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.

You can accomplish only so much through your own efforts. But you can accomplish a great deal more through the efforts of others.

In my CEO bestselling book “Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way”, I show you how today’s top sales leaders build alliances to attract more prospects and clients than they could by themselves.

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!

Please share your examples of alliances that enabled you to increase your success.

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!

A customer-focused mindset is the key to my proven leadership selling process. Based on decades of research with companies of all sizes including Cognis Chemicals, UPS, Marriott and Hertz, I reveal what great sellers do inside my book “Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way”, and I show you how anyone can implement the same powerful tips.

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!

Please forward this video link to your friends and colleagues. Please leave comments on how you get into the right mindset to close deals.

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.

Download for free the Five Beliefs and 7 Traits of Great Sellers. It will help supercharge your career.

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!

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.

That’s the position Karen Cone found herself in at the beginning of the Great Recession when she was President and CEO of TowerGroup, the leading research and advisory services firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry. Having to cut expenses in all areas, her clients were wondering if they truly needed those services. Her competitors were losing clients as well so Cone started working with me.

“We needed to change the sales strategy and find a way to deal with clients in crisis. And we needed to communicate and sell our value proposition in a way that was different and more compelling than what had worked before,” she said. “In other words, we needed to move from being considered a “nice to have” to a “must have.”

We both agreed that if her sales force was going to succeed, it had to move from selling a product to selling an end result. That way they could raise the importance of the service in the minds of the buyers.

The results were extraordinary.

“Many of our competitors were being cut out all together,” she said. “We actually retained the vast majority of our clients. And we retained them at a level of spend that was extremely respectable.”

“As budgets loosened up, TowerGroup was really well positioned to take advantage of that,” she said. “These methodologies and approaches made a big difference in helping that happen.”

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!

Please Comment on how you turned your products/services from a nice to have to a “must” have

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?

Today, Steve enjoys a following of over 65,000 people! His twitter ID is @LeadToday. In building his list of followers, Steve employed 3 simple tactics:
1. Provide valuable ideas on how to be an effective leader
2. Re-tweet valuable ideas from others thereby expanding his network and leveraging other people’s wise thoughts
3. Show appreciation by thanking those who have re-tweeted his ideas and thoughts

This was a process that Steve has nurtured on a consistent and disciplined basis.

So how did Steve and Toro benefit from getting 65,000 followers? For one, it strengthened the relationships with dealers and distributors by providing ideas on how to grow their businesses. This resulted in Toro enhancing its overall value proposition and keeping its competitors at bay.

In addition, the brand of Toro was also enhanced. Imagine having 65,000 people interested in leadership reading Steve’s daily tweets on a consistent basis. How much would it cost Toro to get this kind of exposure on a daily basis using other media outlets? With Twitter the total cost can be rounded to the grand sum total of zero dollars. Add to this the flexibility of customizing messages to events happening real time. This by itself makes Toro and Steve more relevant to the market place.

Finally, the connections Steve has made around the world with other leadership experts exposes him to additional ideas and concepts he can easily import into his organization thereby making him more valuable to Toro’s success and enhancing his own personal brand.
This is the power of Twitter. Notice how Steve does not sell his products in his tweets. He simply builds value which in turn creates buzz that generates business.

Congratulations Steve. And thank you for recommending Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way to your list.

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!