Brain Breach

Having experience playing important roles in a couple business, I found myself quite familiar with many ares of business. One area I hadn’t researched was sales. How does one become a respectable salesman? After spending an hour in Barnes and Noble’s business section, I picked up Exception Selling. Certainly, I am not proposing I lead this area in my company, but until the resources justify a sales team, here we go.

The following are some of my notes on the adventure. I recommend this book, but I don’t know what that’s worth to you, being my first book on sales.

Exceptional selling, notes

Pages 1-50

• when you are feeling pressure, you are doing something wrong
• never answer unasked questions

• just making a value proposition makes customers see your service as a commodity. Then they make a decision based just on price.

• don’t be a lecturer, It’s a ineffective way for them to learn.
• stop persuading and start collaborating

• don’t come in thinking you are a salesman, but a trusted advisory

• value proposition is not enough, everyone offers that.

• value gap, the gap between what you think it’s worth, and what customers do. crossing this gap is done by offer the customer value as they see it in their world

Sales life cycle

value proposition – tell them what you do

value assumption/premise – something you both agree could be a value to them, and MIGHT be confirmed after further investigation.

value absent – investigate the consequences of absent value, quantify, and show

value required – the customer acknowledges value is required

value expected – where you confirm exactly what can be done, for how much

value achieved

Pages 50 – 100

• diagnosis mindset is opposite from presentation mindset.

• you diagnose WITH the customer. selling is something you do TO them(bad)

• go for the ‘no’ early and often. make sure they are ready for what you offer, and if they aren’t, move on quickly to qualified sales leads

• diagnose the problems without insinuating they are incompetent

Mindset

– change guidance
– mutual self respect
– don’t let them run over you
– emotional maturity
– you must remain emotionally detached, but professional in tune

• the process,
  discuss, diagnose, design, deliver,
  the following is the application of those.

• be prepared , and research the company/person you are calling.

• people won’t reject you if you aren’t being a salesman.

• the first call should be one of discovering the problems, from the people closest to the action. – Questions like: do you see this happen? What are the results? – Ask for facts and consequences, – don’t talk about yourself for more than a few seconds

• discovery conversations are not sales calls

• cold call script, pg 92
• towards discovery stage script, pg 97

• don’t answer with questions
• When getting customer is digging to deep before you have appropriate information, keep answers to 20 seconds, and continue where you left off.
• The questions will be; how much and how long, etc. Answer, and get back to learning about them.

• give the customer a small assignment, it keeps them engaged and conjures a sense of collaboration

• high probability to close sale when they learn they have great need

Pages 100 – 220

• once you have permission to move on, start the diagnosis.

• this phase is about thinking of their situation, not your solution

• never let the customer self diagnose, you have the domain expertise

Diagnostic conversation model

– what is happening
– why is it, how bad
– is it bad enough to act on?

• don’t use insulting questions when exploring what they said. neutral ones like ‘can you help me understand ‘not fast enough’’ ?

• questions should start with asking observations, not accusations.

• never insult competition, acknowledge them.

• ask what methods they have used already to fix the problem. don’t assume they haven’t tried.

• let the customers co-create the solution with you, this way, you get a better solution for them, and they gain more trust with customer.

• ask questions from customer point of view; ‘when would you like to see this solution up and running?’, not ‘when can you make a decision?’.

• actually, that’s wrong wording by Thull, again. more like, ask questions from a customer value position, not a sales value one.

Proposals – a confirmation on what has already been decided

1. No surprises
2. Us their wording/phrases wherever you can

• don’t skip diagnosis even if they think they have a problem. they don’t know the value of fixing it until you lay it out for them.

• if you can’t put a cost to the problem, you don’t have a problem

Financial conversation

– how much does our absence cost them?
– What return can they expect from solution?
– How much is that worth to them?

• it’s critical that company execs take part on the sales team when talking to other execs. they have the experience and depth of knowledge regarding their value

This is best illustrated with a story.

ScreenBird Presenter was in its alpha stage, and had little traction in the presentation community, so I went to advertise on GoogleAdwords. What quicker way to get customers for my program? Having seen the effects good Adword campaigns, I know it was a sure bet. Sign up and registration was very straight forward, as was the actual process of setting up the campaign. There is however a learning curve to the whole program. In fact I have watched the creator of Adwords give a lecture, so I appreciated the complexity that goes into the whole program.

What do you know, it worked! For the paltry sum I put into the effort, I was able to show successful installs of ScreenBird. So now it’s time to spend a bit more cash elsewhere, and get a taste of the landscape. Thus we are lead to Yahoo!

Sign up first. Ok, simple, I have three Yahoo! id’s, so I will just use one of those. REJECTED! Hmmm, I will suffer, make yet another i.d. for some reason. With all the Google services I use, I have but one id. Now we go to setup the campaign. That wasn’t too bad, and I would say comparably nice to Google’s tools. I am on a roll now, and pause……. I get an error page during the very end of the process. Too many questions; did my new i.d. take, or do I start over again? Do I just wait for something magic to happen? Is my campaign live? I reload the page to get the same error.

Well bugs happen, but such a large one on your main revenue stream? Three days later I get an email welcoming me to the ad service.

That my friends, is righteously bad after-marketing!

The problem is the message took so long to arrive, and the processes of enrolling was just uncomfortable enough that I am reluctant. The experiential side of their after-marketing was the problem. I haven’t given them too much of a chance to try their other after-marketing techniques on me.

This is similar to buying a new product, and receiving a terribly written manual to jump start your experience. If Yahoo exercised great after marketing in this one little area, they would have my measly cash, and others that maybe shared my experience.

After-marketing happens after the buy-in or sale.  Experience can also be categorized under aftermaketing.  Aftermarketing one of those things that helps retain customers if done well. A 5% decrease on customer desertion can lead to 25%-80% revenue gains, depending on your industry.

There is such a great marketing opportunity after your customer has bought in, and it can be wasted with a bad experience and poor planning, or a great one with opportunities to pitch upgrade services.