Learn how to dramatically grow your market share and sales through powerful alliances. This video blog will show you the alliances you need to cultivate and how to do so. Ron Karr shares a real life case story on how he was able to rally the troops, both internal and external, in order to save a deal and eventually close a blockbuster deal. Powerful video for any sales executive, provider of professional services, entrepreneur, small business owner and any executive looking to marshall the support of others.
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Posts Tagged ‘Sales Boot Camp’
Dramatically Increase Sales and Market Share Through Powerful Alliances
Mindsets That Close Deals…
Getting people to accept your point of view or proposals depends on how well you portray confidence to the person that you are trying to influence. To close more deals and get people to do what you are asking, learn the mindsets from which you need to operate!
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Catch Phrases That Kill Deals
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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The Ultimate Secret on How to Close More Deals
The secret to you closing more business lies in your energy and thoughts!
Last week I had to call back a senior executive of a client who hired me to speak to his team last September. The speaking engagement went very well and he wanted to talk to me about a bigger project.
On the phone, he immediately started to tell me he could not go forward at this moment due to a re-organization. Immediately I felt my energy tanking and the negative thoughts of not getting a deal starting to cloud my mind. Realizing this, I immediately changed wavelengths and thought about how it would feel when we agree to extend the relationship.
Just this shift in thinking and energy led to a critical question where I asked him to tell me about the re-organization. He started to share the goals, challenges and status of where things stood. I shared with him a critical mistake that many organizations make regarding the issues he was dealing with.
That suggestion caught him off guard and he asked me for a proposal. Imagine that; a legitimate opportunity that would never have occurred if I let my energy control my thoughts at the time I thought there was no business.
The mind is very powerful. If our mind is filled with negative thoughts and emotions, our actions will in turn attract negative results. Life is about energy. What we project is what we get in turn.
No matter your situation, don’t think about what you don’t want to have happen. If I ask you not to think about pink elephants, what are you thinking about? Pink elephants! The mind cannot process negative thoughts.
Whatever you are thinking about what you don’t want to have happen will happen! Conversely, whatever you are thinking about what you want to have happen will happen!
What should you be thinking about? Your answer will dictate whether or not you will close the deal!
Want to know about other beliefs and traits Top Producing Sales Executives, Professional Service Providers and other People of Influence use on a daily basis? Download for free the first three chapters of my bestselling book Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way!
Clear Vision Helps You Establish Leadership Market Position
Tim Seale, president of Timber Trading had built a successful wholesale lumber business. However, he realized there was going to be a limited premium that customers would be willing to pay to a middleman to facilitate deals between lumber yards and mills. The only way he would remain profitable was to add value to the process.
Tim decided to buy lumber and bring it to a warehouse where he could regrade it and create a product that exceeded industry acceptable standards. His company created a whole new packaging and labeling system that actually drove down inventory costs. He added a few more innovative products and services, until one day, his competitors realized Tim had created a new way of doing business.
Tim Seale is a visionary. He realized that a new vision was needed and that a whole new set of actions were required if he was to succeed in turning that vision into reality. It wasn’t easy, but he succeeded.
In these difficult times, what steps do you need to turn your vision into a reality?
How to Plan for the Future in Difficult Times
Timber Trading survived the housing downturn that crippled the building industry and the lumber industry. They understood the importance of visualizing the future and building a plan based on that future.
Here are questions to consider:
1. What changes do you see in your industry?
2. What ways can you improve your business and its way of doing business?
3. What can you do to set your company apart from competitors?
If you think the problem through, you’ll see the hidden opportunities that will help you reach your goals.
Your Capacity to Influence Others
The key to your success is the ability to influence others to accept your ideas, requests, etc. The good news is everyone has the capacity to influence others. All you have to do to harness the capacity is remove three self imposed obstacles that usually get in your way.
First obstacle is your belief that you cannot influence others. Anytime you think about what you cannot do, most often you will create that dreaded result as a self fulfilling prophecy. The mind cannot process the negative. If you think you cannot get that person to say yes, the mind is only thinking about that person saying no. Everything you do will be centered on that result and that’s how you produce a self fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, if you think about how this person is going to agree with you, then your mind is now thinking about a different end result and your actions will be different. Influence starts and ends with your mindset. Click here to read more on the beliefs that will enhance your success in life.
Second obstacle is your need to put your self-interests ahead of others. People act on things and ideas for their own reasons, not yours. Find out what people are trying to accomplish. Then show how your ideas/requests are going to help them achieve their goals. Do this often and your level of influence will increase significantly. Your ability to influence others does not lie in the words you use, but in the context in which you say them.
Third obstacle is the propensity to take rejection personally. When someone does not accept your ideas, they are not rejecting you. They simply do not feel it is in their best interests and that the risk vs. reward is too high. Stop allowing the stories in your mind to take over. Simply find out what’s missing for the person you are trying to influence and fill in that gap. Remember, people do things for their own reasons, not yours.
Bottom Line: Many times ideas are rejected not because they are bad, but because their value has not been properly communicated. Influence is about meeting the needs of others and helping them achieve their desired results. Concentrate on eliminating the three self imposed obstacles and watch your level of influence skyrocket. Click here to download three free chapters of a book that will help you increase your sphere of influence.
Please comment on this post and let us know what you have done to help incresae your sphere of influence.
Two Ways to Build a Business
In building your business, whether you are a sales person, CEO, VP Sales, Entrepreneur, Provider of Professional, etc, you have two options. A) Start from scratch and spend lots to time and money in achieving your results, or B) Acquire the knowledge you need by learning from the mistakes of others and using proven techniques to shorten your ramp up.
These two options are similar to what executives and CEO’s deal with in deciding on whether or not to bring in an outside expert to speak at their conferences or use internal experts. Experience shows that outside speakers generate different and sometimes better results than internal speakers.
Internal speakers gain instant credibility as the audience already feels they understand their environment and needs. They already have a relationship developed and can help fill the gaps. But that is as far as they can go.
The downside of using an internal speaker is limiting the viewpoints and strategies to a certain way of thinking. Outside speakers bring a new viewpoint and best practices from other organizations and industries that provide invaluable insight into new ways of thinking.
Some internal speakers are quite good in their ability to speak and move an audience. Yet, for them, it is a part time job as they only do it when asked. Professional speakers hone their craft on a daily basis with a variety of audiences. They know how to move an audience to action. They bring new ideas through personal stories complete with examples of implementation.
There are three phases to adult education: Awareness, transference of skills and measurement of results. External experts/speakers not only provide their audiences with awareness, but they also help them with implementation through powerful examples of how their ideas are transferred into action. The value of a professional speaker is the ability to tell these stories in a motivational and powerful manner to not only keep the audience’s attention but to move them to action.
The challenge for professional speakers today is that there is no patience on the part of audiences for generic presentations that do not take into account the clients environment. There are greater expectations on the part of clients for professional speakers/outside experts to tailor their content to the needs of the client. Professional speakers need to research the client’s environment, goals and obstacles. They need to prove to the audience from the first word that they do understand their world. When a professional speaker tailors her content to the needs and environment of the audience, there is no better presentation available to the client.
So when you plan your next conference, please don’t just look at the budget. While there may be an expense to hiring a professional speaker, you can easily see that by hiring the right professional speaker, the fee for their services is miniscule as compared to the time and money you save by acquiring the right content that will move your audience to action and achieve their goals. Plus, getting an outside perspective brings a sense of reality to the organization and breaks the cycle of limited thinking.
When it comes to building your organization, do you want an apprentice or a pro?
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!
