BIZBUZZ: Cy Charney: The Salesperson’s Handbook

Hi, I’m Gary Brown, a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to episode 16 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations in order to help business owners imagine a future state of affairs that is different from their present state.

The following video highlights some content from The Salesperson’s Handbook, written by Cy Charney.  The focus is recognizing what constitutes excellent customer service.

I am going to comment on the basic customer needs that are identified by Charney.

He suggests that customers have a handful of basic needs. Customers want to feel safe; they want to be treated as special; they have a need to feel successful; they want things done right the first time and customers want to get things done efficiently.

This raises a question in my mind. If basic needs are being met, how focused on price do we need to be?

Charney also introduces an appropriate quotation from Aristotle. He stated that “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”. I wonder how many of us realize that habits are acquired through practice?  Sometimes, I can’t help but think that some more practice is needed!

Well, that’s it for The Saleperson’s Handbook.
Thanks for watching.

Your comments are always welcome.
Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.

“It’s Too Expensive!”

How often do we get confronted with the response “it’s too expensive” when engaged in a sales conversation with a prospect? Possibly more often than we might like?

Next question. How often do we respond with either some type of justification or explanation of our stated price? Or, perhaps we simply jump to offering a price reduction. Do either of these responses sound familiar?

If we believe that the value provided by our service or product offering is fairly priced, why do we experience so much trepidation around the prospect’s response to our price? It might be because this is what generally happens to us and we haven’t determined how best to respond.

Brian Tracy (public speaker/author/educator) offers an interesting response to the price objection. He suggests that we ask “how do you mean?”. Personally, I feel that this response is a good one. In my experience, many prospects (and customers for that matter) have normalized similar products to the point that most of them have been ‘commoditized’. If this is true, then it becomes easy to understand how a prospect would decide to offer a price objection so readily and so often. After all, he/she believes the same product can be purchased elsewhere and presumably at a lower price.

The “how do you mean?” question invites a response. It puts the person who made the price objection in the position of revealing more information. That person might still complain about the price. At this point, our next question might be “compared to what?”.

Pricing can be a tricky proposition. However, some preparation on our part will help us respond to price objections.

Now, if we are able to differentiate ourselves and our offering in some clear and tangible manner, then maybe some of the pricing issues will go away.

When we dig deeper, perhaps what is ultimately too expensive is the ‘hit’ to our business due to a lack of differentiation on the part of our business in the marketplace.

BIZBUZZ: Gary Hamel: Competing For The Future

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to episode 13 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations in order to challenge business owners to Be Different and to Act Boldly.

The following video highlights some content from Competing For The Future, written by Gary Hamel. I enjoyed reading this book and it offers some interesting observations on the subject of differentiation, which is one of my favourite topics.

http://youtu.be/8MCbRuKBEgI

I am going to highlight three of Hamel’s suggestions that I find particularly noteworthy.

The first one deals with return on investment (our return/our investment). Hamel contends that we spend too much time obsessing over the denominator (the amount invested). In an environment where our competitors are growing, denominator reduction with steady revenue is simply a way to profitably sell market share. Hmm. Do we know how well our competitors are performing?  Are we paying sufficient attention to what is happening with the numerator?

Secondly, Hamel suggests that tomorrow’s competitive advantages must necessarily be different from today’s. Companies must be capable of getting different. He further states that laggards follow the path of least resistance.  However, challengers follow the path of greatest opportunity. Which are we?

There are numerous other interesting tidbits in this book but I’m going to end on Hamel’s assertion that it is not necessary to be a seer to discover the future but it is absolutely vital that you be unorthodox. Now if that isn’t a call for differentiation, what is?

Well, that’s it for Competing For The Future.

Thanks for watching.

Your comments are always welcome.

Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.

How to Win the B2B Price War

In this world of high speed communication and 140 character limits, we seem to have become infatuated with short forms and acronyms.  It isn’t too hard to draw the comparison between our communications today and the game of horseshoes. In other words, we use vocabulary with less precision than a given word actually conveys, but that’s okay because getting close seems to be good enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or is it?

 

 

What has this got to do with pricing you might ask? We invariably talk about the cost or price of a product or service that we are either buying or selling. However, when we are ‘on our game’, we’ll use the word investment or introduce the idea of value. Unfortunately, old habits die hard and it is very easy to forget to reinforce the result that one can achieve from an investment that has been made.

Now, we might ask ourselves, “what’s the big deal?” In my mind, the big deal results when we think about the behaviour and attitude that are generally attached to the words cost and investment.

Costs are generally meant to be controlled. Costs tend to be something that we either want to avoid, reduce or, at a minimum, hold constant.  The word cost tends to cause us to think in terms of such adjectives as “expensive”. If ‘how much does this cost‘ is an early question asked by the prospect, then chances are we have not established our value proposition with this person.  It will also be difficult for us to know how to clearly articulate our value proposition if we have not identified the emotion that underlies a prospect’s initial interest in our product or service.  Without this knowledge, we are simply ‘pulling on levers’ without knowing if the levers are connected to anything of meaning to the prospect.

So, … we’ll be in a much better position if we can not only understand the prospect’s stated need, but also the underlying emotional reason for this need. With this understanding firmly in hand, we can speak much more confidently about the return that is possible with the investment being considered. We’ll understand how our product or service can address the emotional need of the prospect. We’ll be able to speak about the value to be derived from the investment being contemplated.

If we’ve made the emotional connection with our prospect, then the level of trust that the prospect ascribes to us will be much higher.  A trusting relationship supported by our understanding of the emotion driving the prospect will greatly diminish any focus on price and solidly centre the conversation on value. Price may not be part of the discussion.

In the parlance of horsehoes, a ‘ringer’ could be just the next ‘pitch’ away.

The Levers to Your Sales Growth Success

Dun & Bradstreet conducted a study that evaluated the factors that contribute to business success. They concluded the following:

– businesses with high sales tend to succeed

– businesses with low sales tend to fail

– all else is commentary    

We can cut our costs, improve our efficiency, consolidate our purchasing power, etc. However, ultimately, our success is going to be measured by how well we sell our goods and services. Hence, our future success lies in how effectively we pull on those levers that influence sales growth.

Sales Growth Success

Brian Tracy is the person who introduced me to the following approach related to sales growth. He describes adherence to the following as The Way to Wealth.

In order to generate increased sales revenue, we need to determine how we can leverage the four inputs that drive sales.

First, we need to find more leads who we will convert into prospects. (This step requires that we know where or how we can find leads.) In turn, we need to convert the resulting prospects into customers.  Both of these steps have a corresponding conversion rate. That is, what percentage of our leads do we turn into prospects and what percentage of prospects become customers?

Can we find more leads and increase our conversion rates?

Once we have customers enjoying our goods or services, we need to know the number of transactions per customer that have occurred during a given period. For the sake of illustration, let’s consider a 12 month period.

How do we increase the number of transactions of each customer?

Finally, our measurements need to capture the average dollar amount per transaction during the 12 months under consideration. Do we have a strategy that we can use to increase this number?

Now, please understand that measuring the above numbers are critical to understanding where we can apply greater leverage to our business. So, if these numbers aren’t part of our current key performance indicators, we need to realize that flying in the dark can be extremely hazardous!

In summary, we know that the levers to our sales success include finding more leads and converting them to more prospects and subsequently converting them to a greater number of customers. What can we do to improve our lead/prospect conversion rates?  Once we have them in the door as customers, what actions can we take to increase the frequency of their purchases and the dollar amount that is spent on each purchase?  This is where we might put on our marketer’s cap to contemplate such things as segmentation and differentiation, as part of our marketing strategy. But, that is for another post.

Now it is time to leverage your sales growth to greater heights!  May the fulcrum be with you!

For some greater detail on the above subject, you might like to listen to a webinar that I recently conducted for SmallBusinessSolvers. It can be watched below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01V2ZSoUxUM

 

 

 

To Be Different or Not (at Your Peril)

It’s easy to talk about being different.

We can all sagely nod our heads and claim that we fully understand the importance of differentiation. We all get the notion that we need to be different in our offering, in some meaningful way, if we are going to successfully attract and retain customers.

The next question is the one that seems to cause us some issue.

Do we actually implement some type of differentiation in our business?

My informal, non-scientific observations suggest that our understanding of differentiation frequently gets parked at the door. We seem to be so immersed in the day-to-day minutiae of running our businesses, that we overlook what it takes to stand out from our competitors. Prospects can buy from us; buy from our competitors or not buy at all. If we don’t focus on maintaining some type of compelling differentiation within our business, why should anyone care?

In Harvey Thompson’s book Who Stole My Customer, he claims that the top two major reasons for losing prospects or customers is lack of courtesy followed by lack of competence. These are both staff related issues. Both speak to skills that can be learned. Both suggest areas where a differentiation strategy could pay significant dividends to the business.  [learn more about Who Stole My Customer in episode 10 of BIZBUZZ]

Phil Kotler (of marketing fame) states that the company that stops getting better gets worse.

Getting better is a conscious decision taken by the business owner. It involves a focus on differentiation.  Better must, by definition, indicate a better experience for our customers.

Are you engaging in a periodic review of your differentiation strategy, in this very crowded space that we occupy?  If you’re not, beware!