PetesWeekly

Firstly, you get lots of practice. When you are confronted by a live person once each month, maybe, it’s very easy to panic. You are so worried about losing the sale that you lose it. When you have two leads  (or five) arriving each day, without fail, you know that you can mess today. And still, two new prospects will arrive on Monday, and Tuesday, …. So, you don’t take life so sternly. You have more fun.

And with that fun you improve your sales approach. You relax and begin to listen, rather than fighting to close each sale. You no longer care too much whether this one prospect doesn’t become a client because you know that the next one will.

Number two, you get lots of new ideas. This only applies to the owner of the firm, I’m afraid. In the superb book Rework, the fine team at 37 Signals point out something that I at first thought insane.

When one client suggests something, they say, ignore it. Don’t even write it down. One person suggesting something is an anomaly. But if you are the owner you will soon notice when a few people start suggesting much the same thing. And that happened with about 10% of our clients. They have enough new requests for something that they didn’t offer at first that they have rejigged their sales model. In all cases they have doubled the profits from each sale by adding something to the sale that their prospects suggested.

Thirdly, of course, you get lots of sales. A few weeks ago I mentioned Frank Betger`s maxim: “If only I can tell my story to enough people, no matter how bad I might be at it, I will make sales.” That’s what we have seen as well.

Many of us spend our days with our backs to our clients, focused on making stuff, pushing paper, and chasing banks. It’s so much easier to just avoid clients. No tough questions to answer, awful choices to make, or mistakes to say sorry for.

But, the owner is by far the best salesperson in a firm. She can decide quickly; her passion shines through; she `feels` the problems that clients face because she has a lot of skill in dealing with those problems. This is  why she is in this field.

Contrast this with a salesperson who is in this firm just because of the paycheque, and on June 1 will start selling used cars, , or frozen chickens because the pay is better.

Just so that we are clear on this matter, I have nothing against selling used cars, passports, or frozen chickens. Although I am little bothered by those that are three months past their sell by date, and returned to the factory for a solid chlorine rinse before being declared fit to eat again.

There is one last thing to think about. When a firm has a steady flow of prospects, that venture no longer relies on the owner as much as before. Each of those prospects is, at first, a stranger. And this means that a new owner can take over on June 1, and the prospects arriving after then won`t know that the old owner is taking a break in the south of France.

In other words, it’s much easier to sell a venture when the owner is not the only source of sales. This occurred to me as I was thinking about the number of my friends facing retirement. They`re not able to sell their stake because their firms are so reliant on their contacts, some of whom go back to van Riebeeck`s birthday.

Apart from word of mouth, and that word of mouth is almost always about the owner and never about the firm, their firms have no other way of finding sales. This means the owner can’t retire. This might not be an issue for you, but there are some jobs that have a 14 to 80 age restriction. Plumbing, for instance, is not the kind of day job one wants having already spent 60 years  dealing with other peoples` shyte.

The people that buy what you sell pay for your future. The more you have the merrier it is.

Your service is not excellent. Your offer is not unique. You are much like the rest of us – struggling to make sense of commerce and fighting the same demons. (The past few months of testing service and sales response levels in SA have shown us at Sales Motor how awful almost all of us are.)

Maybe, after a few years of banging your head against the coal face, you will build some great habits that your clients will like enough to give you money for.

Even then, if you tell us how good you are, we will not believe you. The SA government uses the phrase “service excellence” 15,100 times on their websites. In their case it is more hope than real, like my relationship with Cindy Crawford. The phrase now means as much as “Ja nee.”

More than 28,100 SA sites talk about their “unique service”. That too no longer means much. “Eunuch service” would be more truthful.

I think it is time to stop talking so much about it and start doing it a little. Now, that is something people notice. And it is almost easy!

Over this past month some of my clients have made great sales. And a bunch have not. They differ in just one respect: All the clients who get the sales phone back within 30 minutes of a web enquiry.

When a person sends you a request via your website they don’t quite know what to expect next. Folk in SA have lost hope that much will happen. And, indeed, very little does.

In Norway, if you ask a plumber to visit on Monday at 10am, he will arrive between 9:59 and 10:01. In SA, if you ask five of them to visit on Tuesday at 10am, the only guy to arrive, at 1pm on Thursday, will get the job.

So, when a prospect gets a phone call back from a real person, within thirty minutes, there is a stunned silence, often followed by “Fok me, I have NEVER had such service before.” (Women will often say “Wow” instead of the more robust male response.) I know this because we’ve been testing it for the past 12 months.

At this point you do not have to talk about your service. You have just shown it off in all its shining glory. That memory will stick. Folk offering great service don’t have to mention it. The rest of us do.

This past week I helped a few of my clients work through their own sales processes to adjust to doing it this way. Their sales results improved overnight. (When so few folk in SA offer any service at all, it is not hard to stand out!)

We test our clients after a few weeks, to see if their follow-up is any good. At the same time we test the firms competing with them. And the really great news is that they are all so slow, and so bad, that it really is easy to be better.

A fast email is much more efficient, but not nearly as effective. The call starts a dialogue that your prospect needs so that they will trust you enough to give you money. In a world with so much technology we sellers forget that our clients want relationships.

May I suggest that it might be a good idea to be the first in your field to look at this issue, rather than the second?