Sales Blog with Sales Tips

The reason our customers buy from our company is because of us. This truth tells us that sales professionals need to focus on their personal value – versus corporate value – when interacting with customers.

Corporate Value
During our initial sales training, we are drilled on our company’s corporate value propositions. These are all the things our company does that are presumably better and theoretically different from our competitors.

However, in the eyes of the customer, our competitors look more like our brothers or sisters. Our customers don’t fully appreciate all the effort our marketing department is expending in an attempt to differentiate between our company and our competitors. Companies are very limited in the number of believable value propositions they can actually come up with.

But, there is one clear differentiator we have complete control over. Our competitors can’t replicate it.  It’s one that makes all the difference. One with an endless number of possibilities.

You.

Personal Value
Faithfully towing the company line and exclusively promoting corporate value propositions causes us to miss many opportunities to stand out from the crowd. It is also much easier to differentiate ourselves through personal value instead of corporate value.

We are not restricted in the number of ways for us to personally be prominent and distinct in our industry. The principle of personal value is right under our nose and we’re not using it to our advantage.

A Simple Example Of Personal Value We Can Add Right Now
As sales professionals, we tend to fixate on all the problems our customers’ voicemail systems cause us.

How about our own voicemail and the problems it causes our customers? We can differentiate ourselves from 99% of our competitors by merely updating our voicemail on a daily basis and returning calls according to what we’ve promised in our voicemail greeting.

If we’re going to be out of the office, we must say so and let callers know when they can expect us to return their call. Most importantly, we must ensure that we return their call precisely as we’ve indicated – never make them wait more than two hours for a return call.

By updating our voicemail every morning, we look up to date, relevant and like a sales professional who is on top of things.

Sales Blog Epilogue
The example above is but one of many easy and straightforward personal differentiators that make us look proactive and professional. We are only limited by our imagination and the industry we serve when it comes to creating our own personal value propositions.

Further sales blog reading:
Our Professionalism May Be Killing Us
Value Propositions, Corporate and Personal
Quirky Sales Professionals
Your Personality is What the Customer Wants to See

>You can automatically receive Sales Tips Blog by Scott R. Sheaffer >by email< or >by RSS<.
>Follow >Scott R. Sheaffer< on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
>©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

Advertisement

Are you satisfied with your sales results?
Kay Ray can show you and your team how to reach
your objectives and unlock the door to success.
thekayray.com

A Sales Tips Blog subscriber recently wrote to me:

“…As a new sales rep, I used to dread role-plays. Those were typically done with a manager, and that pressure was far greater for me than meeting with a CEO. Perhaps you can give some ideas for both Sales Managers and less experienced Sales Professionals on how to improve those teaching/learning opportunities…

“Thanks again for all the great sales blog thoughts! Trevor A.”

Why Most Sales Role-Playing Exercises Are Junk
1. Sales managers normally handle role-plays, as Trevor notes. This adds a level of anxiety that isn’t present in real selling environments. We tend to perform for the sales manager instead of exercising our real world selling skills.

2. Customers and sales professionals are usually sitting face-to-face during telephone role-plays. How many customers have picture phones which provide body language cues?

3. For role-plays to be a true learning experience, most sales managers think they need an audience. They want the whole group to learn something. How often do we make sales calls with 20 people observing? The worst examples of this are role-plays done with the participants using microphones in front of an audience of hundreds. Get real.

4. Every call we make is not a first call, yet almost all role-plays are first calls. Great, the sales professional can repeatedly demonstrate the ability to introduce himself or herself; now what?

5. In virtually every role-play I’ve observed (too many), the person who is acting as the customer plays it either as a pushover or an extremely difficult person. In the real world of sales, we operate 98% of the time in-between those extremes.

Sales Tips For Role-Plays That Actually Teach Something

• Bring in a real customer. It doesn’t get any more authentic. Every selling organization has customers that would be more than willing to help in this area. I’ve done it myself with great success. Most sales managers don’t do this because it takes planning and they’re afraid of what they might hear as feedback from the customer.

• Use real customer scenarios when staging a role-play. Instead of creating a make-believe customer on the fly, gather information from a real customer and use them for the role-play. This makes things more believable.

• The sales manager needs to play the role of the sales professional sometimes (I love seeing sales managers sweat when the tables are turned). Salesperson to salesperson role-plays work well too. Sales managers need to avoid playing the role of the customer.

• Participants need to sit back to back when conducting telephone role-plays. This precludes any body-language input.

• Lose the audience and conduct role-plays with just the customer, salesperson and possibly one other person. Don’t always conduct them in a conference room either. Use a real office and have the customer sit behind the desk.

• Practice 2nd, 3rd and 4th calls to customers. A contract signing role-play is critical, yet almost never done.

• When playing a customer, pick the middle of the road on the nice-guy vs. bad-guy continuum. This is the temperament level we normally encounter with customers.

Sales Blog Wrap Up
Hope this helps, Trevor, and thanks for your question.

Further reading:
The Four Mandatory Steps of Customer Meeting Preparation

>You can automatically receive Sales Tips Blog by Scott R. Sheaffer >by email< or >by RSS<.
>Follow >Scott R. Sheaffer< on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
>©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

Advertisement

Are you satisfied with your sales results?
Kay Ray can show you and your team how to reach
your objectives and unlock the door to success.
thekayray.com

My “buyers are liars” mantra has never made me particularly popular in groups that include purchasing types. It’s been my experience that buyers tend to make up little stories about pricing in order to finagle better pricing out of sales professionals.

However, today’s sales blog post is not about their lying; it’s about ours. I recently found myself on the receiving end of a salesperson who was lying like a career politician.

The Setup
My mother-in-law recently died. My wife and I went to a large, respected funeral home and made all the arrangements. We signed all the paperwork. We paid everything in advance. Signed, sealed and delivered.

Fast-forward six months. The “funeral director” (i.e. salesperson) called my wife and was disheartened to report that he had accidentally failed to have us sign a “necessary form.” When queried as to exactly what that form was, he – shockingly – didn’t have a good answer.

It gets better. This guy wanted my wife and I to travel to his office to sign this “necessary form.” Both my wife and I are not new to slight-of-hand sales techniques. We told him we would be happy to sign the form if he came to our house at a time that worked for us. We also told him not to bring his sales pitch book. He assured us this wasn’t going to be a sales call.

The Day Of Reckoning
At the appointed time, the salesperson came into our home and immediately started to pitch us on all the available “pre-need” services my wife and I should be buying. Am I looking that old these days? My wife and I were, to say the least, not particularly surprised that he launched into sales-mode once inside our house.

In short, we bought nothing more from this funeral home, signed his “necessary document” and gave him the boot.

I must admit I felt sorry for him. Very sorry. I’m serious. Let me explain.

It Wasn’t Him
It wasn’t the salesperson’s idea to come up with this scam. It was the creation of the sleazy sales management at the funeral home. No doubt he was coached on how to implement this ruse, accompanied by a plethora of supporting sales tips.

He was just a young pup, maybe 22-23 years old. He couldn’t have come up with this on his own.

This company was promoting a detestable sales scam in an attempt to reach their short-term sales goals. Is sales management that myopic? The answer for this particular company is yes.

Sales Blog Epilogue
I feel we are seeing a slow elimination of this kind of shell game in professional sales – thankfully. It hurts all of us in the profession. It stereotypes us as unethical. And shame on the clueless and inept management that devises, promotes and teaches this kind of junk.

What should you do if you find yourself in a sales job that is encouraging this kind of behavior? Quit. You’re better than that. Working for an organization that advocates this kind of lame trickery will only sully your reputation in the end anyway.

Further reading:
Corporate Dysfunctional Sales Behaviors In A Recession
Sales Managers and Dysfunctional Work Environments
Dysfunctional Work Environments

>You can automatically receive Sales Tips Blog by Scott R. Sheaffer >by email< or >by RSS<.
>Follow >Scott R. Sheaffer< on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
>©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

Advertisement

Are you satisfied with your sales results?
Kay Ray can show you and your team how to reach
your objectives and unlock the door to success.
thekayray.com

Confidence in sales is severely overrated. Confidence is nothing more than a byproduct. Many of the sales tips we receive tell us all we need is confidence. Nonsense.

Why Confidence Alone Doesn’t Work
There are racecar drivers who try to be competitive through confidence alone. Their race speeds are not up to par. They simply aren’t competitive. They don’t measure up. They feel anxious when racing.

These drivers frequently operate under the repeated delusion that once a race is started (versus practice), they will suddenly blossom into world-class drivers and their fears and inabilities will disappear. The adrenalin of the race will carry them through, they think.

These Drivers Aren’t Fooling Anyone
Why would an underperforming racecar driver think the strain and difficulty of a race would suddenly make him or her a great driver? Adrenalin doesn’t improve high-level technical skills; it hurts them.

Instead of continually deceiving themselves about their fears and limitations, these drivers could be using these same fears and limitations to steer them toward tools and resources that would make them better.

Why Fear Is Our Friend
Oftentimes we don’t approach sales any differently.

We might be fearful and ineffective when meeting CEO’s of large corporations. We tell ourselves “we’ll just power through it” by being confident.

We might experience tremendous anxiety about making an important customer presentation because we feel our presentation skills aren’t up to speed. We respond by revving up our confidence – as if we could just push a button and receive “instant confidence.”

How We Can Use Fear
Fear is nature’s way of telling us we are not prepared. When we are fully prepared to meet with a Fortune 500 CEO or when we have an important presentation ready and rehearsed – we have little anxiety.

Preparation and competence kill the fear monster. When the fear monster has been tamed, then confidence is free to flow. Just like there can’t be a waterfall without water, there can’t be confidence without preparation and competence.

Everyone Deals With Fear and Weaknesses
A recent study of corporate executives (i.e. CXO’s) reveals that they feel incompetent and fearful about 20% of the time. Most of them respond to their fear and incompetence by formulating a plan to address the issues. They treat fear and inability as a guide to improvement.

Sales Blog Rx
Fear is our signal that we need to work on a specific inadequacy. Once we tackle a deficiency, then confidence can legitimately flow. Confidence never comes before ability. Quit wasting time chasing it.

Further reading:
The Not So Subtle Difference Between Confidence And Positive Thinking In Sales
8 Sales Tips To Help Control Nervousness When Presenting

>You can automatically receive Sales Tips Blog by Scott R. Sheaffer >by email< or >by RSS<.
>Follow >Scott R. Sheaffer< on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
>©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

Advertisement

Are you satisfied with your sales results?
Kay Ray can show you and your team how to reach
your objectives and unlock the door to success.
thekayray.com