Episode #362: Sales Assets – More Than Just Numbers

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advancedsellinpodcastgraphicbootAre you utilizing all of your assets in your sales process? In today’s Mailbag Monday episode, veteran sales trainers Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale explore a question from Chelsea about how to use your talents to strengthen your impact when opening doors in sales.

Do you have characteristics of your personality that you ignore when working your sales process?

Do you utilize your personal interests, skills and things you love to do to help you connect with others?

In this episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill and Bryan give you techniques you can use to insert more human elements into your process. They help you focus on the things you love to do outside of sales and put them into use in your sales career. If you’ve ever thought to yourself “What if they don’t like the real me?”, this episode is for you. The world needs more of the “real” person in every sales situation, and Bill and Bryan will tell you just how to do it in this episode.

Also mentioned in this podcast:

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Episode #356: How To Be Your Own Marketing Department

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advancedsellinpodcastgraphicbootDoes your marketing department actually help you generate leads? Veteran sales trainers Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale take on the challenge of lead generation… whether you have a full marketing department or none at all.

What do you do when you’re a high-level sales pro without a marketing department?

Does your marketing department spend most of their time doing promos and not really generating any actual leads for you?

In today’s episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill and Bryan walk you through building your own marketing plan— even if you DO have a marketing department to support you. They teach you what it means to “think inbound” and how to establish your own Voice of a Customer series. If you’ve been frustrated by marketing support (or lack thereof), be ready to take notes and brush up on your mad marketing skills.

Also mentioned in this podcast:

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#354: Mailbag Monday – Competitive Selling Edition

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advancedsellinpodcastgraphicbootIt’s another Mailbag Monday edition of The Advanced Selling Podcast. Veteran sales trainers Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale take a question from Matt, the owner of an IT company in Fort Wayne, IN.

Matt is looking for strategies to encourage customer loyalty and ways differentiate himself in the crowded technology marketplace. Do you have competitors nipping at your existing clients? Do you wake up in the middle of the night concerned about maintaining market share?

In today’s episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill and Bryan help you deal with competitors who offer similar services. They will show you how to identify if you’re making decisions for your customer or for your competitor and if you are really clear on what you want in a customer relationship. Learn to use competition to your advantage by stamping your personality onto what you sell.

Also mentioned in this podcast:

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3 Videos That Will Radically Shift Your Client Positioning and Results

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As you begin to think about 2016, I want you to consider three things to commit to next year.

I want you to create…yes I said “create”…3 videos for the expressed purpose of landing new clients.

How can videos help me land clients? Well….are you ever in for a surprise! Let me start with a blanket statement. OK, it’s my opinion….but a statement it is.

Video will help you tell your story, compel people to seek you out, and help you position yourself properly prior to client contact. 

VIDEO 1

Last week, I was in a coaching session with two sales leaders and their lead generation person. In the conversation, I found that they’re asking prospects to fill out a form on the web, then hit SUBMIT. Then, their lead person emails them back to set up a call. Read more

Marissa Is At The Top Of Her Game. So How Does She Do It?

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I met Marissa last month at an event I was asked to speak at. She was 27 years old and, while attractive, she didn’t turn heads when she walked in the room.

And, she was assertive, but in a serene, comfortable way.

SYSTEM-THE-ROAD-TO-THE-GOAL.

As high achievers usually do, she approached me after my speech and wanted to ask me a few questions about my topic-“How To Be A High Sales Achiever In An Ultra-Competitive Market.”

She asked the question, and scribbled down some of my input. But I could tell something was different about her. So, I asked her how she had climbed to be the top ranked sales person at her software company (a company that has over 100 sales people.)

Here was her formula of how she rose to the top:

1. “I have a web page that offers a free download of a checklist I wrote about how you know if you’re ready for software.” She maintained this was THE thing that was the difference maker. Now, when she’s networking, all she does is meet people, collect their card, and send them a nice email that links to her web page.

NOTE: She spent her own money on the site, the email software behind it, and paid to have the checklist written. This total cost was about $500/year, a pittance when you see her earnings. Read more

Building Your Platform To Make Selling Easy(ier)

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Last week, I got called by a CPA firm who wanted training for their people. This you must know: CPAs are not very good at selling. It’s not that they don’t have the expertise. That’s not it at all.

It’s that selling spooks them. It’s not in their comfort zone.

So, when I get a call from a professional services firm (or any company), I always start with one simple question: Do you have a platform?

Platform

After the weird looks they give me, I go on to educate them to what a “Platform” is.

Platform: definition, A position in the market that you occupy where people look to you for expertise.

Physical Platform

Just as you would speak at a conference from a podium (platform) the same thing applies here. In the physical world, it is you speaking from the stage, on a topic that you have some degree of expertise in, where all eyes are on you.

There, you don’t have to fight for attention. You ARE the show.

In the sales & marketing world, your platform could be a variety of things. LinkedIN is a platform. Any kind of social media could be a platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). Your email list is a platform. A podcast is a platform.

Simply, it is a place where you command attention of the people you’re trying to reach.

Your platform is a positioning tool that raises you above the din of competition and market confusion.

You Have One Right Now, But You May Not Know It Read more

Sales Methodology? Sales Process? Sales Philosophy!

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Lots have been written, some tediously so, about Sales Process and Sales Methodology.  It will make your eyes glaze over. So in this article, I want to clarify what each of these is (in my opinion) and also share a third, more important area of growth for sales driven companies: Sales Philosophy.

Just for clarity, here are my definitions:

Sales Process

It’s the sequence of events that characterize how a customer makes his/her way through from Awareness to Comprehension to Conviction to Action. It is usually discussed in a step-by-step way.

An example: 1) Entry Point, which is how a sales person begins the discussion with a prospect. 2) Needs Assessment, where the sales person asks a series of questions about the customer’s state or circumstance. 3) Education, where the sales person educates the customer as to how similar companies are solving their problem. 4) Alternatives, where the sales person brings a set of alternatives on how he/she might solve the presenting problem. 5) The decision, where the customer makes a decision on moving forward.

Obviously, these will vary a lot depending on your structure, culture, and goals.

Sales Methodology

This is more of an over-arching template, usually branded like Rackham’s SpinSelling, Konrath’s SNAP Selling or Miller-Heiman’s Conceptual Selling. It’s typically the “skill set” portion of selling. How to ask questions, how to position your product in the eyes of the customer, how to frame the value. “How To” is the meme of methodology.

Sales Philosophy

A totally missed and misunderstood element. This deals with the mentality of the seller. How one thinks about one’s self, one’s value, one’s expertise, one’s process, one’s customers, one’s follow up, one’s role in the sales process…etc,

My belief, after 26 years of training teams and coaching people is that a sound philosophy trumps process and methodology every time.

Why? Read more

The One Thing That Will Change Your Sales World

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Apologies to the person who created the “flower and the bee” concept but I think that epitomizes perfectly the problem with most sales processes today.

The-Flower-Does-Not

And do we ever have a problem.

The ‘flower and the bee’ phenomena goes like this: in nature the flower must pollinate itself. It sits there waiting for the bee (one of the many ways pollination happens) to pollinate it. The flower does not labor, nor does it stress about bees showing up. Bees, on the other hand, are scurrying about trying to find food, and pollinating the flower.

In business, sales people are typically the bees and the customer is the flower. Sales people scurry around the country looking for food.

Why does it have to be that way? Why shouldn’t the sales professional be sitting – allowing the prospect to show up for them? Why?

It’s because we don’t plan it out that way. (We actually might, secretly, like the scurrying about looking for plants -err prospects.)

We have bought into the flower/bee process so heavily in sales that we refuse to even admit that it’s all wrong. (We also do this when job searching…wrong again.) Read more

Want to Make More Money? Bring More Value!

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Jim Rohn said it decades ago but it still rings true, if you want more money, bring more value! In this audio clip, Bill lays out a way for you to make more money by becoming move valuable to those who pay you. Your income is a by-product of that, but unless you get your arms wrapped tightly around that concept, you and I might be fighting a losing battle. At your next sales meeting, play this clip and spend 20 minutes discussing it.