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Thursday 11th March 2010

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Sales Central - Your One-Stop Sales Shop

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YOUR PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SELLING (the Secrets Revealed)

Below is the list of the book's chapters - click on any chapter to see a small snippet

After-Sales Service
This company must spend many millions of dollars annually in promoting their products. However, due to functional laziness, the number of people like me telling everyone of our bad experience with their product, would easily outnumber their entire sales, marketing, advertising and in-store promotional teams!

Ambition and Goal Setting
These (people) are the fodder that feeds the engine of the economy and who occupy positions of menial work, minimal pay and no real hope of achieving financial wealth, or even independence. In short, they lack the ambition to have any more than they need to survive.

Appreciating What You Have
Too many people are lost in a world of inconsequential need. Some of us are too focused on that new car, fancy television or latest mobile phone. Others crave recognition that really isn’t significant in the greater scheme of things, as recognition isn’t the same as respect.

Attitude - The Power of the Mind
Sometimes salespeople with 'bad' attitudes get promoted 'out of the way' and that's always a tragedy, because ultimately, that person will get back 'in the way' and do damage to other salespeople's careers.

Auctions
I know of no other public forum where normally sane people, without the aid of dancing, music, theatrical entertainment props, alcohol or drugs can become frenzied and out of control, in a state known as 'auction fever'.

Bad Habits and How to Beat Them
Have you ever wondered how those non-smoking advertisements work? You know the ones – they tell you of the horrible health consequences of continued puffing. They are so negative that I wouldn’t be surprised if many people kept smoking in sheer defiance !

Beating the Gatekeeper
The meeting room was long and narrow and he sat me facing a window with the blinds up, meaning that I was staring into sunlight and his face was totally darkened. Afterwards, I thought I'd done reasonably well in the interview, but as it turned out, he rejected me as completely unsuitable.

Beating the Salesperson
Nobody 'beats the house' – the house makes and owns the rules of the game. If somebody starts beating the house, the house either changes the rules, throws the player out, or both!

Being Easy to Buy From
In theory, this is sensible logic. After all, by definition of being in a target market, suspects should be aware, or willing to be aware of, offerings aimed at them shouldn't they ?

Bi-Polar (Manic-Depressive)
Being elated by the successes, or distressed about the downsides, of selling is not quite the same as being afflicted with Bi-Polar (manic-depressive) symptoms.

Branding
This aspirational branding will allow you to position yourself to be most available to those who would most like to work with - in short, you will have the power to make choices in your life, and the options from which you will be deciding, will be rich and varied.

Buyer's Remorse
Did you ever buy something that you just had to have, and then felt the next morning that you had made a mistake ?

Call Centres
It is vital therefore, that you make your own workspace as comfortable as possible before you make or receive calls.

Changing for Gain
When I prompt such people with the question “how well do you think you qualified him ?” I invariably get an answer like “he’s a liar – he said he’s a buyer, but he isn’t.

Closing
Buyers have rejected the selfishness that the Always Be Closing mantra represented - the salespeople whose only interest was to transfer the buyer’s money away from the buyer, and into their own pockets, are fast becoming an ugly memory.

Cold Calling
But what if the ESOK is a genuine prospect?

Controlling the Sale
Most obviously, the Internet has almost totally disempowered the ‘hit and run merchants’ to the point where only the most gullible, or, at the other extreme, the most arrogant, can be ‘conned’ by simple, almost mindless, closing tactics.

Cross-Cultural Selling
This particular salesperson was not one to speak ill of others, but he was really cranky about this particular prospect “lying” to him.

Defining Buyers
Someone driving an expensive car will usually feel superior to someone driving a lesser-priced car, and the driver of the lesser car will normally be either contemptuous or jealous of the other driver.

Dictionary
One-To-One Marketing – where organisations target their promotional activities to individuals, on the basis that they will get the best response through personalisation. The simplest expression of this type of marketing is where a universal letter is individually addressed.

Disabilities
In fact, I have developed a belief that people with disabilities are so appreciative of their ability to participate in ‘normal’ everyday life, that they bring an enthusiasm and dedication to their work and lives that many fully 'able' people lack.

Discounting
So if you think that the demand is there, it’s surely a smart idea to price your offerings correctly in the first place ?

Ethics, Morals and Principles
Unless you are perceived as having high standards of ethics, morals and principles, your value to others is necessarily short-term since you can’t be trusted beyond serving a specific purpose.

Etiquette
If you’re a buyer, your lack of sincerity will label you as a waste of time to salespeople and so your attempts to negotiate ‘a good deal’ will be treated with contempt.

Exhibitions and Trade Shows
If a large proportion of your income is performance-based (commission and/or bonuses), then you're a salesperson, not an educator.

Forecasting
So, how best to create a forecast for management?

Formal Vs Informal Education
It seems that more and more employers are setting minimum academic benchmarks for job candidates to have achieved for those candidates to be ‘short-listed’ for employment.

Franchising
Why do some franchisees enthusiastically buy more franchises, when others end up either going broke or simply getting out?

Gearing
The same applies to people who ‘over-gear’ their investments – with their geared investments normally being real estate or shares.

Guerilla Marketing
The key to successful guerrilla marketing is being proactive and opportunistic, whilst maintaining credibility.

Health
Quite simply, I can’t see how you can have one without the other, as to be truly well and happy, it is important to have all of the significant factors in your life in a comfortable balance.

Interest Rates Vs Repayments
This is an area where normally intelligent people can be separated from far more money than they need to be.

Job Interviews
Equally, although many people attending job interviews are quite defensive and uncomfortable, there is a strange paradox that occurs.

Loyalty
……..as any decent coach or manager will tell you, the rot comes from the top and the more a manager complains about employees, the more obvious it becomes that the manager is the problem.

Mailers
Does this mean that it is still worthwhile to send unsolicited promotional materials ?

Management
It is one of the things that leads to the creation of “functional silos” within organisations, making those organisations highly dysfunctional, and unless they change, ultimately superfluous to the marketplace.

Measures and Motivations
Whilst the concept is both simple and clever, the problem is that Scorecards used for measuring salespeople are often built the wrong way round.

Meetings
Further, it should be an agreed rule of meetings that whoever raises an item must also offer a recommendation on how to deal with that item, being prepared to give reasons for the recommendation.

Network Marketing (MLM)
Although my success in this business came with a company that provided a fully comprehensive sample kit (necessary given that type of marketplace) as a part of their $90 joining fee, I have always liked the philosophy of drawing new distributors from a happy customer base - therefore I recommend that you try using the products yourself, before making a decision to become a Distributor for any Network that you are interested in.

Networking Groups
I believe that it’s a quick and punchy positioning statement you should be offering at your first meeting, because in a networking event you’re not out to make a sale, you’re just there to gauge interest.

Perseverance
To make sure you’ve got the message on how vital perseverance is, I’d like to share a similar story about another company with you.

Perspectives
I am forever dumbfounded at the ignorance and arrogance displayed by so-called ‘salespeople’ who blame the ‘dumb’ customer for the sale not happening.

Planning
The only exception to this is when you enjoy a monopoly on something that everyone needs - for example, if you owned the only source of drinking water in a desert, or the last aeroplane leaving a war zone.

Pre-Sales Service
Is it possible that your company appears (to prospective customers) to have people with the right titles and job descriptions, but who fall short of the mark when tested against buyers’ legitimate needs ?

Presentations
The only exception to this is where you use slides to explain a step-by-step process of implementation and/or production, but even then I caution you to keep it strictly relevant to that particular audience.

Qualifying
Logically, this is a very bad thing to do because nobody likes to be ‘told’ regardless of whether the instruction has a positive or negative implication, although most people are happy to respond positively when asked positively.

Referrals
This guarantees that as soon as a viable competitor appears, your business is doomed!

Retail
What really surprises me is how common the loud music phenomena is, regardless of the value of the goods being offered.

Return on Investment
This is because any change or investment involves a new way of doing things, and that requires people to move out of their comfort zones.

Sales Vs Marketing
This doesn't justify the existence of ‘order prevention departments’ but does explain them, and so these entities will always exist.

Salesperson Vs Representative
Then, of course, you may meet a ‘Negotiation Specialist’, who in the old days was known as ‘the closer’ i.e. the salesperson who convinced buyers to hand over their money.

Scams
A fraud is the act of taking that which you have no right to, by devious means which require misrepresentation (or ‘creativity’ with the truth).

Self Esteem
Loving yourself doesn’t mean swooning in front of a mirror, it means something much deeper than that.

Selling via the Web
Whereas people who worked from home were once considered rare (even eccentric) nowadays there are people who think that working from a fixed home location is too restrictive for their lifestyle !

Selling Vs Negotiating
Therefore, when you are trying to sell and the other party wants to negotiate, you should be hearing warning bells.

Selling
The contempt that many salespeople had for their prospects was only matched by the reciprocal contempt that many buyers had for salespeople.

Sensitive Areas
You will probably miss out on the sale because people buy from people that they like and feel they can trust, because they may have to call on the salesperson's help after the sale.

Setting and Achieving your Goals
The reason could be the money you’ll earn, although few top achievers think in purely monetary terms.

Staying Motivated
The phone doesn't ring, the diary is uncomfortably blank and the commission claim form is not adding up properly! What should we do?

TA and NLP
If so, is this a power game or just the desk and chairs that came with the office ?

Tenders, Proposals, Submissions, Quotes
No, I loved it, because it mean’t that I had achieved enough credibility for the much older and more professional salespeople to actually become jealous of my successes – a big deal for a kid who was as ‘dumb’ and unsophisticated as I was at the time.

The Order Prevention Department
This unwillingness to be controlled is anathema to the sort of people who manage companies, and it amounts to salespeople being viewed as undisciplined vigilantes, given to random acts of demanding immediate service for their customers.

Time
Have you ever heard the saying that there are 3 types of people in the world ?

Trade Shows
Anyone who has ever done duty at a Trade Show will be well familiar with the horrors of getting caught with these people, and if you’re currently selling in a high-tech or new-tech industry, you may well be stress-twitching at the very thought of such people right now !

Upselling
Of course, if you’re a buyer reading this, you may feel there is a degree of manipulation involved that you don’t like.

USP's
I like to think that the concept is a way of retaining your USP’s, whilst also presenting your FFB’s.

Winning is Everything
In other words, if you want to be a winner, the real key to making it is in the way you handle those challenges that you must overcome to achieve success.

Your Promise
Are you offering the buyer your time, dedication and diligence (eg in a job interview), your very best performance (eg a surgeon explaining an operation to a patient) or a product that they will be proud to own (eg a salesperson offering the latest hi-tech gadget)?

Sales Central - Your One-Stop Sales Shop