Don't Get Angry, Get Results

Three options for expressing anger

If you're concerned about how to express your anger with your customers, ask yourself which of the following three options would be most likely to yield the best results:

1. Denial.The first option is to deny that you're angry. The problem is, this seldom fools anyone. More importantly, denying anger breaks down trust by making people feel deceived. Remember, most of us are lousy actors, and most of our customers are smart people. Unless your name is Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, odds are, they'll have a pretty good idea that they're not being told the truth.

2. Acknowledgement.The second option is to acknowledge the anger by saying something like: "Yes, I am very angry." This is preferable to denial, but it can still make the person you're speaking with feel uneasy. Why? Because you're still not stating the whole truth about the real cause of your anger.

3. Verbalization.The third option is the simplest, and also the most effective: acknowledge your anger and verbalize the complete truth. Here's an example: "Yes, I'm angry and upset by this decision, because it means that we won't have enough resources to do the job we agreed to do for you. I'm afraid that if the decision stands, it will negatively affect the outcome of your project, and our future relationship." This way, you're not only being truthful in what you say. You're also allowing others to see what is truly fuelling your anger, so that they will have a better idea of what they can do to help.

Just the facts:

In the final analysis, expressing anger comes down to the same principles that govern the expression of any other emotion: the fine line between honesty and brutality can be walked successfully only by remembering that a customer does not need - or want - to hear all your opinions and perspectives. To stay on the right side of the line, it's important that we recognize and verbalize our emotions, but not dwell on them. Successful sales people understand that they achieve the best results when they limit their communication to the facts and how they feel about them - not their opinions and perceptions.

Breaking out of a Slump

Tips for Breaking out of a Slump, and Getting Back on Track
By Colleen Francis

Sales people who have a poor start at the beginning of a year, often find themselves struggling for the rest of the year to catch up. The good news is, whatever you’re experiencing, we’ve all been there at least once. The bad news is, most of us don’t know exactly how to snap out of a slump, and start making sales.
First – don’t panic! If you’re in panic mode, you can’t be creative, and creativity is exactly what you need right now. Besides, just as dogs can smell fear in humans, prospects can smell desperation in sales people. If you panic, your prospects will sense that you’re desperate, and they’ll avoid you like last night’s leftover Tuna Surprise. Just take a deep breath, stay calm and focus on what needs to be done.
Next, don’t get down on yourself. Think about a time in your past when you were in a similar situation, and how you were able to climb out if it. Focus on that positive experience, instead of focusing on the negative.
Third, don’t get angry. Anger will be misinterpreted by your clients, peers and managers as being emotional or out of control. When you’re in a slump more than at any other time, you need to be totally in control, and assure others around you that you know exactly what to do. Whenever you find yourself becoming angry, try to be as honest as possible, and focus on solutions and options – not on laying blame.

Last but most definitely not least, don’t quit! The worst thing you can do during a slump is to stop trying. The Chicago White Sox were on the verge of a 90-year slump before winning the World Series last year. Yet during that entire period, their team motto stayed the same: “Win, or die trying.” Guess it paid off for them in the end.
Remember: there could be an almost unlimited number of reasons why you’re in a slump. It could be the economy, for example. But even in a poor economy, there are top performing sales people, and those who just scrape by. Admitting that your success is up to you is the first step in getting out of a slump, and getting your career back on track.
To help you snap out of a slump and get your year back on track, try some of the following tips, adapted from the strategies of the Top 10%:
1. Reconnect to your plan.
Review your goals and either recommit to the action plan you set for yourself at the beginning of the year – or create a new one! One client of mine recalculates his plan after every month he doesn’t hit his quota, to ensure his quota for the next month includes both what he was supposed to do PLUS whatever he missed last month. This helps him redefine his actions and gain clarity on exactly how many calls he needs to make, meetings he needs to secure and business he needs to close to get back on track. If you had a really bad month, you could perhaps work your underage into the next 2-3 months to make it more attainable.
2. Get back to basics.
Once, after Tiger Woods had spent hours on the practice green sinking hundreds of puts, a commentator asked him why he was still practicing considering how consistent he had been. Tiger responded: “I don’t like the way the ball is rolling into the cup.” That’s mastering the basics.
As Tiger knows full well, problems aren’t usually caused by something complicated. They’re usually the result of doing the simplest thing just slightly wrong. And more often than not, we know exactly what the problem is. In my experience, for example, slumps are almost always caused by not having enough qualified buyers in the pipeline – in other words, not enough prospecting. If you’re in a slump, start by looking internally, not externally. Remember that the slump is your slump, not someone else’s. Be strong enough to realize this, and take corrective action.
3. Work smarter and harder.
Think of 10 things you could do this week to work more effectively. Then commit to working just a little bit harder until you’re out of this bad spell. So you have to be out of “balance” for a short time. Would you rather that you’re out of balance, or your checkbook? The choice is yours.
4. Get a coach.
Have someone you respect listen to your phone calls, watch you at networking events and evaluate your presentations. This could be a manager, a colleague, a friend or a hired gun. Whoever you choose, ask them to be honest with you, and when they are, do something with the advice they give you.
5. Coach yourself.
Video or audio tape your presentations and calls, and be honest with yourself. Would you buy from you?
6. Change your presentation.
Maybe it’s time to turn your presentation style upside down, or inside out. What you’re doing now obviously isn’t working, so if you want a different result, you have to do something different. Try starting with the end, or in the middle. And while we’re talking about change, everyone should read the cover story of the June 2005 issue of Fast Company magazine: “Change or die.” It’s an excellent article on why change is so hard – yet so necessary.
7. Stay away from life suckers.
You know who they are. The one who lies in wait at the water cooler, just so they can whine, moan and complain to whatever poor, parched soul happens to wander by. The one lurking in the lunchroom way past 1pm to tell you about how nothing is ever right, and they’re always getting the short end of the stick.
When you’ve slept only 4 hours, they were up all night. If you have a stomachache, they’ve got near-fatal food poisoning. When you have a headache, you better believe they’ve got a migraine. Life suckers can’t help you; they have problems of their own.
8. Get to work earlier.
Yes, I know, you’re already screaming at me: “Colleen, I need balance!” Not while you’re in a slump, you don’t. Right now, you’re behind, and you need to do something about it. Only the mediocre use balance as their battle cry during a slump. So suck it up for this short period, and save the balance until you’re back on top.
9. Change your mood.
Listen to your favorite song, comedian or motivational speaker in the car on your way to your next sales meeting. This will help put you into an excellent, upbeat mood when you start your presentation, which will cause you to shine – and your prospect to take a shine to you.
10. Change your environment.
This could be as simple as de-cluttering your office. It’s impossible to feel fresh and excited about what you do if you can’t see your desk. A chaotic work environment will make you depressed to be there, and if you’re depressed to be at work, you won’t snap out of your slump.
Changing your environment could also mean – gasp, yes, it’s true! – taking the day off from selling! If you need motivation, go sit in a coffee shop or someplace with a nice view and read books and articles on positive attitude and self-development. If you need to be re-created, take a hike (literally), and then come back to the office re-energized and ready to take on the world.
Personally, I find that getting away for around 4 days (say, Thursday-Sunday, as I’m doing as I write this to you right now) can dramatically help me to create, re-organize and re-energize. It’s also one of the best ways I know of to avoid another slump in the future.
11. Follow a leader.
Trail the best sales person you know on their calls for a day. See what they’re doing differently than you, and how you can incorporate those ideas in your business. Note that this doesn’t have to be someone from the office. You can learn a lot from watching sales people in other industries, too.
12. Take your boss to work.
Take your boss with you on calls for a week. This will force you to be more prepared and on your best behavior. You’ll also probably receive more feedback than you probably want. Instead of rejecting this feedback, use it to be better.
13. Prove that money can buy a little happiness.
Buy something you can’t afford. This is radical, I know, and not many of you will like this idea or think it’s responsible of me to suggest it. But it works better for me than any other “counter slump maneuver” I know of, so I felt it wouldn’t be right not to at least share the possibility with you.
Of course, I don’t mean racking up all your credit cards to the limit buying gold toilets, and then spending the next twenty years paying them off at 21% interest. What I mean – and what I personally do – is book a first-class trip for 6 months from now. Then, I have to make more sales to earn the money to go. Or book a training class 9 months from now, and again you’ll be motivated to sell more in order to pay for it. I don’t know about you, but for me, the “coming into work early” and all the other hard tasks on this list get a whole lot easier to embrace when I know that I have a trip to Hawaii coming up in a few months, which I really don’t want to cancel.
Having a slump is not the end of the world, so long as it’s short, temporary and you know what to do about it.
Know what motivates you. Be disciplined – it’s the one thing that separates the best from the mediocre – and stay focused on those activities that you know will pull you out of the slump. And remember to keep it all in perspective.
You are responsible for your slump, and only you can change it. But you can change it, and once you accept the fact that you can reverse your fortune, you’ll already be on the road to recovery.

Believe in yourself. I know you can do it.

Filling the Sales Pipeline?

“I have made attempts to contact you to determine if there is a mutual fit between our companies. How would you like for me to follow-up with you going forward?

“I have been working under the assumption that Weiss Communications will be considering _________. Is this still the case? If you are not interested or if there is another person you would like me to follow-up with, please let me know. I certainly do not want to waste your time.”

This is an email I recently received from a sales representative. It’s interesting because this is the first communication that I actually received from this representative. Didn’t recognize the rep’s name. Didn’t recognize the company name. Don’t really know what he’s selling or why I should be interested. And of course, I have heard nothing further from him.

I suppose that if one sent enough emails of this type, eventually someone would respond that they are interested. This strikes me as a very frustrating way to fill a pipeline.

The bottom line is that if you want to be able to sell consistently, if you want to have those million dollar and beyond sales careers, if you want to avoid major frustration and wheel spinning, blanketing the earth with emails, voice mails or even phone calls is not the answer.

The answer is to be highly specific about who your prospect is and why they should buy from you. Far too often when speaking with entrepreneurs, business owners and sales
professionals, I ask them, “Who is your market?” and the response is “Everyone.”

Sorry. “Everyone” is not the answer that will make money for you. Even if “everyone” could use your product/service, (highly unlikely) they would all be buying for different reasons. Your job is to identify those reasons, make sure the reasons correspond with the prospect with whom you are speaking and help your prospect understand that your product/service is the answer to his or her needs, wants and desires.

So here are the questions that you need to ask yourself:

1. What am I selling? What is the value and/or benefit to my customer who buys what I am selling? What is the reason my customer buys? Why should my prospect be interested in
what I am selling? What need, want and/or desire does my product/service satisfy?

2. Out of everyone in the entire world who might purchase my product/service, who is most likely to purchase my product/service? Out of that group, who is most likely to buy a lot of my product/service? And who is most likely to return again and again to buy more of my
product/service?

If you are able to satisfactorily answer these questions, you will be able to spend your time wisely, focusing on prospects who are truly viable. Your selling time will be productive and your numbers will go through the roof.

To your success!

By Wendy Weiss

Think and Grow Sales

Just imagine for a moment that you have perfect sales skills. You know everything there is to know about selling and you know what to do in every sales situation. Now just suppose there is another person selling the identical products and services as you and they too have perfect sales skills.

Who is going to be more successful at selling? The person who is going to be more successful is the one who ‘thinks’ they can. Let me explain this further.

What sets the boundaries of your sales success is you, your thoughts and your beliefs. You can never sell more than the limits/boundaries you have set for yourself. You have thoughts and beliefs about the type and size of the sales you are capabable/deserving of and the amount of sales income you can earn.

So if you think and believe you are capable of earning $100,000 a year, your autopilot system will go into action to make sure you earn that $100,000. If you think you are a $500,000 a year salesperson, your autopilot system will go into action to make sure you take the actions to earn that $500,000. Yes, you may occasionally exceed what you think you are capable of but rest assured your subconscious will go to work to average it all out to what you think you can.

Your thoughts and beliefs are not the truth but you have made them your truth - probably subconsciously - and you will always be loyal to and live up to your truth automatically. All your actions will always be in alignment with making your truth a reality - whether you like it or not. So can you see now that your success at selling is not just about your sales skills?

Your sales success = your sales skills + your thoughts/beliefs.

It is interesting, don’t you think, that most sales training simply focuses on teaching you HOW to sell and how to perfect your sales skills? The false assumption is that to improve your sales success you only need to focus on improving your sales skills. This is only part of the equation.

With respect to selling, there are specific thoughts and beliefs that have a significant impact on your sales success. These are your thoughts and beliefs around: what selling is, who you need to ‘be’ to sell and how successful you think you can be. Your thoughts and beliefs in these areas act as throttles holding you back and there are fairly simple techniques to take these throttles off.

Imagine you have a belief that selling is about convincing/persuading/manipulating someone to buy something they may or may not want. How does that make you feel? Uncomfortable? Resistant to having sales conversations?

Now change that perspective to one where you view selling as having conversations to see if you can help people get what they want. How does this perspective make you feel? Comfortable? More relaxed about having sales conversations?

Where there is resistance there is a throttle. Throttles regulate flow and with respect to selling they regulate the flow/limit of your sales success. With this example, by changing your perspective on what selling is you have effectively released this throttle (resistance) so your sales conversations can now flow more readily. I hope you are getting the concept.

Go in search of all your beliefs and thoughts around sales and look for thoughts and beliefs that cause resistance as you will then have found throttles which are limiting your sales success. Work on releasing these throttles so your sales conversations flow.

At the beginning I said that you unconsciously and automatically live up to the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself with respect to your sales success. Hence it is logical then that the higher the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself, the higher your sales results will be automatically. So if you can remove any throttles you may have around selling, you will automatically raise the boundaries/limits you have set for yourself and you will automatically sell more. It will be automatic. How easy is that?

So forget about trying harder and working harder. Focus instead on lifting your boundaries/limits and watch the quantum leap in your sales happen automatically.

You can really think and grow sales!

by Tessa Stow

In the series of exploring and celebrating the art of selling, We bring you daily articles on different sales methodology, cultures across successful sales teams, Technology updates, changing sales landscape. In a prose very well defined by an anonymous writer (must be a poetic seller)


"I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.”



We will soon have a contest to find the best sales strategist........Wait for more it is coming soon your way;

The Four Truths of Behavior Change.

The Four Truths

Over the past decade numerous research efforts from a variety of disciplines have derived a set of principles on which performance improvement efforts must be based. Initiatives that do not incorporate these principles are destined to fail. Those initiatives that do include these principles consistently generate higher ROI and ROE. We call these principles the Four Truths.

Huthwaite has spent considerable time looking at two areas of human performance research: (a) the principles of adult learning, and (b) the latest research into effective change management. An interesting conclusion emerges from the juxtaposition of these two bodies of research. Together, they indicate that launching a sales force improvement effort will always fail if it relies on training alone to make the difference. Achieving a measurable, tangible and significant change involves far more than just training.

In short, any such effort must adhere to the Four Truths of sales performance improvement.

• Truth One: Organizations don’t make changes easily, nor do they make changes on demand. Only those things that are measured will get done; the engine of change is measurement.

• Truth Two: Adults only learn in the context of what they judge to be important and relevant to them as individuals. Just because it’s good for the company does not mean it will necessarily be embraced by individual sales people.

• Truth Three: Spending time in classrooms is an expensive proposition. Classroom time should be devoted to the kinds of learning that require interpersonal practice and feedback.

• Truth Four: Organizations don’t make change suddenly. Success will only come from an initiative that nests training experience in a process that includes reinforcement, coaching, and quantified, objective, individual feedback.
  

Q4 Race: 70 Selling Days to the Finish Line

On the first day of October, sales teams everywhere hear the sound of a starting gun as the clock starts ticking toward December 31. With less than 90 days left in the year, and less than 70 selling days, the race for revenue becomes all-consuming as sales professionals search for ways to shift gears and speed up the process.

Speed comes with risk, however. Without knowing how to accelerate the process safely, you risk damaging long-term relationships with clients. The key to this process is to choose the right opportunities, spend your time on the right activities, and stay motivated.

The Right Opportunities
Selecting the right opportunities poses a quandary for many sales reps. You may want to go with your gut if it tells you the deal is solid and ready to close. The problem with this logic is the tendency to be overly optimistic. Without a realistic assessment of the opportunity's true position in the funnel, you could spend a great deal of time trying to close a deal that can't be closed early.

Consider the following when assessing your opportunities:

• Your knowledge of what the client wants and when they want it
• Availability of the key decision makers and their sense of urgency
• Client's buying process and implementation timeline

By using these criteria for determining which opportunities have the best potential for acceleration, you can then plan the actions that are most apt to bring them to close before the end of the year.

The Right Moves
After you have identified the right opportunities, it is critical that you spend your time on the right activities. You want to be sure that every move you make brings you a step forward. Think about the following when looking at each opportunity:

• What critical information am I missing?
• Who do I need to get it from?
• How accessible are these people?

Resist the urge to be make assumptions when evaluating these factors. If you don't have something concrete to substantiate your assessment of each factor, do more research. You are trying to spend your time on those accounts with the best potential for early close. To do this, you need realistic assessments and concrete evidence of your position. Remember, if it's not high value to the client for Q4, then you're focusing on your goals, not the client's.

Staying Motivated
When you're running at top speed, working diligently to get the deals closed, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture or to get discouraged when those deals you thought would be slam dunks end up pushing their schedule back.

As sales reps, the key to staying motivated is to take a step back from the micro view and look at the overall health of the account. You might be disappointed that a deal has slowed to what feels like a crawl when you need it to hit top speed, but the long-term health of your relationship with that client is part of the bigger picture. Resist the urge to pressure for a closing timeline they don't want or can't meet. In the long run, you are more likely to make the close and many others if your client sees you demonstrate a genuine joint-venture approach by making their success and needs paramount.

The race to the finish line will always be fraught with high pressure and hectic workload. Determining which accounts have highest priority and planning which actions will move those sales to early close will make the annual race an exhilarating and rewarding test of your mettle that catapults you to the winners' circle.