Sales and Sales Management Blog

February 15, 2011

Free Roundtable Discussion: The Changing Face of Professional Selling Tuesday February 22, Noon Eastern

Filed under: career development,Sales Resources,success — Paul McCord @ 10:21 am
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“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” - Charles Darwin  

Whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organizations must develop.  

Change is continuous and will become more rapid as we move forward over time. The one constant that we can rely upon in commercial life is change – everything is changing, everyday.  

We can choose to embrace the changes, adapt, and thrive, or we can resist, and risk extinction.

The questions we should all be asking ourselves right now are:

What will the sales landscape really look like in five years time?

Who will survive?

How will they survive?

Who will perish?

Join seven of the world’s top sales experts and recognized thought leaders in the sales space, for what promises to be a highly thought-provoking debate.

The Panel

Joanne Black – is the leading authority on referral selling, and the author of No More Cold CallingTM: The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust. Wherever genuine sales thought leaders have congregated, you will always find Joanne, and also in that company, you’ll discover….

Paul McCord – is the president of McCord Training, author of the Amazon and Barnes and Noble best-selling book on referral generation, Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals (John Wiley and Sons, 2008), and SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar, not forgetting Bust Your Slump, which he released last year. www.dynamicsalesgrowth.com  

Colleen Francis – is the president and founder of Canada-based Engage Selling Solutions — a thriving sales-training organization that delivers tailor-made, winning solutions to sales and marketing professionals internationally. Colleen is high-energy and high-commitment, personified.

Jeb Brooks – is Executive Vice President of The Brooks Group, one of the world’s top Sales Training Firms as ranked by Selling Power Magazine , Training Industry, Inc., and The American Business Awards. Over its 35 year history, The Brooks Group has helped more than 2,000 sales-driven companies in nearly 500 industries select, hire, train, and retain top performing salespeople.

Nigel Edelshain – is the man who first coined the term “Sales 2.0″ and he is CEO of Sales 2.0 (LLC). Sales teams trained by Sales 2.0 get radically superior results by employing social media and Sales 2.0 tools in their sales processes. Sales 2.0 works extensively with companies in sales-intensive industries like IT services, insurance, software, printing and telecommunications  

Dan Waldschmidt – is one of the founders of IntroMojo, a popular inspirational speaker, expert author, and a sought-after strategist on creating edgy conversations in the marketplace. He blogs regularly on his popular motivational selling blog Edge of Explosion

The Chairman

Jonathan Farrington – is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author, and consultant. He is Chairman of The JF Corporation and CEO of Top Sales Associates, the creator and CEO of Top Sales World and the man behind the Annual Top Sales Awards.

‘When a collection of brilliant minds hearts and talents come together – expect a ….. lively debate”‘

When? Tuesday February 22nd at 12 Noon (Eastern) 5pm GMT

How Much? Registration is FREE

Where? Please register HERE

In fact, don’t just join, join in!

August 2, 2010

Great, You’re Dealing with Your Self-limiting Beliefs; What About Your Self-destructive Habits?

Filed under: career development,sales,selling,success — Paul McCord @ 8:58 am
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We’re all familiar with the destructive nature of self-limiting beliefs.  We’ve been warned about them; scolded about them; shown how to eradicate them.  But what we don’t hear much about are the equally—if not more—dangerous self-limiting habits that we all have.

Most sales trainers, managers, and motivational speakers preach to no end about the evils of self-limiting beliefs and give a plethora of positive thinking exercises to counteract them.  The core belief is that what we believe—what we really in our heart-of-hearts believe—must manifest itself in our actions.  So if we believe that we are lousy at prospecting, we’ll find a way to guarantee that we are lousy at prospecting—we sabotage ourselves in order to verify one of our basic beliefs about ourself as a salesperson, i.e., that we’re lousy at prospecting.

The idea behind recognizing and changing our self-limiting beliefs is that when we change our belief from a negative (we’re lousy at prospecting) to positive (we’re an effective, productive, skilled prospector), our actions will also change to reflect our new found belief—instead of sabotaging our prospecting efforts, our positive beliefs will force us to find ways to succeed at prospecting.

In theory that’s a pretty fair philosophy.  Except it’s shortsighted because it only addresses part of our problem—our actions are influenced by our beliefs but the actions that hinder or prevent our success are more than just reactions to what we believe about ourselves as salespeople and sales leaders. 

Need an example?

Well, let me first give an example of an action that MAY be a direct response to our belief that we are lousy at prospecting.  Since we are lousy at prospecting, we decide that before we start cold calling we’ll take a few minutes and surf the Internet in order to “relax” and get “ready.”  We start by spending four or five minutes surfing around a couple of news and sports sites.  After a few minutes we make a couple of cold calls and discover that we hadn’t relaxed enough.  As the days pass, without noticing, we’re spending more and more time trying to relax in order to get mentally prepared to cold call.  Before we know it, our relaxation exercise is our prospecting time.  Did we develop this habit simply because it’s easier to surf than make cold calls or did we fall into the habit as an unconscious response to our belief that we’re lousy at cold calling—and besides, it’s a waste of time anyway?

Does it really matter since either way the habit is killing us?

Well, how about an example of a habit that will also kill us but is very definitively not a result of our self-limiting beliefs about ourselves as a salesperson?  From our earliest age we’ve been late for everything.  In fact, we’re one of those preverbal people whom people claim will be late to our own funeral.  At work we’re always rushing to get to our appointments but no matter what, we always seem to walk into our prospect’s office two, three, five, sometimes ten minutes late.  We never have enough time to put our presentations together.  We have to slap something together at the last minute and never have time to practice before we have to meet the prospect.  Surely this isn’t a self-limiting habit developed in order to validate our belief that we’re a lousy presenter or lousy salesperson.  Maybe it just says we’re crappy at time management or that we’re arrogantly self-centered or that we are just plain sloppy about everything we do.

Again, does it matter?  Wherever the habit comes from, it’s killing us and must be dealt with if we want to succeed.

Although we hardly ever hear about identifying and eradicating our self-limiting behavior–our destructive habits—it is just as important as changing our belief system.

How, then, do we eradicate our self-limiting beliefs?

Let me quickly give four steps to identifying and eliminating self-destructive behaviors that I’ve used with dozens of sellers and sales leaders—and myself—that have proven to work:

  1. Replace Negative Beliefs:  I’m not going to go into this in any detail as all you need do is Google “self-limiting beliefs” and you’ll get over 217,000 links to articles, books, ebooks, seminars, workshops, and anything else you can imagine about dealing with your self-limiting beliefs.  Simply let me say that positive self-talk, positive affirmations and other techniques to deal with negative beliefs do work and should be incorporated into any effort to deal with negative habits.
  2. Identify Your Self-limiting Habits:  Of course, this goes without saying.  The hard part is how do you do it? My experience has been that we can discover a number of our self-limiting habits ourselves by simply becoming attuned to what we do, especially what we do just prior to things that we dislike or are uncomfortable doing.  Over the next few weeks pay close attention to what you do.  Since habits are most often unconscious behaviors, you’ll probably have better luck if you keep a log of those things you catch yourself doing over and over.  It could be something as simple as stopping for a cup of coffee every morning on the way to the office or as complex as creating a personal emergency that must be attended to every time you’re asked to work late or retorting with a smart remark anytime someone questions something you say. 

    Unfortunately, we usually can’t find all of our negative habits on our own.  We need help.  Enlist assistance from those close to you: spouse, manager, coach, mentor, or close friends.  More than one observer is ideal.  Observers must be people who know you well and who you trust.  Explain what you’re doing and ask them to observe you over the next weeks and give you feedback on the habits—good, bad, or indifferent–they notice, as well as any habits they are already aware of.  You may not like what you learn, but if your observers are really trying to help, the information you get will be valuable.

    Simply recording the habitual activity isn’t quite enough.  Can you figure out what the action is attached to?  For instance, stopping and getting a cup of coffee is associated with going to the office.  Discovering an emergency that must be attended to is associated with being asked to work late.

    What might be the reason for the action?  Getting a cup of coffee might just be something pleasant—or it might be a way to delay going to the office.  Creating a personal emergency is a way of getting out of staying late.

    Ultimately, you have to decide if the action is negative, positive or neutral—and whether it is a habit that you need or want to change.  I’ve found that if you’re not really committed to eradicating a self-limiting habit you won’t succeed.  If you’re not committed, move on to another habit that you will be committed to eliminating because

    if you only half way try to break a habit and fail, all you’ll be doing is reinforcing your self-limiting belief system.  Instead of gaining on your belief problems, you’ll be feeding them.

     

  3. Replace a Negative Habit with a Positive Habit:  Instead of simply trying to eradicate a negative habit, proactively work to replace it with one that will help you advance toward your goal.  Trying to eliminate a behavior leaves a space, a void where the action used to be.  If you’re like me, if I have a time void I’ll find something to fill it and often that something is something negative. Why put yourself in a position where you’re consciously trying to create a void that could easily create stress and anxiety?  Instead of creating a void, change the negative behavior with a predetermined positive behavior.For example, instead of wasting time surfing the net in order to “relax,” purposely set aside two or three minutes prior to cold calling to sit quietly with eyes closed and envision yourself making three successful cold calls.  Or instead of waiting until the last second to create your next presentation, schedule your presentation creating time several days prior to the scheduled presentation date and then give yourself a reward if you finish the presentation X days prior to the presentation date.  Move from chaos to proactively managing your time and reward yourself for successfully doing so.
  4. Don’t Accept Failure:  Allow yourself the freedom to backslide without becoming discouraged and giving up.  Habits, no matter what their origin, weren’t created overnight and they won’t be changed overnight.  You’ll probably find yourself slipping back into old habits.  That’s fine.  It’ll happen.  But just because it happened doesn’t mean you’ve lost the war.  You just lost a single battle.  If you give up you’ll be guaranteeing you’ll have that much more to overcome to reach your goals—and reinforcing a self-limiting habit of giving in when things get tough.

It’s been said that we humans are creatures of habit.  So we are.  The great thing is we get to decide if our habits are going to be positive or negative.  No one else can make   that decision for us.  Let’s make them habits that work to fulfill our wants and needs rather than ones designed to sabotage us.

July 8, 2010

5 Motivational Aids—Keep the Passion Flowing

Filed under: career development,motivation,success — Paul McCord @ 11:13 am
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If you want to be successful you have to be motivated. 

What is motivation?

Is it desire?  No.  We all desire things—happiness, success, money, love, whatever; but just because we want it doesn’t mean we’re willing to do what it takes to get it.

Is it vision?  No.  We can all envision ourselves with the things we want without taking the slightest step to acquire it.

Is it energy?  No.  There are millions of salespeople spending endless amounts of energy everyday toward their goals but not reaching them because their energy is misspent.

Is it commitment?  No.  There are millions who are committed to success who fail daily.

Motivation is a unique combination of desire, commitment, and energy—let’s roll these into a single quality called passion–to reach a goal no matter how difficult it may be or how long it may take to reach.

Passion—that unique combination of desire, commitment, and energy—in and of itself can virtually force you to succeed by demanding you do those things necessary to be successful.  Passion won’t let you rest.  It won’t allow you to quit.  It won’t allow you to become sated until you’ve reached your goal.

Passion demands your best effort.  It pushes you to go beyond the satisfactory to the extraordinary.  It forces you to reach heights you thought impossible.

Passion is pretty heady stuff.  It keeps you on the edge.  It sharpens your senses, keeping you alert to opportunities.  It awakens the creative juices.  It helps keep the doubts and worries at bay.

Unfortunately, passion isn’t limitless.  It has limitations and weaknesses.  Although strong, it must be reinforced or you risk having it burn itself out.

How do you keep your passion burning?

Here are 5 down and dirty ways to reinforce your passion and keep it burning strong:

  1. Love what you do.  There is no substitute for doing something you absolutely love doing.  If you can hardly wait to get out of bed in the morning to get your day started you’re already half way to success.  Certainly we can’t all be engaged in something we absolutely love, but if you can, even if only on a part-time basis, go for it.
  2. Set tangible, realistic short-term goals.  The more often you see tangible progress, the easier to maintain your passion.  Set short-term, realistic goals.  If you consistently see small goals being reached, you’ll soon begin to see large goals being reached.  By the way, reasonable goals don’t mean easy to reach goals.  Goals should consistently stretch you and your abilities.
  3. Visualize outcomes.  Athletes use visualization for a reason—it works.  If you are afraid of making presentations, visualize yourself making great presentations.  If you fear cold calling, visualize yourself being successful at cold calling.  Visualization is a form of practice.  In a study a couple of years ago researchers found that students who only visualized practicing a piece of music were as proficient at playing the piece as students who had actually practiced the piece on the piano.
  4. Use positive affirmations.  Repeating positive affirmations strengthens and reaffirms your internal belief system.  We cannot do what we do not believe we can do.  On the other hand, if we sincerely believe we can do something, no matter how ‘impossible,’ our brain can find ways to get it done.  Once we believe, our brain begins to go work to figure out a way to turn our belief into reality. 

    Our brain will believe what it hears and what our eyes see.  If it has heard and witnessed failure for years and years, it believes we will fail.  Fortunately, we can change that.  It will take time.  We will have to consciously retrain it.  We’ll have to give it positive reinforcement through what it hears—our positive affirmations—and what it experiences—our small successes as we reach our short-term goals.  But just as it learned we are a failure, it will learn we are successful—but this time we can control what we feed our brain.

  5. Use outside reinforcement.  Motivation—passion—is internal.  It isn’t something that is created externally.  That doesn’t mean that external stimulus can’t reinforce our internal motivation.  The problem is that external stimulus such as motivation books, tapes, seminars, and such burn out quickly—usually within just a few days, sometimes within just a few hours.

    That quick burn doesn’t mean external stimulus can’t be valuable.  It can be extremely valuable.  A motivational tape can give us a great burst of energy prior to an important presentation; a motivational seminar can get our creative juices flowing in new directions; motivation quotes can realign our minds at moments of exhaustion or weakness. 

    Keep favorite motivational tapes and quotes ready at hand.  Take the opportunity to attend motivational seminars and presentations.  Remember the ‘high’ is fleeting—but you can drink of it anytime you need it.

Companies spend billions of dollars every year trying to find the magic motivational bullet.  They’ll never find it because it isn’t something they can order in from a motivational speaker.  We either have it or we don’t.  But if we don’t, we can take the steps necessary to find it and nurture it.

And it isn’t expensive, difficult, or time consuming.

Find your passion and you’ll find your success.  If you’re a sales leader, help your sales team members find their passion and you’ll find your success.

January 4, 2010

A New Year, a New Decade: Turn the Possible into the Actual

Filed under: attitude,career development,motivation,success — Paul McCord @ 10:47 am
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Today, Monday January 4, is not only the start of a new business year but a new decade as well.  Whether you’re a top producer or on the bottom of your company’s sales board, whether you‘re an old pro or fresh out of school, you start today, this year, this decade with the opportunity to create a completely new future.  

Maybe 2009 wasn’t what you wanted it to be—that is certainly the case for a great many of us.

Maybe the 21st century hasn’t lived up to your expectations yet.

Put all of that behind you now. 

The Timing is Right for Actualizing the Possible
I’m not a mystic, but there are times when there seems to be a shift in the universe, where what was, no longer has to be, and where the possible really can become the actual. 

Of course, we preach turning the possible into the actual all the time, irrespective of the day, the year, the decade.  And it is true, we can turn the possible into the actual at anytime.  But the turn of the decade seems to present a unique opportunity, one where change seems to come a little easier and where the impact of change seems more dramatic.  It’s a natural time for new beginnings.

The Change You Want Won’t Happen by Accident
Even though this is the year to turn your possibilities into actualities; it isn’t going to happen unless you make it happen.  Thomas Jefferson observed about his own life that “the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” 

You too can have luck smile upon you by doing what Jefferson did his entire life—make your own luck.  Jefferson was born into a family where he had money and status.  He could have just sat back and drifted along with few worries.  Instead, he saw possibilities for a new nation that would give citizens more freedom than nation had ever known.  He, like many of his contemporaries, wanted to turn that possibility into reality.  He invested his time, money, and energy, willing to risk everything he had—including his life–in order turn the possibility into actuality.  And his willingness to invest all he had resulted in changing his future from one of a soft, lazy gentleman of means to one of the most important figures in history.

Like Jefferson, you must be willing to make the commitment and the short-term sacrifice to turn your possibilities into reality.  Fortunately for us, we aren’t risking our life, just our time, energy, and at bit of our resources.  Nevertheless, turning our possibilities into reality can be just as life changing for us as fathering a new nation was for Jefferson.

  1. Figure Out Where You Want to Go:  Unless you know where you are going, you’re just drifting aimlessly—maybe you’ll drift somewhere you want to be, maybe you won’t.  Set specific, measurable goals.  At a minimum set goals for:
    1. Gross sales dollars
    2. Number of new clients
    3. Number of sales
    4. Monthly and annual income
  2. Figure Out Where You Need Help:  Examine your strengths and weaknesses, then figure out where you need specific help.  Is you weakness prospecting?  Maybe it’s building a relationship based on trust?  Possibly it’s in the area of persuasion.  Maybe you have several areas of concern.  If so, which area if improved would have the most immediate and/or dramatic impact on your career?
  3. Get Help NOW:  Now that you know where you need help, it’s time to put your time, energy, and money on the line—acquire the help.  Whether it’s a book, CD, webinar, seminar, or sales coach, don’t hesitate, get it and get it now.  Yes, you’ll have to work, you may well have to spend some of your hard earned cash, and you’ll have to change your behavior which is always hard to do.  In other words, it probably won’t be comfortable and there won’t be a guaranteed result. 
        Once you’ve overcome one area of weakness, start on another.  Although we never get to the point where we have perfected our sales skills, over time we will continue to get better and better.
  4. Eradicate Your Failure Demon:  Many of us have to deal with more than just weaknesses that limit our potential for success; we also must deal with a personal demon that is actively blocking us from success.  That demon can come in many forms.  It may be one that whispers “you can’t” or “that’s going to be hard, leave it until tomorrow.”  Once you believe the demon that you can’t, you can’t; once he convinces you to leave it until tomorrow, tomorrow will never come. 
        The “you can’t” and “leave it until tomorrow” demons haunt many of us, but even more common is the “you don’t deserve it” demon.  The “you don’t deserve it” demon takes our history and turns it into a bat to bludgeon us with.  Because we failed in the past, because we didn’t do this or that, because we don’t believe we’re good enough, because we don’t believe we’ve worked hard enough, because, because, because whatever, we don’t deserve to succeed.  The “you don’t deserve it” demon is incredibly powerful.  It can defeat the best training, the best product offering, the strongest success commitment.  It wears on us and influences us to unconsciously sabotage our potential success.
        If we want to succeed, we must defeat our failure demon, for, if we leave it to continue working on our psyche, we have little chance of success.  We must recognize our demon and then recognize that its argument is false—we can if we want to, we don’t have to put off until tomorrow what should be done today, and we do deserve success.  We must give ourselves permission to succeed—and then be ever mindful not to let our personal demon creep back in.
  5. Don’t Settle for Failure:  The above steps are critical but they’re still not enough.  You have to make the commitment to succeed.  Yes, you have to know where you’re going and you certainly have to improve your skills.  In addition you have to eradicate your failure demon.  But you still haven’t done enough.  You have to commit yourself to succeeding—to putting in the time and the effort, to seeing enough prospects, making enough presentations, signing enough contracts.  You have to be willing to not quit until you’ve met your goals. 
        Too many of us are willing to settle toward the end of the month for just getting close. We convince ourselves that we’ll make it up next month.  Of course, we don’t.  We just keep settling and the next thing you know; we need a miracle to meet our goals. Settling is just another word for failure.

Now is the time to make your possibility into your reality.  Take the steps necessary, commit yourself to improving your skills, eradicate your failure demon, and refuse to settle, and you’ll find that a new year and a new decade can create a new life for you and your family.

June 6, 2008

Rachel’s Fixin’ to Prospect Issue Revisited

Filed under: career development,cold calling,lead generation,Networking,Personal Marketing,prospecting,sales,selling,time management — Paul McCord @ 7:40 am
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I received several emails about my post discussing Rachel’s prospecting issues from a couple of days ago. The basic message in each email was that the post was timely and the admonition was needed—but what did I recommend for Rachel?

Without going into all of the details of the recommendations I had for her, let me give three of the most basic recommendations I gave her.

But before I do that let me revisit one aspect of her issue—spending time preparing to prospect. Rachel’s problem is one well know to us Texans. In the vernacular of Texas, she had a “fixin’” problem. We Texans spend a great deal of time “fixin’ to”. We’re always fixin’ to do something. Ask a Texan what they’re doing and they’ll tell you they’re “fixin’ to prospect,” or “fixin’ to make a presentation,” or “fixin’ to eat,” or “fixin’ to take a shower.” We’re so involved with fixin’ you’d think we never actually do anything.

Rachel was always fixin’ to prospect and seldom actually engaged in prospecting. So the solution was to change her focus from fixin’ to doin’.

Rachel’s three primary new prospecting activities:

Calling. Her company’s primary prospecting method is cold calling. She had a list of several hundred names to call of which she had made contact with very few. Her first task each day is to speak with a minimum of 15 individuals. That in itself is a big task. She may have to make 100 to 150 dials to connect with and speak to 15 prospects. If she makes 20 dials an hour, she could be on the phone 5 to 7 hours a day.

Networking. Rachel loves to network, but she had been spending her time at networking events that by their very nature presented limited opportunities. She attended three or four networking events a month held by various local chambers and she also attended two networking breakfast groups. During her 8 months of selling, she had made contact with less than a dozen quality prospects and had acquired none as clients.

Her experience with networking events had paralleled that of most salespeople—there were very few quality prospects at the chamber events and those prospects that did attend were surrounded by her competitors. The networking breakfast events were as fruitless, as most of the other members of the groups were not in a position to meet her prime prospects since few sold products or services to her prime prospects.

Rachel was encouraged to change her networking focus from chambers and breakfast groups to organizations where a large number of prime prospects would gather—the associations of various industries. She is in the process of deciding whether to invest her time with the dentist, manufacturers, pr, or commercial real estate associations in town. She’ll eventually join and become active in two, possibly three of these organizations.

Speaking. Rachel has developed a presentation about financial independence for women and is beginning to book presentations at various business, industry and women’s organizations in town. The presentation is educational, not a sales pitch. Her goals are modest—get in front of and meet as many potential prospects as possible. To date she has only given three presentations, but has already begun developing relationships with more than a half dozen quality prospects—more than she would have met in a month when she spent her time fixin’ to prospect.

Although Rachel and I have been working together for only three weeks or so, she has already tripled her monthly average of new prospect contacts. Her secret new weapon? She isn’t fixin’ to do anything any more—she’s actually doin’ prospecting now. Most of her day is spent on the phone, her networking and speaking is done either before or after working hours or during lunch—works great because they don’t interfere with her phone work.

Three weeks isn’t long enough to know whether she’ll have the discipline to continue with her new focus or whether she’ll be able to convert her prospects into clients, but she now has a real shot at success simply because she went from fixin’ to do something productive to doing productive activities.

May 5, 2008

The Sale is About You, Not the Company

Filed under: branding,career development,marketing,Personal Marketing,sales,selling,success — Paul McCord @ 5:30 am
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I acquired a new coaching client a couple of weeks ago.  Richard has been selling IT consulting services for over 10 years.  He has always been a top producer.  He works hard, makes sure that his clients are delighted with both the service and the results they get from him and the company he sells for, and he knows his industry inside out.

Richard makes well into the six figures—well, well into the six figures.  And he is miserable, depressed, and vaguely thinking about moving away from sales and into management even though he loves sales.  In fact, until six months ago, he had never considered management.  He liked the freedom, the income, and the activity of selling.  He wanted no part of the chains of management.

So, what would cause someone making that kind of money, who absolutely loves what he is doing to decide almost on the spur of the moment to make such a radical change?  Why would he be willing to take on a position he has purposely avoided for years?

Richard hired me to do what he thought he’d never need help doing—getting his career back on track.  As things are right now, his income in 2008 is going to drop almost 60% from last year.  He is in crisis mode—so much so he hired a coach, is contemplating moving into management, and is so depressed he doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

How could this happen to a top producer?  What changed so dramatically in the past few months that could cause this?

It isn’t the economy.

It isn’t the company he sold for.

It isn’t the company he now sells for.

It’s worse than any of these.  Richard brought this upon himself.  He is the sole cause of his current problems, and he did it without even knowing he was doing it.

Richard changed employers about six months ago.  He had been with his previous employer for over seven years.  He had built one of the strongest sales businesses in the company.  His clients were top companies with tons of repeat business.  Sure, he brought in new clients, but the vast majority of his business was repeat business—business he could count on, business he knew was there and was going to be there.

But there had been some management and philosophy changes in the company that Richard didn’t think would serve him or his clients well.  As the changes and his dissatisfaction mounted, he eventually decided it was time to make a move.

He talked to a number of companies and finally found a new home with a much smaller company, but one whose philosophy, quality and responsiveness was very similar to his old company’s in earlier years.

He expected to hit the ground running, bringing in a ton of business as he moved his former clients over to the new company.

It didn’t happen.  To date, six months after joining his new firm, few of his former clients have made the move.  In fact, he has to resell all of them.  It is, in his words, “worse than starting over.”

Yes, he can get in the door to meet with them, that’s not a problem.  But he has to un-sell everything he sold previously, because what he had sold his clients on wasn’t him; instead he sold the company he had been selling for.

His former employer was a big, well-known name.  They had a reputation for excellence, integrity, and superior service and value.  Richard sold the devil out of those things.  He assured his prospects that they would get the service and attention they wanted and needed; their needs would addressed quickly and with a focus on saving them time and money; and should he ever leave the company or become unable to manage their account, the company had the personnel and resources to step in and take care of them as though nothing had happened.

He believed that since he had done such a great job of selling and maintaining the relationship, his clients would naturally go where he went.  His clients were his and would be loyal to him, and if he decided it would be better for them to follow him to another company, they would naturally follow.

Richard had done a great job of selling.  His clients are loyal.  They are believers.

Richard’s problem is he sold the wrong thing.  He sold the company he worked for, not himself.  He sold the image, prestige and reputation of the company he was selling for instead of selling his dedication, professionalism, and commitment to the client.  He convinced his clients that it was the company he sold for that was going to provide the service, making sure everything went smoothly, and that their problems and issues were taken care in short order.

Richard misunderstood in a very fundamental way what selling is—or rather, what is being sold.  Moreover, Richard isn’t alone.  Hundreds of thousands of salespeople are on the street everyday selling the wrong thing.

Selling at its core is about selling yourself.  The products you sell are probably indistinguishable from the products your competitor sells.  More than likely your company, like every other company, claims to have superior customer service.  It is highly doubtful you have the lowest prices or offer the most value in your industry everyday.

So, if the products you sell are virtually the same as your competitors, the claims the company makes are the same as your competitors, and the pricing and value are similar to your competitors, what distinguishes your sale from your competitor’s offer?  You.

Actually, you are the sale.
•    You are the one who is going to make sure the customer’s purchasing experience is satisfactory, not the company you’re selling for.
•    You’re the one who is going to make sure things get done as they are supposed to, not the company you’re selling for.
•    You’re the one who is going to negotiate the land mines that can blow up a sale, not the company you’re selling for.
•    You’re the one who must take responsibility for the customer’s purchase, not the company you’re selling for.

Further, a funny thing happens when you sell the company rather than yourself.  When you sell the company, the customer becomes loyal to the company.  When things go well, the company gets the credit.  But when things go poorly, you get the blame.

If you want to establish a long-term, successful sales business, you must understand the basic nature of sales.  You don’t work for anyone other than yourself.  You are your company; you’ve just contracted with a single supplier to sell for them for the time being.  The customers you bring to the company you’re currently selling for are your customers, not theirs.

But as Richard learned, if you’re selling the company instead of yourself, you’re giving your business and your future away for free, and when you decide it is time to sell for a different supplier, you’ll find yourself starting over scratch once more.

April 22, 2008

Selling Is a Business–Run It Like a Business

Filed under: career development,sales,Sales Management,selling,success — Paul McCord @ 6:21 am
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We salespeople have a way of convincing ourselves that we spend more time and energy doing the things we don’t enjoy than we really do.  We fret about low sales and wonder how we could spend so much time prospecting and marketing with so little return.  We become discouraged because we aren’t closing sales and wonder why our closing ratio has dropped so dramatically.  We blast our market with direct mail and can’t figure out why the response on the mailing is so much lower than in the past.

Some of us really do spend a great deal of time prospecting and marketing and a significant drop in production is, of course, a danger sign.  Likewise, some do see precipitous drops in their closing ratio or response to their direct mail pieces.  These also are danger signs.

However, for most of us, our feeling that we’re investing a ton of time and energy in prospecting and marketing, that our close ratio was much higher in the past, or the response rate to our pervious mailings was much higher, is just that—a feeling.  Most of us have no real idea of how much time we really spend prospecting, what our close ratio really is, or what the response rate to our direct mail really has been.  Most of us, in fact, have no grasp on any of the major details of our sales business.

We operate on gut feeling, not on facts.  We ‘feel’ we’re doing more than we really are because we’re always busy doing something.  The problem is we attribute being busy with being productive.  The two are not the same.

Operating your sales business is no different than operating any other type of business.  You have to base your decisions and actions on the reality of your situation, not on vague feelings or a guess.

As a salesperson, you own and operate your own business—even if you’re considered an employee by the company you are currently selling for.  Your employer is you—you just happen to have only one client, which is the company whose products and services you are currently selling.  Although you own and operate your sales business, you’ve contracted with a single client to sell their products and services, and they pay you as they pay any other vendor—they cut you a check for the services your company has rendered them.  The only difference between you and their other vendors is they do your payroll accounting for you.

Just as any other business owner, you must know what is really going on within your business.  Business owners operate their business from a set of documents that tell them exactly what is going on with their business.  You must do the same.

The typical business owner’s first document is their daily receipts.  This informs them on a daily basis what their sales were, that is what they sold and how much money came in to the company.  Although useful, their daily reports don’t give them enough information to make real decisions about their business.  Of course, they have other documents that are equally narrow—account registers, bank statements, and the like.  The information in these documents is too narrow, too limited in scope to be useful for making long-term decisions.  In order to know what changes or additions they must make or to detect potential dangers or new opportunities, they need information that shows trends, that show the business over a much longer period.

Business owners have those documents.  Their Profit and Loss Statement informs them on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis of the details of their business–where money comes from, where it goes, how much is left over when all the bills are paid.

They also have a Balance Sheet.  The Balance Sheet shows the big picture of the business—what the company owns and how much money it has after every debt is subtracted.  It’s the big picture revealing the big bottom-line.

The Profit and Loss Statement and the Balance Sheet combined are the historical documents of the company.  And they are far more than just historical documents.  They show the business owner trends—good and bad—in their business.  They reveal real or potential problems and real or potential new opportunities.  They are the facts that tell a business owner where his or her time, money, and energy has been spent—and where they should be spending more of their time, money, and energy.  They are the facts that tell the business owner what they’ve done wrong that must be fixed and what’s working that they should be doing more of.

As the owner of a sales business, you must have your own set of historical documents that give you the real facts about your business.  You can no more run your business effectively without real knowledge about your business than can any other business owner.  The old adage that knowledge is power is just as true for your sales business as it is for any other entity.  The more you know about what is really happening in your business, the more successful you can become.

Just as other businesses, your sales business has several documents also.  Your pipeline line and commission reports are akin to the daily reports other business owners receive.  The information is useful, but too narrow to really show what’s happening in your business.  You need information that consolidates your activities and results over a longer period of time.

Unfortunately, salespeople don’t have a codified set of documents for their business such as a Profit and Loss Statement or a Balance Sheet.  You have to create your own historical document.—your sales and marketing history document.

Your sales and marketing history document should contain every scrap of information you can feed it.  And like a Profit and Loss Statement or a Balance Sheet, it needs hard facts, not guesses or wishful thinking.  It needs to consolidate every marketing and sales activity you engage in.  It should be able to tell you how many people you called, how and where you found those prospects, how many bought, what they bought, and even why they bought.  Your document needs to go beyond numbers because not only is it a document about numbers, it is a document about who, what, when, where and why.

A properly researched and constructed sales and marketing history can tell in detail where you spent your time and what the results of that effort were; who you sold to, how you found them, and why they bought; what you did well and need to do more of and what you did that didn’t work and that you need to change.  A proper sales and marketing history will reveal problems and often tell you exactly how to correct those problems—and what you did that by doing more will increase your sales.  It will reveal new opportunities and warn of potential problems before they become real problems.

As a business owner, you must take responsibility and act like a business owner.  You must take the steps that any reasonable business owner would take to discover how they can improve their business and you can’t do that without knowing exactly what is happening in your business.

You can manage your sales business the way most salespeople do—by chance and accident, by ‘feeling’.  Or, you can manage your business as a business.  Over 40% of the men and women who enter sales fail and are out of sales within 24 months.  Another 45% never earn above an average or just slightly above average income for their industry.  Most of the failure and the mediocre performance come not from a lack of effort but from a lack of productive effort.  If you don’t really know what’s going on in your business, how can you know what effort is productive and what isn’t?

April 17, 2008

Guest Article: “Proactive Success,” by Nido Qubein

Filed under: career development,goals,motivation,sales,selling,success — Paul McCord @ 6:07 am
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Proactive Success
By Nido Qubein

Some people think success comes effortlessly, with no need for effort or conscious planning. All you need to do is be in the right place at the right time—and at some happy moment, success will fall into your lap.

Such people are usually called “failures.”

Successful people know that in business or any other undertaking, you must plan for success, and you must make conscious choices centered on your core values.

On rare occasions, the aimless wanderer may end up in the right place at the right time. On rare occasions, somebody also wins the multimillion-dollar lottery. But most people don’t. The sure route to success lies through careful planning in harmony with a core motivation. Unconscious choices put you at the mercy of the dice roll.

Your core motivation is the inner drive that propels you toward a desired goal. Your core motivation springs from your core value — the value you choose to place at the center of your life. You must consciously decide what values mean the most in your life. You arrange them in order of priority and allocate your time and energy on the basis of these choices.

Your core value will govern the direction in which you expend your most vigorous efforts.

Everybody has a core value. It may be people, possessions, activities or principles. It may be strong or weak and it may be conscious or unconscious, but everybody has one. If you want success on your terms, you have to make yours a conscious choice.

I once heard a story about an old peasant in medieval times who served as a stable hand on the nobleman’s estate. One day a wizard happened by and watched him laboring away.

“Is a stable hand all you were meant to be?” the wizard asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” said the old man.

“I have the power to turn you into whatever you’d like to become,” said the wizard.

“Make up your mind, and when I come back by in a couple of weeks I’ll grant your wish.”

The stable man decided that the easiest way to decide what he would like to be was to wander around the estate, observing people and noting the ones he felt most drawn toward.

He felt no great attraction toward the miller or the cobbler or even toward the nobleman and his family. The miller’s job was too strenuous; he didn’t like the idea of lifting all those bags of grain and flour. The cobbler’s job required too many skills; he didn’t want to expend the time and effort to acquire them. And he didn’t care for the weighty responsibilities that burdened the nobleman.

Finally, he happened across a peasant woman rocking her baby in front of her cottage. He felt a strong attachment for the baby.

So when the wizard returned in two weeks, the old man told him, “I want to be a baby.” The wizard granted his wish.

Fifty years later—he being gifted with immortality—the wizard happened past the same barn.

And there he saw the same old peasant cleaning out the stable.

Instead of proactively deciding what he wanted to become, the stable man left it to passive choice. And what he got was predictable. Very sad.

Nido Qubein is president of High Point University, an accredited undergraduate and graduate institution with 3,000 students from 50 countries and 44 states. He has written numerous books and recorded scores of audio and video learning programs including a bestseller on effective communication published by Nightingale-Conant and Berkley. Qubein’s business savvy led him to help start a bank in 1986 and today he serves on the board and executive committee of a Fortune 500 financial corporation with 115 billion-dollars in assets and 25,000 employees. He is also chairman of Great Harvest Bread Company with 218 stores in 42 states. He serves on the boards of several national organizations including the La-Z-Boy Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most recognized furniture retailers. Learn more about Nido Qubein at www.nidoqubein.com

April 4, 2008

Projecting an Expert Image

Filed under: career development,developing expert reputation,marketing,Personal Marketing,prospecting,Referral Selling,sales,selling — Paul McCord @ 6:13 am
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Virtually every salesperson with any experience what so ever proclaims him or herself to be an expert in their field.  Their business card, their fliers, their door hangers (if they use them), their cold calling spiel, their brochures, and everything else they have tries to communicate this expert status to prospects and clients.

Why is everyone so anxious to get the word out that they are experts and their competitors aren’t?

Simply because they recognize that prospects want to work with people who know and understand their needs.  They want to work with people who are fully up-to-date on the best ways to solve the prospect’s problems.  They want to work with people who know how to get problems solved in the most effective, cost efficient and advantageous manner possible.  They want the best advice and best solutions in the marketplace.  In other words, they want to work with an expert and most are willing to pay expert prices to work with a true expert.

Yet, knowing this, most salespeople seek to attract new prospects by using methods that shout as loudly as possible that they aren’t experts.  Prospects and clients make some assumptions about salespeople.  Some of their assumptions are accurate, some not.  Nevertheless, whether they are accurate or not, we must deal with their assumptions as they are, not as we wish they were.

Prospects have very definite assumptions about how real experts find new business.

Prospects and clients assume that those salespeople who are cold calling, who are plastering the neighborhood with fliers or door hangers, who are burning the fax machine up with fliers, sticking cheap signs on the street corner, and who are canvassing door-to-door aren’t experts.  They aren’t experts by definition because in the eyes of prospects they aren’t working the way an expert works.  Most prospects, individuals and businesses, believe that true experts generate their business in far more sophisticated ways than cold calling and killing massive numbers of trees for useless fliers.

And they’re right.  The top producers don’t use those methods as their primary methods of finding and connecting with potential clients.  They do use more sophisticated methods.

And they’re wrong.  Those same top producers do use cold calling, they do use strategically faxed fliers, and they do on occasion drop-by on a cold walk-in on an identified quality prospect.  They just don’t do it the same way most salespeople do.  They have learned to turn “lower class” prospecting methods into sophisticated prospecting methods.  And their version of those methods work.

If you want to portray yourself as being an expert, you must begin weaning yourself from the average Joe marketing methods and learn the techniques and strategies of the experts.

It isn’t simply a matter that the more sophisticated methods of prospecting and marketing are more enjoyable or that they produce better results.  It’s more serious than that.  Learning to get referrals the way the mega-producers do, and to network the way they do, and to cold call the way they do, and to do the other things they do is crucial to moving away from being just another salesperson.  If your prospect views you as just another run of the mill salesperson, why should they use you if you don’t have the absolute best price in the market?

Being an expert is as much about how you’re perceived as what you know.  You may be the greatest financial planner or Realtor the world has known or network engineer the world has ever seen, but if you’re cold calling prospects, you’re just another tele-marketer.  There’s nothing wrong with that–if that’s what you want to be.

March 22, 2008

Goals, Planning, and Real Change

Filed under: career development,goals,motivation,sales,selling — Paul McCord @ 6:18 am
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How often have you been exhorted to set your goals down in writing? How often have you done it? How often have you immediately forgotten about them once you’ve completed the writing exercise?

Most of us have experienced the frustration of setting goals only see them fade away into nothingness. We never reach them. More than likely, we never think seriously about them after we’ve ‘established’ them. They make us feel good for a while but they’re really not something ‘that’s going to happen.’

That experience naturally leads us to ask whether goal setting is even an exercise worth our time and effort. Research by Dr. Peter Gollwitzer, Professor of Psychology at New York University, indicates that the answer is a resounding, “yes it is”—and an equally resounding, “no, it’s not.”

Setting goals in and of themselves will lead nowhere but to frustration and feeling guilt for not reaching them. Simply setting goals is fruitless because by themselves they result in no positive action. They simply state a wish, not a concrete objective.

In order for goals to be met, they must be accompanied by a definite, realistic action plan to reach them. In other words, knowing what your goal is will get you nowhere if you don’t know how you’re going to make it happen. Furthermore, according to Dr. Gollwitzer’s research, the very act of creating a detailed plan of action helps bring about the realization of the goal.

Allow me to quote a relatively lengthy summary passage of his research as presented in an article of his, “Metacognition in Action: the Importance of Implementation Intentions,” as published in Personality and Social Psychology Review. (emphasis added)

“When people furnish their goal intentions (“I intend to attain the goal X”) with implementation intentions
(“I will initiate the goal-directed response y when situation z arises”), the initiation of goal-directed
responses becomes automated. As this type of automaticity stems from a single act of will, it is referred
to as strategic automaticity. We report various studies demonstrating that the strategic automaticity leads
to immediate and efficient responding, which does not need a conscious intent. In addition, the situational
cues specified in implementation intentions seem to be easily detected and readily attended to. Further
research indicates that the strategic automaticity induced by implementation intentions also helps resist
temptation and fight bad habits.”

In other words, the act of creating a detailed, step-by-step action plan generates “immediate and effective responding” to the situation to implement the plan without the need of “conscious intent.” If your plan is well thought-out, detailed and actionable (that is not vague or theoretical, but concrete), your mind will initiate the next steps necessary to work toward attaining your goal.

Other research by Dr. Gollwitzer indicates actionable goal planning is the primary differentiator between top producers and average and below average salespeople and managers. There is no magic to becoming a top producer or a top manager. The key is knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there—in detail, in realistic actionable steps.

Paul McCord is the author of SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar, a detailed guide to creating a real, workable, actionable sales and marketing plan and Creating a Million Dollar a Year Sales Income: Sales Success through Client Referrals. Paul’s work has appeared in such business and industry publications as Forbes, Business Week, Selling Power, Fox Business News, and other leading business and industry publications. Visit his website at http://www.mccordandassociates.com or his highly popular blog at http://salesandmanagementblog.com. He may be reached at pmccord@mccordandassociates.com.

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