Sales Laundry

Archive for the ‘Q&A Sessions’ Category

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q: What do you do when your client tells you that your proposal is twice the price of your nearest competitor?  My client just called me and told me that my quote was 2X more expensive than the highest bid received from other companies.  What do I do next?

A: First, don’t panic.

At least your client is talking to you.  They could have just as easily thrown your proposal in the trash and never contacted you.

This could just be a ploy by your client to get you to lower your price or it could be a legitimate question about why your price is so high.  Either way, your next move is to contact the client as soon as possible.

Your client is theoretically trying to make the best decision possible for their business and that is how you should approach this problem as well.  Be a resource to truly help them figure out the best course of action.

If your price is 2X your nearest competitor, either:

A.  You misunderstood the requirements.
B.  Everyone misunderstood the requirements except you.
C.  You are offering something of additional value that your competitors are not offering.
D.  You are priced too high for your market.

If you have a great relationship with your client, I would ask to meet with them and help them compare the competitors proposal to your own to make sure it is a fair comparison.

I would do the following:

1.  Review the specific issues that the client said was important to have addressed in the proposal.  If you can get the client to rank the issues in order of importance, that would be even better. (See point #8.)

Doing this exercise should tell you if you and your client are in agreement on what all of their issues are that should be addressed in the proposal and help you identify if the problem with your client is A, B or C above.

2.  If you have a unique service or offering that would be of value to your client that your competitor is not capable of matching, you can try to get that service included on the “important issues to address” list, though you should have done this the first time around.  I would just say make sure you keep your clients best interests in mind when making this decision.

3.  Once you are certain you and your client are in agreement on what issues need to be addressed in the proposal, ask to review the quotes.

4.  Compare your quote and the competitors quote to the ranked list of issues and point out the specific spots where the proposals differ from each other or the list.

5. If you have addressed issues in your proposal not on the list or that the client does not want it is up to you to offer to remove the item or convince the client that they need it and to pay the additional cost associated with it.

6. If your proposal has addressed everything on the list, but your competitors proposal has not, ask the client if the item the competitor left off is important.  If it is important, the competitor needs to add it, if it is not truly important, take that item off your proposal and adjust the price accordingly.

7.  If your competitor has offered a very low price to get the business that you do not think they can honor, explain your concern to the customer and offer a fixed price or a guarantee to meet the price you quoted to eliminate the advantage such a tactic might give your competitor.

8.  If the client did rank their issues in order of importance and price seems to be their ultimate concern, you might offer to remove the lowest ranking issues from the proposal and reduce your price accordingly.

9.  OPTION: Offer up a discount/rebate or refund if you are wrong.  You could offer to charge a lower rate if your actual costs are lower than what you are predicting in your proposal.

Good luck!

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q: We have a strong sales guy, excellent with Small/Medium Enterprise accounts, but is obviously struggling to land large enterprise accounts and failing to sell them on our services.  He has not closed a single large enterprise opportunity.

I would appreciate any help in steering this guy in the right direction, any issues you feel they may have with these account types, and what plans/procedures/proposals may be put forward to resolve this issue. Thanks

A: The absolute best way to get to the bottom of the problem is to go with him on some SME account calls where he is excellent and some large account calls where he is struggling and see first hand where the challenges are getting the best of him.

The good news…

He is able to at least get an appointment with the Large Enterprise accounts, so he is able to convey value over the phone (I assume) to a viable company contact and get the meeting.

The fact that your sales professional is excellent with Small/Medium Enterprise accounts tells me he does have the ability to convey your products value to a prospective customer and secure a signed contract.

Areas to look for an answer…

The fact that he is struggling to land a Large Enterprise account does suggest some potential problem areas worth investigating.

1. SME accounts will almost always have fewer decision makers involved in making the ultimate decision to purchase your product while large accounts may have a handful of individuals scattered across the organization that need to be collectively convinced.

Look at who he is meeting with at the large accounts, is he uncovering all of the potential people involved in making the purchasing decision?  He might need help identifying who the key players are in large corporate environments and developing a successful strategy to get in front of all of them.

2. While he may be getting meetings at the large enterprises, I would evaluate his efforts at qualifying the person he is meeting with making sure they can make a purchasing decision vs. being an internal advocate that cannot influence vendor/product selection.

3. The problems of the SME customer may not be the same as the large enterprise customer.  If he is selling to the same pain points in a large enterprise as a SME account, he may be missing the mark by trying to solve problems the large enterprise does not have or are of too low a priority to garner immediate attention.

Ask him what pain points/problems he is trying to solve for the large enterprise and evaluate his answers with other sales professionals successfully landing large enterprise accounts.

4. Look at your historic sales cycles.  It is not uncommon for a sales cycle to be longer with a large enterprise account vs. a SME account because of the bureaucracy and volume of departments and decision makers that have to be won over to your offering.  Benchmark the sales cycle you went through to land your other Large Enterprise accounts and SME accounts and compare them to this sales professional’s benchmarks.

From my experience, the answer you are seeking is most likely somewhere within these four suggestions.  If, however, none of these seem to address the problem, pinpoint the specific areas (from first call to signed contract) where your sales process differs between your SME and Large Enterprise accounts.  Systematically work through each one of those identified areas with your sales professional as it is almost a certainty that one or more of them are the source of his struggles.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  What is the interrelationship between a sales process and the sales person’s natural style?

A:  A “Sales Process” should simply be a sales tool designed to get the greatest number of potential prospects successfully converted from “leads” to “landed” in the most efficient manner possible.

A “Sales Process” becomes overbearing at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the most likely path for sales success and becomes an overriding dogma that must be adhered to regardless of customer, personality, situation or circumstance. When adherence to the process becomes so important/rigid that the sales process itself becomes an impediment to the sales of the very product the process was built to serve, it is time for a change.

Conversely, a “Sales Process” becomes ineffective at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the best path to sales success and becomes an exercise in “style independence” with so loosely a defined process that the process again becomes an impediment to product sales. The rigidity of the sales process needs to be tuned to the product being sold.

Very knowledgeable customers making repeat purchases of commodity items could benefit by a very clear and rigid (to the point of being automatic, even) process. The floor of the NYSE being one example. Products being sold to customers with varying depths of knowledge or with wide ranging customer specific variations and infrequent purchase patterns require a more broadly defined “guiding hand” type of sales process, where listening, asking situation specific questions and conversation become more important than blindly following a rote process.

A well defined sales process should be malleable enough to bend to the needs of the product being sold and potentially the personalities selling it, as the product moves through its life cycle, anything else adds unnecessary friction.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  I work with a web design company that is not running at full capacity at the moment, so they are looking at getting a sales person. We have tried various methods to find salespeople, from outside sales professionals to inside tele-salesmen. Mainly it is lead generation, just getting the lead, not the actual closing that we need, but so far we have yet to find anyone who can actually do a decent job.

A:  You might look at this from a different angle.

If you would, ask a few questions of your firm first.  (Stay with me, there is method to my madness)

1. Why should a customer buy web services from us vs. every other web services provider?

2. Do we have a product, unique point of view, or skill set that really seperates us from the competition?

3. Have we identified who our primary customer base is?

4. Have we determined an effective way to consistently generate leads?

5. Have we developed any products to entice our existing customers to spend more with us?

6. Do we have any reference letters, videos, etc. compiled to help a sales rep land new accounts on the backs of our success stories vs his word as a sales man?

7. What sorts of marketing efforts do we have in place to help drive our sales message?

There are other good questions, but that should put you on the correct path.

It will always be difficult to find exceptional sales people because exceptional sales people are rarely out looking for a job too long.  Their existing employers either keep them happy or competitors tired of losing to them snap them up when given the chance.

If you have some clear and decisive answers to these questions, you can stop looking for a “sales genius” that can overcome other potential internal shortages and be successful with the more plentiful “young to pretty good” sales person that can execute given some direction.

In short, the more you refine and perfect your sales process, the wider and deeper the pool of candidates become that can execute your process successfully.

Spending more time searching for and refining the perfect sales process for your business may ultimately prove more rewarding than the search for the ultimate commission sales representative.

Hope that helps.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  How do I convince a prospective customer to switch from using a competitors product to using mine?  He likes my product but is content with the product he is using.

A:  There has to be a compelling reason to get them to switch.  If there is no compelling reason, you are probably better off spending your time on better prospects.

With that said, here are a few strategies to try and help you find that differentiator.

Strategy 1: The laziest solution is to cut your price to the point you still make money but have undercut the incumbent significantly enough to convince his customers to move.  This, of course, will eventually be followed up by someone else undercutting you.

Strategy 2: Analyze the prospective customer’s product, learn it, and look for significant feature/function/benefit advantages your product provides to justify the change.

Strategy 3: Analyze the competitors business looking for weaknesses that you can exploit to facilitate a change.  Better yet, just be better than your competition at every turn.  Better still, look past your competitor and give your customers more than what than they want, give them what they dream of and let them do your selling for you.

Strategy 4: Help the prospective customer so they can help you.  Per Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone, you could try a strategy of helping the prospective customers solve some of their personal/business problems, if you can identify them, with contacts from your network of people.  Providing legitimate answers to their problems without looking for direct compensation might give the prospective customer just the compelling reason they need to switch.

Strategy 5: Look for a way to change how the game is played, like what Amazon did to Barnes & Noble/Borders; Netflix is doing to Blockbuster, what Napster/iTunes did to CD sales for the record labels, etc.  A good book on this topic would be Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

Strategy 6: Tie your product to something bigger that makes switching to you a more compelling proposition.  Kellogg’s cereals tied Mini-Wheats to bigger issue of improving education of our children; Microsoft has tied themselves to Jack Welch of GE fame and a video interaction series to help teach businesses executives, or what Lance Armstrong did by tying his story, celebrity, athletic ability, and even the color yellow from the famous Tour De France winners jersey to his foundation and cancer research with a simple yellow Live Strong bracelet that became the “cool” thing to have and cause to support.

Strategy 7: Bundle your product with a product or service that is compelling to your prospective customer that your competitor can’t offer.

Strategy 8: Be attentive to your prospective customer and take care of them and keep an eye out for an opportunity to sweep in when your competitor ignores their customer or makes a major misstep.

Strategy 9: While not a full strategy, per se, find the leaders or first movers in the industry of the prospective customers you want to reach and focus your efforts on winning one or all of them.  Getting the respected thought leaders of any group using your product will make future sales easier as their followers will be more easily convinced.

Where do you find these thought leaders?

Here is a hint:  They are often the people quoted in the Business Journal, the newspaper or the trade magazines on the hot industry topics of the day.

Good luck.  It can be a very daunting task to get a happy customer to change from a vendor/product that is a known quantity to a vendor/product that is an unknown quantity, even if it is a significantly better product.  However if they are willing to take that jump with you, then they were probably not that happy to begin with.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  At what point does process become so overbearing that the sales person comes across as unnatural, insincere or insensitive? Conversely, at what point does style independence create disorder, chaos and inconsistency?

A:  A “Sales Process” should simply be a sales tool designed to get the greatest number of potential prospects successfully converted from “leads” to “landed” in the most efficient manner possible.

A “Sales Process” becomes overbearing at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the most likely path for sales success and becomes an overriding dogma that must be adhered to regardless of customer, personality, situation or circumstance.

When adherence to the process becomes so important/rigid that the sales process itself becomes an impediment to the sales of the very product the process was built to serve, it is time for a change.

Conversely, a “Sales Process” becomes ineffective at the precise point that it stops being a roadmap defining the best path to sales success and becomes an exercise in “style independence” with so loosely a defined process that the process again becomes an impediment to product sales.

The rigidity of the sales process needs to be tuned to the product being sold.  Very knowledgeable customers making repeat purchases of commodity items could benefit by a very clear and rigid (to the point of being automatic, even) process.  The floor of the NYSE being one example.

Products being sold to customers with varying depths of knowledge or with wide ranging customer specific variations and infrequent purchase patterns require a more broadly defined “guiding hand” type of sales process, where listening, asking situation specific questions and conversation become more important than blindly following a rote process.

A well defined sales process should be malleable enough to bend to the needs of the product being sold and potentially the personalities selling it, as the product moves through its life cycle, anything else adds unnecessary friction.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

 

Question:  What is the most effective form of prospecting for business machine outside sales?

 I am new to outside sales and my company does not provide much training.  They had me watch some Tom Hopkins videos from the 1980’s, but there was nothing on prospecting. There also are no senior sales people from whom I could get information on what has worked for them. 

The company I work for is a multi-line dealership; we focus mainly on X Brand and Y Brand copiers, although we sell several other brands and types of equipment.  We have small business customers to global oil companies.  My plan is to get as many new customers as possible, but the cold calling (door to door) I have done hasn’t generating any positive results. I am in a very competitive market with 7 other copier dealerships in a city of approximately 300,000 people.

A) What is the most effecting form of prospecting? 

B) What questions should I ask potential clients when prospecting? 

C) Is a script really necessary when cold calling and if so how do I write one that doesn’t make me sound like every other salesman?

  

Answer:  A) The most effective form of prospecting is using referrals. Outside of that, the best form is the warmest form of prospect you can get. (People you know, friends of people you know, contacts from reference accounts with your company, etc.)  A cold phone call, or as is typical in my area for business machine salesmen, a cold walk in the door is the most difficult. 

B) The questions you should ask depend heavily on the client and what problems you are trying to solve.

C) A GOOD script can be very beneficial in giving you a repeatable process. What is in the script and how you say the script will determine if you sound like every other salesman?  Here is one good cold call approach.

 

It looks like you have some transactional customers or customers that understand your products and shop mainly on price and you have some consultative customers that might be looking for your assistance to help them develop some solutions to their problems with document security, workflow, document management, etc.

 For this discussion, I am focused more on the transactional customers and some ideas to get in the door.

 In general, if you know where you are going to be cold calling the next day, I would spend some time the night before looking these companies up on the internet, reading any press releases or news about them or anything on the person you might want to meet with so you can come in with an idea of what they do and how you might be able to help their business, as opposed to just stumbling in and hoping for the best.

 Here are some ideas that might help you stand out…

 Looking for angry copier stories

 Create a contest every week or every month, looking for the best angry copier stories and give gift certificates, dinner for 2, toner, spa treatment, etc. as prizes.

 Take a pocket tape recorder or a Snap HD camcorder, depending upon you budget and your ability to pull it off, and walk into these businesses telling them you are looking for angry copier stories of the worst, meanest, paper eating, toner spewing, cranky, always needing repairs copiers in town.

 Record their stories, and get the details on the copier you need to help sell them a new one (brand, age, clicks, monthly repair bills, how often it breaks, etc.)

 Ask for referrals to other people they know that have angry copiers.

 To make it fun, go in with a couple of photos of beater copiers with good stories about them if asked.

 Every week/month go back and award the certificate to the place with the worst copier, take a photo/video and put it on your website so your contest can build a little credibility.

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 Talk to security guards or building management of larger office buildings and see if they will let you set up a show in some vacant space.  Offer up a 1 day rental of the space as a last resort.

 Go around to every office in the building with a flyer letting them know there will be a show on a certain date and time.  If you have the budget, cater in lunch, if not provide snacks, door prizes or some compelling reason to show up.

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 Put ads in the paper/Craigslist and sell your trade in copiers.  Use this as a lead source.

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 Look for good copier technicians.  While cold calling, tell them you are trying to locate good copier technicians and wondered if their guy was any good. Find out who he is, who he works for and a number if you can. Then ask questions about him like, when he fixes your copier, does it stay fixed? How often does he have to come back out? Etc. 

Part 2 of the strategy is calling up the technicians and taking them to lunch if you can, and offer up referral fees for leads to where the broken beat up copiers are in town, regardless of brand.

Part 3 of this strategy is building up a short list of the best copier repair guys in town that you can (as an option) refer people to the best of the best if they are under contract for multiple years with a competitor.

Part 4, which is a bit out there, would be to setup a separate web page with reviews and rankings of the local copier repair guys. Advertise the URL to the people you talk to and let them give their feedback to help other office managers find and pick the best repair guys to keep their equipment running. Of course the site should be branded with your information all over the place to remind them of who is providing them with this fantastic information.

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Simple cost per page demonstration.  I don’t know what the numbers are today, but the last time I was looking at a copier it cost me 25 cents for every page that came out of an inkjet printer, a nickel for every page that came out of a laser printer and a little under a penny for every page that came out of a copier.

If the numbers still work, you could walk in and put a penny on the counter and a quarter, and when they ask what you are there for, point to the coins and say you are there to show them how to save 24 cents every time they push print.

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 Sponsor events that help show off your products. Help charities print flyers, contact the local dog catcher and offer to print flyers for lost family pets for free, print Christmas programs for churches, help the Girl Scouts sell some cookies. Provide volunteers/staffers with your card and put a small tagline on the bottom of every document you can print if you think you can pull it off. “Brochure printing provided by Dave T. Smith over at XXX Office Machine Co. 555-555-5555”

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A critical metric is contract expiration date, so set up events or put your dollars to work supporting other events and provide a service or something of value that would make someone want to go to the trouble of finding their contract expiration date and give it to you. Maybe free coffee and doughnuts, maybe a raffle, a free car wash on Saturday morning, etc.

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 Build a transactional referral program. On the bottom of every invoice, business card, mailer, technician work order, etc. include a flyer or information asking for referrals.

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Build a relationship referral program. Talk to your existing client base, your insurance agent, your barber, and anyone else that has been happy with your service and ask them if they would bring a friend or meet you for lunch with them, or introduce you at one of the events mentioned above.

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Analyze your territory and find the community leaders and active voices in the community and get your equipment in their hands as a trial or a demo where it makes sense. These could be civic organization leaders, church leaders, politicians, local media, school boards, etc. The point is to find the people that influence others in your community and get some of your equipment in their hands and point to them/use them as references.

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 Don’t know if it will fly in your business, but you might try offerings free contract audits. Help people out by evaluating their existing copier contracts making sure they are getting a fair deal, understand their usage guidelines, and know their expiration dates, etc., regardless of the brand. Make it a valuable service for them, not just a sales pitch. Maybe partner with a local leasing company to do an independent review or to look at aspects you might not be familiar with. Of course that leasing company should be using your equipment.

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Stay in contact with everyone you meet.  The number one car salesman in the world mailed out cards to everyone he met every month to make sure he stayed on the top of their heads when they started thinking about buying a new car. Read about him here…
http://tinyurl.com/d9kk2b

 Good Selling!