KEEP SEARCHING FOR AN EDGE – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #101

101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas Idea 101: KEEP SEARCHING FOR AN EDGE As a final entry (and yes, I know it says 100 ideas on the cover, but I have made a point of emphasizing the usefulness of something unexpected), I would like to make a point about the dynamic nature of the sales process. Sadly there is no one magic bullet that transforms every sales situation into a certain winner. Every sales person must get used to some rejection, and work with the prevailing strike rate in their industry. What this book does is provide ideas that might improve your strike rate. The best sales people never give up on the process of improvement. They see the process as dynamic, and constantly work to better what they do. Not every skill is like this. Something that illustrates his principle, one that occurs to me as I write, is the skill of typing. I may type less than perfectly, but I do use a lot of fingers, and I do go at a fair rate. (Publishers do not pay enough to make slow writing economic!). This is something of a static skill. As long as I do enough typing, and do so regularly, my speed will keep up,...
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NEVER TELL OBVIOUS LIES – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #99

101 Best sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 99: NEVER TELL OBVIOUS LIES It may be that selling involves some exaggeration, and occasionally a little white lie, but more than that runs risks. Tell someone that the battery life of some gizmo is twice what it actually is, and this description may help clinch the sale, but it may also mean the customer is back promptly to return the goods, and resolves never to buy from you again. Yet despite the logic of this, some sales people not only tell lies, they compound the damage by telling obvious lies, in some cases making statement that are both cliché and spotted as doubtful at ten paces. My least favourite, and a common one, is the sales person seeking an appointment who says something like, “What about Tuesday morning at 10 am? I will be in your area then”. Now, not only do I not believe this for a single second (the person will be in my area only if I agree to a meeting), strangely I do not see helping the person to reduce their travel time as a priority at this early stage in our relationship. Certainly it is not a reason to see them. Such a line simply fails...
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BENCHMARK YOURSELF – Best Sales and marketing Ideas #95

101 Best Sales and marketing Ideas IDEA 95: BENCHMARK YOURSELF You may be pretty good at selling (even though you say so yourself), but do you know how you compare with others, not just in your organization, but also more widely? Idea From consultants Miller Heinman … This company specializes in the sales area. It does not regular research, and one survey, conducted in conjunction with Quest Media Ltd, and published in the journal Winning Business, reviewed current practice and looked to the future. It examined the changing sales role, customer expectations and beliefs, and the whole way sales teams are organized, staffed, rewarded, and managed. Key finding indicated that: Customers are becoming better informed and more organized, demanding, and sharp in their dealings with sales people (with the internet being used to a significant extent for pre-buying research). Technology is having, and will continue to have, an effect on sales activity. Most dramatically it is replacing sales people with electronic, impersonal buying, although this is not affecting large numbers of business areas. The dynamic nature of this area is evidenced by the uncertainly respondent reflected in their forecasts of what other influences are becoming important. Recruitment is a perpetual challenge, as is retention. CRM is becoming a more...
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BECAUSE YOU’RE SPECIAL – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #93

101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 93: BECAUSE YOU’RE SPECIAL There is saying that a little flattery goes a long way, meaning that flattery can oil the wheels of relationships, and carry people with you. Of course, this is something to use carefully. If flattery is used like a blunt instrument, or in the wrong context, it will simply rub people up the wrong way. Besides, many people think they are not susceptible to flattery, and perhaps the more sophisticated are not. If you have just said to yourself, “Quite right, I can spot flattery coming at ten paces and it doesn’t fool me”, then you have just proved the point that it does work. Idea From an international conference organizer … I was recently asked to be a keynote speaker at an international conference is to be held in Seoul. Although the organizer offered to cover the costs of travel and accommodation, the fee was small, and I needed to be there for the three days the event lasted. So allowing for my travel time, I wasn’t going to make much money for the time it would take me. The organizer used two major tactics to persuade me to participate. First, the event would attract interesting people,...
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NO PROBLEM – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #92

101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 92: NO PROBLEM As I write this I am arranging a training course for a large multinational IT company, to be held in its office in Singapore. (I work there regularly). With participants assembling from five countries, and an HR manager who keeps tinkering with the agenda, there are many arrangements to be made. This is a new client, and one with potential for the future. One thing about this situation illustrates an important principle. Idea When circumstance pose some difficulty … There are two potential difficulties in this situation, which both link to the fact that my clients and I are 6,000 miles apart, and I want to ensure that this does not look in any way inconvenient at the client end. First, there is the question of language. My prime contact is Thai, and although he speaks good English, the potential for misunderstanding is greater than would be the case if we had the same first language. I need to take care, and just a little more thought and time than usual, to avoid any ambiguousness, and make sure everything is clear as we go along. Second, there is a time difference between the two locations. If I have an...
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BIG STRATEGIES – Best sales and Marketing Ideas #91

101 Best sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 91: BIG STRATEGIES Not only are some customers different from others (it has already been stressed here that customer need individual treatment), some are also larger than others, in terms of either business received from them or potential. A big customer is sometimes satisfying and gratefully simply labelled “big”, and no further action is taken. But if the volume of business is already large, that does not mean it cannot be increased. There is an old saying that even the best performance can be improved , and despite the apparent contradiction, this is a sensible attitude to take. Idea Analyzing the potential of major customers … There is a whole separate literate on major accounts, and on the management of the relationships that go with them (something to investigate if you have such customers). Here, however, is one idea that can quickly create new business possibilities. I like it because in its simplest form it can be worked out on the back of an envelope (even using approximate figures). The necessary analysis simply takes the value of a large customer’s business and splits the figure across two axes of a matrix. One axis lists products (or product areas) one by one, and...
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A TELLING SONG – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #90

101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 90: A TELLING SONG The idea here is important, but the example that brought it to mind is not strictly a sales one. First, some brief background: I have recently written a travel book (First Class – At Last!, Marshall Cavendish), which focuses on a journey from Singapore to Bangkok on the luxury Eastern & Oriental Express. This involved a visit to Singapore, where one evening I went to Harry’s Bar, a well-know jazz venue on Boat Quay. Idea From jazz singer Marina Xavier … At around every evening, Harry’s bar presents live music. There is a resident band, but the right I was there a guest artist was appearing, Eurasian songstress Marina Xavier. (She had an album to promote, so she was selling, in a sense). Let I give her plug: she’s very good, and if you like cool jazz, the album is When the World was Young (available on Amazon, if Singapore is off your route). One of the last things Marina said by way of introduction was, “What day is it today?” Someone shouted “Tuesday”. “OK”, she said, “let’s make it seem like Friday night”. And she was off into the first song. Wittingly or not, she did two...
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THE POWER OF DESCRIPTION – Best Sales and Marketing Ideas #89

101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas IDEA 89: THE POWER OF DESCRIPTION Everyone in selling must know the concept of features and benefits, and that, to use and an old phrase; you sell the sizzle and not the sausages. People buy something because of what it does for them, or means to them; that is, they buy because of its benefits. As a result, sales messages should predominantly be benefit-led: you talk about the benefits, and use the features as factors that demonstrate how a benefit can be delivered. So far so good, yet prevailing practice is by no means perfect, and the world is full of sales people busily talking about features. Certainly I find that significant number of people attending courses on sales techniques do not really understand the difference between features and benefits. Even when you clearly understand the difference, the way benefits are described is a key factor in making a successful sales pitch and obtaining agreement. Idea From a manufacturer of catering equipment … Selling a range of cookers, grills, water heaters, and other items for hotels, restaurants, and various such establishments certainly involves a degree of technical detail, but let’s just concentrate on a couple of simple facts. Imagine too that a busy...
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BE PREPARED – Best Sales and Marketing ideas #88

101 Best Sales and Marketing ideas IDEA 88: BE PREPARED Every text about selling stresses the need for preparation, and the danger of trying to wing it. Yet there are occasion when many sales people do just that. They think they have everything in mind, and that no further thought is necessary. This area is so important that one example to stress the danger is a must. Idea From a firm of architects … This particular firm was already successful, but it wanted to increase the size of projects for which it was invite to pitched. It went for a job involving the building of residential training centres for a national charity, and after preliminary meeting, was put on the short-list. This firm and two others then had to make a presentation to the board that ran the charity. This necessitated some preparation. Three people were to speak; they met briefly and shared out the task, and one of them agreed to make the slides they would use in the presentation. Give the nature of the business, there were impressive things to show, and slides were always an important part of any pitch for an architecture firm. The three met again on the evening before the presentation, and looked...
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