The House
of Sales Ideas


Welcome to where the magic happens. Every project, class, system and process I have ever implemented started with a blog post RIGHT HERE. So dig in, there is gold in these electrons.

Standing Out In A Crowd of Competition

Don’t look now, but your market space is getting tougher by the day. Customers are looking for any possible edge in negotiating with vendors while the competition performs pricing acrobatics to grab business. The crowd around your prospects and current customers is growing and it is not going to stop anytime soon.

“Success is about standing out not fitting in,” so says Don Draper from TV’s MadMen. Most people in business are looking for an advantage. They want to stand apart from the competition, but they just don’t know how. Lower pricing is a temporary fix at best until somebody trumps you. Touting more features & benefits is just as fleeting. No, we have to find a new place, somewhere nobody else has looked or even has thought of looking.

ASK & LISTEN

One of the inherent weaknesses of salespeople is the fact that we like to hear ourselves talk. Worse, we like to talk about ourselves and our products. Get over it! ALL customers are tuned into their own radio station WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) everything else is just noise.You have 2 ears and 1 mouth, use in the proper proportion. Ask your customer questions about their business and then LISTEN!

Don’t be content to ask only about what features from your product/service they might be interested in or basic logistic questions that you can get answered at any time. Ask about their company goals, their personal goals, ask how the 2 intersect. Find out how you can make their work day easier. Your purpose here is to build a “snap shot” of what their future COULD look like. I promise you, the deeper level your question, the more you know about the customer, the easier the sale will be. “Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causus,” a quote by Georgics Virgil its translation: Happy is he who knows the cause of things.

DIVE INTO THEIR REVENUE STREAM

It’s simple, make yourself responsible for a portion of revenue the customer generates. At the end of the day it’s NEVER about a product or service it is about the impact made on the company’s ability to make money. Find out what makes their business tick then figure out how your product/service helps to  keep it ticking.  If you do not, all you are doing is providing a service or product that can be provided by ANYBODY ELSE, and many times cheaper. Once you become part of how a company grows and makes money you become an invaluable resource, essentially irreplaceable.

HEART AND SOUL

What TRULY motivates a prospect or customer lays deep inside. It is rarely as simple as a feature or benefit. Pricing is always going to matter but pricing can be mitigated when confronted with the achievement of something bigger. What we are tasked to do, as business people who sell, is to FIND the deeper purpose, the bigger achievement, the question is how?

The answer begins with you. Altruism aside, make the accomplishment of a customer’s goals your purpose as well. Customers can sniff out a “salesman” who is selling a product trying to hit quota and they have NO time for those people. But the business person who sells and has a solution to their problem WILL become part of the customer’s bigger success. If you come with that mindset you have the opportunity to achieve great things for your customer and yourself.

These 3 concepts are crucial to your success and by NO means simple. I will be exploring each of them individually in future blogs.

For now, I am out of here, and remember you can either make sales or you can make excuses but you can’t do both….

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