Sales Laundry

Today something remarkable happened, I got a piece of junk mail that I actually felt compelled to open, and once I read the contents I was even more compelled to give them a call.

This impressed me because 99.99% of the junk mail I get does not make it past my office door where the shredder sits consuming the daily unwanted unopened contents of my mailbox.

I have read that the average American adult receives 40+ pounds of junk mail every year, so what did this company do that was so remarkable to get their one ounce sales message past my shredder?

The small envelope was hand addressed to me with a first class stamp.  Inside was a single page handwritten note off of a mini legal pad with a name, pitch and a phone number.

They made it personal, made me curious, communicated their message quickly, and they got me.

In this world of demographic driven marketing-to-the-masses, could simply sending personal messages to targeted groups of individuals be a successful strategy to improve lead quality/quantity and help your company stand out?

I don’t know, but at 75 cents a lead, I can afford to find out.

How personal is your company’s message?

A good first step is to read your own marketing materials.  Does the text talk about you and how great your company is or does it talk about how your product benefits the person buying it?

It’s easy to write on our websites and press releases that we are “industry leaders,” or talk about our own accomplishments and how many years of combined experience we have, but that is not a very compelling read to a potential buyer trying to answer the age old question “What is this product/service going to do for me?”

No matter the method, make your message personal and a little bit different to get your prospective buyers attention.  Then make the most of that precious attention by delivering a message that does more for the person experiencing it than the marketing department that wrote it.

Image courtesy of zcache.com

Recently I was talking with a small business owner enjoying a degree of success growing his business from a one-man-band to six person shop and achieving a degree of local business notoriety.  Our discussion centered on talk of hiring a sales professional for the company and the owners exciting growth plans to take the business to the next level.

The owner was convinced that the correct course to grow the business was through a large expansion in products, markets served and by targeting larger customers that could buy in bigger chunks.

His theory was that with a significant expansion he could grab more revenue and tap new markets to avoid the risk of his primary revenue source drying up and foundering the company.

It was a reasonable line of thinking that I identified with even though it was a poor decision that could not have been more wrong.  I know this because I was guilty of the same mistake in a similar situation at an earlier point in my sales career.

I could not persuade the owner to look at a more focused strategy of measured growth or any other option for that matter, so I knew it was something I was going to have to pass on.  With any luck, maybe I can help you avoid a mistake that your business just may not recover from.

The biggest lesson I got out of my own personal foray into this folly was simply this:

Be the Master of Something or you will be known for nothing.

As a little, growing, cash starved business there is usually a strong desire, at some point, to throw sales discipline out the window and bend your little company around any and every opportunity for potential revenue you can find to survive.

Making that decision would likely be one of the worst decisions you could make, but I also know that over 50% of you will take that leap anyway because the alternatives will be too ugly to even contemplate.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the solution is to go narrow and deep, not wide and shallow.  Narrowing your focus to your best product(s), best prospects, building your brand, your experience and credibility in a niche you can own is the best strategy for success.

Look to expand after you have become Master of your Niche and can successfully leverage your hard-won market credibility into sales of your new offerings.  Having too many offerings or serving a large diverse market where it is hard to get traction will leave you Master of Nothing, unremarkable, swimming in a sea of mediocrity.

As focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass gets the attention of the local ant population, a razor-like focus on what you do best is the best way to burn through all the marketing and sales noise that can water down your message and drown out a small company.

What is the worst that can happen?

Typically this story ends one of three ways.

1. The company expands and expands to a wider range of products and offerings in hopes of capturing cash flow and the company ends up eating the people it was supposed to feed.
2. Continued expansion occurs until the sales, support or management structure collapses, damaging customer service, reputations and sales to say the least.  With any luck the smaller but right-sized company will begin to grow again at a more measured pace.
3. Miracles happen.

Three tips for the road.

Create a sales strategy to go deep, building brand, customers, and loyalty as you attract sales.

Manage your cash carefully to avoid potentially being forced to make poor decisions in a crunch.

Get known for something before your company and bank account are worth nothing.

Want to know more on the subject?  Drop me an email with FOCUS in the subject line.  val {at} saleslaundry.com.  As an extension, click here to learn how to multiply your existing sales momentum into more sells.

Image courtesy of positivepsychologynews.com

I was posed this problem recently so I thought I would open up discussion to you and get your input.  What is the best path to grow sales for this company based on what we know below?

A company is manufacturing and selling 25 different products.

Company sales are split approximately 50/50 between wholesale and retail channels.

Sales cycles are short, the company is on cash terms with most of its suppliers, but the five year old company is making a 20% profit annually on just under a million in revenue.

The manufacturing facility is at 100% capacity with no ability to outsource and does not enough cash/assets to leverage for expansion.

50% of company sales come from one product and demand is increasing.  The remaining 50% of sales is split evenly among the remaining 24 products.

Removing any one product from the lineup will anger some segment of the customer base and potentially impact sales to some unknown degree for every other product.

Cash flow is tight because the company is still paying off the last expansion and the largest customers want the company to extend Net 10 terms to Net 30 and some are asking for Net 60 terms on payment.

The sales team is being actively pushed to sell the entire product line every day.

You are hired as the companies first VP of Sales charged with overseeing a sales staff of 8 retail and 2 wholesale sales representatives and finding someway to get past these issues and grow the business to a point where the company can afford another expansion.

The existing retail sales staff is working at maximum capacity, and just able to cover sick days.  Customer service is at an acceptable level.

The wholesale sales staff is getting irritated because their income has been capped by the manufacturing facilities inability to increase supply, and competitors in the market are promising no such problems for sales staff working in their facilities.

If everything holds steady with no significant equipment breakdowns or cash expenditures, the President has told you it will be 3 years before the company can afford the necessary expansion.

What would be your solution to this problem and how would you grow the business?

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Big or small, we should all be actively working to prevent our products and services from sliding in importance for our consumers and being recategorized as a low priority as our customers retrench and re-shuffle priorities in this new economic climate.

What are you doing to raise your profile with your prospects and customers, compelling them to spend their hard earned dollars with you instead of sitting on the sidelines waiting for better days?

In this downturn, some huge companies are pushing new innovations to enhance the buying experience.  A few others are trying some far reaching ideas to connect with customers in a meaningful and personal way to gently nudge them into continuing to purchase their products.

Previously, I have written about what Kellogg’s is doing to make a bowl of breakfast cereal more important by tying breakfast cereal to our children’s education.  I have also written about Domino’s Pizzas use of technology to enhance the pizza delivery experience.

Today I noticed Microsoft paired itself with the infamous Jack Welch and Suzy Welch as co-hosts of a new online program (everybodysbusiness.msn.com) delving headlong into the problems faced by brand name (Hertz & Domino’s Pizza so far) businesses.  Jack and Suzy guide a diverse executive group in identifying some real challenges the company faces and then leverage the groups collective experience to find some legitimate solutions in a very candid way that makes you the viewer feel like you are sitting in the boardroom with them, watching and listening to an honest conversation you would otherwise never get to hear.

With the help of Jack and Suzy, Microsoft delivers valuable entertaining content that stands on its own, but still manages to drive the company message and squeeze in a stealth mini case study.  I for one am happy to report I did not feel like I had just swallowed a twenty minute Microsoft infomercial.

After watching this was I compelled to run out and setup a server farm driven by Microsoft products?  No, but I now understand in a subtle way that a lot of the technology Domino’s has in place across almost all of their stores, including their powerful online pizza delivery system is built on Microsoft technology, so Microsoft can probably handle the needs of my business.  I am not certain, though, how Microsoft fits into the Hertz solution by watching the show.

I just consumed a Microsoft case study reframed as (and rightly so) as a content rich business dialog with Jack Welch, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Enough about Kellogg’s, Domino’s, and Microsoft, how can we make your product a more compelling purchase?  What can we tie your offering to that enhances you brand and ultimately sales?  How can we take a product that has dropped in priority with your buyers and get them snapping up your goods again?

I know several of you out there, so I am going to offer up a few ideas that will hopefully get you and everyone else reading this to expand your thinking.

Mortgage Industry. – Could you put together real/virtual seminars providing honest advice and resources for people struggling to pay their mortgage and help them save their homes?

If you could help me keep my home, or cross the great divide from renting to home ownership, helping me avoid the pitfalls along the way, you would earn my loyalty in a way the cheapest mortgage rate on Bankrate.com never could.

Copier/Office Machine Industry. – Every business of any size has some form of copier they bought/leased, right?  Could you setup business forums introducing clients that could benefit by doing business with each other?  Could you setup a lead exchange program identifying a need at one client business and passing that information along to another client business to potentially fill that need?

Bringing my business real leads and I just might be more likely to accept a slightly higher price for my supplies.  Real leads would certainly inspire my loyalty more than a cold-call walk-in four-legged (the new copier sales guy and his Sales Manager, typically) sales call ever could.

Can you think bigger?

Annual charity drives to collect reams of paper for a local school district or charity organization in your region?  Could you put together a toner cartridge recycling program for your city?  Have a big service fleet of vehicles?  How about delivering or augmenting Meals on Wheels efforts?

What about every other business?

How can you raise your importance to your community and the need for your product?  What programs or partnerships could you put in place to positively change the perception of your business and its support of your community?

Think out loud about your business and how you can raise customer loyalty and the priority of the problems your product solves in your customer’s eyes.

Think until you hear a “Wow” in your head, then tell me about what you came up with and let me know if I can help.

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.

Through an odd set of circumstances I found myself touring the Lyndon B Johnson ranch outside of Johnson City, TX a while back trying to give my kids some perspective on history.

While looking at the hundreds of photos and exhibits across the three or four different sites I ran across a picture that gave me some perspective I was not expecting.

Under an otherwise typical picture in the exhibit of President Johnson shaking hands with an old gentleman with a bushy white beard was a crisp little quote that I almost missed.

“A five minute speech with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen minute speech… that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.”

- Lyndon B. Johnson

As I thought about that statement my mind immediately jumped to the hours I have spent watching boring PowerPoint presentations wishing a hunk of ceiling would fall on my head so I would have a legitimate excuse to escape.

Then it hit me, (and not a piece of the ceiling, mind you) that spending hours writing and developing a presentation with little to no time spent developing a strategy to work the room post-presentation to communicate the important points face to face was just plain silly.

President Johnson figured out a long time ago that influencing the key individuals in the room that could be catalysts for the change he was advocating was a far more effective strategy than solely focusing on a big fat presentation.

Presentations are best used to lay out the facts as concisely as possible and not used as bully pulpits to agonizingly persuade an audience.  Face to face conversation, or “handshaking” as President Johnson put it, is where the deals really get done.

Long term success in sales is more determined by the network of prospects, customers, partners and friends you build than all of the killer 70 slide PowerPoint presentations you have spent all night cranking out.

Don’t get me wrong, a good speech or presentation can be essential to your eventual success but it does not have to last a lifetime in delivery.

The power in the room does not come from your presentation or your powers of persuasion but from the power of the prospects in the room and the strength of their desire to want to engage with you.

Presentations and speeches alike that are sharp, crisp, and to the point are, from my experience, much more effective than a gut-wrenching three-act opus that forces everyone to take a “bio-break” upon completion.

Use your speech to make them curious, use your handshake to make them customers, and that is a History lesson worth repeating.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Image courtesy of americandigest.org

Today I was volunteered to help a relative move some stuff from storage and was otherwise minding my own business when I got smacked in the head by a sales lesson.

Mid morning, as I was driving over to the storage facility, I passed a guy on the side of the road holding a small sign that read Car Wash.  Glancing behind him, sure enough there was a small charity car wash in the parking lot well underway.

The people washing the cars were smiling and visibly having fun, but the guy that was chief in charge of advertising and converting prospects into car wash customers, otherwise know as the guy holding the car wash sign, looked unhappy and was clearly not making much of an effort.

I was surprised the car wash was making any money but did not think much about it as I was on my own mission.

When I got to the storage facility it quickly became obvious that this was not going to be a one trip job.  So much for “just having a few things to move.”

I loaded up and made my first run.  After unloading, I headed back for the next load.  Sure enough, the charity car wash was still underway, but by now the cranky guy had been replaced with a guy that was smiling, dancing and having fun with the cars trying to coax them into the car wash.

Clearly his efforts were having more of an impact because there were more cars being washed and a few lined up waiting their turn.

I was still on my mission, so once again I ignored the car wash guy and stopped by the storage facility to try to squeeze everything into one final load.

Nope.  That was not going to happen, there was so… much… stuff.

Fortunately I was able to get it all on the third run and headed home.  Once again, I saw a guy holding up a car wash sign.  This was a new guy.  He was holding the sign up high, smiling like he was thrilled to be spending his afternoon attracting customers and helping out this charity.

There was something wrong, though.  The sign he was holding up with a big smile, beaming with great pride was upside down.  People driving by were clearly disturbed by this and tried to wave at him or yell at him.  Some even stopped to let him know.

Sitting at a traffic light observing this up ahead, I was surprised by the quantity of cars jamming that parking lot, in all stages of getting clean.  I found myself really wanting to know what they were doing to quadruple their business from just a few hours before.

As I got closer to the car wash sign guy, he was trying to make contact with me, smiling bigger and waving his sign, still upside down.  Getting closer still, but strategically not too late for me to slow down and turn into the car wash, he flipped the sign over the right way, smiled even bigger and politely tried to gesture the cars into the car wash, and it was working.

I immediately got the message.

If you are just going through the motions like the first guy, you might get lucky enough to attract a few customers.  Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut, as the saying goes.

If you engage your prospects directly in a positive high energy way, you will attract more customers and be more successful, as the second guy demonstrated.

However, to experience maximum success, you need to figure out a way to get your prospects seeking to engage you.  One upside down car wash sign compelled prospects to want to engage with the car wash sign guy to help him correct his mistake.

My guess is that once the people driving went to the trouble to engage the car wash sign guy on their own, trying to be helpful, it was a short step to continue being helpful and getting their car washed for charity.  Maybe they felt better about participating in the charity car wash on their own terms instead of being coaxed into it.

What I find more remarkable is the upside down car wash sign guy expended 10% of the effort of the high energy second guy, but was 4x-10X more successful than those that were there before him.

10X the conversions, mind you, with the same cost of sales.

How expensive was it to flip a cardboard sign upside down?  Yet it was effective.  What can you do to compel your prospects to want to engage you?  How can you change your one way marketing message to a two way conversation with your prospects and clients?