“You can not stay in business unless you’re closing sales. Evading sales is a fatal business mistake.” – Liz Wendling in today’s Tip 329

Are you evading sales?

Join the conversation below and feel free to share your thoughts!

Liz Wendling Website (FREE Audio Program)
Liz Wendling Blog
The Heart of Authentic Selling
Sell Without Selling Your Soul
Liz Wendling on LinkedIn

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 Liz Wending. Liz is a nationally recognized business and sales consultant and the author of 6 books. Liz shows professionals how to make a profound difference in the way they sell and communicate both online and offline. Here she is:

Liz Wendling: Many of the thousands of individuals with whom I’ve coached and work with came to me with what I call “A love-hate relationship with sales and selling.” They told me they love what they do, but they hate to sell. They love what they do, but they hate the process of finding new business. They love their client’s work, but they hate the idea that they have to sell themselves. To them, sales and converting clients is a daunting and unsavory task and something that should be avoided at all costs. Well, evading sales is a fatal business mistake. If you’re responsible for attracting clients and closing sales, you cannot avoid the only activity that brings in the business and that is sales activities. You can not stay in business unless you’re closing sales. Evading sales is a fatal business mistake.

Sales are like oxygen. You need them to survive. You know this. Sales are how you get paid. You know that too. Every single business is sustained by sales, so if you’re reluctant to sell or you hate to sell, I always tell people it means you’re not doing it in a way that is comfortable for you and it doesn’t match your personality and your style, but you can find that way that syncs up with you and matches who you are and how you want to be in the world. Selling isn’t as daunting or as bad as you think and selling shouldn’t be jam-packed with lost opportunities where you constantly hear; I need to think about it. I don’t have the money. Call me in a few weeks. It should not be riddled with those kinds of objections. Selling shouldn’t be about prospects blowing you off and disappearing or people ignoring your emails and voicemails. It’s only like that when you’re doing it wrong. When you’re doing it right, selling is fun. Selling is fluid. Selling is predictable and profitable. Selling is much more than just getting someone to purchase a product or a service. Most people have this misconception that in order to be good at sales, you have to use pressure or manipulate or force someone to buy something from you. They think of a stereotypical obnoxious individual who won’t take no for an answer and uses high-pressure gimmicks and cheesy and salesy techniques to close the sale. That is not selling, that is being an ass. You never have to resort to that.

These days. You get to choose. You get to choose how you want to show up and who you want to be in the sales conversation. You get to choose a way that feels good to you and is easy to execute on a daily basis, a way that lights you up from the inside out and attracts people to you.

Scott Ingram: As always we’ve got more links for you at DailySales.Tips/329. One of those links will take you to a free audio program where Liz will show you how to transform your sales language and change your sales results.

Thanks for listening and be sure to stop by tomorrow for another great sales tip.

“When your clients challenge you with the prices too high, make sure that you know enough about their situation that you can focus on the results.” – Ian Altman in today’s Tip 328

What will you do?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

[email protected]
Ian Altman on LinkedIn
Ian Altman Website
Same Side Selling 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. Today’s tip comes from Ian Altman. As a CEO for two decades Ian started, sold, and grew his business-services and technology companies from zero to over one billion dollars in value. He’s a co-author of the bestselling book, Same Side Selling and hosts the weekly Same Side Selling Podcast, and you can read hundreds of his articles on Forbes and Inc. Here he is with today’s tip:

Ian Altman: Hey, it’s Ian Altman. You just had an amazing meeting with a potential client and now at the end of the meeting they say, “Well, this all looks great but it’s just too expensive.” What do you do? Well, what you need to realize is that price separate from results is always going to seem too high. So if you spend time with your client or prospect, understanding what problem they’re trying to solve, what happens if they don’t solve it. And if you’ve done a good job using something like the same side quadrant tool to actually understand what results or success might look like for them, then when they challenge you with price, you get to counter with, “Well, if I understood correctly what you’re trying to achieve and where results need to look like, then my fear is that if we do something that’s less than that we’re not going to achieve the results. And my guess is it’s not a good deal no matter what it costs. If you don’t get the results that you need.” See if you are traveling with your family of five and you reserved a minivan and you get to the car rental counter and they say, “Oh, all we have is this two sitter.” For a fleeting moment, you think to yourself, “Maybe I could take one of the kids and no one will notice.” But you know, that really won’t work. And if they said, “I’ll give it to you for free”, it still doesn’t help you see results matter more than price. So when your clients challenge you with the prices too high, make sure that you know enough about their situation that you can focus on the results. Because once the client realizes you’re as committed to the results as they are, that’s when you end up on the same side. If you have any questions, just drop me a note to [email protected]

Scott Ingram: For links to all things Ian Altman, Same Side Selling and for the video version of this tip. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/328

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“If you don’t believe in your ability to help people, then stop, go find another career.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 327

How about you? Are you apologizing for being in sales?

Join the conversation below and check all the links!

Great salespeople never apologize, except this ONE scenario
You Don’t Have a Closing Problem – Jeff Bajorek on Spotify
White Paper: You Don’t Have a Closing Problem
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
Jeff’Bajorek on YouTube

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 Jeff Bajorek is back, and now that his giant 16 part “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem” series is complete, we get to hear a completely different idea. Here he is:

Jeff Bajorek: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you need to stop apologizing for being in sales. Please tell me how, if you go out of your way to proactively tell your initial prospect that you’re not going to sell them anything right now. No, no, no. You can trust me. Don’t look over this way, not a salesman over here. How’s that going to help you sell something later? If you are fundamentally apologizing before you even get the opportunity to sell somebody something, I just don’t understand how that’s going to help you later. I don’t understand how you’re going to flip that coin. I don’t understand how you are going to be able to dig yourself out of the hole that you just created for yourself. It’s as if selling wasn’t hard enough. Now in a way to separate yourself from some old stereotype that nobody even believes anymore.

You’re getting in your own way to actually do that thing that you need to do. Get this straight for yourself. You help people, you’d be damn good at it if you let yourself be good at it, but your belief system is getting in your way. And if you don’t believe in your ability to help people, then stop, go find another career. But if you believe in what you do for people, if you believe in the problems you solve, if you believe in the solutions to those problems, and if you believe in your ability to persist long enough to tell enough people about how you can help them and then actually follow through to help them, then what’s there to apologize for. Stop it

Scott Ingram: For more about Jeff Bajorek including the video version of this tip. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/327. On that page, I’ve included a link to a LinkedIn post that Gong.io recently shared titled: “Great salespeople never apologize, except this ONE scenario,” based on all of the great data they collect. It’s the perfect companion to this idea from Jeff and definitely worth checking out.

Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Ian Altman.

“Asking for help entirely has been transformative for me because people will be very supportive of you if you ask for help.” – Neil Ashford in today’s Tip 326

Are you proactively asking for help?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Neil!

Neil Ashford on Sales Success Stories Interview
Neil Ashford on LinkedIn
Dun & Bradstreet

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. Yesterday we released the latest interview episode on Sales Success Stories with Neil Ashford who is the #1 Strategic Account Executive in North America for Dun & Bradstreet. Here are just two short clips from that interview:

Neil Ashford: Proactively asking for help. I always want to ask, what don’t I know about a product, about a prospect, about everything that we’re working on. I have absolutely no shame about it. I want to ask this so internally talking to other reps on my team, other reps in, so I’m in Canada, other reps in the United States that may be facing similar challenges or similar markets to what I plan, talking to leaders at my company, talking to the product teams, talking to process and project post-sale, pre-sale and always asking that next question of like, “Hey, I kind of don’t understand. Can you walk me through it? Maybe one level deeper.” And I’ve so rarely been turned down from there. And even when it’s asking other reps who, you know, maybe competing with me for advice or for help. Have you seen this before? Have you, how did you approach it? What did you do that was successful and what wasn’t successful? And if you’re actually going, willing to learn open-mindedly with a growth mindset to say “You know, I’m not asking just to ask, I’m asking because I want to be better and I’m asking for help genuinely.” Everybody is willing to help and set some time aside and say, “Yeah, absolutely throw 30 minutes on my calendar, I’ll talk you through it.” It’s almost like at a party if you ask somebody what they do, people open up entirely and they’ll tell you everything. And so you can ask people for help and then from there, taking it back and doing the work on your own to say, “Okay, well now I’ve learned all these things. How should I integrate it into my approach?” So it takes that second step. But asking for help entirely has been transformative for me because people will be very supportive of you if you ask for help.

Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And again, going back to your point of the willingness, if that weren’t true, this podcast would not exist. Right? People would, and my ask is extreme, right? Cause it’s like, can we schedule two hours for an interview? I mean that’s, that’s excessive. But it works. And again, people generally are, unless they’re just an Uber jerk, which I don’t meet very many of those. Right. I think everybody’s willing to, “Hey, if you want to hear about the way I’m doing stuff and it’ll help you and you’ll actually act on some of this stuff that’s awesome.”

Neil Ashford: Absolutely. And sometimes I’ve, I’ve approached it, you know, on larger deals or larger sales, like proactively building it into my process to say, “I need to find someone else who has encountered this before or someone who’s dealing with it regularly” and set time in their calendar to say “Hey, how does this work? How have you done it?” And it’s not, you know, it’s not a school thing where you’re cheating. It’s not anything like that. It’s a business and we’re here to create value for the business. And if you go in with that approach, there’s no shame or problem in doing it. You’re doing the right thing by asking for help.

Scott Ingram: I love this idea. It’s not cheating to steal the best ideas from the rest of your organization. Right?

Neil Ashford: No, absolutely not. It’s the right thing to do if anything if you’re doing the right thing for the business and you’re doing the right thing for yourself, you should be doing it all the time. I should probably do it more. It’s interesting in terms of the origin story of how I kind of decided to want to be number one because it was a conscious decision. In late 2016 my sales leader I wasn’t on every email chain yet. Every email distribution list for whatever reason. And one had come out about the presidents club that was happening in the next year and he sent it around to myself and a couple of other new hires said, “Hey, have you seen this?” And I absolutely didn’t even really know it was a thing, didn’t even know it was a concept. One of my colleagues in my office though said, “Hey, don’t get too excited. It’s very difficult to win out here. It’s, you know, we’re, there’s a lot more business in Canada, in Eastern Canada and Toronto and Montreal and that sort of thing. It’s, everyone has bigger territories, everyone has more targets out there. So, you know, it’s cool, but don’t get too excited.” And I kind of said, “Well, I get where you’re coming from, but there’s no reason I can’t do that.” You know I consider myself, I think very highly of myself in terms of my capabilities and my skills and my ability to develop into the kind of seller that I want it to be. And so in 2017 when we were doing our annual business plans, I put it right on there. I want to come number one, my plan is to come number one in aim high, and I’ve had it on there every year since. So that’s kind of the origin story of how I decided to take that approach and really put the work in to be number one from there. Once I started with Dun and Bradstreet,

Scott Ingram: Hopefully you’re already subscribed to this podcast and the Sales Success Stories podcast as well. If you’re not, that’s where you’ll find my full 103-minute long interview with Neil. Obviously a lot longer than these tips, but there’s a ton of great value in there. We’ll have links to that episode and to Neil Ashford’s LinkedIn profile at DailySales.Tips/326

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Jeff Bajorek, that for the first time in months has nothing to do with the closing problem that you don’t have.

“Sell them on why the problem is worth fixing first and then sell them your solution.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 325

How do you sell differently when doing outbound and inbound?

Join the conversation below and check out Jason’s LinkedIn post!

Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Jason’s LinkedIn post

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 listing to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with another of his super insightful tips. Check it out:

Jason Bay: For as long as inbound has been around, especially with all the digital marketing and all this stuff that HubSpot is doing around creating inbound engines and helping people do that. There’s been a controversy over whether you should do inbound versus outbound. And I believe that you should do both. We happen to specialize in the outbound process, but I don’t think that should be the only part of your marketing mix, so to speak, and where you get leads and set your appointments from. Now if you’re an SDR, you might not really have a choice. I’m doing outbound, but there are also SDRs that do inbound, right? So what I want to talk about and where I see people having challenges is closing outbound versus closing inbound. There seem to be people, if you haven’t had a lot of experience with outbound seems to have some trouble closing at as high of a rate as you do with inbound. And someone put up a LinkedIn post and they said to the average close rate on outbound was like 10% or something like that, which I think is very, very low. So I want to talk about what those differences are.

So when you look at an inbound prospect that comes to you through your website, reaches out to you, whatever it might be, the biggest difference between that and outbound is that they’re typically further along in their buyer’s journey and closer to making a decision. So the buyer’s journey, that first stage is awareness. You know, I know that I have a problem and then I’m looking for a way to solve it. The interesting part of that, that’s the next stage in the buyer’s journey. And depending on the buyer’s journey you look at, there could be multiple stages in between, but interest typically is the next stage. And that’s like; Hey, I’m starting to look into options. I’ve identified what those are, and now I’m starting to explore a product or a solution or service to help me fix this problem that I am aware of. So the sale is focused more on why you’re the best to help them typically and less on why they should make a decision sooner rather than later. The second part with inbound that’s a little different is the internal narrative around their problem. And the best way to fix it has usually already been established, right? They already know that they have our problem, they’ve defined it already and they’ve already defined what they think is the best way to fix it. So with outbound, very different in these areas. So the first part that’s different is outbound prospects. When you reach out to them, unless you get lucky, which you will see, you know, 2 or 3% of the time is you’re typically catching people that are not very far along the buyer’s journey and they might not be in the buyer’s journey like at all.

So they’re probably not aware that they have a problem and they’re probably not looking for ways to fix it. So the sale typically is focused more on educating the prospect about a problem that they have or a way of fixing it that they may not be aware of. And the second part of this that’s different is the internal narrative around their problem in the best way to fix it has not been established because they’re usually not aware that they have a problem or they may not be aware of how to fix the problem that they have. So where do you want to focus your efforts little differently with an outbound sale is instead of asking all of these questions during the discovery process, you really need something valuable to share that’s going to open their eyes to a new possibility. So you need to have like the, Hey, here are two or three strategies we see companies like yours using to close this gap in whatever they’re doing.

So you need to educate the prospect on the opportunity that exists between where they are and where they could be. Usually, you need to come in with that information on a cold call or a cold email in order to get them to hop on a call. So you need to teach them something. The second part to that is again because the person and the company really haven’t gotten to the point to where they’re, you know, in that interesting stage and decision stage where they’re narrowing down solutions, you really need to sell them on the problem. So sell them on why the problem is worth fixing first and then sell them on your solution. Second, you really got to get their consensus on what the problem is and why it’s worth fixing because you caught them unexpectedly and they didn’t come to you with a problem.

So this is the two things that you need to do differently when you’re selling with outbound that you need to really, really focus on more than you might have to with inbound. So I put up a LinkedIn post about this, check it out in the show notes and I asked this question of how do you sell it differently for an outbound versus inbound lead and a lot of people comments, I recommend checking that out and I would love to hear from you, how do you sell differently when doing outbound versus inbound?

Scott Ingram: We’ve got a link to that LinkedIn post for you to check out at DailySales.Tips/325. Read the comments, add your own and be sure to connect with Jason.

Then make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast and come back tomorrow for another great sales tip.

“Collaborating with your company’s executives in assigning sponsors to your key accounts is really a great way to drive growth, retention, loyalty, gain insight, and really guide your strategy.” – Warwick Brown in today’s Tip 324

Why should you have executive engagement in your key and strategic accounts?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Warwick!

Warwick Brown on LinkedIn
Account Manager Tips
Rain Group Article
Top Performance in Strategic Account Management
How to Identify Key Accounts: A Quick Guide to Getting it Right

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 Warwick Brown is back with a great tip and he’s self introducing here so I’ll just let him take it away:

Warwick Brown: How would you like to know the number one, the number one action for strategic account growth? Any ideas? According to a Rain Group Benchmark Report on high-performance in strategic account management, quite a mouthful. They surveyed 370 companies and the number one account growth strategy was to get senior management involved and supportive of strategic account growth initiatives. But hang on, it’s not always so rosy because we have all been there where we’ve invited our senior executives into a meeting, they’re promised something we simply cannot deliver and we walk out thinking, “Oh no, now I’ve got to fix this mess.” So let’s weigh up the Pros and Cons of having your senior executives involved with your clients and your prospects.

Hello, it’s Warwick Brown here, founder at Account Manager Tips and I help organizations grow client revenue, reduce churn and get things done by empowering their account management teams and giving them the tools and mindset to succeed. Alright, Now enough about me, let’s talk about you. Why should you have executive engagement in your key and strategic accounts? Well, collaborating with your company’s executives in assigning sponsors to your key accounts is really a great way to drive growth, retention, loyalty, gain insight, and really guide your strategy. It shows commitment to your most important clients and drives a customer focus culture. It creates a partnership, orientation, and interdependence between you and your client and your prospects. And it improves resource planning and alignment. I mean, you know what’s not to like.

Here are the different types of executive engagement you might like to consider. You’ve got strategic contact, so that’s where you engage executives on issues of major importance that have long-term effects such as expansion into new markets for example.

Tactical contact. This is short term engagement that’s relevant to particular opportunities such as say post-sales service. You might invite your executives to welcome a new client on board and be part of that onboarding first sort of kickoff implementation meeting.
Social contact. So that’s an interaction between the supplier and the buyers, executives. So between you and your client or you and your prospects.

And then organizational alignment. So including your executives in goal setting, encouraging collaboration from different functional areas. So trying to get everybody to work together as a team who’s involved in either winning the business or keeping the business.

Executive engagement is a great way to get everybody on the same page. So let’s dig a little bit deeper into the benefits handling of the problems of executive engagement. What I like about including executives is that it does show commitment to my clients and my prospects. It builds trust and it really helps to nurture some of those more strategic relationships. Executives really can contribute an amazing amount of insight and experience because of their positions that you know, they’ve got greater knowledge, they can better identify opportunities and assessed risks in the way that maybe you or I can’t, you know, they’ve learned a few things along the way.

It also helps to develop Goodwill through strategic personal relationships with their counterparts within your clients or your prospects. It can earn greater access to decision-makers and improve information exchange.

There are just things that the people at the top might discuss with each other that they just wouldn’t share with your knee; including executives can help align different areas of the company to deliver quality outcomes for your clients and your prospects. And one of the greatest benefits of executive engagement is strategic advice and direction. You know, they’ve been around the block a few times. They’re really close to things like expansion, mergers and acquisition and business development. Those are the things that they have a law of experience, wisdom, and knowledge and 15 minutes with, you know, one of your execs can really give you some amazing insights and fast track some of your understanding about how to secure an opportunity or how to keep clients happy. But, it’s not all a bit of rose. There can be problems. It’s largely beneficial, but some of the things to be aware of, executives do need to tread a little bit careful when they’re engaging with clients and prospects. If they appear to be taking over, it may signal to the client that you don’t have control or you don’t have the skills or the authority to be the person they should be dealing with. It can really undermine you a lot. They don’t do this intentionally, but it might just be the message you’re sending. Decisions might be made without enough knowledge of the account profile or the history or some of the just logistics of how you do business. You know, execs aren’t always as close to things as you are and they may drop you into something or commit you to something that actually is can be a real challenge to deliver an unsure that’s happened to you. It’s happened to me many, many times and I’ve had to really unpick and sort of getting into a bit of damage control for things that they’ve committed to or said during the course of a sale and it might increase role ambiguity. You’re not really sure now where you sit in the whole sales cycle. Is your exec kind of taking the lead? Who’s doing what? Communication lines can get blurred. It can get a little bit messy depending on the extent to which they’ve been involved with the client during the process of securing the business or keeping the business. You don’t want your client latching onto the exec instead of you. Now that being said, the benefits far outweigh any of the problems and I would certainly encourage you to invite your executive team to engage with your major accounts. If you want to do that, here are some ideas to get you started.

Look for opportunities to foster sea-level access and networking. You know, develop and maintain those C level relationships. Encourage your executives to develop personal relationships with your clients, executives. Get them talking to your customers about how your two firms can grow together in the long-term in aware of the opportunities for them to expand the business with new product categories on market segments and find ways to create opportunities for your executives to socialize with your client’s executives. Invite the executives to attend joint goal setting meetings between the client and their account manager. Great way to do this. I can just join an annual review or a strategy session. I know sometimes it turned off because the meetings are really long, but they don’t have to be there for the entire meeting. Just invite them to part of it, if that makes sense. Talk to the executive team when you need to secure resources, remove roadblocks and obstacles and get their help to encourage the people involved in servicing your account, to collaborate with each other.

And lastly about inviting your executives to some of your internal planning meetings. You know, your quality pipeline reviews, your KPI performance reviews, your account planning strategies, whatever it might be. Getting those executives a little bit closer to your world and a little bit closer to your clients is never a bad thing.

That’s a wrap. Let me know what you think about executive engagement with your key accounts and with your prospects. Love to hear from you. You can find me on the social media platform of your choice at Warwick Brown or over at Account Manager Tips. Until next time.

Scott Ingram: To help you connect with Warwick we’ve got links to his profiles at DailySales.Tips/324 there you’ll also find a copy of the Rain Group report that he mentioned.

Once you’ve connected with Warwick and signed up for his great Account Manager Tips emails, come on back tomorrow for a great prospecting tip from Jason Bay.

“So what you want to do is take the position, blow it up, and then bring it back to something that you think is reasonable and that you both can agree on.” – Jason Cahill in today’s Tip 323

How about you? What’s your sales inception?

Join the conversation below and share your own thoughts!

Jason Cahill on LinkedIn
Ceridian
Submit a Sales Tip

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 Jason Cahill is back with another tip. Jason works in Commercial Sales at Ceridian and is responsible for their South Western Ontario territory in Canada. This is pretty interesting stuff, give a listen:

Jason Cahill: Hey Scott, Jay here. I thought I’d share it with another tip with you. That’s more of an advanced sales tactic and I like to call Sales Inception. In this method, if you really want something, you actually kind of push it to the extreme. Some people call this reverse psychology. I just called it Inception Sales because that’s what I’m doing is it’s suggesting that it’s not my idea. It’s actually their idea, even though it is mine. This often works on a lot of type and driver personas. And I’ll give you an example of how this works.

So for example, in sales, we’re always trying to tie the customer back to a timeline to close the deal or get a next meeting or whatever. So the traditional salesperson would ask, you know, when can we move forward on this? When’s our next meeting? And we know that if we’re polite and ask for the meeting, our customers will likely say, “Yeah, well, you know, I’ll let you know I gotta talk to somebody else or whatever. I’ll let you know.” So they’ve got the ball essentially. And basically you’re done in the sales cycle. You don’t have any control over any left. But if you said instead “You’re not in a rush or anything, are you? I mean, we have some time.” The client usually will answer pretty honestly and a lot of times they’ll actually say “Yeah, you know what, we’re not in a rush.” And you can suggest like,” Hey, okay, well let’s book something out like two or three months later or something.” They might say, “Great, that works for me.” And then now you have at least they have a timeline and a date. And obviously you don’t want to do it three months later. Yeah, time kills deals. But you might want to put it to the extreme. If you have a really good feeling that you know, Hey, there they are in kind of a rush, but you want to take that power position back, but give them a window to get it back. And the only other option is faster than two months. So if you said, “Hey, you’re not in a rush or anything, we’ve got some time, let’s book the next meeting.” If they said, “Yeah, well no, we’re good. You know, I’ll let you know” and say, “Great, well let’s book something out. You know, two months anyway, and then we can kinda catch up and we’ll move to the next stage. “Sometimes the customer will say, “No, no, no, no, no. We need to actually move faster than that, Can’t do two months.” And so the other option is, okay, well let’s figure out a date faster than two months. Now you’re back in the power position. So in pricing, it’s called anchoring high. When you suggest a higher price, the customer asks for a discount. After several theatrics, you settle for a lower price. And what you could have raised the higher raised, higher than the normal price anyway. I’m not saying you should do that, but you know, a lot of people do. So next time you’re negotiating or anything that you need, suggest the extreme kind of blow-up that extreme. So you know, “Hey, you want to move faster in the next month?” “ No, no, we’re good.” “Okay, great. Well, I don’t really have time until like three months out. So let’s book something that.” “ No, no, no, no. We need to do something faster.” “Okay.” Well, now you’re back. You’ve got the power position. Okay, You want them to buy the more expensive package, suggest the really cheap one. For some reason, they kind of want to be gained that upper hand over a salesperson in terms of prospects. So if you want them to buy the red one, so just the green one. No, I like green anyway. But basically it comes down to my mantra, which is if communication is anticipated, it’s automatically discounted. So what you want to do is take the position, blow it up, and then bring it back to something that you think is reasonable and that you both can agree on. Don’t give up your power position by asking too much suggest

Scott Ingram: To learn more about Jason just click over to DailySales.Tips/323, and if you want to be like Jason and like Andrew yesterday, because you regularly listen to these tips, but want to give back to the community and contribute your own tip. Just look for the Submit a Sales Tip link at the top of the page.

Then after you’ve sent me your tip. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Focus and take a long-term view, and engaging and connecting with your prospects.” – Andrew Kappel in today’s Tip 322

How can you improve your prospecting effectiveness?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Andrew!

Job Listing for Protegrity
Andrew Kappel on LinkedIn
Protegrity

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 Andrew Kappel. Andrew has been a long-time listener and has supported both of the Sales Success Stories book projects (thanks for that Andrew!) He credits the Sales Success Community for helping him get promoted from no tech experience to landing his first SDR job at Protegrity, a data security company. He sent from SDR to AE and now to Global Manager of Sales Development… all in under 2 years! Here he is:

Andrew Kappel: Hey Sales Success Community! What I’ll share with you today are two principles popularized by Jeff Bezos, Founder, and CEO of Amazon, and specifically how you can leverage them to improve your prospecting effectiveness in 2020. So the first is when prospecting, it’s critical you focus and take a longterm view and engaging and connecting with your prospects. A snippet from one of Jeff Bezos’s annual letters to Amazon shareholders, Bezos shares, and I quote; Longterm orientation interacts well with customer obsession. If we can identify a customer need and if we can further develop a conviction that the need is meaningful and durable. Our approach permits us to work patiently for multiple years to deliver a solution. So your objective when prospecting is to peak the interest of your prospects and earn the right to meet with them to understand a bit more about their situation and to discover and qualify if your products and services are a fit to solve their problems and help them achieve a better future state. Your prospects are busier than ever. They’re flooded with unpersonalized and generic sales pitches that are not relevant or personalized to them. Similar to how Amazon succeeds as a company, it’s really important to take a longterm view when communicating and looking to engage in your prospects. You might write a great email or a LinkedIn message, but if you expect them to immediately come back to you, take the bait and want to meet with you, that’s just not realistic and you’re not going to have a lot of success with that. Here Protegrity our SDRs, they’re executing three, five, even 10 or more personalized touchpoints across multiple channels, including email, phone, handwritten letter, even going on starbucks.com sending the prospect a digital gift card trying to set up a virtual coffee. It’s quite easy. It can go along way with your prospects.

The second principle is to be customer-obsessed. Well, that principle isn’t unique to Amazon. No doubt is a critical factor related to tremendous success and growth as a company. In your case, when prospecting, it’s critical to be prospect obsessed by reaching out to your prospects with relevant prospect centric insights and ideas. You’re providing value to them and you want to make it as easy as possible for them to connect, engage, meet, and eventually do business with you. If you remember one thing, when prospecting, it’s vitally important to have the right narrative. It’s about them, not you.

As this wraps up, I want to make this tip tactical and actionable. So in the show notes, I’ve shared a quick video demonstration of exactly how our SDR team app Protegrity executes with these principles to effectively take the longterm view and always being prospect centric. I’d love to hear what you think and better yet if you’d be interested in joining our SDR team here at Protegrity, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to talk. Thanks a lot.

Scott Ingram: The next big project Andrew is working on at Protegrity is the launch of Protegrity’s first SDR-hub in their new offices in Salt Lake City early in 2020. If you’re interested in jump-starting or re-invigorating your career at the intersection of data and cybersecurity, then check out the job listing in the show notes at DailySales.Tips/322, Of course, you’ll also find links to connect with Andrew there, and he created a bonus video where he walks through how Protegrity sets up their sequences with Outreach which is super cool. Talk about stepping up. I really appreciate Andrew for doing all of this and I hope you’ll check out his work.

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip!

“I think what they’re looking for is someone that understands their particular task at hand and can clearly articulate how they met back to that.” – Amy Volas in today’s Tip 321

What are companies looking for in sales professionals today?

Join the conversation below and connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Amy Volas on LinkedIn
Amy Volas on Twitter
Avenue Talent Partners on Facebook
Avenue Talent Partners
Avenue Talent Partners Blog

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 Amy Volas is back. Amy is a sales fanatic turned entrepreneur, she was bitten by the startup bug and can’t imagine spending her time anywhere else. She created Avenue Talent Partners to help with the tremendous task of growing startups through one of their most valuable assets—salespeople. Here she is with today’s tip:

Amy Volas: So the question is, What are companies looking for in sales professionals today? And the second piece of that question is how has it changed over the last few years? So it’s a bit of a tricky question to answer because not all salespeople are created equal. And I think when I was thinking about this question, I think back to all the feedback that I get from my clients and I think about why they don’t move forward with people in their interview and selection process. And so I want to reverse engineer the question a bit of what are they looking for and what’s missing. And I think what they’re looking for is someone that understands their particular task at hand and can clearly articulate how they met back to that. People really struggle, being specific about what they’ve done, where they’ve done it, who they’ve done it with, what the outcome was, what they learned from it, how they can apply it. Companies are craving that they’re craving natural curiosity that people want to immerse themselves into whatever it is that they might be doing because that translates to the buyer journey. People care about folks that can listen, that they want to work hard, that they want to roll their sleeves up. These are things that go back to a lot of the basics and the human element of things. So think about the criteria so to speak, that cannot be replaced by technology. That’s what the best companies are looking for in terms of the people that they’re hiring for sales.

How has that changed over the last few years? I think because we live in such a world where it’s digital and technology is everywhere and there are a million ways to sunday to get help from a technology perspective. It has made salespeople a little lazy. I’m a salesperson. I promise I come in peace. I’m not trying to be offensive, but we’ve over segmented the sales world. It is really choppy. I grew up in the world of having to do every single thing myself. I was my own customer success person. I was my own BDR, I was my own account manager, I was my own enterprise seller. I was all of it. And I’m so grateful that I had that because it has served me well. And so I think over the last few years, at least the last decade, we’ve fallen into this world of over-segmentation where sellers learn one thing and that’s all that they know. And then to get ahead, they either have to be promoted or they have to leave, which contributes to a lot of other problems that people talk about. But what’s really changed is technology has contributed to that and it’s made people hide behind tech to not be able to have real conversations, which goes back to what companies are looking for in sales professionals today. They want somebody that can communicate. They want somebody that can be accountable. They want somebody that can have a thoughtful strategic business discussion. They want someone that’s going to follow through. All of these things technology can’t really do because it’s a human thing.

Scott Ingram: For more about Amy and Avenue Talent Partners, just click over to DailySales.Tips/321. On that page, you’ll find a link to Amy’s LinkedIn profile. She is an incredible follow, so do yourself a favor and connect with Amy right now.

Then e sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from one of your fellow listeners!

“When you fix this belief issue, you increase your chances of success.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 320

Do you have a belief problem?

Join the conversation below and If you enjoyed this series, please reach out to Jeff on LinkedIn and tell him so!

You Don’t Have a Closing Problem on Spotify

You Don’t Have a Closing Problem – Jeff Bajorek on Spotify
White Paper: You Don’t Have a Closing Problem
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
Jeff’Bajorek on YouTube
JeffBajorek.com

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 Jeff Bajorek is back with the last of his 16 part series that we kicked off almost 4 months ago in tip #208 called: “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem.” Give a listen to this final installment and then I’ll tell you how you can more easily listen to the complete series:

Jeff Bajorek: Now we’ve come a long way together by this point and in this series, I’ve given you 15 other problems that you have that aren’t a closing problem but will help you close more sales. Now it’s time to get to the last one. You don’t have a closing problem, you still don’t have a closing problem. You have a belief problem. This is the one thing that is common among every salesperson who misses or fails to land a deal. They don’t believe that they can make it. They don’t believe that they can get it. Now, I can tell you that there are going to be times when you really believe that you can get it and it just doesn’t happen. That’s not the point. I’m talking about the deals, the majority of the deals that you leave, that you never really believed you had in the first place.

Now, why do you believe that you have a deal? Well, because you’ve addressed all those other 15 problems that I mentioned, and when you do everything in your process to put yourself in a position to win, and you have every right to believe that you’re going to win it, but when you’re not addressing those things, it erodes at that belief. It lets doubt creep in. And when you doubt if you can make it, your success rate plummets. So when you fix this belief issue, you increase your chances of success because of all the things that go into that belief. But this is about confidence. This is about knowing that you’ve got the right solution for your prospect. This is about knowing that your prospect is better off for having done business with you than anybody else. And when that belief drives your actions and your activities, you’re going to put yourself in a position to win more often.

So in your quiet moments when you’re by yourself, when you’re brainstorming these deals, do you believe that you’re in the position to win? Do you believe that you have what it takes or are you still leaving things to chance? Do you believe that you can provide an outcome for them that nobody else can provide? Ultimately, do you believe you’re good enough to make this sale? That’s a tough one. And that kind of confidence needs to be bolstered on a regular basis. And so one of the things that I recommend that everybody does, if you’re in sales, hell, if you’re just, even if you’re not in sales, this is what I want you to repeat to yourself a hundred times a day. I’m the best in the world at what I do. And the really scary part is I’m only half as good as I’m going to be. Think about that. Say it once or twice. You’ll smile. Say it 10 times. You start to get a little bit of a fire in your belly. Say it a hundred times before you leave for that first call in the morning and you’re to want to run through a brick wall to provide outcomes for your prospects and customers that nobody else can. This belief is where it all begins and ends in selling, and if you don’t have it, you’re not going to close anything. You will have a closing problem if you have a belief problem, but when you fix all of the other issues that I’ve mentioned in this series, you’re going to close a lot more sales

Scott Ingram: For the entire series you can get the white paper from Jeff and read them all, OR I’ve also created a Spotify playlist with all of these tips in one place. That way you can just start with the first tip in the series and let them autoplay all the way through. For links to both of those things, just click over to DailySales.Tips/320. Then do me a favor. If you enjoyed this series: Please reach out to Jeff and tell him so. I thought these were really great, and if you did too connect with him on LinkedIn and let me know. Or better yet, share your favorite tip in the series publicly and tag both Jeff and I.

Then be sure to stop by tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!