?

Do you have a stack of business cards stashed somewhere in your office?

How hard is it to find the one you want when you want it?

Have you ever wanted to refer someone and then discovered you didn’t have their contact information so you spent hours looking for it just so you could do a good deed?

There may be a solution that’s just right for you.  DubMeNow offers this cool service that allows you to send your business card to any mobile phone, provides automatic updates,  and a bunch of other pretty handy stuff.  Check it out.

==================================================================================

Sales 2.0 and Selling to Big Companies

This event is for sales people, sales managers and CEOs who want to keep up with how sales is evolving in a Web 2.0 world.  New tools are available, and continue to come-to-market, that give us additional selling approaches.  The speakers believe you need to keep up with these changes or become a “sales dinosaur” — especially during in a recession!

The speakers will cover:

* What is Sales 2.0?
* Why should I care?
* How will Sales 2.0 help me sell to big companies?
* Is Sales 2.0 something I should bother with during a recession?

April 28 1:00 EDT Sign-up here to register at a discount

photo credit: Csaba_Bajko

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or sales professional you need all the help you can get to make your life easier.

You balance a lot of responsibilities throughout your day.

You simply have to make the most of every opportunity that comes your way.

Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised to find how much a simple tool can do to improve your life.

I’ve decided to share 7 of my favorite tools with you because I hope you find them as useful as I do. Some of these tools are completely free others require a small investment or a trip to your local library. In any case there’s nothing preventing you from trying these tools and improving your life. Plus you could increase your sales along the way.

So here’s the list not listed in order of importance:

1. Cool Timer - This is a piece of free software you download to your computer. You can use it as a stop watch, a timer, or an alarm. Now you never have to search for a stop watch or worry about dead batteries. Just click on the icon on your desk top anytime you want to use it. One of my favorite ways to use it is to manage 30 minutes of focused and concentrated work.
2. Mindmeister - This is another free tool you get simply by registering. Don’t just use this tool for projects use it to plan out anything involving several actions. When you’re finished your mind map is saved to your account plus you can print out this neat and tidy mind map to use as you take those desired actions so you never miss a beat.

   Behind every successful person is a good library. Here are a couple books you must add to yours.

3. ”The Race to Success – Make Time to Win” - The way you use your time is a big differentiator between the super sales producers and the average producers. If you find yourself rushing from one thing to another with no end in sight; if you rely on a calendar, PDA, or CRM yet they don’t seem to work this book will help you understand why. Make sure your local library has at least one copy.
4. ”The SPIN Selling Fieldbook” - Neil Rackham isn’t a sales person he’s a researcher. The fieldbook takes his research and transforms what he learned into actionable sales ideas. Anyone selling an intangible or a high ticket item must have this book and internalize it.
5. ”The On-Purpose Person” - Kevin McCarthy will help you do something few people ever do, most wouldn’t even think of doing, and everyone who wants huge success must do. This book will get your head in the real game.
6. Carbonite - I’ve had a computer crash on me so many times I’ve lost count. Each time it was a dramatic traumatic experience. Each time there were things I lost forever including precious contacts. You can get a free trial for this service that quietly works in the background so when that crash happens you can restore absolutely everything including all your computer settings in minutes.
7. Google Calendar - The reasons I like Google calendar include the fact you can share your calendar, you can have more than one calendar, you can access from any computer, and your calendar syncs automatically with your phone. So you can check and make appointments from your phone and they automatically appear in your Google calendar online.

How many of these sales tools are you using?

photo credit: OakleyOriginals

Remember when you wished for fun things like toys and vacations and such?  Now it may seem like the one thing you wish for each day throughout the day is…time.  As you constantly remind yourself you have to hurry up.

I know this will shock you BUT right now you’re chosing not to have enough time.  It isn’t a conscious choice.  Instead you choose never to have enough time by not chosing to decide how you’ll invest your time.

You have no more nor no less time than anyone else.  Have you noticed how the top producers seem to have time to enjoy life?  Are you thinking when you get there you’ll have time too?

Unless you change the way you use your time now you won’t have any more time  later than you do now.  You won’t flip a switch and instantly have all the free time you want.  You won’t, that is unless you…

Get serious about how you use your time now.  Right now huge chunks of time are slipping through your fingers.  You don’t know where they go.  You don’t know what you did during those chunks of time.

One of the first things you can do to get more time is discover exactly how you’re investing your time now.

Only after you’re armed with this knowledge can you make wise decisions about how you’ll invest your time from now on.

Join me for this free event (click here to register –> “Time! The Key to Your Sales Success” as I show you how to get more time.  You must register to attend.

You started the year with big plans.  The first quarter is nearing an end.  How are you doing?

Less than 60% of all sales people hit their targets.  The sales game has changed and it’s time to change your game by revamping what you’re selling to better fit what your clients want now.

Sales Resolution (video link)

Sales Resolution (audio link)

Join me for this free event where I show you how to hit your targets in less time (click here to register –> “Time! The Key to Your Sales Success”  You must register to attend.

photo credit: nd.strupler

Sometimes it can feel like you’re in a race to sell more.  You think you just need to do more to sell more.  You think if you make more calls, and hold more appointments your sales will go up.

The problem with this approach is that eventually you reach the point when you just can’t do more.  There aren’t enough hours in the day to do more.  You have every second of every hour of every day tied up and there’s no where to go to get more time.

At that point you realize doing more isn’t the answer.  The answer is doing less more effectively than you are now.  There are two components to this solution.

First, you have to produce greater results from your actions.  Second, you have to automate as much of the marketing and sales process as you possibly can.  Then, and only then, can you do more in less time with better results.

To produce greater results from your current actions you first have to know what actions you consistently take.  Then you have to know the results those actions produce.  At that point you can focus on the actions that produce results and challenge yourself to improve your actions to improve your results.

You’d be surprised how much of what you do now could be automated if you just thought about it.  When you automate things you know they’ll happen, you know they’ll happen consistently, and you can track your outcomes.  Just like the actions you take by moving your own hands and feet you can improve the outcomes of your automated actions so it takes even less work on your part.

Join me as I show you how to get more time than you have now in this free event (click here to register –> “Time! The Key to Your Sales Success”  You must register to attend.

Referrals are a quick and easy way to build and maintain a successful business.  The best way to get referrals is to develop a system or process to produce them.  Whenever possible automate your system.

That way it will get done and it will get done consistently.  Then you can track your results and focus on what works.

Join me for this free event where I show you how to get more time (click here to register –> “Time! The Key to Your Sales Success”  You must register to attend

Sales Referral Success (video link)

Sales Referral Success (audio link)