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November 25, 2010
 Who Moved My Seven Effective Good to Great Cheese Habits?
By Mark Faust
Every week a new book hits the shelves touting the “new” idea in management and “new” wisdom for business. Regarding the processes of business, human nature and true wisdom, nothing is new under the sun, just as that phrase dates back to Solomon.
 Instead of looking to faddish books start looking to your sales teams. Stop looking to faddish books and start looking to your sales teams.
True innovation revolves around where your focus lies, how unique your solutions to customers are, and how you define, promote and deliver the value you have to offer.
One of the best places to begin your accelerated growth fueled by innovation efforts is by listing and prioritizing your top constraints. You can begin by asking questions like:
1. Where are our greatest untapped sales growth potentials, either existing or specific new customers or both?
2. What do we need to improve to make more sales?
3. What are the top risk factors existing in our business in need of improvement?
…that said one of the simplest ways to ask your team about innovation opportunities is to just ask this one simple question:
• What are this company’s biggest problems that hinder our growth or salesforce?
Great question, but be ready for the answers. Oftentimes the top constraints to growing a business lie in its culture, talent management and talent engagement.
Talent engagement represents the extent to which the workforce identifies with the company, is committed to it and provides discretionary effort so that it can be successful. Engagement is a key leading indicator for high performance workplaces, improved employee productivity and subsequent turnover.
Often while top management is looking out the window into the marketplace to find the levers of growth, the linchpin to growth may be inside the heart of the organization, your people.
Innovation efforts should be holistic and involve improvements in how you serve your internal customer as much as how you might improve your products and services to your external customer.
If you are committed to growing the company through accelerating your efforts in innovation you must focus on the people within your company and work on ways to get and keep more internal customers. And no one has more impact on the talent and employee engagement of a company than the top echelon leader. As long as he or she is humble, innovation can begin. “Humility is the sire of all virtue” especially creativity.
An often ignored area frequently in need of improvement is the sales teams culture. Often a company culture is set by the attitudes and character of the top leader. The strength of a leader’s character can sometimes be the flip side of their weaknesses. One who is patient and a great listener may be slow to make a decision and hard charging visionaries can often be poor listeners and not focused on the people. These weaknesses tend to trickle down into the behaviors of the teams and ultimately build into the culture weaknesses that can become abrasive to both customer and employees.
When the answers to the “biggest problems” question are things like “no one around here appreciates…” or “the company tends to tolerate (fill in a negative term)” then you know you have to work on improving culture.
Two steps to improving culture are:
1. Ask your sales teams for ideas around, “What would make this company a better work place?” or “What would make your job more fun, or you more excited about coming to work?”
2. Put in place a character recognition program where you recognize people for good character qualities.
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November 18, 2010
By Mark Faust
Many companies have an old set of value statements, written by a founder or previous management teams. These values might hang on the wall or be passed into collateral. Whether these speak of the priorities of customers and service, or of treating others with respect, there are several steps any management team can take to make this essential element of your strategy fuel to accelerating growth.
Do you have conflict within your salesforce and/or is growth not as fast as it could be? What is the cost of conflict on productivity and effectiveness?
Most conflict within teams or a salesforce can be traced back to a lack of understanding or enforcement around company values. To have values work as a tool for improving teamwork and reducing conflict, having your team answer two questions each year in an all hands on deck exercise can help to reinforce the desired attitudes and actions.
These two questions are: 1. How do you and customers want to be treated in the workplace? And 2. How will we deal with it when someone doesn’t live up to these values?
Since people tend to support that which they help to create, everyone should have input into these answers.
To supercharge the values in an organization and transform them into strategic growth oriented values, also ask sales teams:
“How would we need to:
• conduct our work,
• work with each other and customers
and what kind of environment do we need to foster
• in our company,
• in our work
• and in our relationships
in order to absolutely maximize joy in the workplace as well as the growth rate, profitability and stability of this company?”
 Use these team oriented strategies to accelerate growth Have every sales associate openly discuss the top traits, qualities, ways, habits, environments, attitudes…i.e., values, that we need to live and work by, and list this out in a long list that will usually have several dozen potential values.
Then ask each individual to privately list out the top six values that they feel are the highest priority values that will most accelerate growth and improve satisfaction, happiness and profitability in the workplace. Then have sales associates team up in twos and agree on a top six together, then repeat the same process in teams of four, then eight etc. until the entire team has come up with what they have prioritized and agreed to what can then be a list of the top six to ten values that will create the optimum environment.
Conduct a similar facilitation around the question, “How will we deal with it when one of us doesn’t live up to our value statements?” the much tougher, but more important question, and yet key to ensuring that the values become reality.
The team or committee could work on also building out working definitions of each value, and perhaps examples. The final word-smithed document can be printed on a poster and ceremoniously signed by the entire team.
Leadership should regularly and publically recognize employees being good examples of walking out the values.
Most teambuilding exercises like ropes courses and falling backwards into your co-workers arms are a waste of time compared to having the team create growth oriented values and strategic growth objectives that will work to accelerate growth as these exercises help to Create Emotional Ownership, the C.E.O. of your growth oriented culture. I’ve seen this process double the size of companies while making it a much happier workplace. Are you ready to grow?
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November 4, 2010
By Mark Faust
Have a clear central growth goal?
• 66% of the companies we surveyed don’t have one, but wish they did.
• Of the companies that had one, only 32% regularly communicated their progress.
• Of the companies that had one, only 28% had a realistically challenging one.
• Only 14% of companies are creatively engaging their customer to accelerate their progress toward it.
• 100% were certain they could exceed their current performance!
What are we talking about? A central growth objective that is both a stretch beyond your current growth trajectory and yet realistically challenging.
 What is your Central Growth Goal? If “all the stars were to align” and your sales teams implemented significant improvements and innovations, what is the incremental growth you envision your sales teams could experience?
We recently sent a survey to hundreds of leaders of companies and found that, despite agreement from the respondents that the following were key best practices in accelerating growth, the vast majority of organizations failed to successfully implement any of the following guidelines. How does your company stack up?
1. Do you have a specific central growth goal for your salesforce that is understood by everyone on your sales teams?
2. Does your salesforce realistically believe in and are they challenged by your Central Growth Goal?
3. Does your Central Growth Objective excite, inspire, and emotionally charge your sales teams; does it exhort your sales teams into action, or is it just another directive?
4. Are your metrics charted, graphed and visually fed back in shorter (monthly or more frequently) periods of time, to all of your salesforce?
5. Is an objective third party challenging you and the sales team to raise the bar, dispelling skepticism of aggressive growth, and insuring open communication?
6. Is your Central Growth Goal built not top down, but by consensus, with a representative set of inputs from your sales teams that is more objective?
7. Is a representation of your customer base invited to give insights toward improvement and are customers’ challenges invited through one on one open dialogue, ideally with a third party instead of quantitative surveying tactics?
Despite excellent past history, almost every company has made significant improvements when they challenged themselves to raise the bar. It’s not magic, but rather a simple process of management formulated over 60 years ago that just isn’t fully implemented very often and isn’t quite as effective unless a third party is involved in facilitating, coaching, challenging and holding accountable those who are the stewards of growth.
If your “strategic plan” doesn’t come as close as you want in regards to having each of the above seven points executed, you probably have a partial growth plan instead of a fully fleshed and aggressive one.
If you are a steward of growth and think the bar can be raised, pass out the survey above. Challenge your leadership to raise the bar and make this the fastest growing time in your company’s history, just as many other companies are experiencing.
Imagine what January, 2011 might be like if you accomplished your stretch vision!
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October 21, 2010
By Mark Faust
On the wall of an employer hung the sign, “In business as in life it’s all about three things: 1. Relationships 2. Relationships 3. Relationships.”
While recently participating in a conference of sales VP’s, we heard from researchers and panels of successful sales leaders who shared some contrarian insights. University professors Dr. Chris Plouffe and Dr. Arun Sharma shared a variety of insights from their extensive research on selling and sales effectiveness.
One discovery was that younger salesforces tend to outperform older salesforces. Now this did not mean that a sales team of twenty somethings will consistently outsell those with ten or twenty years more experience, rather sales teams with average ages lower than companies very similar to them consistently had better results. They mentioned the younger salesforce performance factor because it related to another more important finding; effective relationship sellers are significantly out sold by those that focus their selling on added value.
In fact, sales reps that are not as well liked as others on a team are often significantly outselling reps who rate very high on rapport and relationship because they sell value well.
 Relationship vs. Value Selling This didn’t mean that relationships were not important; rather, what these new studies are showing is that in our new economy, selling value is more important than ever, and selling value is getting better results.
This has brought to mind the many experiences of our smaller agricultural company clients whose most experienced reps have been losing business to “young punks” from the larger multinationals. While our clients weren’t often certain why they lost the business, and the sales reps were pointing to that “special deal” or “special pricing” as the reason for the lost business, our research finds otherwise.
As is customary in our work, we interview champion customers, customers with potential for significant growth, and lost customers. The customers lost to the large multinationals do occasionally mention certain “deals” they may have received or some attractive pricing offer, but more often than not, they speak in terms of how the package offer is a better overall value and how they feel and hope that by going with the new supplier they are going to make more money. While some will sometimes point that the “more money” is coming from a lower price, in the same breath those lost customers are asserting that the quality, effectiveness and result from the product and service is basically the same, but most lost customers believe that there will be an increase in performance/value/profits/net return. They were consistently sold by the “young punk” on value, not relationship.
So what can you do to insure that all of your team is improving their focus on value?
The Value Quota – Metrics for Success
In the dashboards and metrics that we help sales management build to better manage their team; we often suggest a measurement, coaching around and inspection of Value Clarification. Rather than starting the focus on “how much do you think you can sell customer X?” start the focus on “how much added value do you think you could bring to customer X and why?”
How do you think your customers wish you would sell them? Wouldn’t they prefer that you created a list of not just the biggest customers, but a list of those whom you thought would have the most financial gain from your solution? Suppose target lists were managed not on the supplier’s benefit and profit, but on the customer’s. Your sales will go up; we know it, because we see it all the time.
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October 14, 2010
 By Brad Ristas
 It really used to be just plain old fashion common courtesy to return a phone call. That was of course until voicemail became so prevalent that our frontline defense system become a voice messaging system. “Hi, you’ve reached the phone of…”.
Most of us grew up thinking that not returning a phone call was rather rude. It was obviously someone having something to say to us, and in the case of running a salesforce, perhaps a potential sales opportunity.
So what really happened to what used to be both a common courtesy and a very effective way of conducting business? We’ve diluted it by embracing non-responsiveness as a practice. It’s going to end up coming back to haunt all of us.
I have to ask: How many long term relationships were built from original cold or referral calls? Most, I would say. Many clients and business associates we’ve retained over the years began with that cold, blind call that said, “Hello, my name is…and with a few minutes of your time…” Today, all of that is no longer the case. And I believe we’re missing good business and sales opportunities.
It’s so in vogue now for organizations to say they are utilizing social networking tools ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn. Is there so much more we can do at these levels? Absolutely, we have just begun seeing what these tools can deliver. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great.
But understand its place as a business tool and sales tool.
Beware of how social marketing tools give us permission to NOT answer the phone. It is OK to occasionally not answer the phone, but not returning the call? Not good.
Try answering the phone a few times on your own and engage in spirited conversation. Challenge the caller. Be congenial, but be honest if you only have a minute or so and get to the bottom of what you both want out of the call. But for gosh sakes, Communicate!
If you don’t, in time you will likely be retreating behind a wall of emails, text messages, meaningless PowerPoints, To do lists and the like that you think will solve your problems. You don’t have a clue what you’re missing.
That next call coming in from someone you don’t know could be the result of that person having done some really heavy duty research and determined that they can be of service to you. They might be able to help your business or be of some valuable service to your organization. Give them the time of day and don’t throw that baby out with the bath water.
I’m afraid there are thousands of potential opportunities and business relationships out there that will never even get to first base because of the acceptability of NOT returning a call or email if we just don’t care to.
So next time, especially if it is me calling, please answer the phone.
Then you can put me on your speed dial for caller ID.
Then you can email me and I will email you.
Next thing you know we’ll be LinkedIn and not removed by 3-4 connections.
Shortly after that we’ll be exchanging family vacation beach pictures on Facebook.
So, could you please just simply answer the phone?
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August 22, 2010
By Mark Faust
My son worked for one of the world’s top dog handlers who taught him one of the keys to her business success. When she was asked for what was a top strategy for continually growing her business, in a heartbeat she quipped; “Get rid of the idiots!”
Who are “the idiots?”
Anyone who robs your intended customer from any part of the value your business is meant to deliver is in this woman’s mind “the idiot.” This could be your worst customers, poorest performing salesforce employee, and even the poorest performing products or methodologies of your business.
We’ve all heard it many times, someone complaining about their “worst customer.” Frankly most businesses would have no problem listing out their top 20 worst customers. These customers don’t only cost your business profits by being high maintenance, they cost you business and profit in a myriad of ways. They are probably bad mouthing you and thus costing you potential referral business or lowering your salesforce’s closing ratio in their geography.
 Improving Sales The “worst/idiot” customers probably negotiate the lowest margins and worst yet, they probably rob your sales and service teams a load of valuable selling and service time that other more valuable/profitable customers are warranting. Ultimately the idiots cost you valuable sales time and an exponential amount of growth potential.
There are also idiot products and services. These are the hardest to deliver, lowest profit margin dogs that are legacy products that should have been abandoned long ago. Yet because of the lack of a strategic abandonment process in your company or because of a nostalgic yearning for yesterday’s product and people, these profit drainers are still around.
Most companies also have “idiot” sales performers, teams, or employees who deliver abysmal performance or walk out horrid character traits, and thus your company is suffering a tremendous drag. Jack Welch grew GE for many years with significant results from firing the bottom 10% for a period of many years.
Here is a three step strategy that can help you “get rid of the idiots.”
1. Have every sales rep list their “worst customers” based on profitability, pain or overall “drain.”
2. Conduct topgrading throughout your salesforce team and employee base; A performers, B performers and those who ideally you’d like to replace…for whatever reason, but especially for poor character and poor selling performance.
3. Make a list of all products, processes and protocol in your company that if you were beginning anew, would not make the cut in today’s environment
Now create teams for each of the above lists. Strategically “fire” your idiot customers who cost you growth and who rob your intended ideal customer market. If you are afraid to make the step, just do it with a fraction of the idiot customers, choosing only the worst of the idiots and watch closely what happens in those territories.
Next, closely consider who you could replace with better talent. This current economy presents one of the greatest employer markets for finding and hiring top talent. It is almost impossible for companies with a salesforce of more than 20 people to replace the bottom 2 and not make a marked improvement in production.
Finally consider all of the worst products, services and procedures of your company and have teams systematically eliminate and replace as many as you confidently can. This is a heart of continuous improvement, innovation and profit improvement.
Great opportunity abounds for the companies who aren’t afraid to fire the idiots and focus on their ideal customer. With your ideal employees and your best products and services this is the market in which the “idiotless” will thrive.
August 18, 2010
 By Rye D’Orazio rdorazio@rayandbarney.com
As Organizations focused on Sales, it’s important that we take time to assess ourselves internally. Are we doing the right things? Focusing on the activities that are important? Are we structured in such a way as to motivate and reward our teams? Often the best way to answer these and other important questions, is to view ourselves from the outside looking in. What better eyes to use than those of new Sales recruits?
Geoffrey James in his blog, “Geoffrey James Questions to Answer” provided a comprehensive list of interview questions for sales professionals. This list of 21 questions, focusing on 5 central Sales areas, can aid all Sales Professionals looking to assess potential employers as well as act as a starting point for employers looking to assess their Sales organization. Here is James’ list:
COMPENSATION:
- What is the base pay, commissions and perks?
- How soon are commissions paid after deals close?
- Is there a ramp period?
- How are commissions handled during that ramp-up period?
SALES PROCESS:
- What is the sales process for this company?
- How is the sales process documented?
- What sales process training will be provided, when and from whom?
- What product knowledge training will I receive, when and from whom?
- What is the typical sales cycle and how long does it take?
SALES TOOLS:
- What sales tools will be provided?
- What marketing materials will be provided?
- What sales technology is available?
- Does the company provide computers and/or cell phones?
OPPORTUNITY DEVELOPMENT:
- How are prospects identified?
- What percentage of your sales comes from customer referrals?
- What role does marketing play in lead generation?
- When a customer is dissatisfied, how is that handled?
MANAGEMENT STYLE:
- What are your expectations of your sales people?
- How and when do you communicate with your sales people regarding their performance?
- What kind of coaching can sales people expect from management?
- How frequent are sales meetings and what happens at them?
These are great questions to act as a “gut check” for Sales Leaders. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves what our sales culture is all about in order to make the right decisions moving forward. What about the CEO/President/company leader, could they better lead and manage if they had this perspective on their sales organization too? To best lead and manage your sales leader with confidence you, as the company leader, need to have the knowledge of how your company’s sales organization operates. “Knowledge is power to control where you want to lead” James Rores Pipelinecoach.com founder says.
Here are a few additional questions to help you focus your knowledge of sales in your internal assessment:
COMPENSATION:
- What is the sales team incented to do and does the incentive align with what we want the sales people to do?
SALES PROCESS:
- How well are your Sales, Marketing and Product/Service Packaging aligned?
- Do these 3 groups understand their roles in the sales process?
SALES TOOLS:
- How well is the Sales team in line with the sales process?
- How do the sales reps consider the tools they use; for reporting to management or a valued part of the sales process that helps them perform better?
OPPORTUNITY DEVELOPMENT:
- What type of sales associates make-up of the sales team and what are their roles? Account Management, Hunter and Opportunity Lead Generator, Solution development, etc.
MANAGEMENT STYLE:
- Is it a one way is the only way? Is it results oriented focused and not style focused?
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Pipeline Coach provides the following simple scorecard for sales assessments, the knowledge that gives visibility to lead:
How well does your sales organization consistently
… 1. Needs Improvement 2. Meets Expectations 3. Exceeds Expectations
Document and follow a well-defined sales process? 1 2 3
Balance each step in the sales process? (e.g. opportunity generation,lead incubation, buy-cycle management, solution development, proposal writing, negotiation, closing, and account management 1 2 3
Collect and report accurate pipeline metrics? 1 2 3
Collaborate and share best practices? 1 2 3
Compensate producers consistent with overall business goals? 1 2 3
Meet forecast sales goals? (e.g. what will close, when, for how much) 1 2 3
Properly qualify and prioritize opportunities? 1 2 3
Avoid price as an objection? 1 2 3
Effectively cross-sell and up-sell? 1 2 3
Add new clients? 1 2 3
Schedule and run effective internal sales meetings? 1 2 3
Recruit, on-board and retain top sales talent? 1 2 3
We have to ask ourselves are we better leaders when we have this knowledge, is it worth the investment to know your sales organization?
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May 25, 2010
By Mark Faust Echelon Management
 Our sales improvement business has always thrived during recessions, and one reason is what a recent Harvard Business Journal report showed in how the faster growing companies with aggressive management have been shown to invest in growth strategies during down times and reduce costs during the up times contrary to the typical approach of business. Thus it is easier for us to sell the better companies on growth strategies during a downturn.
We’ve noticed these companies tend to gain market share during down times. If they can do it, why can’t you? Isn’t your competition facing the same pressures as you? Aren’t the sales reps of competitors as likely to use the recession as an excuse as anyone? Much of what it takes to beat a recession is the concerted effort and decision to not let it happen to you, but to take it head on and innovate your way out of being a victim of lower sales.
Here are just three of the many strategies a company can take during the midst or beginnings of a recession to actually increase sales.
1. Talk about it, decide as a team to no let it be an excuse
2. Begin building a list of innovations in the marketing and selling of your business then prioritize and act on them
3. Create a list of reasons as to why you are the best company to do business with during a recession
Some examples of selling and marketing innovations are:
- Create a marketing campaign that can be as simple as 3 inexpensive mailings followed up by strategically timed sales calls with your top 20% customers and highest growth potentials.
- Create incentives for tying up business with you, or buying more from you. Focus on creating incentives that don’t cost you much or anything at all, but actually should be lowering your total COS/Cost of Sales. Your customers benefit because they are securing a better than average cost during the recession.
- Survey your customers for what they most fear during these times and what problems most impede their performance during a recession, and then find unique solutions your team can deliver to those needs. The survey in and of itself, if done over the phone or face to face will act as a selling accelerator. Never conduct surveys through email or in the mail.
- At the same time while conducting depth interviews with your customers in a way that is an open ended qualitative face to face or phone approach; ask about what makes you different, and why they prefer you or the competition. This helps to further clarify your positioning in the marketplace. This analysis helps to prioritize your competitive advantages and weaknesses. The process also helps you to better target your idea customers, demographics etc. Improving the focus your sales and marketing efforts have on the right prospects will improve sales results as well.
- Hire more sales people, put a company-wide focus on new sales and marketing strategies and create new incentive packages or sales rewards for securing new customers.
- Getting the team to set a mission critical company growth goal and have every one identify ways that they individually can help reach that central sales growth objective brings the entire team’s focus onto the most important focus during a challenging economy.
- Only focusing on cost savings gives a company a fraction of the potential in the profit improvement process as costs can only go so low. Sales and production are the open ended and often unlimited potential areas of focus for health sales and profit improvement.
Bring the team together immediately and start on the three steps toward growth in these challenging economic times.
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April 19, 2010
By Mark Faust – Echelon Management
 One challenge in today’s competitive landscape is how does one create an image of difference in the mind of the customer to compete and win? One angle is to sell profit, not simply product. One should sell to customer’s objectives and the value that the customers stand to gain with your solutions. But how do you help your team become better questioners and thus consultants? How do you help them find new profits for customers by using better questions?
Getting to the point of empowering a sales team to be true consultants, takes the effort of customizing a vocabulary of questions that is not just a list of relevant info you need to know in order to qualify a customer, but that is also a list of questions that clarify the profits being lost for inaction and profits to be gained with the implementation of your solution.
There are 5 types of questions that can be asked in the selling process. We call this the FOCUS Questioning Method™
- Fact questions elicit data that is of a neutral importance to the customer. While certain fact questions may be critical to qualifying or appropriately presenting the right solutions to your customer, poor sales performers get caught up in asking too many fact questions many of which may be of little importance and/or could be found through basic preparation before or after the initial call. Examples: How many acres to you have? What have been your top hybrids?
- Opportunity questions elicit the objectives, problems, pains, or direction toward which a customer needs to move. Most often the answers find a pain; it could be the pain of an unsolved problem and/or the pain of not moving as fast as possible toward a valid objective or result. Examples: What are your top problems? Which hybrids are performing poorly?
- Consequence questions (can also be called Cost questions) elicit the cost of not solving that problem or reaching that objective faster. Cost questions can quantify the negative dollarization of the problem. Sometimes the Consequences are merely emotional, but in most business situations an excellent questioner/consultant/sales professional can help a customer discover the dollarized costs of the “Opportunities” discovered. Examples: What did that problem cost you? Is that really that important of a problem to solve?
- Upside questions help to understand the value that stands to be gained if a change is made, the problem is solved or the objective is reached sooner with an intervention that has yet to be decided upon. Examples: If you can solve this, what would happen? What is the value of reaching that objective?
- Solution Step questions clarify the next steps that help to advance the sale/relationship and often give the customer a choice of options rather than a yes/no “doyawanna…” forceful buying close. Most complex sales aren’t closed as much as they are advanced to the next step if all proper qualification has taken place at each step. Examples: What are the next steps we need to take to get a solution approved and implemented? We have the solutions to your problems, what do you need from us to make a decision?
Bottom line creating a list of these five types of questions listed above creates an empowering tool that is a key to more thorough preparation and selling effectiveness. Create a sheet of questions for you and your team and add to it the best questions as they come to mind. Review regularly; evaluate each others sales calls and questioning effectiveness and you will have created a process for creating consultants that sell profit vs. peddlers that just present product.
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March 30, 2010
Selling in a Tough Economy
By Brad Ristas: bristas@rayandbarney.com
Wow! That’s both a statement AND a question. Well first and foremost, rest assured that if you can sell ANYTHING in this business climate, you can sell ANYTHING!
Is that encouraging? I happen to think so.
If you haven’t figured out by now that Selling is an Attitude and a Discipline, then your boat has left the dock and there’s a good chance it isn’t coming back for you, at least for awhile.
So, what do you do? First, you decide if you have the chutzpah to even be in this game of Sales, representing anyone or anything. Second, you need to be fundamentally excited about your Products AND your Services. This excitement feeds directly into the Compassion you have for the bigger picture. The bigger picture is defined as the ability to show that you and the Products/Services can be transparent to each other. Companies usually buy from individuals first, not other companies selling them something.
Most companies have cut back their overall buying activities and I certainly don’t need to remind you about the overall employment picture. If you enter every deal with a Compassion for a process that works, and the defined need from the customer perspective, then this means you have done your due diligence with the client, and the rest of the deal is simply the details.
 Seriously, do your homework before you pick up the phone or send that email to a prospect. Put yourself in their shoes for just a minute or so. Why do they have to return your call or answer your email? Answer: They want to….You differentiated yourself by showing Compassion, Conviction, and intersected with Preparation in your contact to them. You also kept it simple, and they respect this. Although they might be hit on from other Sales Reps on a regular basis, they haven’t heard quite the way you have articulated their own needs differentiated by your straightforward Compassion for what you do.
So don’t look for a magic formula and certainly don’t hold your breath for an economy to really turn around markedly in the near future. Take on the challenge of the game right now and know that if you practice a little more what we have discussed above, when this economy does turn around, and it will, you will be even more prepared for the windfall!
Happy Selling.
Brad Ristas can be reached at bristas@rayandbarney.com
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