PetesWeekly

Sell more and visit foreign lands.

June 2nd, 2011 | by | marketing, selling

Jun
02

Once you have travelled around the world a little, as I have, you begin to notice the difference between your average South African and the normal folk that populate places like Australia, England, and Norway. You even begin to notice the very distinctive South African accent.

As long as I lived in South Africa, I had no idea how South African I sounded. The moment I walked through London the very first time, and heard a South African in the distance, I realised quite how loud we are, and quite how unique our dialect is.

It is even more so in Norway where one doesn’t often hear English being spoken in public. One is tempted to rush up, hug the poor fellow, and invite him around for a braai tonight at your igloo.

The single biggest difference between a South African and anybody else, at least in every country I have visited, is that the South African is a master at the art of offering unsolicited advice. This makes us pretty unique. In the rest of the world, most folk will respond if you ask for help. But they will keep their distance until then.

This does not happen when a South African is around, whether this is in South Africa, or anywhere else. You can be, for instance, in a supermarket, looking at the range of adult diapers on offer. Most of the locals will diplomatically leave you to your ponderings. Not so your basic South African.

“I see that you are looking at the adult nappies?” Is the opening gambit.
“Hmmm.” Is the usual, very embarrassed, response.
“May I suggest that you take the extra large, silicon-based, waterproof, ShyteNoMore, and take the big packet because it’s much cheaper? I have tried all of the others, and that’s the one that works best.”
“Hmmm.”
“The regular size simply doesn’t hold enough to make it worth the trip to empty it. Trust me, three bars of sugarfree chocolate and that’s my bundle!” Our South African hero helpfully offers.
“Hmmm.” The victim mumbles desperately hoping that a heart attack – whether his own or the South African’s – might end this agony.
“Hey Janet, “our hero calls across three aisles “I told you that I wasn’t the only one with this leakage problem. I just met another guy who also needs those extra large  ShyteNoMore  nappies that you keep laughing at!”
It is usually at this point that our deeply embarrassed victim shuffles away, possibly to the WC to cram a large wad of toilet paper into the back of his trousers while he walks to the nearest supermarket where South Africans are no longer welcome.

It doesn’t just happen to strangers. Befriend a South African, and you’re inviting a one-person-expert on everything into your life. Their knowledge knows no bounds, and they are always happy to offer guidance on issues like raising your children, your garden, your engine size, why Norway and Britain should not allow more immigrants in,… I could go on, but you get the point.

What’s even worse is when you find yourself doing it. Women typically don’t like us men because we offer answers and solutions long before they have finished explaining the problem. For them the joy lies in the explanation, and the subsequent discussion. They don’t want answers, they want dialogue.

Folk living in Norway and Britain don’t even want the dialogue.

Which brings me to the point of this email. The best sales advice I can offer: Shut up and listen for at least five minutes for each minute you speak. When you speak, don’t mention – ever – how great your service is. People will believe you as much as they believe Telkom’s current statement about their service: “You will enjoy uncompromising service excellence and an unparalleled range of affordable communications products and services.”

Your sales will rocket. Your prospects will respect you. And you will earn enough money to be able to pester strangers in any foreign land you care to visit.

No Comments »

Sales Practice.

May 26th, 2011 | by | marketing, selling

May
26

Things change when you have a steady flow of enquiries. I can say this because I have spoken to 50 small firms over the past two months who have found such a steady flow.

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.

Sales Motor

Please check out our simple approach here. Very little BS, and lots of prospects.

We help clients sell first aid training, electric vehicles, creche enrolments, boxes, gate motors, wendyhouses, rentals, valves, legal services, steel wire, coffee, and a whole lot more.

Each client that has joined us despite having an existing Google campaign has halved their adspend and doubled their enquiries. Maybe we can do the same for you?

No Comments »

No Really, Service Excellence?

May 18th, 2011 | by | marketing, selling

May
18

May I be direct?

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?

No Comments »

Sales Funnel Spiders

March 29th, 2011 | by | best business books, selling

Mar
29

I spent three years selling life insurance in the 90s. It was the toughest time of my life. But as a learning experience it remains unbeaten.

About 100 years ago Frank Bettger started selling life insurance in the United States. Some time later he wrote about his experiences in a book that was translated into more than one dozen languages. It’s called How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, and you can download it right now for your Kindle or iPad. I read it for the first time in 1992, and I think it is one of the best sales books ever written.

In short, Frank started selling life insurance at a low ebb in his life. I seem to recall that he started without socks, although that might have been my brother. In my case, I had socks but no car.

After 10 months of pain Frank realised something very simple: no matter how good or bad he was at selling, as long as he was able to tell his story to enough people, someone would buy.

Think about that. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are at selling, if enough people hear what you have to say, someone will buy. And that’s the secret to selling. (I have been selling since 1984 so I have a touch of history in this field.)

Insurance salespeople are amongst the best sellers in the world. And they get taught well. They know that selling is a numbers game. Allow me to explain.

They know, for instance, that for every 20 cold calls they make, they will get 10 appointments. For every 10 meetings they arrange, they will actually meet eight people. (Two people will cancel or just not arrive or set the dogs on them.) They know that for every eight people they meet, they will get four requests for a complete financial report. For each of those four reports they will present three (another no-show). And for each of those three final meetings they will sell one policy.

Let’s work that backwards in terms of money.

The commission on the policy is, shall we say, $10,000. That income is the result of making 20 phone calls, making each of those calls worth $500. That income is also the result of meeting eight people, making each of those meetings worth $1250. And, they had to put in three final meetings to arrive at their income, making each of those worth $3333. (Your own numbers will depend on your process, what you sell, how good you are, the season, and a few other factors.)

Sales is a numbers game. This is easy to measure. And once you are measuring it, it’s easy to improve each facet because you can see where the problem is.

Effort Activity Effect Value
20 Prospects Phoned 100% 500
8 Generates 8 Meetings 40% 1250
3 Which Generate 3 Presentations 37.5% 3333
1 Which Generates 1 Sale 33% 10000

It’s easy to motivate yourself to make each phone call, because each very short phone call is worth a lot of money because 20 of them are going to result in a sale.

And it’s easy to notice when things change, or to focus on improving each facet of your process.

But here’s the thing. In speaking to a whole bunch of business owners this past week, many of whom were their own salespeople, very few had any real idea about just one number: how much their average sale was worth.

And if you don’t know what the average sale is worth, it means you don’t know any of the numbers that are important to your business. You cannot work out the value of a lead, which means you cannot work out how much you can spend on marketing. (Marketing is the process of finding enough leads to get to that one sale).

It means that you don’t have a sales funnel. Your process is more like a funnel spider, and they are fugly boisonous pastards. Maybe that’s why about 96% of small firms fail in the first ten years.

No Comments »

Sales Quotations

March 2nd, 2011 | by | marketing, selling

Mar
02

Here is a true story. (All my stories are true. If I made them up in a novel you would not believe them.)

My new client, Dave (not his real name) sells a product that we all need. It is a high value item. We each buy one every 10 years or so. Dave wants some help finding clients. That’s what we do, so we dive into action.

Within 10 days Dave has received more than 50 leads, some of which are worth about R250,000 if the deals come through. (Hotels need this product en masse.)

Dave calls up. He is not a happy camper. Turns out that the leads are not turning into sales. We hear this often so we start at Dave’s coalface: How does he respond when an enquiry arrives in his email inbox. (Or in the boxes of his office slaves.)

That’s easy. The prospect either gets a quotation or a price list. We ask to look at the covering email.

The covering email is a problem:

  • No mention of Dave’s firm.
  • No gentle thank you for the request.
  • Not even a phone number for the prospect to call to place the order.

In other words he sends a standard SA quotation. Even if a prospect wanted to buy, she could not.

“Dave, please tell me that you at least called that fellow looking for 500 units last week?” (No chance, that prospect got the ‘standard’ email.)

So, no sales, and it’s not the leads that are bad, it’s Dave’s process.

I told this story on Tuesday night to 100 SA business owners. I asked them how many of them had a simple response process in place. (In other words, how many had taken some time to think through the process by which a stranger becomes a client.) Just one in five!

  • It’s not just a prepared response for a possible big sale. (In which case an instant phone call is crucial, in my humble view.)
  • It’s also a response for a possible small sale.
  • And it’s even a response for a NO sale. (That might be someone looking for a job, or for help to do it himself. In this case a polite email response is useful to say that Dave cannot help, but offering links to a few sites like the industry association, or Dave’s biggest competitor who might have the time to get involved.)

We’re finding more than 11,000 sales enquiries each month, and many of our clients treat each one as if it’s the first they have ever seen. Hint: An ounce of routine is worth a ton of inspiration. (Not sure who said that but I heard it somewhere.)

We call the document we send to a person (to persuade them to give us money) a quotation. It isn’t. A quotation is something clever a famous person like Errol Flynn once said: “My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.”

I think of it more as a sales proposal. A proposal should come after some dialogue. For instance, you and a stranger snuggling up on the couch to discuss your future. As you find common ground, and find that this person likes your jokes, you get comfortable together. After a while you make a proposal – based on what you know about the other person. And you indicate how much you really, really want to spend the next 200 years in her (in my case) arms.

A sales proposal is not quite so personal, but it also should not be like walking up a stranger on the street and suggesting a quickie – which is the way most small business sales quotations appear.

“Here is our price list.

If you want to buy one of these you must deposit 80% of the purchase price into our bank account within 3 days of ordering, as long as it is a day starting with a ‘T’.

We don’t have time to include any nice words from our clients about how great we are, because, well, you’re not important enough to us. So we’ll just tell you that we offer a unique service and that excellence is our motto.

We know that you wanted this for your children, but we don’t have time to tell you how our children’s product differs from our office product or garden product because, well, you’re not important to us. And besides, we’re too busy making the blerry things.

Our order process is so obvious that we’re not going to waste time detailing it here. Just remember that all orders need to be lodged in triplicate, with an official order number, between 3:30pm and 4:30pm. As long as the day does not start with a ‘T’.”

The good news is that the service bar in SA is so low that my pet earthworm can jump over it. It’s like scuba diving. When a shark appears you don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer. You just need to swim a little faster than Dave.

No Comments »

Business Pick Up Lines

February 16th, 2011 | by | selling

Feb
16

Picking up new clients is much the same as finding a new friend for tonight – or for life. (I can’t use the d-word. This email won’t reach you.)

We’re all out of practice. For instance, ‘Can I help you?‘ is the standard pick up line in any store. It hasn’t worked well since Ali Baba’s father first used it to sell pyramids 8,000 years ago. Oh sure, some person with an urgent need will tell you what they want, while the rest of us will saunter out without anything that you sell.

My partner, Peter Bowen, once owned a nursery. (The kind that sells plants, not babies.) He taught his staff to approach saunterers (another word for prospects) and ask ‘Are you looking for anything specific today?’ Sales tripled in 13 months. It’s a much, much better pick up line because it allows your new best friend to get to the point quickly.

Almost everyone who asks me ‘Can I help you?‘ is patently unable to. If I am looking for something specific I just ask where it might be hiding. (Those directions are often pretty suspect as well.)

We’re seeing a bunch of our clients battling to close sales when the leads come from the Web. They’re aiming at efficiency, getting the info out the door fast. But that’s not the right way to do it. Aiming at doing it effectively is better. Effective means getting more sales.

The best way to engage a prospect is to start a conversation. It’s no different to picking up a future partner. Don’t spend the first 10 minutes talking about yourself, your other friends, your money, or your last friend (client). Do spend the first 10 minutes asking about your client (or friend).

There is a simple reason for this. Future spouses (like clients) fall into two basic groups:

  • I want this one.
  • I don’t want this one.

The only way to find out where the fine person in front of you fits in is to ask a few questions. Spending ten minutes dumping all your info means that, for this new person, you will often fit into their ‘I don’t want this one’ bucket.

In essence, when two people come together the various combinations are:

  • I want this one, this one wants me. (Mutual)
  • I want this one, this one does not want me. (Chase)
  • I don’t want this one, but this one wants me. (Let down)
  • I don’t want this one, and this one does not want me. (Goodbye)

When first you spy this new person in your life (friend or client) you see just the polished exterior. If you’re looking for friends, this is the scent, the Gucci bag, hairstyle. If you’re looking for a new client this is the Porsche in the parking lot, or (if online) the domain in the email address. (MD@JSE-listed-company.co.za is a lot more impressive than joe169@gmail.com.)

But it’s only when you start talking that you find out who this person really is. By talking I mean asking and responding. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to do this right. And it’s easy to see whether this one is a keeper or not. (Prospects are people too. They’re full of the same social challenges the rest of us face.)

It’s easy to choreograph a follow up dialogue, ready for each group.

Mutual wanting is easy. Just pull out your invoice. OK, so maybe that’s a tad hasty. But all you have to agree on is the date, time, price, and colour.

Chasing is easy. Find out what she’s really looking for, and if you think you’re up to it, offer it. This means dealing with objections en route. If you’re the best solution right now (her firm needs it done by Friday) then you’re in the game.

Let down means that you may have sold yourself too well. Even though you can get the job done by Friday if you work all night, will you get paid? You should take the lead in suggesting that the fit does not work for you. Go with your gut feel on this. Some clients have too much baggage because their past relationships have been awful.  After a few weeks you begin to see why.

Goodbye is easy. In a real store it’s a ‘Call me if you need me.’ before you rush out to an early lunch. Online it’s a relaxed wait because you know they won’t email again.

This email intends no insult to any other colour, gender, or religion, nor to any person currently without clients (friends). It’s simply much easier to read from a single perspective, and a lot easier to write from my own perspective as a pink male. If you have ever thought of yourself as white, try sitting on some snow while unclothed. Snow is white. Whites are pink.

No Comments »

Telkom vs Small Business. Who wins?

September 29th, 2010 | by | marketing, selling

Sep
29

Why will Telkom always sell more than Joe Seep, a small telecomms entrepreneur? It cannot be the service, because they don’t have any. Or their pricing, because they are about the most expensive in the world.
Joe Seep consoles himself with the fact that he offers better, more personal, service at a much better price.
Yet 96% of Joe Seeps go out of business in the first decade. Telkom, by contrast, seems to have been around since before Alexander Graham Bell invented the first phone!
This has long puzzled me. Over the past few months, however, as we’ve helped hundreds of small business owners find thousands of prospects, we’ve realised one thing. The average small business owner could not sell a set of shoes to Imelda Marcos.
I say this gently and respectfully because anybody that forsakes the security of a real job and wades into these entrepreneurial waters has my undying admiration.
However, as a marketer and salesman for the past 25 years, a few things bother me immensely. One of these is this enduring belief that if you’re good, you must succeed better than if you’re bad. That is rubbish. Telkom is living proof!
It doesn’t matter how bad you are, as long as you have a stream of prospects, you cannot help but succeed in business. It has very little to do with your quality of service, and everything to do with your stream of leads.
At least, that’s what I used to think, until I started looking at how some of my clients handle a hot prospect.
Badly! The response is often late. It’s often an inadequate e-mail. It’s hardly ever followed up. The concept of phoning somebody who wants to buy what you sell is right up there with time travel. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the concept of doing a little research to check out how hot the prospect really is – that doesn’t really exist in real life.
Allow me to share a simple f’rinstance.
Lets say I sell luxury cars, and a prospect lands on my desk, out of the blue. And let’s assume that I have the name, e-mail address, phone number, and the desired vehicle. Then surely it would make sense to do a few simple Google searches to establish whether this name (or phone number, or e-mail) belong to the MD of Eskom, one of our leader’s many relatives, the new head of MassMart, or a 17 year old student. (All of this is there if you just ask for it.)
Nope, almost all the auto sales folk we spoke to have no Internet access because Joe Skeef down in spare parts was caught last year checking out the spare parts on 1989 Gold Hunni instead of a 2007 Bronze Hummer. So, all dealership Internet access was banned. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your exhaust pipe.
I wrote about this research thing some months ago, but I fear that most of us just yawned. And most of my  clients don’t have the time, inclination, or skill to do it by themselves. So we’re adding it as an option for any leads generated through our Global Warriors system.
A single click will open a series of searches – Google, Linkedin, Facebook – so that our hero can quickly assess (with increasing accuracy) whether this is worth a phone call or an email. And how fast.
So why does Telkom knock spots of the rest of us littler businessfolk? Well…
They have systems to generate prospects and to follow up those prospects. (Most of us don’t.) They don’t rely on word of mouth marketing. (Most of us do.) They’re not shy about their prices. (Most of us are.) And of course, they have the government as a shareholder. But there’s nothing you or I can do about that.

No Comments »

Success is all in the mind…

September 1st, 2010 | by | applied tech, entrepreneurial life, selling

Sep
01

Henry Ford once said “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” I’d like to share a few anecdotes from the past week.

I get an email each time one of the new sales sites our clients have set up generates a prospect. (This would be a person who searches Google, finds their new site, visits it, fills in the form asking to be contacted, and details what they are looking for.) Most of the sites are less than 10 days old, and I am keeping an eye open for problems.

With more than 100 prospects filling in forms each day on more than 30 completed sites in the past 10 days, it’s very inspiring.

Three sites stood out because they had higher numbers.

The first was about designing houses. All 9 emails were empty! That doesn’t happen often. I did a quick search. Google showed the site on the front page. I clicked to follow the link. The site was up. But it had no words. Just a coloured layout.

Our client had created the site, not filled in the detail to tell the rest of us what he was selling, and then created a full Google advert campaign. I was getting the empty emails because the form was triggered each time Google sent him a visitor.

I called him on his mobile. The moment he heard it was me he started telling me that he was having second thoughts. “Selling design services online,” he said “is not like selling products. People don’t search for them.” This went on for a few minutes while he convinced himself that he was not going to get any leads. (A lot of folk do this.)

When he stopped for breath I told him that I was calling to tell him that his empty, almost non-existent site, was already getting visitors from Google. Maybe completing it would make it easier for them to give him their details?

I thought about Henry Ford’s quotation. ‘If you think you can’t…’

A minute later I called Karen. Her effort was on the front page of Google as well. When she came on board 10 days ago to sell reconditioned engines, her firm’s website was already the first site Google displayed. She chose a single brand from the few brands the firm covered, and after getting massively frustrated a few times the site launched this past weekend. Yesterday 7 prospects filled in her enquiry form wanting various engines urgently.

I called to say “Well done!” She was ecstatic. They’d never had so many enquiries in one day. In the next couple of days she will set up sites for the other brands of engine they refurbish. (The profit from each sale covers their investment with us for the full year.)

I thought about Henry Ford’s quotation ‘If you think you can…’

And finally, early last week we had a Garden Route accommodation site go live, getting 6 very specific enquiries each day. At the webinar on Thursday I congratulated my client. “Don’t blame me,” he said, “I was too busy so I asked my son to mess with it.” Accommodation is one of the most crowded spaces online. I don’t think the boy knew that.

I though about another Henry Ford quotation ‘I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. ‘

“Actually,” continued my client, “we’re having a bit of a problem now. My son has put up another 3 sites, and haa started SMSing me from school to find out ‘his numbers’.”

We are not limited by what’s possible, just by what we think is possible.

No Comments »

Newer Posts