I love sales! I love it because at its core, sales (and selling) is about building strong relationships while helping your customers solve a key problem.

When done correctly, sales will help you build long-term, profitable relationships, and you get to be the hero in one part of their business journey (I’m well aware that sales positioning is about the customer, not you, but this article is about what makes great salespeople).

However, if you’re like most business leaders, you probably don’t share my love of sales, selling, or sales professionals–yet.

According to a 2017 HubSpot survey, only 3% of people surveyed found sales professionals trustworthy.[1]  

I’ll take it a step further, it’s not just that people don’t like sales professionals; they don’t like being sold, or feeling manipulated or pressured to buy something that they don’t want or need.

If you’re among the 97% of those who don’t trust (or like) sales professionals, that means that you likely will not take the time to learn the craft of selling.

As a result, your business will suffer because you need sales to grow.

I understand, no one wants to be seen as someone who is untrustworthy or manipulative.

How to Change Your Mind About Sales and Selling

Has it occurred to you that, as a business leader, you are already always selling?

I’m sure you’ll agree the days where the boss says “Jump” and the employee says, “How high?”  are long-gone.

Today, you need to create buy-in from your team, your clients, your vendors, and your investors to get your business moving.

You need to cultivate leadership skills, which I’m here to tell you also means, you need great relationship building and sales skills.

Tactical Implementation of Good Salesmanship

The tactical implementation of good salesmanship involves excellent communication skills.

That said, don’t mistake excellent communication for speech-making. I’ve seen people talk themselves right out of sale for two of the following reasons:

Your Biggest Sales Mistakes Revealed

Mistake #1: Listening to Respond

Listening to respond is when you are thinking about what you are going to say next while the other person is still talking.

For example, you may be hyper-focused on listening for objections or rehearsing in your mind what you’re going to say next.

Most people do this. It’s a common habit.

The problem is when you listen with a response already in mind, you are distracted.

At best, you are only half listening, and the person with whom you are speaking knows it.

A study completed in 2018 on the power of listening, found that when participants were paired with good listeners “…(versus those paired with distracted listeners) felt less anxious, more self-aware, and reported higher clarity about their attitudes on the topics [discussed].”[2] In other words, they felt more positive towards the listener.

More importantly, distracted listening is disrespectful. It is not a way to win over a prospective client or soothe the ire of a customer who has a complaint about your company and services.

Instead, try active listening. You will greatly improve your customer (and personal) relationships.

Active listening involves:

1. Genuine interest in hearing what the other person has to say.
2. Making gentle eye contact.
3. Mirroring their gestures and tone of voice (building rapport).
4. Making encouraging sounds, such as, “mmm” or “uh huh.”
5. Nodding your head “yes” at certain points to encourage the speaker to say more.

Mistake #2: Talking Too Much

This can be challenging because there is a balance between strategically positioning yourself and your company during any sales conversation, active listening, and over-talking.

That said, you do need to be aware of lecturing or diving into a monologue about your company and services.

Instead, ask leading questions:

1. What is your primary pain point?
2. What have you done in the past to help solve it?
3. In your opinion, why didn’t those other solutions work?

Then, ask for permission:

1. Is it okay if I share with you some features about our services? I think they may help you resolve… (mirror back what they told you).

By the time you get to the permission part of the discussion, not only will your customer feel validated, you’ll have a deeper understanding of their needs. It’s likely, too, that you’ll uncover some additional needs or issues.

Lastly, this process will place your customers in a reciprocal state of mind, which will allow them to hear your ideas better.

Didn’t I tell you? Sales is a beautiful thing!

Ready to take your business to the next level? Contact me today for a free 30-minute, no-obligation Help U Grow Discovery and Strategy Session, where you will leave with at least 1 actionable tip that help you grow your top-line revenue.

 

 

[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/salespeople-perception-problem

[2] https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change

 

When I tell you the secret, you may roll your eyes. But bear with me. I promise, it will be worth the read.

The secrets to sales success include two main ingredients:  1) Processes and 2) Communication.

But let’s be honest, most business leaders hate creating and implementing processes.

Like Angela Basset, they just want “to do the thing.”  

And that “thing” typically isn’t selling. It’s usually about delivering the service.

For example, a dentist went to dental school to learn how to help people live better lives and eliminate the shame and pain associated with a patient’s dental care. She didn’t go to learn how to run a marketing campaign.

Or a Chief Information Security Officer who set up a consulting practice to deliver and guide the implementation of security services. He’s passionate about protecting our economy and infrastructure from the bad guys. He’s not so keen on how to implement a sales strategy.

However, if you want to grow sales (topline) revenue and scale your business, your best bet for success (and to continue to do the things you enjoy in the business) is to build scalable revenue operations.

That is, you’re gonna have to sell the “thing,” or build a team that can.

In this article, I’m going to share with you the importance of building solid processes and give you some tips on how to do it effectively. The next article will address Communication.

Why Process?

Having clear marketing-sales-customer retention processes will help you build a predictable sales revenue cycle.
This is especially important if you want to scale your business and manage your employees’ utilization rates.

Also, having definable and repeatable processes that you can test and refine over time will provide the added benefit of mining actionable, first-person data.

For example, if you struggle with inconsistent sales, i.e., sales come in then stop, having your processes written down (defined) will provide you with actionable data. That is, you should be able to reverse engineer your process and benchmark it against current industry trends to help determine why sales lag in some months and are robust in other months.

The All Important Four “C’s” of the Sales Process

Sales processes demonstrate competence, confidence in your services offerings, continuity, and care.

Your sales process is how your customers will get to know about you and the services your company provides.

So for example, let’s say you’re an IT provider and you have a long sales cycle. In fact, according to your data, it takes 9 to 12 months to close a deal. (This is often the case whenever you have an expensive and/or complex service offering).

Your prospective customer may read a few reviews before an initial engagement, but that’s not going to sell them on your services.

Rather, your prospective customer will get to know you and your services through your sales process. Your process will determine whether they should trust you or not.

7 Questions to Help Improve Your Sales Processes

1. Do you have a definable and repeatable sales/lead generation process? Or is each engagement different?
2. Does everyone on your team understand their part in the sales process? Or is it disjointed?
3.  Does your sales process uncover and address your prospect’s key pain points?
4. Is your process well structured, taking the customers’ psychology and buying cycle into account?
5. Do you ask for feedback on your process from prospects you win and lose?
6. Do you believe that your process builds confidence?
7. Have you ever been complimented on the professionalism of your process even when being rejected? Or do prospective customers ghost you during the sales process?

Not sure about your sales processes? Then contact me today for a free, no-obligations Sales Growth & Strategy Session today at  https://helpugrowcro.com/contact/

It is 2019 and “James” is giving a talk on ethical hacking at the Technology conference in Las Vegas.

The room is buzzing. You can feel the eager anticipation of the IT engineers in attendance, and James does not disappoint.

Like a master illusionist, James wows his audience with how easy it is to break into a network. Then he gives them a peek behind the curtain and says, “Anyone can learn to hack into your network. Anyone.”

The audience claps their approval, even if they are still not completely sold on his assessment. Because this is a time when IT folks and their bosses, especially their bosses, believe that only the Targets and Equifax’s of the world get hacked. Not small manufacturers, mortgage brokers, or consulting firms, never them.

James is sly, though. He expects his audience to be doubtful. They’re engineers, after all, and being doubtful is in their nature. But James has a plan.

Everyone who attends the conference is added to his email list.

On Monday morning, they receive an invitation to attend a live webinar with his “crew.” Other security professionals who talk about the hacks of the day.

One of the regulars is named Chris. His company does incident response.

Chris and James are thought leaders. Through the medium of video, they help you to feel like you know them, even before you’ve met them. They demonstrate knowledge and likeability. They are consistent with their messaging.

More importantly, they’re the ones you’ll reach out to when your systems are down. I know, because I was at that conference in 2019, I’ve attended their webinars, and I have worked with them since.

How to Build Trust in 2024

Your customers have a problem, and they are looking for the services you offer.

Unfortunately, there is way too much information (including misinformation) on the web to sort through it themselves.

So, they need an expert, a thought leader, to help them make the right decisions for their business.

2024 is the year of know-like trust. It’s the year when you should be thinking about videos, podcasts, and marketing that makes you visible.

Think about it: if there are more data points on the web than grains of sand on the plant (citation), then it makes sense for your customers to go to people they know, like, and trust to help them solve their business problems.

Now, you may be thinking, “How will they find us if there’s so much information on the web?” Good question.

Thought leadership content can work for you in a myriad of ways.

Here’s a true-life example of how thought leadership content can work for you:

Your sales rep, Sheila, is golfing with an important prospective customer named Tim.

Tim brings up an issue he’s having with his ERP system. Sheila says, “That’s interesting because our marketing department just made a video on that topic. Is it okay if I send you the link?”

“Sure,” Tim says.

Sheila sends Tim the link and follows up with him.

Tim likes the video and does a little more research on her company. He easily finds several more videos and other pieces of good content on how  Sheila’s company can solve his problems.

 

Building thought-leadership for an online community

• You can take this strategy off the golf course and apply it on LinkedIn and email outreach.
• You can even do it as part of a larger community-building strategy on YouTube.
• You can drive traffic to your content and develop an automated conversion strategy.
• With the right tools, you could even build your own ecosystem, like James did, where prospective customers go to your channels rather than search aimlessly on Google.

 

The psychological benefits of video

There’s a positive psychological effect of seeing someone on video that imparts importance and a feeling that they already know you and your organization. It’s called building rapport.

Rapport is about building meaningful connections with another person (citation). And it can be done through video and other content marketing strategies. It’s a “one-to-many” strategy.

Rapport will help to provide warmer leads when a prospective customer calls you.

If the video content is done well, meaning appropriate for your ideal customer, it will have a similar effect on prospects as having written a book and calling yourself an author.

If you and your team could manage one good piece of meaningful content a week and share it, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you become a thought leader in your industry.

Let’s have a conversation. Call me today for a free, no-obligation strategy session. I’m here to help.

Are you frustrated because you can break through your revenue glass ceiling?

Maybe you want to grow through $1 million in top-line revenue, $5 million, or even $50 million. But you’re unable to sustain a level of revenue generation from which to grow your business.

2-steps forward, 2-steps backward

Maybe you get close, and then you fall back. It’s very frustrating.

In this article, I will give three common reasons this could be happening, and then I will give you one of my favorite actionable tools that you can use today to begin to get you to the next level.

Reason #1: Wearing Too Many Hats & A Lack of Resources

Most businesses have resource issues, but this is often a huge obstacle to sustained revenue generation for small and medium-sized businesses.

It’s not uncommon for the person who is responsible for revenue generation, i.e., sales and business development, to also be the person who is responsible for service delivery or another crucial aspect of running the business.

They are wearing too many hats, which translates to a lack of human capital, which prevents you from scaling the business appropriately.

Let’s say you’re a larger small or middle-market company, and you don’t have this issue, but you may have misallocated resources.

For example, your VP of Sales and Marketing is busy hiring and training new salespeople but lacks the time or the resources to spend on the marketing end of the business, which means that your lead generation engine isn’t running.

Even if you’ve outsourced your marketing to a third party, the lack of oversight is causing the lead generation activities to fall flat. So, the resources you have aren’t being well spent.

Questions to ask

Questions that you might want to ask yourself are:

• What resources do I have?
• How are they being allocated?
• Do I have the correct resources to help me scale the business appropriately in order to break through the revenue glass ceiling?

Reason #2: No or Too Few Processes

Another key reason you may not have sustainable revenue growth is due to a lack of processes.  

Think about your process from lead generation to onboarding and customer care.

Questions to ask

Questions you may want to consider are:

• Do we have a sales process?
• Are our processes repeatable?
• If a key person leaves the company, are there sufficient processes in place so we wouldn’t suffer significant downtime?
• Do I have the appropriate processes in place to help scale the business?
• Are my processes connected? In other words, are all the processes that touch the customer and generate revenue connected?

Reason #3: Mindset

Revenue generation is a top-down process, so the mindset of the leadership sets the revenue generation culture within the organization. Period.

It cannot be overlooked.

My favorite quote

There’s no such thing as fear of success, there’s only the fear of the responsibility that success brings.

 The fear of added responsibility is largely unconscious, but I often hear it from business leaders and owners when asking them about their struggles.

Questions to ask

• Will adding new staff and processes create more work for you?
• Are you concerned about losing control if the company grows too big?
• How will growth impact your lifestyle?

The good news is that just recognizing that you have some unconscious fears and concerns will help you break through.

Next Steps: Create a Gap Analysis

If you are unsure what is causing your revenues to stagnate, then consider doing a S.W.O.T. or S.W.O.T.T Analysis to measure your organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (and Trends). You can even use this tool for specific departments within the business.

When done well, a S.W.O.T. analysis can be a guiding document for the organization. Once it’s been completed, you can use the S.W.O.T to create a gap analysis and plan based on your priorities.

If you’d like to discuss your biggest challenge, please give me a call at 888-365-1085.