Many sales organizations these days are struggling to achieve organic sales revenue and profit growth.

According to the TAS Group, 67 per cent of salespeople do not achieve their sales targets.

Thanks to the internet, buyers now have more information available to them than ever before. This easy access to knowledge is putting sales reps into a weak position, as it empowers buyers to take charge of the sales process. Buyers now carry out extensive online research before feel ready to contact a vendor. Thus, now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the buyer even existed. Yes, we are in the era of the buyers journey.

Now the Buyers decide WHICH VENDOR they will contact, and WHEN they will do so. If your organization is not among the chosen ones your reps may never know that the Buyer even existed.

As illustrated below, there are three distinct windows of opportunity in the buyers journey to influence the buyer towards our brand and our goods/services:

1. Opportunity To Create Desire

In the early stage of their buyers journey sellers have the opportunity to create desire in the buyers’ mind to consider our offerings, whether it be a new car, a new pair of shoes, or a complex IT system.

2. Opportunity To Influence The Buyer

Later, we have the opportunity to influence their decision-making and lure them away from competitors and towards our brand and offerings.

3. Too Late To Influence The Buyer

But, unfortunately, once they have made up their mind about what they want to buy and which vendor they want to buy it from, there is little opportunity left for vendors to change the buyers’ mind. They simply have come too far down the track towards making their buying decision to change tack now. Unless, that is, you have a very compelling argument or information that they had not considered (see the section on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling below).

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a buyer is not a great sales strategy. We need something more pro-active, and we need to focus on the first two windows of opportunity that I mentioned above.

Obviously, waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy.

Over time, several options have become available to restock the sales and marketing arsenal that has been depleted by the buying journey and by the modern buyers. They can be used in any combination to help you reach your sales targets. Here are some of the more commonly used ones:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Selling
4. Storytelling
5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)
6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

Let’s now look at the above options in more detail:

1. Cold Calling / Warm Calling

A lot of articles have been written about the pros and cons of cold calling. Tony J. Hughes, has written extensively on the subject, largely promoting cold calling as an effective sales technique. Personally, I am not a huge fan of calling somebody out of the blue, interrupting whatever they are doing and expecting them to drop everything to listen to your sales pitch. The only time this has half a chance of working is if you really have something significant up your sleeve that is of vital importance to them and to their business. If you have something like this then please feel free to go straight on to the section below on Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling.

Otherwise, my recommendation is to stay away from cold calling. Instead, warm up your prospect with Content Marketing or Social Selling (both described below) before making direct contact. In this way, at least they know who you are and that you have something that is worthy of their time, or not.

2. Content Marketing

This strategy requires marketing to issue content that entices and compels buyers to our business. This content is usually published to the website and online generally, and complementary material is issued to the sales team. Content may comprise white papers, thought leadership articles, client success stories and lead generation campaigns. The key to success is that marketing continuously monitors the performance of its content and actively seeks feedback from the sales team about how prospects and customers react to it. Equally, sales reps must actively provide their front line intelligence to marketing so that the performance of marketing content can continuously be improved.

Success depends largely on a highly collaborative feedback loop between sales at the customer-facing front and marketing at the online front.

3. Social Selling

This is a specialist version of content marketing which is practiced by individual sales reps. The idea is that we want to attract buyers not only to our brand but also to individual reps who have built a reputation of being subject matter experts.

The way it works in many organisations is that marketing provides the right content to the sales force for them to promote their personal subject matter expertise on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. In other words, individual sales reps attract the buyer through their personal brand, as well as their employer’s brand.

Again, the success of this initiative largely depends on close collaboration between marketing and sales, if the content is to match the individual, and vice versa.

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is very powerful. Ever since humans were living in caves we sat around the campfire and told stories. Before the written word was invented stories were the way that we acquired information and learned new skills, such as how to hunt, gather and grow food. Even today, us humans remember stories much better than mere facts or figures.

When salespeople engage with a prospect or client they will have much deeper impact when they convey their information through a story. Storytelling also has the advantage that it doesn’t feel like selling. Just telling a story or an anecdote feels less intrusive to both the buyer and the rep. So, go ahead and tell the story of how a past client found themselves in a similar situation to your current prospect and how your solution helped them to overcome their challenges and to succeed.

Your marketing team should arm your sales force with stories to regale your prospects and customers.

5. Account Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is nothing new, but modern sales and marketing technology has elevated it to the latest “must-have”. The reason is that it can be very powerful, if executed well. Imagine you want to win a new key account or retain a major client that is at risk of moving on to a competitor. Wouldn’t you want to give them the attention they need to help secure or retain their business ? So, you create a specialist team, let’s call them a “hit squad”, to identify the key stakeholders in your account, i.e. the decision makers, influencers and gate keepers, and you identify what makes each of them tick, their likes and dislikes, challenges and opportunities. Then you provide each of them individually, through whatever means necessary, with the information that they need to make an informed decision on why they should buy from your organization. This is so that when they all meet to decide which vendor to go with, they will discover that they all miraculously agree that they should go with your business.

This “hit squad” must consist of a multi-disciplinary team, comprised of marketing, sales, product management and communications experts. So, once again, close collaboration between marketing and sales is the key to success here, too.

6. Challenger / Disruptive / Provocative Selling

I have previously written about this type of selling and why it is not suitable for every rep. However, if your sales force has people with the stature to challenge your prospects’ or clients’ thinking then it can be very effective. The idea is that you disrupt their thinking with some new information that they either did not previously possess, or that they had not yet considered. Something that stops them in their tracks. The neat thing is that, because this particular insight was brought to them by you and only you, it gives you instant credibility over and above your competitors and turns you into a trusted adviser. It should be easy from there on to close the deal.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a myriad of options to engage your prospects and clients, but waiting to be contacted by a Buyer is not a great sales strategy. And, given the myriad of alternatives, there is also no need for cold calling.

Regardless of which of the above sales techniques you choose to go with, much of your sales performance and success will depend on how well your marketing and sales teams work together to engage the Buyer and to differentiate your business from that of your competitors.

Ideally, your teams will collaborate across the entire 360 degrees, as illustrated here.

You are invited to talk to us about your business challenges and we’ll do our best to help, if we can. Go ahead, what have you got to lose ?

The post Six Sales Prospecting Methods, Including Cold Calling. appeared first on Head Of Sales.

My dad passed away on Christmas Eve in 2014. He was a committed atheist who taught me the power of belief.

Every word from your lips has the power to build or destroy. Your words can be precious gifts that help change lives because behind their façade of confidence is usually someone secretly feeling that they’re an impostor. Inside the shy or reserved is often someone great who just needs a little encouragement to break-out.

My parents divorced when I was age 9 and Dad moved interstate. He was a workaholic and not around very much so I really only got to know him well in my late teens when I moved to live near him. I then joined him in business and wow, what a ride. Dad was Mensa level genius, bipolar (manic-depressive) and an alcoholic… what a combination. He had a break-down and was hospitalized, and I was thrown in the deep end to manage the business. My dad was difficult to work with, to say the least, and I was young and judgmental.

But months later, over dinner with just him and me – I asked him to tell me his life story. Judgment gave way to compassion and I started to become aware of the greatest gift we can give to another person… believing in them.

Dad had an unconventional childhood where he lived with various foster parents, estranged relatives, in convents and boarding schools. By the age of 12, he had lived in 16 different places. This was because his father was an Air Force officer during World War II and raised him as a single parent. His mother, Winifred, incredibly beautiful, suffered from postnatal depression and was subjected to electroshock treatment – she descended into severe mental illness and, as was the custom of the day, was institutionalized and never spoken of. Dad only discovered that his real mother existed when he obtained a birth certificate as part of applying for his driver’s license at age 22. He was told that she had died giving birth to him – but this was not true and I was there when he finally met her for the first time, shortly before she died in her eighties.

From birth through to joining the Australian Air Force in 1952, Dad’s childhood was as far removed from normal as one could imagine. He had no real sense of belonging or being loved. To compound his childhood problem of being relentlessly moved from situation to situation, Dad suffered from a severe speech impediment – chronic stuttering. He was always the loner, the outsider, and the target of bullying and sexual abuse.

I asked Dad how in the world he had managed to survive and why he wasn’t a bitter person (Dad was a pacifist and never sought revenge). He answered by telling me about Ms. Beatrice Ternan, a speech therapist, who had the biggest positive impact on him as a child. His stuttering affliction was debilitating and he was sent to Ms. Ternan several times a week for speech therapy exercises. Once she got to know Dad, she let him sit and read, no speech exercises. She would quietly do paperwork and then take him to her home for biscuits and lemonade where he was then collected by his father. She told him that his stuttering was something that would simply pass and she showed him a kindness that he had never experienced. She gave my Dad the gift of believing in him. Beatrice also taught Dad two principles that stayed with him for life:

“To be interesting you must be interested. Give your time generously to others and you will be rewarded many fold.”

As my Dad and I hugged that night he whispered into my ear: “Son, all you need to make it in life is someone who’ll believe in you.” He was that person for me and I became that person for him.

As you embark on your journey in life, think also about giving something to others that can change their lives – the gift of believing in them; the gift of encouragement; the gift of speaking positively into their future. There are people in your life that need you to believe in them– your children, your partner, your employees… even your boss.

Bindi Irwin lost her dad when she was young but Steve’s belief in her continues to this day beyond the grave. Terri, her Mother, has done an incredible job in raising her children without Steve and keeping them grounded in reality and purpose (environmentalism) rather than destroyed by the lure of narcissistic celebrity. Bindi won America’s Dancing With The Stars in 2015. These two clips say it all.

For those in sales, notice how dancing masterfully is all about telling a story and transferring emotion. Singing, selling, leading in any way requires the same ability and, like Bindi and Derek, with authentic belief in what you’re doing.

Bindi Irwin posted a tribute to her father on what would have been his 58th birthday in February. Steve was born in February 1952 and died 4th September 2016 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray.

View this post on Instagram

Dad, Today is your birthday. I had an extra strong cup of tea just how you liked it. I hugged Mum for you and told her how much we love her. Robert and I went on a hike through the mountains you cherished. I watched one of your documentaries with Chandler and shared stories about you. I walked through your office in the zoo and smiled at our old family photographs. Today and every day I miss you and love you beyond description. You’re always with me.

A post shared by Bindi Irwin (@bindisueirwin) on Feb 22, 2020 at 4:04am PST

Here’s the biggest thing I’ve learned about leadership: ‘It all about you but it’s not about you.’ Leadership is an inside job where you believe in others and become the person worthy of serving them.

The post Leadership: The Power Of Believing In Someone appeared first on Head Of Sales.

The sales rep paused for a moment, ensuring all eyes in the room were fixed on him, before clicking through to his first slide. A kaleidoscope of company logo’s sprung up on the screen, wowing the audience with the vendor’s customer base and depth of industry experience. An audible gasp rippled through the room as a 2nd logo slide replaced the first, with even more customer logos. Whispered conversations broke out as the user community remarked on how lucky they were to be embarking on a project with a vendor of this experience.

When the sales rep casually mentioned his company was 100% Australian owned, you could feel the excitement beginning to build to a crescendo.

“We’ve won countless awards for our projects” he continued, sensing the audience were now eating out of the palm of his hand.

“Did I mention we’ve got very low employee attrition rates and are regarded as one of the best businesses for employee satisfaction in our industry?” he concluded, with an air of supreme confidence.

The spontaneous burst of applause took even the sales rep by surprise, as the CEO jumped out of her seat, hand extended and pen poised, ready to sign the waiting contract.

At least that was how it was mean’t to go…unfortunately even the best laid plans can sometimes go astray. What really happened went something like this:

• Sales rep puts up first logo slide – an audible groan emerges from the back of the room and what sounds like the word ‘Bingo’. This group have spent the past week sitting through PowerPoint presentations and have seen the same logo’s represented again and again across all three sets of vendor slides.
•  Sales rep puts up second logo slide – CEO looks at her watch, gives a disapproving stare to her key project sponsor, whose job it was to properly brief the vendors and makes a quick note on her iPad.
•  Sales rep explains his company is 100% Australian owned – The entire room collectively asks themselves “So what?”
•  In quick succession, the Sales rep highlights the awards, low attrition rate and high employee satisfaction which his company enjoys – By this stage half the room have zoned out completely and the other half are feeling bad for the rep, as they watch their CEO getting more and more irate.

For those sales professional who conduct dry-runs before an important customer presentation (and I hope that’s most sales professionals) you could do a lot worse than taking 3 or 4 pieces of cardboard and a marker pen and writing the following:

During your presentation dry-run, ask your colleagues to play the role of the customer. Every time you make a statement, particularly one which relates to your business or your solution, anyone in the room should be encouraged to hold up their ‘So What’ card, if they fail to see how your statement is relevant to them as a customer. Let’s look at a couple of quick examples:

• We’ve got lots and lots of customers, look at all their logos on the slide behind me

So what?

 “I’d like to highlight 3 specific customers from this slide to talk about, due to the similarity in the business pains they were experiencing and the fact that these might represent good customers for you to speak, when we move into the reference phase of your review process”

• We’ve won lots of awards for our projects over the years

So what?

 “We’re incredibly proud of the industry awards that we have received over the years, because we have won them in conjunction with our customers and they recognise the commitment of teams in delivering an exceptional project outcome. I sincerely hope the project we’re about to embark on might be nominated for an industry award also”

• We have a very low employee attrition rate in our business

So what?

 “Our employee attrition rate is well below industry standards. What that means for our customers is far greater continuity in terms of the resources working with you to deliver on your project outcomes. It also means that we have built deep domain and industry expertise in our business, which we leverage to deliver an even better outcome for our customers.”

Remember, as a prospective customer of yours:

• It’s not my job to care, it’s your job to make me care.
• It’s not my job to search for the relevance, it’s your job to highlight the relevance.
• It’s not my job to make the link, you need to ensure you create the link for me.

Add this 1 simple step into the way you prepare for presentations and it will transform the way your audience connects with your message. Oh and if you do try it, please send me a picture of your ‘So What’ sign for my collection!

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