Let’s get real.  Every sales person really wants to be an order taker.  Even the sales people who take great pride in being able to manipulate, pressure, or talk people into buying would rather be order takers… if for no other reason than the fact that it’s far more productive.  When you spend your time in front of people who aren’t ready to buy your sales are probably 1/10th of what they could be if you spent the bulk of your time in front of ready buyers.

If you’re the business owner you should want your sales people to be nothing more than order takers too, and here’s why.  If your sales people are order takers that means your marketing efforts are WORKING… that means your sales are up… that means your profits are up.  Plus it also means you don’t need a stable of big headed monster ego sales super stars.  You just need a group of likable… polite… regular Joe sales people.

The Housing Disaster Didn’t Just Happen

There was a time when mortgage loan officers could make a King’s ransom with almost no sales skills.  Yes, not all that many years ago the housing market was so hot clients were beating down the doors at the bank.  All the loan officers had to do was behave like nice polite people and write a ton of loans in a timely manner… and take home 6 figure incomes for doing so.  Well, that’s all changed now…

Car Sales the Ultimate Order Takers…

The car industry is another example of order takers.  Yet, the dealers and their sales people still blow it and here’s why.

It’s no secret… people aren’t nearly as free with their dollars as they once were.  Buying decisions that came easy just a few short years ago are now major decisions.  So people aren’t nearly as likely to run out and buy a new car just because the old one is 2-4 years old.

Plus most people when asked, “Do you want to buy a car?” would respond “No”.  Cars are simply a means to get from point A to point B.  Yet, that’s not why most people buy cars.  Most people buy cars because…

• they want to feel good about saving the planet
• that want to feel power and control
• they want to show off their wealth or give the appearance of wealth
• they want to live like the famous
• they want to own a piece of history
• they want something that says, “I’m steamy, hot, sexy”

You could add many other highly emotional reasons people buy cars.  The automobile industry knows this and that’s why most commercials feed into those emotional motivators.  The car manufacturers know that it’s your emotional motivators that get you into the dealership to buy a car.  Even though most of us absolutely HATE buying a car.

Sometimes dealers and car sales people will do anything to get people into the dealership… including offering free gifts just for showing up… because they think if they can get you into the dealership then they can talk you into buying a car… even though buying a car isn’t even on your radar of things you need to do.

Now, if you are on the front lines selling you understand there is a huge difference between trying to have a conversation with someone you need to “convince” they need to buy a car… and someone who…

• is already looking for a car
• already believes they have the money to buy a car
• has already decided they want to buy a car

… in other words, someone who is a highly qualified buyer.  Yet, the dealer who came up with the “get’em in the door scheme” often expects the sales people to sell cars as though every warm body whose feet touch the lot is a ready buyer… when that was never the case.  Plus, because of the way the dealer set the stage to get people at the dealership many sales were not realized from the people who were ready buyers.

Don’t Send the Wrong Message & Expect the Right Results

The dealer sent the message… “Stop in and get free stuff”.  So lots of people who want nothing more than free stuff show up.  So many, in fact, that the real buyers find it hard to get to a sales person.  Plus the sales person has to start from ground zero with each and every person.

All too often sales people blow the sale with ready buyers because rather than getting to the real reason the buyer is there… all they want to talk about is features.  Now if  you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you know talking about features is an INVITATION to get objections.  Talking about features without being specifically asked about a particular feature… or directly pointing out how a particular feature fulfills a desire the buyer has already stated… sets up an adversarial relationship from the get go.

For example, the ready buyer will let you know they are looking for a Mustang.  The typical sales person will easily uncover that the buyer wants a red convertible with a manual transmission.  However, what they almost never uncover is the reason each element of these criteria is a deal breaker for the buyer.  In the buyers mind it has to be…

• red because that’s what makes it hot
• it has to be a convertible because that’s what makes it sexy
• it has to be a manual because that’s what makes it steamy and an automatic says “pony car” no matter what size the engine

Because the sales person doesn’t understand any of these highly emotional motivators the wheels fall off the cart and the sale person quite often loses the sale because they get caught up in the minutia of the deal rather than what the buyer must hear to buy.

It doesn’t have to happen like that though…

The Right Message Leads to the Right Buyers

Rather than using a message that sets the sales people up for a sales “numbers game”… the dealer would have been better served setting the sales people up with ready buyers.   Sure the dealership would have gotten far less people on the lot.  But the dealership would have sold more cars… at greater profits.

The manufacturer already has commercials that speak to our Mustang buyer.  All the dealer needed to do was send out a message that picked up on that message.  Better yet, the dealer could make certain those ready buyers communicated what marketing message they were responding to so the sales person wasn’t left playing a guessing game.  And that’s so easy to do.  For example, the dealer or the individual sales person could send out post cards and encourage readers to bring those post cards to the dealership because when they do they get something they want… like something that compliments their Mustang purchase.

Anyone Can Get Steamy Hot Sexy Sales…

It’s just a matter of developing your communication… getting it in front of people… preparing your sales force to expect the people that communication speaks to.  No matter what product or service you are selling.

Coach Cheryl

P.S.  Are you getting the right message out there?  Do you need help developing that message and a plan for putting it in action…

Are you frustrated because your “hot” leads list isn’t turning into clients? This is a common complaint among mortgage load officer leads, insurance professional prospecting leads, and leads obtained by all service professionals. How did you get those leads?

Hopefully, you’ve earned your leads through your marketing efforts. That means that these leads are on your list because they’ve responded to your direct mail campaigns, your website, your trade show booth, etc. If you simply purchased a list or bought leads from a business that claims they can deliver “hot” leads to you, uh-oh poor choice.

For the leads you’ve properly earned through your efforts you can turn them into “hot” leads yourself it will just take a little longer than you hoped, but it’s well worth the effort. When a lead responds to your marketing communications you and the lead aren’t necessarily at the same stage in the buying process. They may not be ready to become a client now. When you try to respond to every lead as though they are ready to become a client now there can be a huge disconnect between where they are in the buying process and where you think they are in the buying process.

Buyers can be in one of four stages of awareness and until you know which stage they’re in you can’t know how to properly follow-up with that lead.  Michel Fortin uses the acronym OATH to describe the stages of buyer awareness.

• O - the prospect is oblivious of a need for the solution you offer
• A - the prospect has some awareness of a need for your services, but they’re apathetic about doing anything about it
• T- the prospect recognizes they have a need for your services and they’re thinking about doing something about it
• H- the prospect is fully aware of their need for your services and they want help now because their need is hurting them

People who are oblivious or apathetic won’t usually respond to your marketing efforts becoming leads.  Occasionally they will, but when they do they aren’t ready to become clients now.  And none of the people who respond to your marketing efforts want to hear a sales pitch or be sold.

Even though you may have a list of leads most aren’t ready buyers, so you have to filter those leads to identify the ones who are are ready to act now.  You can help the leads that aren’t ready buyers to become ready buyers by having a system to follow-up with them providing value with each contact.  To sort out the ready buyers you need to get them to help you to discover their reason for wanting what you have, and the reason they want what you have now.

If they don’t have a clear reason and a clear reason for acting now their isn’t a need to know about you and your solution.  So when you follow-up with those “hot” leads you have to get those questions answered so you can find the real “hot” leads and focus your energies on those folks.  You aren’t trying to sell them anything you’re only trying to understand, so you both will know if there is a reason to have a sales conversation.

You need prospects.  You’re having trouble filling your appointment book and that means your sales are down.  In desperation you start asking everyone you talk to if you can meet for coffee.

You think that if you can just talk to them you can turn them into a prospect.  For the most part those thoughts are pure ego.  Most of the people you’re meeting with won’t become prospects and you’ll continue to waste a lot of time and energy trying to convert them into prospects.

That’s not a very smart approach.  Rather than wasting countless hours both trying to talk people into meeting with you, and talking them into doing business with you focus on high quality prospects.  That means you have to learn how to attract high quality prospects.

It’s a whole lot easier and less time consuming than what you’re doing now.  It’s no secret how to get high quality prospects:

• know your market
• know what your market wants
• communicate that you have what they want the way they want it
• give it to them
• base your solution on what’s best for them

In all the hours you’ve wasted meeting suspects who probably won’t ever be prospects you could have developed a prospecting system that would fill your appointment calendar.  And you’d only be meeting with people who are most likely to say “yes”.  And that means you wouldn’t be struggling to fill your appointment calendar and you’d have the financial security you want.

When it comes to increasing sales the bottom line comes down to the traditional face-to-face selling appointment.  But there are a number of things to keep in mind about traditional face-to-face selling.  Not the least of which is what you do to get the opportunity to have a traditional  face-to-face selling conversation.

Many salespeople want to appoint anyone who can fog a mirror because they’re desperate for a sale.  Top Producers won’t appoint anyone who hasn’t met their criteria for an ideal qualified prospect.  Consequently when a Top Producer has an appointment the traditional face-to-face selling opportunity is almost always going to convert into a client.

Whereas when the average salesperson meets their appointments for a traditional face-to-face selling conversation only a few convert to clients.  So what does that do to your self-confidence and ego?  You continually put yourself in situations where you have little likelihood of succeeding while the Top Producers put themselves in situations where they have every likelihood of succeeding.

You put yourself in a position to be rejected.  Top producers work to reject qualified prospects, so when they take on a client they have a good relationship that results from working together to achieve the clients goals.  The relationships you start with your clients are tenuous at best because they aren’t sure if they trust you.

So what can you do to set yourself up for traditional face-to-face selling conversations where you’re likely to gain a new client?  It starts with the way you prospect for new clients.   Prospecting is a little like courtship.  The first thing you need to do is get their attention and interest.

You must do this in a way that positions you as valuable to the prospect.  That doesn’t happen when you follow traditional big marketing practices.  Those approaches are fine for large companies that don’t mind paying to have their own egos stroked.

You, in contrast, can’t afford to waste precious marketing dollars on marketing approaches that don’t produce specific and measurable results.  However you choose to prospect make sure you can track and measure the results from your efforts.  That way you can make improvements and measure the impact.

Instead of thinking traditional face-to-face selling with anyone.  Start thinking traditional face-to-face selling with the right qualified prospects.  Plan your prospecting approach to weed out the wrong prospects and move the right prospects closer to you.

Service business success is tied to your customer/client relationships.  When you talk about your buyers do you refer to them as clients?  If you don’t you should and here’s why.

A client is someone who is under your care in regards to the service you provide.  The fact that they are under your care implies a long-term relationship versus a one time event that is often associated with a customer.  You work with your clients helping them to get a particular result that you’re able to deliver.

Each and every person that works with you in your service business must be keenly aware of this relationship.  When you think long-term life long relationship rather than one time sale there is a big difference in the way you and your staff treat each client.  This is a mind set when it comes to the proper care of clients.

Because each client is expected to be a life time customer you must make meaningful and lasting connections.  Thus it’s important for you and everyone in your organization to get to know each client.  You should know what they like, how they prefer to be communicated with, what there interests are beyond your service, etc.

You should know and care about the things your clients care about just like you would any friend or loved one.  This genuine interest and caring leads to raving fans.  Raving fans don’t drop you over price.  They refer you and they do business with you over and over again.

Make coaching a client mind set part of your standard business training.  Accept no less than the utmost care of every client from every member of your staff.  Make caring client behaviors part of your culture and standards for operation.

Many small service business owners miss the mark when it comes to marketing themselves.  The only reason to market your service business is to produce leads.  Once you have leads you have an opportunity to move them through your sales funnel and earn a customer.

Until or unless your marketing produces leads you’re just throwing your hard earned dollars away.  Unfortunately, ad space sellers have their best interest in mind and they only want to sell ad space.  Never ever waste your money on ads that do nothing more than “get your name out there”.

In fact, before you spend one cent on advertising of any kind make sure you have a message that attracts the attention and interest of your ideal clients.  There are two free or nearly free ways you can test your message before you spend any real money.  First, develop a core marketing message and test it in face-to-face encounters.  Second, draft a marketing campaign of at least 3 if not 5 touches with a clear call to respond in each message.

Don’t get scared when I say draft a marketing campaign.  Your campaign could be nothing more than a series of three letters that you write and send to no more than 30 people a week.  By the time your ideal clients get your last message you’ll know if you have something you can improve on, or if you need to start over.

When it comes to marketing practice my philosophy of “aim small miss small fail forward fast”.  Aim small means that you’ll have a small pool of test subjects that you’re focused on connecting with.  When you do that it means you can’t miss big you can only miss small.  Fail forward fast speaks to the fact that if a marketing communication doesn’t work once it isn’t going to work the next umpteen times, so you have to make improvements until you reveal the message that does work.

You can work on your core marketing message without any financial expenditures.  And you could test a small marketing campaign for the cost of postage for three post cards mailed to 30 people for three weeks in a row.  That will fit into any small business budge, and what you’ll learn will be priceless.

When you’re selling a service you never want to think of or treat sales like an event. If you do you’re setting yourself up to be a perpetual hunter always and forever on the prowl for the next customer. You’ll never achieve more than mediocre success, and you’ll never have a sustainable and viable business.

There are three ways to grow your business. You can get more customers, you can increase the sales value of each initial sale, and you can get more repeat business over the life of your relationship with your customer. It’s pretty easy to immediately see that the best way to grow your business is to develop a life-time relationship with your customers getting repeat business.

When you treat sales as an event you aren’t likely to develop relationships that lead to life-time value. To develop a life-time money producing relationship with a customer you have to provide more value than the immediate sale, and you have to work to maintain the relationship you’ve started with the first sale. But that is far easier to do and provides more financial security than basing your business on one time sales.

Think of sales as an investment activity that is worth far more than the initial sale. Look at your current customers. On average how much is the first sale worth to you? Do they buy again, if so how much is that sale worth? If you were to maintain that relationship over even a ten year period how much would just that one average customer be worth? Starting to get the picture?

Without prospects an agent has no one to sell to. That means that agents are often frustrated because they’re always struggling to get appointments. Out of sheer desperation and exhaustion many agents rely on three things to fill their appointment calendars that are actually detrimental to their business.

Most agents are told they have to cold call to get a business up and going. Cold calling is a big prospecting mistake. Top producers know that if you want to develop a viable business you have to gain the trust and respect of your customers. Cold calling creates distrust and disrespect. Two negative emotions you may never be able to overcome even if they do buy from you.

The second thing many agents do out of sheer frustration is they buy leads. This is a costly mistake. In most cases those “prequalified leads” have been mislead plus you aren’t the only agent who has bought their contact information. Again you aren’t in a position of having their trust and respect and you won’t be able to turn more than a few, if any, into customers.

The third mistake agents make is buying “done for them” marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong those “done for you” marketing solutions can contain some really good stuff. But you don’t know how to adapt it to fit you and your customers, and you don’t know how to correctly implement it.

There are no free lunches. Instead of wasting your precious time and dollars looking for the quick fix instant solution accept that it will take some work on your part and learn how to attract ideal qualified prospects to you. When you make this investment in yourself you’ll never be at the mercy of others again, and you’ll be able to fill that appointment book with people who will do business with you thereby increasing your sales.

One of the great myths held by people in service businesses is that they have to cold call, and that if they do they’ll be able to make it. That’s absolute bunk! Cold calling is one of the worst things you can do to grow your business. It makes you look like a desperate needy loser. And it sets you up for failure. Here are seven cold hard facts about cold calling.

1. Cold calling makes you look needy and desperate because you are. And people never want to do business with people who are needy.
2. Cold calling puts your prospect on the defensive from the onset because they feel like they’re being sold. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to gain their trust.
3. It’s one of the lowest value activities you can invest your time in. You spend countless hours dialing for dollars to get one appointment that either stands you up, or doesn’t buy anyway.
4. Cold calling erodes your self-confidence causing you to close less business when you do finally get an appointment.
5. People are more resistant to cold calls than ever before plus the legal ramifications of calling someone on the “Do Not Call List” could put you out of business.
6. Top producers never cold call and neither should you.
7. There are countless ways to effectively prospect that consistently and predictably produce qualified prospects that reach out to you for an appointment wanting to know how they can do business with you.

Don’t listen to the purveyors of myths and lies. Learn from the best and learn how to get qualified prospects reaching out to you. You’ll have more confidence and close more business in less time than you ever could trying to get business cold calling.

Sales Coaching for Women Who Want to Achieve Great Success

Women in sales sometimes find it difficult to succeed. There are several reasons for this: they aren’t sure how to conduct themselves without being perceived as overly assertive or submissive, they lack the self-confidence required to gain respect and admiration, and they lose focus torn between work and personal demands. Yet there are a few things you can do to change your results.

1. Be confident in yourself and your abilities
2. Identify your strengths and use them to your advantage
3. Set an objective for each and every sales activity
4. Be prepare with an opportunity for prospects to connect with you
5. Have a follow-up plan to build on that connection and get prospects entering your sales funnel

Practice these simple behavioral habits on a daily basis, and you’ll be surprised how quickly your results begin to change for the better. As you get better results your attitude will improve, and as your attitude improves you’ll be more likely to continue these positive behaviors. Theirs absolutely no logical reason women in sales can’t outshine the men with a little sales coaching help.