I commonly see survey results indicating that more than 3 out of 4 customers of the salespeople I’m working with, have indicated that they would be happy to recommend.

And yet, when I do an analysis of the number of meetings with referred prospective customers, I generally find that the majority of salespeople have had NO referral meetings in the previous 60 – 90 days. When I analyse how many deliberate referral conversations salespeople have had with happy customers, I generally find a similar result.

The point I’m making here is that despite customers indicating they’re happy to help, the majority of salespeople are not turning that willingness into actual referrals. And customers aren’t the only people in our lives that would help us, if we were better at asking for help and staying top of mind.

This article is all about leveraging the credibility, networks and goodwill of others as part of your sales growth strategy. “Who can help me?” is a question not enough salespeople ask.

Let me share a few exercises and questions worth considering in relation to this very important part of your sales growth strategy.

1. Identify influential people

The first question is something I picked up at a Verne Harnish conference and it had a significant impact on my thinking and focus in this area. It’s a simple question but it normally takes 3 to 4 sessions to really answer it effectively. The question is “Who are the 20 people that will have the BIGGEST influence on your success or failure in the coming year?”

As you write out your list two things will become apparent. The first is that there are people that can help you and have a major impact on your success. The second and more confronting realisation is that there’s a very high probability that you’re not paying the top 5 enough attention.

2. Develop third-party referral relationships

The next consideration relates to developing third party referral relationships. In nearly every industry there are natural partners dealing with the types of customers you want to be doing business with and a single partnership can often deliver all the new business leads you need to achieve your sales growth targets.

My strong advice when considering this area is that less is more. Most salespeople have a lot more success if they focus more energy on less potential referral partnerships. The starting point is identifying 2 – 3 partners that you think you could deliver value to as part of the relationship.

3. Maximise customer referrals

And then there’s referrals from your existing customers and prospective customers. The first question to ask in this area is WHEN are the best times for engaging in a referral conversation. If you fail to identify the moments, you’ll miss all the opportunities there are for engaging people in a conversation about the potential to refer you. Here’s a big tip. The research indicates sooner is a better time to ask for a referral than later.

Once you’ve figured out WHEN you need to determine HOW you’ll engage customers in the referral conversation. Once again, a big tip here. If you’re not asking or you’re not turning asking into referrals, you need to review HOW you’re asking. You’re either not confident in asking or you’re asking the wrong way.

As a simple example of the impact this type of questioning can have, an Adviser I worked with in Canada was able to attribute $225 000 of additional annual revenue from just a single year of using a single strategy at the right time in the customer relationship.

There is major power in asking “Who can help me?” and taking it to the next level with the more detailed questions and exercises I’ve shared here.

The post How to Find Sales Opportunities Within Your Network appeared first on Head Of Sales.

You must be doing more of the right activity with the right people at the right times if you want to achieve major sales growth without sacrificing your health, personal life and all the other things that should matter to you.

A great place to start is considering all the people or businesses you’ve done business with in the last twelve months. Both success and failure leave clues on where we should and should be spending our time.

Write out a list of all the people you did business with and consider the following questions:

1. What are the similarities between the customers I won and lost?

Consider things like where the lead came from, the industry the customer is in, the gender and age of the person or people you dealt with, the problem the customer would say you solved for them and ease or difficulty in winning the business. Generally, this type of analysis will give you some great insights into where you’re more likely to succeed.

2. Which customers are you most able and likely to deliver significant value to?

Take some time out to consider this as if you were a potential customer. As an example, I don’t do sales training for salespeople that carry out large enterprise sales. There’s plenty of money to be made in that space, but I don’t have a competitive advantage in training these people. I leave that to Miller Heiman because that’s what they are very good at. I prefer to focus on salespeople that engage smaller businesses and individuals. I love working with call centres where every word matters and my skills in developing powerful and compliant scripts can make a big difference. I love working with large scale teams because over a decade of experience in training salespeople with online video and social coaching tools, means I can add significant value in these types of opportunities. If you focus on the people you can deliver the most value to with the skills and products you have, you’ll be a lot more successful.

3. Consider which of your customers you’re passionate about helping

Once again, I don’t focus my marketing on sales strategy projects with CEO’s and executive teams. I have the skills and over the years I’ve had great success in these projects. But they just don’t excite me. I get a lot more passionate about helping front line salespeople and small business owners trying to get this thing called sales handled in their lives. I get excited when a salesperson sends me a message telling me that a strategy, they viewed in a video worked for them. I get excited about helping people that are new to sales. That’s why I love video sales training so much, because it enables me to work with thousands of these types of people each week.

4. Consider which types of prospective customers are easy to identify and access

If you can’t easily build a list and make contact with your target customer, you’re unlikely to be successful in new business prospecting. It is a lot easier to identify and access every Dentist in a 25km radius of your office than it is to identify and access high net worth individuals in your state. It’s a lot easier to identify and access the business neighbours of your existing customers, than it is to chase every business in your territory. It’s a lot easier to identify and access the Accountants of your customers than it is to chase every Accountant in your territory.

The easier it is to make a list of specific people or businesses the smarter your targeting is. The easier it is to access people or businesses on that list the more likely it is you’ll be motivated to do your new business prospecting.

5. Consider where you got your best RoE

Which type of customers gave you the best returns for the time, effort and energy you had to put in. And remember that return is not just dollars. Return includes how much you enjoyed working with them, whether having them as a customer was great for your brand, whether they refer and whether they’re likely to remain a customer for the longer term.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything you should consider but if you ask these questions, you’re significantly more likely to be smarter in your targeting.

To summarise all of this, the question to get the smarter targeting conversation going at your sales kick off is “What type of people or companies am I MOST able to deliver value to AND capture my fair share of that value?”

The post 5 Strategies For Smarter Sales Targeting appeared first on Head Of Sales.

Over a century ago, Russell Conwell was famous for his travelling lecture, delivered more than 6000 times. What’s interesting about the lecture, is that Conwell was preaching customer-centricity over a century ago!

Let me share the parable at the centre of this lecture and how it applies to the development of your sales growth plan.

There was once a wealthy man named Ali Hafed who lived not far from the River Indus. “He was contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented.” One day a priest visited Ali Hafed and told him about diamonds.

Ali Hafed heard all about diamonds, how much they were worth, and went to his bed that night a poor man. He had not lost anything, but he was poor because he was discontented, and discontented because he feared he was poor.

Ali Hafed sold his farm, left his family, and travelled to Palestine and then to Europe searching for diamonds. He did not find them. His health and his wealth failed him. Dejected, he cast himself into the sea.

One day, the man who had purchased Ali Hafed’s farm found a curious sparkling stone in a stream that cut through his land. It was a diamond. Digging produced more diamonds — acres of diamonds, in fact. This, according to the parable, was the discovery of the famed diamonds of Golconda.

The point of the story is that we often dream of fortunes to be made elsewhere. We ought instead to be open to the opportunities that are around us. And so often I talk to and coach dejected and worn out salespeople that have looked everywhere for new business except their own backyard!

Until you’re confident that you have genuinely mined for all the opportunity in partnering more effectively with your existing customers it just doesn’t make sense to be cold calling and spending hours on LinkedIn trying to build your brand and create inbound leads.

If you generate ongoing revenue as a result of the relationship and value, you deliver to existing customers you should first consider retention. There’s always a need to balance out the ongoing service delivered with the ongoing revenue. BUT in my experience, too many salespeople miss out on retention, referrals, re-pricing as delivery gets more expensive and taking care of more customer needs, because they’re not focused enough on delivering value once the sale is complete.

The point is, take a little bit of time out to consider what the opportunities are inside your existing customers.

If retention is important, consider ranking all your customers from highest retention risk to lowest.

Consider whether there are re-pricing opportunities across your portfolio of customers. So often when I coach salespeople, their portfolio of clients is full of people or businesses that promised growth in volume for lower pricing but never delivered on their side of the bargain. Even if you can’t achieve upward re-pricing, you may be able to negotiate referrals for maintaining the discounted pricing.

Consider whether there’s an opportunity to take care of more needs for your customers. This doesn’t have to be just about cross-selling other solutions you sell. You may be able to partner up with someone in an aligned business and do mutual referrals. As an example, if you’re a lawyer, you could introduce your clients to an Accountant, Real Estate Agent or Banker on the basis that they reciprocate.

And consider whether there’s an opportunity to grow within the client. This isn’t just about big enterprise customers with lots of divisions. If you take care of my personal mortgage, there’s an opportunity to grow within my extended family. If you take care of a property developer there’s an opportunity to grow within their network of suppliers and that includes builders, architects, plumbers and a host of other companies and people.

If you don’t have existing customers or you don’t earn ongoing revenue from existing customers—that’s ok.

The post How To Grow Revenue From Existing Customers appeared first on Head Of Sales.

A message I constantly repeat is the reminder that in most businesses with margins of 20% or more, a 10% improvement in conversion generally increases profit by 40% or more. And the thing is that a 10% improvement in conversion is VERY achievable if you commit to driving more efficiency into your first meeting and proposal process.

Notice I didn’t say “Getting better at closing and objection handling.”

These are important skills. But this is generally not the real problem.

Let me take you through a few considerations for improving efficiency in this area.

1. Confirm the need

The first thing to consider is how effective you are at creating or confirming an emotional need BEFORE you agree to provide detailed proposals and pricing.

Until there is a problem to solve what you’re selling is NOT a solution. Ask yourself “How could I consistently share and create discussion around the problems that I or we are MOST effective at solving for our ideal target customer?” Could you visualise those problems to make them easier to discuss? Is there a diagnostic you could have people do prior to or during your early meetings? Is there a third party report you could send prospective customers that highlights problems you solve with your services or products. The better you get at highlighting and educating your ideal target customers on the problems you solve the better your conversion rates will be.

2. Confirm commitment level

Next, consider whether you need to introduce a customer commitment level that’s required before you spend more than 30 minutes on a written proposal or pricing. What would you want the prospective customer to do, say or share BEFORE you agreed to commit time and effort to writing proposals and providing detailed pricing? The big point I’m making here is that for most salespeople, too much time is wasted writing proposals and providing detailed pricing for people that are either not ready to buy or not ready to buy from you. Writing proposals makes us feel like we’re making progress and a fat pipeline makes us feel safe as salespeople. But none of us get paid to write proposals and provide pricing. So, we need to make sure the time and effort we put in is correlated to the amount of genuine commitment the prospective customer has given us. If you’re not sure how to quantify whether a prospective customer is ready to buy, search my other posts on the IDEA model and other strategies for quantifying prospect commitment.

3. Simplify the process

Next, consider whether you can simplify the process of creating proposals and pricing you write. Consider which part of proposal writing is taking the MOST time and effort and find 3 ideas for reducing this.

Once again, too much time is wasted doing up detailed solutions when an email confirming high level discussions and offering more detail if they would like to proceed is much more effective. Often creating a generic capabilities or solutions document with case studies, testimonials and other supporting information enables salespeople to deliver lots of content without re-inventing the wheel every time they have to write a proposal. These don’t even need to go into a document as a lot of this information can exist in a capability document you attach to proposals or even a web pages you provide links to.  I’m not saying you can’t do major tailoring for important proposals BUT only spend time doing this for prospective customers that have absolutely committed to doing business with you, your way and at your price.

4. Develop closing and objection handling processes

One last thing you should consider is whether you do have highly developed closing and objection handling skills and processes. The goal must always be to help prospective customer’s buy your solution but that doesn’t mean people won’t need your help’ guidance and enthusiasm to make decisions.

Some questions to consider are “Have we written down all of the common objections we face in both engaging prospects and selling our solution?” Remember a problem identified is a problem that can be solved.

Once you know what the objections are the next question is “Have we developed strategies we can deploy throughout the sales process to educate the customer on why common objections should not be a concern or reason to not proceed?” Avoiding objections is significantly more powerful than handling objections and a much more pleasant experience for the customer.

And finally, “Are we practicing our solution presentations, closing and objection handling skills in a manner that genuinely improves our skills and conversion rates?” One of the most powerful strategies in this area is to role play live opportunities the day before a proposed solution is presented to the prospective customer. This is also a great place to role play pricing objections and responding to customer negotiation strategies. If you do this in a team setting and get other salespeople to role pay the customer everybody learns, and everybody improves in this area. And even better – you don’t need to pay an expensive consultant like me because it is all in-house.

Let’s wrap this up by reminding you that the goal is NOT to provide lots of people with pricing and written solution plans. The goal is to win business and do it with the least amount of time, effort and energy. The question to consider at your Kick Off and throughout the year is “What are the most efficient and effective ways to convert interest into confirmed need and genuine opportunity into new customers?”

The post 4 Ways To Convert More Proposals Into Sales appeared first on Head Of Sales.

I want you to seriously consider that question. Give yourself a score from 1 – 10 and be as honest as you can with yourself because this is important. If you’re below 7, you’re a part of the sales majority and definitely NOT alone.

“Sales” is tough. It involves rejection, failure, problems, uncertainty and we’re measured like very few other professionals are. The score board is brutally clear on a moment by moment basis and it constantly gets reset no matter how good last month or quarter was. This is our reality and the environment we work on and that’s why a deliberate approach to building confidence and motivation is SO important.

This is a big area but let me share a few of the big questions that will get you started.

“Why am I committed to growing my sales?”

First question to ask yourself is linked to the first conversation. As I mentioned very early in this series, you MUST link your personal goals to your sales goals, if you want the motivation it takes to break free of the bill paying and boss’s budget cycle.

“Why do I enjoy and feel passionate about helping the customer’s I help with the solutions I sell?”

Second question is really important. Try telling an Apple employee they should buy a Samsung phone and you’re going to have a very serious debate.

Not every product or service we sell is going to make a huge difference in people’s lives but the more you get in touch with, and passionate about why you and your solution matter, the easier it will be to maintain consistently high levels of motivation.

A question that’s aligned to this is “What do I enjoy and like about working with my customers and prospects that match my ideal target customer?” The number one predictor of whether you will be supported and successful in your customer relationships is how much you like them and dealing with them.

Another interesting and valuable exercise is to reflect on what really motivates you as an individual. Generally, it’s a combination of factors and needs but understanding what really gets you going is important. As a human you’re motivated by 6 things:

1. Achieving a base level of certainty
2. Freedom and choice
3. Feeling important
4. Feeling more connected
5. Achieving progress and a sense of advancement
6. Contributing to the lives of others

If your sales role is just about paying the bills, then your motivation is attached to achieving a base level of certainty. Don’t be surprised if you’re in the bill paying, boss’s budget cycle if that’s your only motivation.

We also need to consider confidence. Higher quantities and quality of sales action is correlated to higher levels of confidence in being able to execute on the plan you’ve developed, and the activities required to grow sales.

As an example, if you’ve identified asking for referrals as a key part of your strategy but you don’t feel confident in asking for referrals then we have a problem.

Once again, a huge subject but let me offer two key questions here.

The first is “Who is making me feel more confident on a regular basis?”

As a starting point, most people should probably start with “Who in my life is destroying my confidence?” and make plans to spend a lot less time exposed to those people.

But we also need to consider which people we need to be spending more time with. Our confidence should be positively impacted by the peers we spend most of our time with and I challenge you to reflect on this and make changes if you’re not surrounding yourself with peers that build your confidence.

Rumi challenged us to spend more time with people that fan our flames. Great advice and please make sure you’re NOT spending time with people that are tipping buckets of water on the fire!

The post How To Stay Motivated And Confident In Sales appeared first on Head Of Sales.

If your sales results are not where you want them to be the primary cause is likely to be internal rather than external. Confidence is critical, but all the confidence in the world without intrinsic motivation to perform will not enable you to break free of what I call the “Budget and Bill Paying Cycle”.

Most salespeople lack the motivation to perform in the top 13% because their goals are controlled by others. Their work rate and commitment to skill improvement are determined by what it takes to pay their bills and achieve their boss’s budget.

There are two major problems with this:

The first is that your boss did not define the budget by determining how much you needed to sell to live an amazing quality of life. They didn’t determine the budget by asking “What sales goal will enable Dean to earn enough to move into a better house, remove all his debt and take all the financial stress out of his family’s lives?” That was not the question he or she was asking when they set the budget. And for nearly every salesperson it is very unlikely that simply hitting budget is going to deliver a truly better quality of life for you and your family if you have one.

The second challenge with this is that it is very difficult to get motivated if the only thing you’re striving to do is pay the bills. Most of us are motivated up to the point the bills are paid but once the fear of not being able to that is gone, so is our motivation to do additional prospecting and make additional sales.

You must KNOW why it is important to go beyond the boss’s budget and bills. The more you connect personal goals that matter to you and those you care about to sales performance, the more likely it is you’ll do what it takes to move into the 13%. Remember that 13% of salespeople are taking home 91% of the rewards and commissions above salary. And the primary reason they outperform is they know WHY they MUST achieve beyond the budget and the bills.

As I like to point out, “If you don’t know, you won’t grow!” So, every sales kick off should start with salespeople reflecting on their personal motivation for sales growth beyond the budget.

Once we’ve made that link, it’s important to reflect on where the growth is most likely to come from. A great tool for considering this is the Ansoff Matrix considering the 4 key sources of sales revenue.

1. Selling the same product to existing customers

Source 1 is selling more of the same to existing customers. Salespeople should consider how much revenue is likely to achieved simply by retaining existing customers and if this is a large percentage of the desired annual revenue then the amount of retention activity in your sales growth plan should reflect this.

2. Selling new products to existing customers

Source 2 is all about meeting more of your current customer’s needs. As an example, if you’re a mortgage broker that does not take care of customer’s personal loans, insurance and equipment finance this could represent a great opportunity for growth in both your customer relationships and your sales. If this is a big opportunity then spending time with existing customers, more depth in your needs analysis and systematically engaging all your existing customers will be an important part of your strategy.

3. Selling the same products to new customers

Source 3 is all about new business prospecting. The research suggests that the average salesperson is only having 3-4 meaningful new prospect conversations per month and only bringing on 4 meaningful new customers a year! Those are scarily bad conversion rates, but this also suggests that most salespeople need to be prospecting more. And before you start blaming marketing, I want to remind you that if your ‘Why’ is big enough, you’ll take personal responsibility for the number of prospective customers you’re speaking to each week. If this is where you need a big percentage of your sales growth to come from, then prospecting activity and a disciplined approach to getting it done needs to be a big part of your strategy.

4. Selling new products to new customers

For completeness, source 4 of sales growth is selling new or non-core products and services to new customers. Unless you’re about to release a new product into a completely new market, this is unlikely to be an important source of sales growth. If it is, new business prospecting will be a major part of your growth strategy.

Having determined where the growth required to achieve your goals will come from, it’s time to do a little bit of thinking around what activity is most likely to enable you to achieve them as efficiently and effectively as possible.

There are a multitude of ways to retain and grow existing customers and the same goes for securing new customers. Before you charge off into a frenzy of activity, it’s important to consider which of those is most likely to work best for you, your target market and the solution you sell.

The post “If You Don’t Know, You Won’t Grow!” appeared first on Head Of Sales.