Want to Increase Your Level of Influence in All Areas of Your Life? Watch this video and avoid common catch phrases that will demotivate people from acting on your ideas. Please leave comments on the phrases you hear that just irritate you.
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Posts Tagged ‘Retail Success’
Catch Phrases That Kill Deals
Supercharge Your Success in Life the Justin Bieber Way
Justin Bieber is by far the biggest teen sensation today and for that matter one of the biggest stars of all. At the ripe old age of 17, you may be wondering how he achieved this phenomenal success. Truth be told, he did it the old fashioned way; a lot of hard work coupled with ingenuity.
In looking at his success over the past 4 years, the three key strategies he used to build his fame are what I have been urging my audiences as a motivational sales speaker to do themselves on a daily basis. And you can use them too to enhance your success in life.
1. Hard Work – Justin knew that in order to succeed, he had to win over all of his market segments. That included the fans, radio stations and recording studios. He first started making YouTube videos of his songs and posted them on the internet. Slowly but surely, he developed a following until one day a record produce saw his video and signed him to a contract.
Justin did not stop there. He then went to hundreds of radio stations to promote his songs and gain their support to play them on the air. He gained their support not just by showing up, but by using the internet to make the radio stations successful. Before each appearance he would send tweets, write blogs on where he was appearing next. Fans started to show up and before you knew it the radio stations had huge throngs outside their studios waiting for Justin. He made the radio stations successful that were happy to return the favor.
2. Be Damn Good- There is an old marketing saying that you are your best marketing brochure. Want to sell more of your stuff and ideas, be good at what you do. Better yet, be great at what you do.
3. Create a Phenomenal Customer Experience- Justin excels at creating phenomenal customer experiences. He is all about being out there with his fans and making sure they are enjoying themselves. On this morning’s Today Show, Justin was promoting his upcoming movie and talked about how he enjoyed going to the top row of the venues he was playing at and giving front row tickets to some of those folks. That act alone has created hundreds if not thousands of lifetime fans who are now promoting his work to all of their friends. He understands the power of the customer experience and how that can propel anyone’s success.
During that same interview, Matt Lauer brought in a female fan from the street to ask Justin a question. The girl was in shock. First thing Justin did was to give her his 3 D glasses and made her feel comfortable. After answering the question, he told the girl to come here and he gave her a hug. In Matt Lauer’s words to Justin, “you just made that girl a hero in the eyes of her friends”. Justin knows that each and every encounter with a customer is an opportunity to either lose or win a customer for life. He excels at winning customers for life.
Justin Bieber may only be 17 years of age, but he has a lot to teach all of us on how to propel both our organizations and ourselves to greater levels of success.
To learn more about this subject, please join me on Monday, October 3rd at 2pm ET for a free webinar where we will show you how to engage alliances as well as other strategies to immediately grow your sales. Click here to reserve your free seat now!
Check Out the November Sales Success Summit ’11 in Orlando Florida, an event destined to dramatically increase your sales success. Spend two days with me and I will personally customize ideas that have generated millions of dollars for my clients to your selling environment. This is a small group. Two days of personalized attention. Reserve your seat today by clicking here!
Customization the Key to Extraordinary Sales Results
Retailers like Sam’s Club and CVS have figured out that huge profits come from customization. Using discounts to track results, Sam’s Club achieved a 1-2 percent acceptance of generic discounted offers.
Realizing it had a trove of information regarding buying habits and the purchasing history of each customer, it developed a new program called eValues. It gives each buyer discounts on the items they normally purchase. This customization has led to an acceptance rate of discounts between 20-30%, a dramatic increase from the generic discounts’ acceptance rate.
Customers want and expect vendors to know their wants and needs. In sales, this means asking the right questions, doing the right research and listening.
If you conduct sales using the old school method of talking too much about the features you have to offer, you are going to lose the deal. Find out the outcomes they are after and then only talk about the features they are interested in. Customize the solution so they will accept your offer. This strategy is crucial to being competitive and closing more business in less time.
To learn more about this subject, please join me on Monday, October 3rd at 2pm ET for a free webinar where we will show you how to engage alliances as well as other strategies to immediately grow your sales. Click here to reserve your free seat now!
Check Out the November Sales Success Summit ’11 in Orlando Florida, an event destined to dramatically increase your sales success. Spend two days with me and I will personally customize ideas that have generated millions of dollars for my clients to your selling environment. This is a small group. Two days of personalized attention. Reserve your seat today by clicking here!
Appreciate the Living, Not Just the Dearly Departed
Something happened this weekend that reminds us all that we should not only appreciate the ultimate sacrifices made by our brave men and women fighting for our freedom, but also take time to thank the living and show our appreciation for all that they have done to help us achieve our successes.
The incident I am referring to is the untimely passing of the legendary child actor Gary Coleman. The child star of Different Strokes stormed into our living rooms in the early 1980’s, broke down racial barriers and touched the hearts of many with his loveable and sassy personality. Unfortunately, after the show Different Strokes went off the air, Gary’s fortunes came to an abrupt end and the rest of his life was saddled with financial and personal woes.
You may ask how this is different from all the other stories of child actors who could not smoothly transition into adult life. What’s different is not so much Gary’s story, but the untold story of how his loved ones wished they had repaired their relations with him and his wife before it was too late.
Gary sued his parents and manager for allegedly mishandling his earnings from Different Strokes. Estranged from his parents at the time of his pre-mature death on Friday, his mother told the Associated Press that she had prayed that “nothing like this would happen before we could sit with Gary and Shannon and say, ‘We’re here and we love you.’ ”
We have Memorial Day to thank and remember those who made the Ultimate Sacrifice. We have Thanksgiving to give thanks for all of our riches.
We have 362 days a year to thank everyone who has made a difference in our lives and to simply say we love you. Use each and every one of those days to give thanks. Saying thank you and showing appreciation while people are alive allows them to experience your true heartfelt feelings. Don’t wait until it’s too late and you are then forced to say “I wish I only said…..”
Three Strategies to Immediately Increase Sales
There are three Strategies you can start to employ today that will generate a significant increase in sales revenues in a very short period of time. Some of these strategies you will intellectually understand and know already. The key is to go beyond your intellectual comprehension and identify whether or not your tactics are in support of these strategies. If they are not, then you may be missing out on sales you should be closing and leaving dollars unnecessarily on the table.
Strategy # 1: The Power of Increase
When you look at most buying decisions, the issue at hand for the buyer is to eliminate pain or gain improvement. Any time you eliminate pain, you gain some kind of improvement in an area of your life. By solving problems for your customers, they will realize a gain in efficiency, sales, performance, career path, satisfaction, enjoyment, etc. All of these gains revolve around the concept of increase.
Everyone is looking for improvement in some areas of their lives. They may want to increase their standard of living, take longer vacations, increase their satisfaction in life and career, improve relationships, increase quality of products, improve their customer service, etc. Everyone wants to achieve a level of increase in some part of their professional and personal life.
Here’s the question. What increases in life are positively affected by your products and services? Once you have answered this question, the next question is are you communicating the value of your products and services in the context of the specific increases each and every customer is looking to achieve? In other words, are you customizing your message in the sales call to the specific increases that particular customer is looking for? Most people do not. We will come back to this issue in Strategy #3.
Strategy #2: Competition vs. Creation
In my book Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way, we share a story where one of my clients repositioned themselves with their key customer who in turn threw out a bid and awarded my client with a 10 year negotiated agreement worth over $200 Million. During the 18 months we worked on positioning my client as an invaluable resource, the client would ask the same question time and time again in our strategy meetings: “How is our competition going to react to this?” My answer was always the same. Forget about your competition. Concentrate on creating a new benchmark and your competition will take care of itself.
All too often companies worry too much about their competition and they fall into a zero sum game. They concentrate all of their efforts in beating the competition which only results in everyone doing the same thing and therefore being forced to do it a little bit better; Which in most cases means lowering the price. This strategy only leads to price erosion, commoditization of your products and services and missed opportunities for increasing market share.
Instead, you should be concentrating on creating new areas of value. Identifying new opportunities of solving problems no vendor has yet to achieve. Instead of fighting the same game everyone else is trying to win, you should be changing the game by increasing the bar and forcing your competition to play catch up. This is exactly what we did with this client and that’s why they were awarded the $200 million contract.
This concepts works for all sales situations not matter how big or how small.
Strategy # 3: Customer Focus vs. Self Focus
In my sales boot camps, I ask the audiences if they are more self focused or customer focused. The majority of the participants claim they are customer focused. At the end of the two day program, I ask the same question and they now claim they were self focused. Why? Everyone truly wants to be customer focused. Yet their actions throw off the perception of being self focused.
This is clearly evident when sales people “Puke” (see video) about all the features they have to offer vs. finding out what’s truly important. Selling products and services for reasons you think they should buy vs. their perceptions of what they truly want. All of you have what your customers need. But are you giving it to them the way they want it?
In his new book The Mirror Test, Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of Kodak clearly states that if you want to succeed in marketing today, you need to personalize your message around the specific needs of your market place. I take this a step further. If you want to increase your sales, you need to personalize your sales pitch around the specific needs and wants of the buyer. This means you need to ask better questions and listen more effectively. These two skills are crucial in order to build a value proposition that will compel customers to accept your offers.
All of you are asking questions. But the real BIG QUESTION is Are You Asking Enough of the Right Questions? Most people are not. This includes those selling professional services, key account managers involved in the complex sale and those selling products and services on a smaller scale.
Remember this simple message: People buy for their own reasons, not yours! Find out their reasons for buying and you will in most cases get the deal. Or, at the very least, your closing ratio will increase significantly, it will take you less time to close the deal and the deal will most often be more profitable than the deals you are closing now.
To learn more about this subject, please join me on Monday, October 3rd at 2pm ET for a free webinar where we will show you how to engage alliances as well as other strategies to immediately grow your sales. Click here to reserve your free seat now!
Check Out the November Sales Success Summit ’11 in Orlando Florida, an event destined to dramatically increase your sales success. Spend two days with me and I will personally customize ideas that have generated millions of dollars for my clients to your selling environment. This is a small group. Two days of personalized attention. Reserve your seat today by clicking here!
Do Baseball Coaches Need Sales Skills?
Why did Steve Teel of Teel’s Baseball (academy softball and baseball) bring me in to speak with their coaches on sales skills? The answer is simple. Coaches need to know how to communicate to all of the buying influences if they are going to grow their business.
Steve Teel is a smart business owner. He knows there are several buyers in any sale. In his market, you have the kid taking the lessons. Let’s call him or her the end user. You also have the parents who sign the checks. They usually have a different set of needs and desires than the kids do. And then you have the area coaches who can act as a great source of referrals.
Steve realized that if his coaches do not spend time with the parents asking about their expectations, they will feel neglected and the possibility will exist that the coaches will fall short in certain areas. Steve understands that his coaches need the same set of skills a professional sales person uses. Afterall, any coach at any level has to sell their ideas to their students or clients. Therefore, you need to know how to ask the right questions, how to present the ideas so they are acted on and how to listen to your customers.
After spending an hour with his coaches, the results were dramatic. Some coaches left with a renewed sense of purpose regarding the tremendous impacts they have on the lives of their young clients. All of the coaches now have a greater appreciation of the role the parents play in the success of their lessons and are now making them an active part of the process.
Bottom line, referrals have increased as have revenues from satisfied clients.
By the way, Teel’s Baseball was very successful before they brought me in. Like all successful companies, they realized there were things they needed to pay attention to if they were going to stay at the top.
What things do your sales people need to pay attention to in order to get to the top or stay at the top? What increases are you looking for in your sales career and life? If you are looking to increase your sales and earnings, then get your copy of Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way today! This is the book I used for the presentation to Teel’s.
