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Daily Sales Tips

A Daily Podcast and Blog for B2B Sales Professionals

Sales Tip 707: Best of 2020 Top Sales Tips Countdown #6 – Scott Ingram

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Scott IngramYou’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. From now until the end of the year I’ll be counting down the 10 most popular sales tips of 2020.

Here’s #6 and this came from me in tip 574: where I talked about Find Your People:

One quick note here. While the 2020 Sales Success Summit has come and gone and your opportunity to participate in that Live Steam has passed. We do have the Encore series coming up where we’re going to be bringing those presentations and those presenters back all through Q1. For those details, just click over to top1.fm/encore and register.

Sales Tip 702: Closing out 2020

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Scott Ingram“Do what works for you!” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 702

How about you? What do you need to do in the last two weeks of 2020?

Join the conversation below and be sure to join the listener list!

All Things Sales Success – Tales from the Trenches
Sales Hacker’s Beyond Quota

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. This will be the last new tip of the year before I kick off a countdown of the top 10 tips from 2020 starting tomorrow. My tip for you today is this: Do what works for you!

This time of year you get so much competing advice. From the hustle porn side of the equation and folks who suggest you shouldn’t stop or slow down at all and should have the pedal to the medal all the way through the end of the year, to those who are in the don’t worry about it camp who might even suggest you should write off 2020 and start gearing up for a better 2021 instead. I say: do what works for you. It really depends on your situation. If you’ve got deals left that you can still close before the end of the year, go make it happen! If you had a horrible year and can’t wait for the reset that comes on January 1st. Great, start preparing or take some time to do some planning. This is personal, and you probably already know what’s best for you and what you should be doing.

As for me, I think I’m on the shortest vacation ever right now doing a bit of hiking near Lubbock and Amarillo in North Texas at Palo Duro Canyon and Caprock Canyons which is home to the Texas State Bison Herd. At least that’s the plan as I’m recording this. Just a couple of days, and for me, that’s what I need. After running hard since really the week of the 4th of July and especially these last couple of weeks I need to catch my breath, but I’ll be back the week of the 28th to tie up some loose ends in 2020 and finish my prep and planning for 2021.

I’ve got a couple of things you can look forward to as well. Over the course of the next 10 days from December 22nd through the 31st, I’m going to be releasing the top 10 tips based on the popularity that have been featured on the podcast this year in a Best Of Series. If you’re on the listener list I’ll be sharing that complete list and a few other details in Tuesday’s newsletter on the 29th. So if you’re not already on the listener list, this would be a great time to join. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/702 and drop in your name and email address there, or if you’re in the US you can text DST to 55444.

In addition to the best of series, Jack Wilson is going to be joining me on a new show we’re launching called All Things Sales Success: Tales from the Trenches that you’ll find on The Sales Experts Channel the 2nd Monday of each month at 2 pm CT. Jack and I are going to be talking about Habits, Productivity and really digging into his concept around Minimum Viable Habits.

I’ll also be presenting at Sales Hacker’s Beyond Quota event on January 26th. There I’ll be talking about Building Your Own Productivity Process.

For links to all of those things just click over to DailySales.Tips/702. Do what you need to do to make the most of these last two weeks of 2020, and keep coming back because we’ve got more great stuff for you including this top 10 countdown that starts tomorrow.

Thanks for listening!

Sales Tip 701: Personal Development and Your Suit of Armor – Bill Sciacca

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“Be in your personal development program every single day.” – Bill Sciacca in today’s Tip 701

How do you improve personal development and your own personal suit of armor?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Bill!

Bill Sciacca on LinkedIn
Bill Sciacca on Udemy
Interpersonal Communication
High Octane Leadership: Pole Position Performance

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Bill Sciacca. Bill is the author of 5 books on goal setting and leadership and has been teaching sales at the university level for 40 years and in executive education formats for 30 years. Here he is:

Bill Sciacca: Hello! I’d like to talk to you today about personal development and your own personal suit of armor. Now, let me unpack a couple of concepts here. The first concept I’d like to unpack is the suit of armor. I’m sure all of you remember from history class, the notion of how Knights would wear suits of armor while they were on their horse, carrying their lands. Now, obviously, the reason behind a suit of armor is, is pretty well known it’s so that their opponent’s lance couldn’t pierce their skin and basically hit a vital organ and killed them. So consequently, a suit of armor prevented that it gave the ability to deflect the opponent’s lance or to sometimes just break it.

Now, suits of armor had different gauges to them, and the test of the thickness of the gauge of the suit of armor that a particular knight war had to do with the knight’s physical stance. In other words, as Knights became stronger, they had the ability to done greater suits of armor with greater gauges, thus giving them even more protection, but you couldn’t put a very, very heavy suit of armor on a younger, less experienced Knight because the weight of that suit of armor would basically collapse them even before their enemies lance did.
So it was something that you had to build into. Well, salespeople, listen closely. You realize every day you are jousting. Now I don’t mean to make this sound adversarial, but let’s face it. If you are in a heavy prospecting role, that means that you are out every day talking to nine people that don’t need your product in the hopes of finding that one that does. If you remember the term prospecting, it comes from the gold rush. It means having to move a ton of dirt before you find a nugget of gold.

And if you’re in that prospecting mode, you realize that you’re going to hear a heck of a lot of no’s before you get that yes. Even if you are not in a heavy prospecting mode, just by virtue of having to get out there every day and make your presentations, you’re going to hear more no’s than yes’s. And the end result of that is that you can sometimes begin to feel down. How do we prevent that? By putting on our suit of armor every morning. Now our suit of armor is what allows us to be able to take those lances And not have them affect us. Now, as a salesperson, we should be looking for ways to increase the gage of our suit of armor. It’s an extremely important thing. And the best thing that we can do is to create a personal development program for ourselves.

You know, over the years this has changed. 20 years ago, developing a personal development program was difficult. It meant you had to go to companies and order cassette programs and buy books at bookstores because there was no online way of doing that. Well, now it’s so much easier. For example, if you have trouble listening, if you go to YouTube and just type in the word listening, you’ll probably get 10,000 various videos on listening. If your problem is developing the courage to prospect, if you go to any number of sites like Udemy, you will find courses that will assist you just in that. The point is this. When you have identified something that you need to change in your particular sales repertoire, the resources that are out there now are so plentiful, your challenge is not going to be finding the resources. Your challenge is going to be sorting through them to find the correct one, but that’s a personal development program.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, my suggestion to you is that you should be in your personal development program every single day. Every morning, when you wake up, you should spend at least 15 minutes, maybe half an hour going through something in terms of what your particular areas of development are. And by doing that, what you’re going to find is that the gauge of your suit of armor is going to increase. You are going to be faced with a question or an objection from a prospect that you are able to answer simply, whereas when that same question or objection was given to you three or four months before starting the personal development program, you may have stumbled and fallen. Now you’re able to do it, why? Because the gauge of your suit of armor is thicker.

That is one of the best things that we can do for ourselves as salespeople get into a personal development program. And it’s not just the mental program, either ladies and gentlemen, it could also be a physical one. It could be an emotional program that we need to get into. Maybe by two or three o’clock, we start to peter out. We don’t have as much energy. Well, then what we might need to do is find some type of personal development program to get on the treadmill, to start eating better. Maybe it’s the emotional content of the rest of our day that we made need to work on.

Whatever it happens to be, I can’t answer that only you can, if you were I, and I were in a coaching situation, I could help you through the particulars. But the fact of the matter is that at this point, you have to look at yourself and the reflection in the psychological mirror that you call you, and you need to decide what it is that I need to grow so that my suit of armor can increase its gauge.

Once you’ve determined that find the resources and begin to use them. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been doing this for 30 years. Well, before the internet was out there and I saw what it did to salespeople to transform their lives. It is even easier today. It is easier, but we need to be able to have the self-discipline and the determination to look at what we need to change. And then the courage to change it. If you do that, what you will find is your confidence soaring, what you will find is your income story and as a result of that. I wish you all the best.

Scott Ingram: You’ll find a bunch of great links to connect with Bill and a couple of his books and a Udemy course at DailySales.Tips/701

Once you’ve checked that out, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

Sales Tip 700: Overcoming 3 Simple Obstacles to Selling More – Jeff Bajorek

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“When you understand your sales process, you understand the steps in it and what a typical customer journey looks like.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 700

How do you overcome obstacles to sell more?

Join the conversation below and check out the links!

The Perfect Close
Books by Jeff Bajorek
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
The Why And The Buy Podcast

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. It seems only fitting that Jeff Bajorek is the star of episode number 700 today since he’s consistently been here about every 7th tip. Here he is with another one:

Jeff Bajorek: If you’ve been paying attention to my work, any of my work, really over the last eight months or so, you will know that I believe there are only two things that will help you sell more. You either need to spend more time selling, or you need to make sure that you are advancing that sales process at every possible opportunity. Now, you can’t speed up someone’s buying process. You know that you can only avoid slowing it down. And I believe that about 80% of reps failed to ask for the next steps. Now I think there are three reasons for that.

One, you don’t know what success looks like for this meeting anyway, but you got to fill out the CRM so you’re going to go. Two, you’re not sure what to ask for because you don’t know what success looks like. And three, you really don’t know how to ask. This comes down to simple planning. It doesn’t need to be complicated. I’m going to lay this out as simply as possible, because it is really simple. Decide what success looks like for this meeting. Why are you meeting with this prospect in the first place? Of course, you have a solution that fits their problem. Okay. What do you want them to do ultimately, as a result of this problem and as a result of your solution for their problem, and how does that break down? This is where you understand the purpose of your sales process.

When you understand your sales process, you understand the steps in it and what a typical customer journey looks like. So that should help you boil down and understand what it is that you need to ask for in every meeting. And then if you know what to ask for, it should be pretty simple to phrase the question, but this is where a lot of people get hung up because they feel like I have to word it a certain way. They feel like they have to do it a certain way. Maybe they feel like they learn some complicated technique that they need to revert to, but they don’t quite have it down yet. Or maybe they’re just a little gun shy at the moment of truth and they can’t spit out the question.

Look, this is ultimately very simple. And if you need a cheat, a hack, or whatever, then take a page out of my friend, James Muir’s book, The Perfect Close, and just say, does it make sense to fill in the blank, right? Fill in the blank with your suggestion. Now James wrote that book several years ago. It’s really, really good. I’ve been using my own version of that for really the entirety of my sales career. And this might even be a little simpler than James, although maybe not as specifically effective. I just say, Hey, I feel like we’ve got something going here. I feel like you understand how we can help you. And I think I have a pretty good idea of what you’re struggling with and how we can plug in our solution to help. Why don’t we do from here?

It’s such a simple, but very vulnerable way to move the process forward, and look, you’re making it clear in any case. You’re making it clear that your prospect has control of the situation, but you need to be the one that nudges the process in that direction without you. And that call to action. Nothing is moving forward, which is why so many of your deals stall.

So look, those three little obstacles, they really kind of dovetail into one another. And when you figure out one, it leads you to the answer to the second, which should lead you pretty well into the answers to the third. And look, even if you don’t have those specific questions that you have to rehearse, you can bail to what I just told you or what James outlines in his book. This is simple, you’re capable. You just got to do a little work on the front end and that little bit of work you do on the front end makes the other stuff, the profitable stuff, so much more imminent and possible.

Scott Ingram: For more about Jeff Bajorek, including a link to James Muir’s The Perfect Close and Jeff’s own books, just click over to DailySales.Tips/700.

After you’ve bought a book or two, come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!