The Best Voice Message

Over the years, I’ve heard some voice messages that do work better than others. As a rule, the simpler the better.

For example, “Hi _____, this is Scott Olsen. Please call me back at ### ### ####. Thanks _____, bye.”

This message will take around 12 seconds. Of course, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. As always, the absolute best voice message includes the name of someone credibly that has referred you.

When you don’t have a referral, please try this simple voice message and let me know how it works. And better yet, please share the voice message(s) that you found to work best for you.

The Oldest Negotiation Tactic in the Book

My client met with a prospect who was interested in consulting services to help streamline product development cycles. During the visit, the President said, “we could really use your help, but we don’t have a budget for this, give us your best pricing and we’ll see what we can do.” Not having budget and not having resources to pay for services are two different things. Listen closely to your prospects and customers, but don’t let negotiation tactics get you down. When it’s time to present your proposal, make sure you share with your prospect you listened and understood his/her concerns about expenses. Point out specifically how you’ve taken his/her comments into consideration into your proposal to make sure you can meet the confirmed needs and budget requirements.

Negotiating for What You Want

What you don’t negotiate can cost you.

You’ll never know what you can get unless you negotiate for it. The following story is a reminder to me that “negotiation” is a skill that has to be learned, developed, and thoughtfully put into action to work.

Do you ever wonder how much you are paying for your airline seat compared to what the person paid for the seat next to yours? How about what the person at your athletic club is paying to use the same equipment as you each month? And finally, how about the office space next to your office? Well, one of my career development clients just learned the hard way. She was paying $1300/month for a one person interior space with no windows. She was told that the one person office across the hall with the beautiful windows with the forest view was $1800/month. When she asked if their was any room to negotiate, the response was “no.”  A few months go by and she starts to talk with person who ended up leasing the window space across the hall and learned that he was paying $1300/month. After she got over her frustration that she was paying the same as him without the window…, she asked how he got that rate? He replied he asked the management firm to match another (less desirable) space across town or he would walk. He used the “competition” tactic like a pro and it worked!

Selling is a Profession

Selling is a profession. Therefore the skills involved in this profession can be identified, learned, reinforced and improved. To become successful and stay competitive, sales professional must utilize the right approach at the right time with the right customer and present the right product. In the present competitive environment nobody sells alone. Understanding how to utilize internal company resources and various teams to achieve desired results certainly must be considered a significant priority in the overall generation of revenue and profits . Additionally, each selling organization has unique training requirements that cannot be satisfied in total by standardized shelf courses.

To generate the most repeat sales in a competitive marketplace, leading organizations take a customized approach to sales skills that begins where sales professionals need assistance, builds on strengths, always reinforces previous training, establishes habits of successful selling and generates more business again and again. Sales training becomes a process not a series of discontinuous events.

Selling in Difficult Times

A good friend of mine shared a short story with me about a software sales person who told his boss,  “I can’t sell anything… half the country is unemployed!” The boss replied, “Then sell the other half.” I love that story!

Based on first hand experiences and the situations I help my clients deal with, these are very difficult economics times with countless examples of empowered CFO’s scrutinizing every current decision as well as reviewing any past decisions to explore ways to unwind or minimize their expenses. In the big picture, economies go up and down, trends come a go, but solutions to problems never go out of style.

Are you selling products or solving problems?

-Scott Olsen

Where Are Your Prospects?

When the market gets soft, the first thing that many companies do is “go back to basics”. This has always driven me crazy. Shouldn’t you always focus on the fundamentals?  I remember hearing how Larry Bird was always the first one to show up to practice. Even though he had one of the best free throw shooting percentages, he still felt that he always needed to focus on the basics.

When it comes to your database, the same holds true. You should always be “fine tuning” to make sure all of your prospects are on your radar screen. If you don’t know where they all are, how can you sell to them?

One big challenge most companies have (even Fortune 500’s) is that they lack visibility. I have found that many companies that are household names don’t even know about 65% of their prospects. They are not even on their radar screen?

Just like there is a process in free-throw shooting, there is one for building and maintaining a database:

Start by making sure that everyone who should be in your database is.
Continually look to update your database by adding or deleting companies.
Verify and validate the critical info to make sure it is always up to date.
For large account sales, make sure you know of all sibling companies and their relationships to the parent.

To have and maintain a world-class database, you have to commit to the process. No matter how good you think your database is, you can always do better. That’s the first step. Just step up to the line, commit and shoot.

Don’t Give Up!

You have a solid sales process that used to produce lots of money per sales rep, but now is producing next to nothing. What went wrong?
The answer is that the clients started answering your questions with vague answers.  When the person asked for clarification, the client would stall the sales rep with things like we have a few things to check, budget, time lines, etc. The truth: they just were too scared to be honest with us!
Salespeople are numb to the fact that people are not buying.  When you make your follow up calls, they tell you that it’s tied up in budget…but to check back again.  So you wait to follow up, with answers to their questions, but you get stalled again. It’s not until you dig further that you are made aware of the true problem: they aren’t buying and have no idea when that will change.  So as any good salesperson, you dive into your list and start the process again. But the changes are apparent at all companies…there just not telling you!

So we present our sales leaders with some difficult choices. What do we do? Do we just give up? Offer them free terms?

You just need to ask tougher questions. Instead of asking questions about budget, ask questions about their intent to buy. Do you intend to buy this? What will cause this situation to change? Why are they looking to make a change? Where else are they looking? If they have to decide today, will we win or lose? Why? Is anything going on in the company that we need to know about? If you get the answers to these questions, at least you’ll know the status of the deals and now your pipeline becomes real.

Just try it today and let me know if it works.