December 2006 Sales Success Newsletter

Ideas, Tips, and Tools for Sales Success

Our goal with each issue is to provide you with usable, proven ideas and techniques that will make you a more effective salesperson or sales manager and increase your sales and earnings.

I want to wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year! I hope that the holiday season will be an occasion for you to enjoy time with you family and friends, and to rest and refresh yourself for a great 2007. I wish you and yours all the best of health, happiness, and success in the coming year!

In this month’s issue . . .

Last month we looked and the importance and value of establishing your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), and why it's essential to be able to clearly articulate your USP to your prospects. This month I finish my look at USPs by giving you some tips for crafting a compelling USP and on how to most effectively utilize it to its maximum advantage.

This month I also have two articles from some very good friends and fellow sales trainers. The first, from Mark Christie, is a great article on how (your) silence is a powerful and extremely useful method to help guide the flow of the conversation where you want it to go.

The second article comes from Barry Caponi and Steve Bookbinder and is an updated and fresh view of Steve's article on the value and importance of gaining "Next Calendar Events" with your prospects at each stage of the sales process.

We welcome your questions, comments, and success stories - just e-mail us at info@kosa-consulting.com.

Here’s to your sales success!

Kent Howell

Unique Selling Propositions: The Power of Differentiation - Part II
By Kent Howell

Last month I started a look at the concept of Unique Selling Propositions with a focus on understanding what they are and why it's so important to know what your USP is and that you utilize it. This month I'll get into a little of the nuts and bolts of how you create your USP, and where and how you use it to maximize its effectiveness.

There's definitely an art to creating a great USP, but the art primarily revolves around the wording which is very important; however this is the secondary task in the creation process. The first task is the hard part - determining what aspects or components; or features, advantages, and benefits - are actually the most unique and differentiating characteristics or your product or service (from this point on I'll be using the word product to mean either product or service)

The best way to begin crafting your USP is ask yourself a number of questions. The first questions you should ask must be focused around the customer (it always starts with the customer). Start here:

Who is my target customer?
What do my customers gain (what to they want to gain) by using my product?
What value does my product bring to the customer or stated differently - what value does my customer desire from my product?

These are examples of just a few of the customer focused questions you must be able to answer.

Since you're objective is to create a Unique Selling proposition you must make sure that you don't claim something as Unique that one (or more) of your competitors is already touting. So it's vital that you know exactly what your competitors are espousing about their products - this means everything. Therefore you need to learn everything about their products, you need to know what features and aspects of their product that they are emphasizing, you need to know what their advertising messages are saying, what their product brochures and other marketing brochures state, and so on.

Once you have clearly defined who your target customers are and you know everything about your competition then you can begin to look at your company and your products.

So where do you start?

Start with understanding that an effective USP has three elements:

It must be truly unique.
It must be strong enough and exciting enough to get people (prospects) talking about it.
It must not be something that can be copied or imitated easily.

With this as your foundation begin making some lists. For example, make a list of everything your product does (it's also important to know what it doesn't do too); what does it do or provide that competing products do not.

Ask yourself a series of questions about your company and your product using the "six wise men" (who, what, when, where, why, and how). Some examples are:

Who benefits the most from using our product
What do we do better than anyone else?
How will the customer use my product?
Why should someone buy from us?

These are just a few things you can ask, but remember this most of all - always ask your questions and look at everything from the customer's perspective.

As you start to write your USP think of the single biggest benefit your products offers to your potential customers.

Try to boil it down to a single statement (and absolutely no more than two at most).

Make it benefit oriented (let your prospect now what they gain).
Be precise (no ambiguities)
Use easy to understand language
Be concise (get to the point, don't beat around the bush)
Make sure it is, in fact, unique. Let the prospect know exactly why he should buy from your company and buy your product and from no-one else.

Lastly, make sure that your USP passes the following test:
* Is it true?
* Is it easy to understand?
* Does it differentiate us from the competition in a positive manner?
* Is it expressed in a way that people can easily express it to themselves and to others?

Now that you've finished the hard part, crafting your USP, you can move on to the far easier part - where and how you use it.

Variations of your USP should be included in ALL of your marketing materials such as your...
• Advertising and sales copy headlines.
• Any and all promotional materials.
• Business cards.
• Brochures.
• Your "elevator pitch", phone, and sales scripts.
• Letterhead letters, & postcards.
• Sales letters.
• Website & Internet marketing.
• Your Email signature.

Incorporate it into everything you do. All your of your correspondence (including invoices) should echo your USP. Don’t waste an opportunity. Each time you connect with your customers, deliver your unique selling proposition.

How do you know if it's working? Take a look at your Web site. Will someone who knows nothing about your company understand your USP immediately when first visiting the site? Knowing you have less than five seconds to grab their attention, it better be crystal clear right away. If visitors don't know exactly what you do and what you stand for quickly, they're gone. The same holds true for your print materials.

Your USP is the force that drives your business and success.

The Power of Silence
By Mark Christie

In my role as a sales trainer and consultant, and prior roles as a sales manager working with reps in the field, it always strikes me just how well most reps know their products inside and out. If you ask a sales person a question about what they do or sell, you usually get some phenomenal, well versed, carefully crafted responses, that take, oh, sometimes 4 or 5 minutes, or even longer.

No doubt about it, today's rep comes well equipped with a plethora of product and company knowledge. Our marketing departments are clearly hard at work with the product groups at generating plenty of literature that can tell the sales department (and the consumers) everything we need to know and more about what it is we sell.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what gets most sales people started down the path towards making an ineffective sales call. Whenever I attend a sales call, or even listen to a role play in one of our courses, often I will close or divert my eyes, and focus on just listening to the dialogue between the seller and the buyer.

It never ceases to amaze me just how much of the conversation is dominated by the sales person. I have literally witnessed (with my ears) calls in which I have heard the prospect literally say one word in the first five minutes of the call. (The word is something like "Fine" after the salesperson has asked "How are you doing today?" - well at least we cared enough to ask that!!)

As sales managers, I wonder how many of you have noticed the same behavior in your sales reps. Somehow, that art of successful communication got lost, and nowhere is this more evident than on a sales call.

I attribute this to a number of reasons - (i) sales people in general are outgoing, 'A-type' personalities, who are naturally exuberant; (ii) today's technology means that our products and services truly are rather remarkable, hence we get quite excited to demonstrate them; and (iii) most sales people have never had the proper sales training that helps to correct this communication problem (or at least if they had the training, they didn't have the required follow-up with the trainer to ensure successful application of the training - see last month's Targets article on Transfer of Training).

The absolute irony of it all, is that the most successful sales people are the ones who do the least amount of talking, not the most. This doesn't mean that these reps are less outgoing, or less enthused about the products or services they represent. But it does mean that these individuals clearly recognize the power of silence in the sales call.

Sitting down and allowing your prospects ample opportunity to speak does truly amazing things and leads to incredible results for sales people. By letting our customers discuss themselves, their problems, and their needs we generate a number of tremendous benefits for ourselves, a few of which are;

Building wonderful rapport with the prospect - and prospects buy primarily from people they know, people they like and people they trust;
Understanding our prospect's personality type, so that we can adjust our style appropriately to match that of the prospect;
Gaining a much better understanding of what our prospects truly need to solve their problems;
Determining how to turn those needs into wants - which is when the prospect is most likely to buy;
Recognizing what is going to really benefit the prospect and selling on those specific benefits, rather than just spouting out feature after feature after feature;
Comprehending the true nature of objections so that we are better prepared to respond to them;
And many more.

Given that there are so many advantages to being silent in the sales call, and let the prospect do all the talking (and conversely, so many disadvantages to doing the opposite), why is it again that most sales reps follow the wrong route?

Well, its not just enough, obviously to just sit there and remain silent. We must tactfully guide the conversation in the direction we want to move in, through proper use of asking questions. It is a skill that takes some time for even seasoned reps to learn and master, but when you consider the benefits of doing it properly, it is a skill well worth honing.

Mark Christie is the President of SalesForce Training & Consulting. For more articles by Mark visit www.salesforcetraining.com. He can be reached at Mark@SalesForceTraining.com.

The Art of the "Next Calendar Event"
By Steve Bookbinder and Barry Caponi

If you are a sales manager, how often have you heard someone on your sales team talk about this ‘great prospect’ they’ve got, but when pressed for details have no concrete next step in the buying process? And then how often do those ‘great prospects’ wind up dropping by the wayside? Or you might hear a pretty good explanation of the next step, but it is only the logical next step in YOUR selling process, not the prospect’s buying process or cycle. (There is a difference.) In other words, when you ask your rep what the next step is, they’ll tell you, "It’s getting them a quote", or "Setting up a demo". What you’re not hearing is that the prospect has committed to that next step, and in concrete terms – a date, a time, and a place; complete with objectives for that step along with any resources necessary for the completion of that step. We call that the "Next Calendar Event" or NCE for short.

In selling, a "Next Calendar Event" is tangible evidence that someone is working with you, or as we like to say, is fully engaged with you. It’s not a ‘gut feeling’ that the person is interested in moving forward with you, but PROOF of that interest. And measuring the presence of a NCE by the way will increase your forecasting accuracy immensely.

At Caponi Performance Group, we believe that interest is demonstrated by action. That action takes the form of an agreement to meet with you, speak with you, or do something for you (or with you) on a specific date and time…typically within a couple of weeks or within the time period that is consistent for your selling environment. This is the "Next Calendar Event". And as a matter of fact, we don’t consider this person to even be a ‘prospect’ in our Tactical Opportunity Management system, unless we’ve got a "Next Calendar Event" scheduled within that normal time period.

So why do we think this is so important? Here are seven reasons to ask for the "Next Calendar Event":

Shorten Buying Cycles
At the end of a sales call, many salespeople say, “I’ll call you next week to follow up.” They end up easily adding an extra week or two to the buying cycle playing phone tag. Why not set that "Next Calendar Event" while you’re still face-to-face? In long buying cycles you can save yourself weeks, not to mention the time you’ll save during the day playing the frustrating game of ‘phone tag’. That means that you need to know what you’ll be asking for as the "Next Calendar Event" before you leave for the meeting or pick up the phone. And if you need someone else’s involvement (from within your own organization) in that "Next Calendar Event", make sure you get a couple of possible times from them beforehand. Trying to ‘triangulate’ when only two are present is problematic at best, so make sure you take this into account while planning your sales calls. Don’t ‘wing it’.

One last thing on shortening buying cycles – remember, every product or service has a ‘normal’ buying cycle. Run past that time line and the odds of closing that deal start to drop precipitously. Believe it, people buy on emotion. Once you lose that early excitement and interest and the emotion starts to wane, your odds of success really decrease. And all that work you put into the cycle up to that point is basically lost. Don’t let that happen to you any more than necessary.
Test Their Commitment
When you ask for the "Next Calendar Event" and you start to hear the equivocating, what have you learned? Maybe they are not really going to buy, right? Many times we can pinpoint when we actually heard the ‘No’ when doing the postmortem, can’t we? But even then it wasn’t a, ‘‘No thanks.” It was when they stopped returning phone calls, or emails that was the real clue. If we ask while we’re face-to-face, at least we have the opportunity to test their commitment. They are the ones who really control the situation, so don’t be afraid to hear ‘No’. Just make sure you ask the right questions to make sure it truly should be a ‘No’ and it’s not just a misconception. If they are really saying no, that is a good thing. You’ve just opened up time on your calendar to invest more profitably elsewhere. Time is a gift. Don’t waste it on those who are embarrassed or too polite to tell you they’re not going to buy.

Testing their commitment also has another concrete benefit to you and that is a more reliable and accurate forecast. If there is no NCE, don’t let your reps forecast the opportunity. (Keep it on the pipeline, but not on the forecast.) The granular accuracy (WHICH opportunities will close) will increase dramatically.
Territory Management
Once you know you are meeting again with this client, you can set another appointment in the area or you can work in ADVANCE to set up other meetings in the area and fit this one into that pattern. Also, an ongoing prospect is more likely to meet with you in those hard to fill time slots as well, leaving the more attractive ones for those initial meetings.
Time Management
In addition to the fact of life that not all people will buy from us, is that the proposal that’s due ‘sometime next week’ will probably slip to the bottom of your priority list. The proposal that’s due because of a meeting you’ve got scheduled for next Tuesday at 2;00 will be less likely to slip. Find out exactly when it’s DUE as soon as possible so you know when to DO it. Why? Because there are four things you should always make a conscious effort to schedule; meetings with prospects, work you have to do BEFORE and AFTER a meeting with a prospect, and prospecting time.
You’ll be better able to Prioritize with Whom to Follow Up
Let’s say you have twenty initial meetings in a busy month. Say that seven of them don’t go anywhere – you get a clear NO or the person is obviously unqualified. If you’re not asking for a "Next Calendar Event" at the end of the initial meeting that means thirteen people are in “call-me-next-week-sometime” mode. Suppose you’ve only got time for five quality proposals this month. Upon which opportunity do you focus? Well, if you regularly ask for a "Next Calendar Event", you’ll know EXACTLY who you should be writing proposals for, because they are the people who are agreeing to move forward with you. Their interest is demonstrated by action. The others, when asked, didn’t agree to see you. So here’s the question: If they didn’t agree to SEE you again, what makes you think they’ll BUY from you?
You’re Sending the Right Message
Your time is valuable, too. Consider this: We teach people how to buy from us based on how we act and what we say. So when we do ask for the “Next Calendar Event’, we don’t want to say, “When are you free?”, but rather, “I’ve got a slot open at 11:00 on Wednesday. Are you free then?” Let them know you respect your time as well as theirs. My clients know I’ll be asking for the "Next Calendar Event" at the end of every meeting. Not only are they ready with their calendars when we sit down, but most of them ask me before I ask them! It makes sense to them too.
You Worked too Hard to Set Up the Initial Meeting in the First Place
You’ve made a sizable time investment to get to this point, drive out, and meet with this person. Why walk away from that without a commitment if you truly think you can help them improve how and what they do?

Conclusion

Put this in practice and I promise it will help you uncover the prospects that are really suspects much earlier in the buying cycle. This action alone will free up your time to work on the ‘real’ prospects or find new ones. It will also shorten your buying cycles. Both of those improvements will increase your closing ratios, not to mention the increase in the accuracy of your forecasts. So here’s the rule. Write this down and look at it every day until it is engrained into your very being: Don’t ever hang up the phone, or leave a meeting without getting a commitment for the "Next Calendar Event".

If you’re interested, we’ve got a document providing some different suggestions as to how to ask for a "Next Calendar Event" in fifteen different types of situations. If you’re interested, click here and fill out the form and we’ll send it to you.

Steve Bookbinder is a Senior Sales & Marketing Executive at www.247realmedia.com with over 25 years of sales and sales trainig experience. Barry Caponi is the President of Caponi Performance Group the leading sales training firm in Dallas, TX. He can be reached at bcaponi@caponipg.com