Altameroy Blog

In Part 1, we summarized that you may have the best service in the world and the best widget in its category. But if you can’t physically get in front of your targeted business prospects on a routine basis you won’t meet your revenue objectives.

And we discussed these (3) realities:

• If you double your new appointments you will double your revenue… regardless of your closing ratio
• Not setting enough new business appointments leads to Sales employee turnover, sub-par revenue results and longer Ramp-to-Quota for new hires
• The communication act of asking for a Business appointment should be internally declared a KEY sales competency and trained to individually

So logically, sales organizations should be willing to develop and provide ‘Best Practice’ support systems to their sales teams for ‘Measurable’ performance results in line with effectively setting sales appointments.

Why is a Conversation-to-Appointment Ratio a core sales competency?

Because it’s a sales skill set that is measurable around an essential task; sales prospecting and setting business appointments. It has a purpose and is directly tied to the end results; good or bad.
In this case, it is to introduce and education the value of your product or service to a specific individual or group. It initiates your selling process. It doesn’t matter if you are having this conversation by telephone, cold-calling in person, on elevators, or just yelling from one rooftop to another; it is a communication skill set that is essential to your sales success. It’s what you say and how you say it.

Here are a few prerequisites of whether or not something should be declared a core competency:

#1
Is it an essential component to the sales mission or is it just an ingredient in the recipe?

Think of a sports person. What are a golfer’s essential competencies from tee-off to last putt? Are the ball and club core competencies? Or are the core competencies the golf swing and putting stroke?
How about a basketball player with the essential competencies of passing, dribbling, and shooting?

Hint: Don’t relate an Indy car pit crew putting gas in the fuel tank as a competency.

#2
You must be able to be measure it routinely and accurately. Ask yourself if you could measure it with a napkin, pencil, and calculator?

That way you’ll be able to know if you’re performing this business activity better than your competitors.
It’s sort of like knowing if your team is “Blocking and Tackling” better than your opponent’s team in a football game.
Because at the end of the day, it’s the individual (Or the team) with the best overall stats that wins.

#3
You should be able to apply “Timely Training” and “Powerful Routines” around each core competency.

We all know what sales training is. But do we understand why sales training fails?

And to understand this…it becomes important to understand what I mean when I use the term…”Timely Training.”

Timely Training means you have in place appropriate structures for learning and application. You have to be able to define useful short-term goals, long term objectives and performance benchmarks, but also measure each participant’s progress. Have participants work closely with qualified trainers for proper follow-up and support.
But most importantly…”Timely Training” should be focused on only one key sales competency at a time.

That means you never move on to your next training objective (In-line sales competency) until your intended ‘benchmark’ performance metric is realized.

“Powerful Routines” are Best Practices internal to each Core Competency that result in the highest ratio of success. It’s a technique or communication process that through experience has proven to get the best result parallel to a particular sales scenario.

As an example, when a prospect says “Just send me some information” we identify that communication as an objection. 95% of the time it’s a polite way of getting rid of us. Deep down inside we know what happens to the information. It goes in the ‘circular file’. Bottom line, it keeps both the Post Office and the office Janitor busy. One delivers these ‘information requests’ and the other one throws them out.

What’s your current ‘Powerful Routine’ to effectively communicate to a third solution, because none of us want to be in the ‘Postal’ Business.

Key Learning Point:
There are only so many scenarios in any sales process. If you isolate them, train to each one of them with Powerful Routines and then measure the outcome, you are on your way to success.

Take for example setting ‘Top-down’ business appointments. We’ve already decided it would be a benefit to our sales success if we could reduce the time it took to achieve the necessary number of ‘Top-down’ appointments.
In building an effective learning system to improve your Conversation-to-appointment ratio from the national average of 4-18%, you must first understand why that competency ratio is only 4-18%.

With that in mind, here’s what I know to be true:

1. We don’t seek to first (Before we pick up the telephone) understand the Prospect’s internal business objectives parallel to our solutions offering, then model our appointment approach around it
2. We settle for a business level of contact that has no direct fiscal authority
3. We sell our ‘product/service’ instead of selling the diagnostic steps in our ‘Evaluation’ Process
4. We fail to develop an effective Call to Action; strategic words and phrases that create a positive ‘visual’ reference to the Prospect of what happens during the initial appointment and how long it takes
5. We don’t support our ‘Call to Action’ with 3rd party valuators parallel to the Prospects business objectives; valuators like business statistics, appointment performance ratios, ROI figures and relevant success stories
6. We fail to visually ‘take the risk out’ in case they find that we are wasting their time once we’re in the door

These (6) ‘Here’s What I Know to be True’ factors are where you should begin your sales prospecting and sales performance improvement journey, because the definition of insanity is doing the same old thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

In Part 3 of ‘How to Double Your Sales Appointments in Half the Time’, we will take an in depth look at these 6 failure factors and flip them 180% into individual powerful routines to effectively set more ‘Top-down’ business appointments in less time.

Jeff Hardesty is President of JDH Group, Inc. and the Developer of the X2 Sales System®, a blended training system that teaches sales professionals the competency of setting C-level business appointments. Jeff can be reached at jeff@convertmoresales.com.
Calculate your sales team’s ‘Sales Performance Competencies’ here:
convertmoresales.com/marketing_blitz.php.

Submit your numbers for a complimentary 30-minute performance consultation with Jeff Hardesty:
convertmoresales.com/roi_survey.php.

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Why do your christmas gift shopping the mall when you can get
your gifts safely online?

Seriously. I was reading the latest news about black Friday at
the malls. A 73 year old lady was knocked down and hit her head
against the floor as she was swept by a wave of impatient
shoppers at BrandsMart USA. She was lucky. At West Michigan
Wal-Mart, the stampede was so bad, 2 shoppers who were trampled
were hospitalized for it. One was a pregnant woman. The other
was a 13 year old. I mean, how ruthless can the crowd get?
Trampling down a woman with her unborn baby. Right at the start
of the Christmas season on top of that.

People in the queue for hours, just waiting for the stores to
open. Fights breaking out because of line jumpers at a Best Buy
at the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando. Officers getting called
into the picture to break fights. 1 person may be arrested for
it. Imagine spending the start of the Christmas season in jail.

This is Christmas shopping at the malls. I mean, is it worth it
risking your life for that discount, when you can get discounts
that are just as good, or even better online?

That comes to my first tip

#1 Do your christmas gift buying online.

There are websites that feature discounts you can get online. Cheapest Sale is such a
website which features products from various stores, showcases
the best discounts and helps you pick the best price at your own
time. No queues, no stampedes. Just safe shopping.

Another place you can see the discounts from multiple online
stores is http://www.womanht.com/d
iscounts/. Every item there is going at below the retail
price. You don’t have to go from store to store to search for
the discounts. They are all put upfront for you right there.

#2 Think about a person’s reaction before you buy that gift

Talking about safe christmas gift giving, there are a few gifts
to avoid if you want to stay out of hospital this christmas.

If your wife/girlfriend is overweight, for your personal safety,
do NOT give her the following

1. Diet Plan

2. Weight Loss aids or supplements

3. Maternity clothing

4. Anything that suggests that she needs to lose weight.

Safer gifts would be what you would give her if she were at her
perfect weight. Check out these Gift ideas for
your wife.

#3 Get organized.

Now, how do you get your Christmas gift shopping organized?

1. Make a list of all the people you are going to give gifts
too. It can be quite embarassing if you miss someone out. Go by
categories. Use this gift giving guide
to help you set up the list. If you already know what each
person wants for Christmas and it is within your budget, then
write it down. If you don’t and you want to surprise the person,
then you could use that gift giving guide for ideas as to what
to get for each person in your list.

2. Think of each person in your immediate family, your extended
family, your spouse’s extended family, cousins, nephews, nieces
and all. Decide who you are going to gift presents too.

3. Think about your workplace. Your co workers, your boss, your
clients, vendors, everyone you come into contact with in the
office. Who should go on your list?

4. Think about your social circle. Each social group you belong
to. Who are the ones you would exchange gifts with?

5. Now how about those you missed out. To avoid embarassment,
get a few generic gifts, wrap them up but do not label them. Use
the color or pattern of the wrapping paper to distinguish the
contents. Write down in your notebook what each contains based
on the pattern or color of the wrapping paper. When you someone
gives you a gift and you have forgotten to get anything from
that person, you can always fish out a gift from that lot and
discretely write the name.

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Could this be the worst moment in your selling cycle?

You’ve done all the right things with your prospect:

• You’ve identified a real need and developed a reasonably solid relationship.

• You’ve determined that your prospect is interested in your solution.

• You’ve had a couple of great meetings or conversations that let the prospect move the sales process forward.

• You’ve supplied everything needed to make a final decision.

• And you’ve followed up, as customary, by leaving messages or e-mails to see if you can get a final decision

But instead, all you’re hearing is dead silence.

Not a word. Not a peep.

“I don’t get it,” you say to yourself.

“Everything was going so well, there’s definitely a fit, we had a good relationship.

Then, all of a sudden, nothing.

What went wrong?

I know this feeling well because just about everyone who gets in touch with me (and I speak with dozens of you almost every day) struggles with this exact desperate situation — wondering what went wrong, why your prospect has broken off communication, and, most importantly, what you can do about it.

The only person who can solve this mystery is — guess who? Your prospect.

You may have done all the “right” things throughout the sales process, but, somewhere along the way, he or she has never felt truly comfortable enough
to tell you the truth about where they really stand with the decision to buy or not buy your solution.

Why not?

Because in most cases prospects don’t want to hurt your feelings by telling you something that might disappoint you.

The problem is, something in your selling approach (your tone of voice, your attempt to create forward momentum, your use of traditional sales language) told them that the most important thing on your mind was making that sale.

However, what your selling approach must do is let prospects feel comfortable telling you the truth, all the way through the sales cycle, about exactly where you stand with them, without their having to worry that you’ll feel disappointed.

This is the gap that makes it easier for prospects to break off communication, because keeping you at bay lets them feel safer and more in control.

Take “following up” as an example.

When you call or e-mail to follow up, what message are you really sending?

Consider this: that you’re pursuing and trying to move closer to your sale.

This triggers sales pressure that makes prospects protect themselves by retreating behind their wall of silence.

Is there anything you can do in these situations?

Yes, definitely.

Don’t worry, all is not lost — but it’s important that you look at how something you did or didn’t do may have created the situation.

My guess is that, at this point, you’d like to hear is the “truth” about where you stand with your prospect, no matter what that truth is, right?

So, how do you get to it?

Not by moving forward, but by moving backward to try to repair the hidden break in the relationship. “I don’t understand,” you say. “How would I do that?” It’s simple:

1. Just Give your prospect a call (avoid leaving a voicemail, and send an e-mail only if you have no other options) in which you convey the following message:

2. “Hi John, it’s Ari with XYZ company, how are you? John, I’m not calling about moving the project forward or anything about the project itself. I’m just calling to apologize…I haven’t heard from you for a few weeks and I figured it must be my fault or something that I may have done, maybe I dropped the ball somewhere along that way…so I’m simply calling (or writing) to see if you wouldn’t mind sharing some feedback so I can improve for next time?”

In other words, you apologize.

That’s right — you apologize because it’s crucial for you to take the high road and be willing to be told that something on your end did cause the communication breakdown.

However, most of the time, prospects will find your apology so disarming that they’ll stop worrying about you trying to “sell” them and will finally feel comfortable telling you their truth.

Try it, and let me know how it goes.

With a Masters Degree in Instructional Design and over a decade of experience creating breakthrough sales strategies for global companies such as UPS and QUALCOMM, Ari Galper discovered the missing link that people who sell have been seeking for years.

His profound discovery of shifting one’s mindset to a place of complete integrity, based on new words and phrases grounded in sincerity, has earned him distinction as the world’s leading authority on how to build trust in the world of selling.

Leading companies such as Gateway, Clear Channel Communications, Brother International and Fidelity National Mortgage have called on Ari to keep them on the leading edge of sales performance.

Visit http://www.unlockthegame.com to get his free sales training lessons.

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Second in a series of articles, we’ll discuss various issues and practices associated with modern ways of selling over the phone.

*****************************************************************

The New Telemarketing is a set of selling practices designed to accomplish several things:

(1) To sell more goods and services than its predecessor, the “traditional” style;

(2) To be less offensive than its predecessor to buyers;

(3) To be consistent with a customer service style of communicating;

(4) To help in recruiting and retaining qualified phone representatives and managers; and

(5) To repair and reform the image of telemarketers in business and consumer communities.

We need new practices, because traditional telemarketing, which utilizes a command-and-control communication style is inherently offensive, inefficient, and out of date.

It has resulted in hostile legislation (chronicled in the first article in this series), fewer sales, and a poor image in business and beyond.

The main driver of telemarketing is people: buyers and sellers. Traditional telemarketing offends and degrades all parties, and a proper replacement will elevate the process and make it a more enjoyable and productive process for all.

The New Telemarketing will produce more sales, at a lower cost. It will enable companies to recruit and retain high quality personnel, who will earn a better living, and it will rehabilitate the image of practitioners.

What Thomas Watson did at IBM to improve and reform selling, we need to do with telemarketers across companies and industries.

In later articles, we’ll discuss exactly how The New Telemarketing differs from its predecessor style, and how it works.

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of www.Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone®, You Can Sell Anything By Telephone! and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com

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When we talk about our BLITZ CALL® System for prospecting and making cold calls we say that it is easy to learn, simple to do, low key, repeatable, measurable, and effective. People seem to understand each of those characteristics except the word repeatable.

Repeatability is important in virtually every skill that you practice. For example, in bowling, tennis, or golf you develop a form or delivery that puts the ball in the exact position you want it. Then you simply try to repeat that movement every time. When you take lessons your performance is judged on how well you do compared to that “perfect form.” This makes life a lot easier for you because you don’t have to try something new every time.

We feel that the same rules should be applied to prospecting. Develop a system for making the cold calls and then simply do it over and over. When you have it down pat, you can then judge your performance by that standard. If things are not working like you want them to, you are probably not doing it right. You just have to review what you are doing, compare it to the standard and make the necessary corrections.

Or, you may have developed a prospecting approach that wasn’t exactly the right thing to do, so you will need to do some fine tuning. Either way, by having a repeatable standard, you can quickly and easily make corrections.

The alternative would be to try something new every time and hope that it works. When it doesn’t, you probably will have no idea why and with no standard by which to judge, you won’t be able to find out. It is much easier to have a standardized, repeatable system.

I was working with a salesman in Dallas who thought that BLITZ CALLs were simply lots of very short prospecting calls. With that thought in mind he would make the calls on his prospects and simply hand over a brochure with his business card stapled to the cover and say, “if you see anything you need give me a call.” I don’t consider that a prospecting call.

I told him that an initial prospecting call my way, was indeed designed to be brief and able to be done often, but that it was to begin a relationship with a prospect, not simply let them know you exist. You have be a proactive sales professional to stir up the kind of activity most of you want.

By learning the wording and the goals of his prospecting system he was able to make a very fast and dramatic increase to his sales. He did it by simply learning his wording cold and then repeating it over and over again to prospects.

When you are prospecting on a regular basis, I suggest that you learn a BLITZ CALL or some other type of system for prospecting, just make sure that it is something that you can do over and over - repetition.

When you have accomplished this, you will see that any weaknesses in your implementation can be quickly identified and corrected. And now you can see the importance of repetition.

Sell Well and Often,

Bill Truax
Bill@BlitzCall.com

© Copyright 2006 WJ Truax

Bill Truax is a Sales Management and Field Operations Consultant living in Cleveland, Oh. He conducts Sales Team Assessments, Management and Leadership programs, and works with Field Sales Professionals and Managers both in the field and in workshops. He has written 3 books and recorded 2 CD’s on Prospecting and Making Cold Calls and conducts a variety of skill based seminars, workshops, and train the trainer programs.
Bill has spent literally thousands of hours in the field making cold calls with sales professionals to teach his BLITZ CALL System. When Bill is in the field he actually makes many of the BLITZ CALLs himself, regardless of the industry. This is to demonstrate that anyone can prospect you just need to know how.
Bill writes a Free weekly Prospecting Succes Tip for subscribers at his website http://www.BlitzCall.com The site also details all the materials and programs Trufield offers.

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While developing your pricing strategy, it is important to remember that there is an implicit relationship between price and value. We expect to pay more for gourmet food than for fast food and for a luxury car than for an economy model. At the same time, value is a matter of opinion, not fact. I prefer a new Subaru to a ‘95 Cadillac; my husband prefers the opposite. His wardrobe is built around Dickies; my taste runs to rather more eclectic (and non-synthetic) clothing.

Given that there is a relationship between price and value and that value is a matter of opinion, I had always priced my products and services by triangulating three factors: what I wanted or needed to earn, my costs, and what the market would bear. That’s what I had taught countless other people to do, and it worked fine. All else being equal, quality, price, and market generally reached a dynamic balance where prosperity and service overlapped.

But, once came the day when something felt out of synch in the way I used that marketing strategy, and I felt some gritchiness around the prices of products I recommended. I kept examining my assumptions, and everything seemed right. Still, the feeling that something wasn’t quite right persisted.

Never one to ignore an itch, I kept scratching until this week I realized what the problem is. I had been using quite different “markets” to assess what the market would bear. That is, I’d been looking at markets that had different values from the values of many of the people I attract. I based my pricing strategy and marketing on the proven best practices of other respected “info product” gurus, but those practices were designed to address the values of people who didn’t, and probably never would, be attracted to my e-zine.

Readers of my e-zine were a special case. From their emails and phone calls, I knew that they placed a high value on authenticity, intelligence, and creativity. I knew they had high standards for courtesy, honesty, and what I might call “finish.” They were tolerant of mistakes (assuming they were acknowledged). They had a sense of humor, a hunger for spirit, and a fundamental commitment to growth. At the same time they tended to be a frugal lot, willing to pay for high quality, but unmoved by hype and positively turned off by pressure tactics.

The generic information marketing model is designed to address the needs of people for whom profit is an over-riding value. These folks — many of them good souls indeed — thrive in the hyper-stimulating atmosphere of the motivational circuit: loud, upbeat music, extravagant challenges to dare to be great and simple formulas for achieving success. The more costly the package, the more this customer tends to believe in its value. And I’m willing to suppose that for the right person, that value can be substantial.

But this model didn’t fit me and it probably didn’t fit my e-zine readers, either. More than likely, they were past believing in “7 Steps to Instant Gratification.” They probably didn’t believe in easy answers, however much they might sometimes long for them. (Me, too.)

The bottom line is that, in that case, so-called “best practices” just didn’t apply. The sophistication, values, and life experience of this community constituted a different market, and we would just have to develop our own best practices.

What would those practices look like? My hunch was:

Transparency: No fake sales; any specials should be clearly linked to a business purpose, and the regular retail price should always be fair so if you miss a sale you can feel good about buying at another time for full price.

– Clarity: Accurate, no-hype descriptions of products and services.

– Simplicity: Prices expressed in whole dollar amounts. Forget the “95 cents” gimmicks. We can round up!

– Trust: Simple returns and exchanges.

I evaluated the marketing and pricing strategy for my products and those of affiliates, keeping asking the questions that gave birth to “Authentic Promotion” in the first place: “What’s bugging me about the way I do (or think I have to do) business? What am I assuming? What is the truth of this? What if the truth were not a problem?”

Goldilocks tried three chairs, three bowls of porridge, and three beds before finding the ones that were “just right.” In much the same way, your working toward “just right” prices and marketing methods will definitely pay off, as it did for me. I believe this price-value matrix will help you to find your “just right” price!

For example, my client sells a course which is a comprehensive self-guided seminar that transforms fears and resistance to marketing into grounded advocacy for good work. It’s a high value, if she does say so herself. Still, it has a medium price because she is still working on way to convey to potential purchasers the potency and efficacy of this course. One way she is doing that is to develop a series of follow up emails that remind buyers of key practices and principles, that ask powerful questions to help them move forward, and that suggest specific sections of the program that solve specific challenges. As she develops this support, she will be able to charge — and receive — a higher price.

PRICE-VALUE MATRIX
(please see the chart at http://www.authenticpromotion.com/pricing-strategies/pricing-strategy-matrix.html):

HIGH VALUE — LOW PRICE

Underpriced: value undercut by price. “What’s wrong with this picture” pricing strategy.

HIGH VALUE — MEDIUM PRICE

Attractive pricing: ideal for market penetration. “More for your money” pricing strategy.

HIGH VALUE — HIGH PRICE

Premium pricing: prestige, prominence. “Connoisseur” pricing strategy.

MEDIUM VALUE — LOW PRICE

True bargain: may be a temporary special to raise revenue or to move discontinued items. “Inventory sale” strategy.

MEDIUM VALUE — MEDIUM PRICE

Price and value are in balance, exclusive of other factors. “Square deal” pricing strategy.

MEDIUM VALUE — HIGH PRICE

Overpriced: informed buyers will stay away; sales may be made to unsophisticated market. “Infomercial” pricing strategy.

LOW VALUE — LOW PRICE

Cheap stuff. Often sold with lots of “bonus” items or features. “Tourist trap” pricing strategy.

LOW VALUE — MEDIUM PRICE

Turns sales into complaints. “Caveat emptor” pricing strategy. (”Let the buyer beware.”)

LOW VALUE — HIGH PRICE

Don’t even think about it: the “Fleece ‘em and run” pricing strategy.

Molly Gordon, MCC, is a leading figure in business coaching, writer, and a frequent presenter at live and virtual events worldwide. Join 12,000 readers of her Authentic Promotion® ezine, an invaluable self promotion and small business marketing resource helping you grow your strong business while you feed your soul, and receive a free 31-page guide, “Principles of Authentic Promotion.” Don’t miss Molly’s articles on setting prices and fees which will help you find your “just right” pricing strategy.

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