Amp Up Your Sales: by Andy Paul
Foreword
- You need to be super-responsive.
Introduction
- In the eyes of the customer, all competitive products and services look increasingly alike.
- Salespeople will always adapt corporate sales procedures or given selling methodologies to an individual selling process that fits into their comfort zone.
PART I Simplifying Your Selling
CHAPTER 1 What Is Selling?
- The key to consistent sales success resides in the process you execute to gather and provide the necessary information the prospect requires to make a decision.
- You have to maintain a laser focus on how you can be completely responsive to a prospect or customer’s requirements for information.
CHAPTER 2 Understanding Your Selling Process
CHAPTER 3 Balancing Selling and Buying
- A seller cannot control the customer’s buying process. You can only hope to influence it.
- The only way you can influence the course of the customer’s buying cycle is through how you sell.
- If you can respond more quickly and completely to your prospect’s information requirements, then their buying cycle for your product may move forward more rapidly than it would for your competitors.
CHAPTER 4 The Mechanics of Decision Making
- Every one of your customers falls into one of two broad categories of decision maker: a satisficer (pronounced “sa-tis-fys-er ”) or a maximizer.
- Satisficers make a decision or take action once their basic decision criteria are met. In dealing with a satisficer, the speed of your selling is very important.
- The satisficer will be open to making a faster decision.
- Maximizers are decision makers who can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every possible alternative and are convinced that they’ve made the best possible choice.
- One difficulty in selling to maximizers is that they evaluate so many different options that they may have a hard time remembering you. This means you have to create clear differentiation by quickly and completely responding to a maximizer’s need for specific information.
CHAPTER 5 The Ratio of Planning to Action
- Like any effective story, the customer’s buying process can be envisioned in three phases: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution.
- In the setup phase, your customer’s business is humming along.
- We then move into the conflict phase of the storytelling / buying process, in which your customer is simultaneously using outside consultants to troubleshoot the cause of the system failure,
- In the resolution (or redemption) phase, share how you used your creativity to implement a sales strategy that (1) helps him to better understand his current and future requirements, (2) is completely responsive to his need for information to make a quick decision, and (3) provides sufficient value to motivate him to move with you to the final step of his buying process.
CHAPTER 6 Earning Selling Time
- On every sales call, your primary responsibility is to make sure the customer earns a positive return on the time she has invested in you.
- Responsiveness in sales is the combination of content and speed.
CHAPTER 7 Being the Seller Your Customers Need
- Four personal characteristics for you to embrace
- Responsive: The first seller with the answers wins.
- Curious: Success is about the solution the customer needs, not about the product you have to sell.
- Empathetic: Understand customers ‘problems from their perspective.
- Problem Solver: Have the knowledge and insights to formulate optimal solutions to the customer’s requirements.
CHAPTER 8 Simplifying Your Selling
- The first line of competitive differentiation for any company is not what product or service they sell, but how they sell their product or service.
- The foundation for every salesperson’s ‘how’ is built on the simple things like follow-up, responsiveness, trust, and value.
CHAPTER 9 Winning the Sale
- If ever you find yourself at a loss for what next step to take with a prospect, you can just ask yourself the question, “What information does the customer need from me right now in order to take at least one step forward in the decision-making process (or buying cycle)?”
- Your customers make up their minds about which seller they’re going to buy from fairly early in their buying process. From that point forward, they are using their buying process to validate that decision.
PART II Accelerating Your Responsiveness
CHAPTER 10 The Speed of Responsiveness
- Embracing responsiveness enables you to quickly and effectively react to changes in the customer’s decision-making criteria.
CHAPTER 11 The New Sales Funnel
CHAPTER 12 Accelerating Your Responsiveness
- Responsiveness, the combination of content and speed, at every stage of the customer’s buying process creates the foundation for true seller differentiation
- Measure your responsiveness.
CHAPTER 13 The Power of the First Perception
- Your ability to win any order hinges in large measure on the customer’s initial perception of the value you’re able to provide.
PART III Maximizing Value
CHAPTER 14 Delivering Maximum Value
- Every sales interaction, large and small, has to be planned for maximum value.
- What is the desired outcome of this interaction?
- If you don’t have a plan to maximize the value of a customer interaction, just don’t do it.
- Top salespeople are mindful of the actual value the customer will receive from each sales interaction.
CHAPTER 15 Visualizing Value
- In the B2B space, very rarely are salespeople in the room when the customer makes the final decision about which product to buy.
CHAPTER 16 The Peak / End Rule of Sales
- The prospect’s feelings about you will be “almost entirely determined” by the peak experience (good or bad) that you created for them during their buying process and by the most recent experience the customer had with you.
- You should plan and execute each and every sales interaction, no matter how big or small, as if it will be the peak experience for the customer.
CHAPTER 17 Delivering Value with Peak / End Selling
- I once worked with a salesperson, John, who reliably created a positive perception and a peak event in the minds of his customers by asking during their first interaction what he called his “killer question.”
- Provide meaningful insights and context.
- Closing questions are the questions you ask to verify that there are no gaps in your understanding of the customer and the problem that needs to be solved, the customer’s understanding of your product or service and the value that it will deliver, as well as to ensure their understanding of your proposal and how it will meet his or her business and financial objectives
CHAPTER 18 Shaping the Buying Vision
CHAPTER 19 Being 1 Percent Better Is Enough
- You only have to be perceived to be 1 percent better than the alternative products or services your prospect is considering in order to win the order.
- Did you respond more quickly and completely to the prospects ‘questions? Did you consume less of their time in the buying process? Did you deliver value at each step of the sales process? Did you ask perceptive questions about the prospects ‘requirements? Did you provide a new insight into their business that helped them better understand those requirements? Did you make it easy to do business with you?
CHAPTER 20 Making Your Selling Memorable
- If your customer’s objective is to gather the information in order to make informed decisions more quickly and at a lower cost, then it is your primary responsibility to make that happen.
- As customers move through their buying processes, they require less product content and more business insights.
- Any insight that can help customers understand more fully how your product can be used to produce results that will meet or exceed their expectations can produce a peak event. Any insight that will help customers more completely understand the financial returns to be generated from using your product is also such an event.
PART IV Growing Through Follow-Up
CHAPTER 21 The Simplest Strategy for Growth
- There is no simpler or faster strategy to grow your sales than to effectively follow up your sales leads.
- Yes, if you consider someone downloading a white paper from your website to be a lead, you will likely have bad leads.
- Follow-up is a live conversation with the customer. An automatically generated e-mail in response to an inquiry is not follow-up.
- The art of follow-up is less important than the act of follow-up.
CHAPTER 22 The No-Lead-Left-Behind Sales Process
- Every salesperson needs to employ a No-Lead-Left-Behind policy.
- Most people don’t casually fill out multiple web forms on a company’s website unless they are prepared to engage with a salesperson.
CHAPTER 23 Standing Out by Following Up
- Killer questions: For example, in my business, I ask potential clients penetrating questions about their core sales processes and sales metrics that I know they aren’t tracking but should be.
PART V Amp Up Your Prospecting
CHAPTER 24 To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call
CHAPTER 25 Doing What It Takes to Succeed
- Great salespeople are not born that way. It takes an investment of time over a long period to become really expert at prospecting.
CHAPTER 26 Sell More The Difference Between Activity and Prospecting
- It’s not about engaging in random sales activity… To sell more means to fill your prospecting time with intelligent, productive, creative, and responsive sales actions that set you apart from your competitors and motivate potential customers to learn more.
- Although it is important to fill every hour with selling, it is more important to do it wisely. Persistently. Creatively.
CHAPTER 27 Being Worth a Second Call
- The hard part is getting the second call (which in reality is oftentimes the first sales call), which signifies that the customer is preparing to initiate his buying process.
- Deliver value in the form of a compelling question or a unique business insight
- Story-Question-Listen
- An, “Are you aware …?” question. “Are you aware that independent research has found that companies like yours that use products like mine are growing 25 percent faster than those who don’t?”
- The extent to which they are motivated to prepare for your first call indicates something about their level of interest.
CHAPTER 28 Practicing Value-Based Persistence
- Statements of disinterest from customers are usually statements of fact, not objections.
- Be persistent without being a pest via Value-Based Persistence. Remember that you are nurturing your relationship with prospects until their timing is right.
PART VI Qualification: Doing More with Less
CHAPTER 29 Are You Selling to the Right Customers?
- Top sellers don’t waste their limited selling time on potential sales opportunities with customers who are not absolutely qualified to buy what they are selling.
- Qualifying a sales opportunity is a binary event. A customer is either qualified or not. An opportunity cannot be mostly qualified.
- The root of bad qualifying is pressure — both self-imposed and from managers — for salespeople to demonstrate that they have a sizable pipeline of sales opportunities.
- Ask yourself this question about each opportunity on your list: “Why am I going to win this deal?” If you can’t identify two unambiguously rock-solid differentiators that have quantifiable value to the customer, then the customer doesn’t belong in your pipeline.
CHAPTER 30 The Bulletproof Qualification Process
- You want to be relentless in your prospecting and qualification to find sales opportunities that are suited for precisely what you’re selling.
- The first step of qualification offers two paths:
category qualification and product qualification.
- Category qualification is the default strategy for most salespeople. It means qualifying a customer who wants to buy a product or service that is similar to theirs.
- Product qualification is aimed at confirming prospects need the unique value that your product and services provides and that differentiates you from your competitor.
- Discovery is not just about uncovering customers‘ requirements. It’s also about winnowing down their requirements from the “wants” to the “must-haves” and educating them about how the must-haves correlate to the features and value provided by your product or service.
CHAPTER 31 Qualifying on Price and Value
- Qualification on price and value doesn’t mean that your prospects will be 100 percent in love with your price. But it does mean they agree that you’re in the ballpark and that any further discussions about price will be a negotiation about deliverables, not a price objection
- Price qualification’s rightful place is early in the sales process, no later than during the discovery phase.
- You can’t qualify a customer on price without disclosing your price.
CHAPTER 32 Objections and Qualification
- Instead of playing defense, your job is to convert the customer’s objection into a question and to respond to it so that the customer can start moving forward again toward a decision.
- Simply ask for an assessment of how well you answered the objection. “Does that answer your question?”
- “Mr. Prospect, on this particular issue, how would you rank our solution compared to the alternatives you are considering?”
- Look at each customer objection as an opportunity to requalify that sales opportunity. Qualification is not a one-time event.
CHAPTER 33 Building a Productive Pipeline
- Three strategies to strengthen your pipeline
- Disqualify the losers.
- Requalify the qualified.
- Plan for the end game.
- Customers will go radio silent and just stop communicating with you when they’re no longer considering your offer.
PART VII Mastering Stories That Sell
CHAPTER 34 Becoming an Effective Content Curator and Provider
- To customers, content is the sum total of the information and insights they need to gather in order to make a fully informed purchase decision in the least time possible.
- She may need to know what her own competitors have done or are doing with products and technology similar to yours.
- Sellers who can create value for their customers by consistently serving them information that helps them develop a more informed perspective on their upcoming decisions dramatically increase their odds of winning the business.
- Identify relevant third-party sources of information.
CHAPTER 35 Four Questions to Build Compelling Sales Stories
- Basic ground rules about effective sales stories.
- Keep it simple and short.
- Use simple detail to draw the prospect into the picture.
- Illustrate a defining moment of value.
- Use a story to provide insight and context.
- Four simple questions:
- 1. What problem was your customer trying to solve?
- 2. Why was your expertise relevant to your customer?3. Why did the customer buy from you?
- 4. What value has the customer received from your product / service?
CHAPTER 36 Are Your Stories Worth Repeating?
CHAPTER 37 Integrating Stories into Your Selling Process
PART VIII Selling Through Customer Service
CHAPTER 38 Selling and Service
- Every call to support should be considered a sales call for the customer’s next order.
- Selling never stops. Even though customers ‘attention may be focused on implementation versus acquisition, they’re counting on you to continue to provide additional insights about how to maximize the return on investment in your product.
- You want to train your customers that communications from you deliver value.
- Another best practice for servicing customers is to publish a newsletter or other form of structured communication with your existing customers.
- The role of the salesperson in a Land and Expand service role is to find additional uses of your product for the customer beyond the original business case [or to expand usage to more people or additional business units].
CHAPTER 39 The Most Important Sales Call
- The most important sales call you make during the course of a sale is the first call after you receive their order and before the product is shipped or the service delivered.
- ake the call the first day after you receive the order.
CHAPTER 40 Building Customer Relationships That Last
- Delight your customers with your commitment to customer service. Commit to being completely responsive to your customers ‘requirements for support, both presale and postsale.