Small Business Success | Small Business Mentoring

Written by Alan Rigg

Wouldn’t you agree that every sales job is unique? Aren’t there significant differences in products and services sold, target markets, target geographies, company cultures, lead sources, sales cycle lengths, and more? Given these many differences, how can you accurately define the parameters that will produce success in your company’s sales job?

The questions asked in this article do not identify every possible factor you should consider as you analyze your company’s sales position(s). However, reviewing these questions should spark useful thoughts concerning desirable salesperson characteristics. At minimum, if you carefully consider each question, you will become more consciously aware of key requirements than you were previously.

If you are a salesperson, you can also benefit from considering these questions, as they can help you identify target prospects and further refine your sales approach.

1. Nature of the Customer

• What are your target markets?
• Are they horizontal or vertical?
• Do you sell to consumers, corporations, schools, state and local governments, etc.?
• What level(s) in the organization do you sell to? (Purchasing, Engineering, Business Unit Manager, C-Level Executive, etc.)

Target markets drive numerous sales parameters including the typical sales cycle length, prime selling seasons, and specific knowledge or experience that may be required to earn credibility with prospects and customers. Wouldn’t you agree that selling effectively to C-level executives (CEO, CFO, CIO, etc.) and other high-ranking officials requires different attributes and skills than selling to purchasing agents?

2. Nature of the Offering

• Are your offerings complex or relatively simple?
• Are they tangible or intangible?
• Do they consist of stand-alone products or services, or bundles of products and services?
• Does your company have a small portfolio of offerings or a large portfolio of offerings?

The nature of the offering(s) will determine the most effective Sales Style (see item #5), the importance of Learning Rate to sales success, and desired prospecting and opportunity qualification approaches.

3. Sales Environment

• What kind of environment do your salespeople work in?
• Are they office-based or home based?
• Is most of their selling done over the telephone or in person?

Salespeople that work from a home office usually perform best if they are independent self-starters, whereas office- based salespeople may have the option of receiving more frequent direction and support from their sales manager.

4. Geography

• How many sales locations does your company have?
• Where are they located?

Different sales approaches are usually required to sell successfully in different locales such as downtown Manhattan (NY), Baton Rouge (LA), and Los Angeles (CA).

5. Sales Style

• Which sales styles (Consultative, Relationship, Display, Hard Closer) are most effective in your target markets?

The nature of the customer and the complexity of the offering(s) should be considered when answering this question.

6. Relationship Preference

• Is your company more concerned about:
  • Finding new customers?
  • Increasing account penetration and/or managing long-term relationships?
  • Both?
• If both, please estimate a percentage for each.

Salespeople usually prefer one type of sales role to the other. If you truly want to accomplish both new business and account penetration sales goals, you may want to consider staffing two different sales positions.

7. Sales Cycle Length

• How often do your salespeople have opportunities to close sales?
  • Several per day?
  • Several per month?
  • Several per year?

If a salesperson receives gratification from closing sales, he or she won’t be happy in a role that offers just a handful of opportunities per year to exercise this skill. This kind of salesperson is often better suited to selling products or services that have shorter sales cycles and higher volumes of opportunities.

8. Prospecting

• Do prospects come to your salespeople, or must your salespeople seek them out?
• If the answer is “both”, estimate a percentage for each.

If your sales position requires a lot of outbound prospecting, your salespeople will need more energy, mental toughness, and a positive attitude.

Seven additional parameters are covered in Part 2 of this article.

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

Another key reason why companies suffer from 80/20 performance is their processes for hiring, training and managing salespeople rely almost entirely upon SUBJECTIVE information. Think about it:

• What are resumes? They are an individual’s subjective portrayal of their capabilities and experiences.
• What occurs during an interview? Interviewees attempt to package their responses to questions in a manner that will make the best impression. Meanwhile, interviewers are forming personal opinions about candidates’ qualifications for the position.

I’m not suggesting that subjective information is useless. Subjective information is a valid and valuable component of any "people decision". However, if decisions based solely upon subjective information produce an undesirable result 80 percent of the time, doesn’t it make sense to consider making a change?

One way to introduce OBJECTIVE information into sales recruiting and management is through specialized sales assessment tests. I’m not referring to personality or behavioral tests like Myers-Briggs or DISC. Those types of tools are useful for learning how to communicate more effectively with someone. However, I have not found them to be useful for predicting whether someone will succeed in sales.

The specialized sales assessment tests that I’m referring to identify an individual’s strengths or weaknesses in the following areas:

• How rapidly does the individual learn new information? This talent is of particular importance if your company has a broad portfolio of products and services and you want your salespeople to sell the entire portfolio.
• How precisely and effectively does the individual communicate, both verbally and in writing? If your salespeople author a lot of proposals and/or e-mails, the quality of their writing will definitely impact their sales performance!
• How strong is the individual’s talent for asking insightful questions, picking out important pieces of information from the answers, and using this information to construct additional questions? This talent is critical for effective sales opportunity qualification.
• How strong is the individual’s talent for learning how to manage effective return on investment (ROI) conversations with prospects and customers? This talent is critical for increasing close rates by creating a context for price discussions.
• How energetic is the individual? How easy will it be for them to consistently maintain the level of productive activity required to achieve their sales targets?
• How effective is the individual at convincing prospects and customers to "get off the dime" and take action?
• How sociable is the individual? Do they enjoy interacting with others? Do they build rapport with strangers quickly?
• Can the individual successfully direct his or her own activities, or does the individual require frequent input and direction from a sales manager to stay on track?
• How will the individual respond when things don’t go their way? Will they start to whine and complain, or will they be able to "shake it off" and maintain a consistent level of productivity?
• How strong is the individual’s desire to be liked? Will they be able to maintain a "win-win" focus, or will they give away the store?
• How competitive is the individual? How confident are they in their ability to compete successfully?
• How emotionally tough is the individual? How do they respond to rejection?
• How dogged and determined is the individual in pursuing opportunities and overcoming roadblocks that arise during the sales process?
• Will the individual follow through on their commitments?
• How success oriented and outcome focused is the individual? Are they able to stay focused on the desired end result, or do they let themselves get bogged down in details along the way?
• Does the individual actually enjoy the activities involved in selling? If they don’t, chances are they won’t perform very well for very long.

Specialized sales assessment tests can also help existing salespeople that are struggling

How? First, they can be used to determine whether these individuals should be in sales. If an individual doesn’t have the talents required for success in your company’s sales job, there may be other roles in your organization where their talents and interests can be applied to mutual benefit. If there aren’t any such positions available, the kindest thing you can do is let them go. Why? Because it is NO fun to struggle in a job that is a poor fit!

Second, specialized sales assessment tests can help identify each salesperson’s unique training needs. Here is an example:

Two salespeople, Beth and Bill, work for the same company. Beth is weak in Sales Drive, which makes her reluctant to ask for orders. Bill is weak in Emotional Toughness, which makes him sensitive to rejection and limits his prospecting effectiveness. If Beth and Bill go through the same sales skills training course, how much improvement in sales performance should their company expect to see?

The answer is little or none. Why? Because Beth and Bill have completely different training needs that will NOT be addressed by basic sales skills training.

Beth would benefit the most from attending an assertiveness training class. She also needs coaching to help her recognize that failing to ask for orders denies her customers valuable solutions to costly business problems.

Bill needs to learn to not take rejection personally. He could also benefit from training that teaches positive thinking and other motivational techniques.

Unfortunately, unless each salesperson’s unique training needs are identified, and targeted training is supplied to address those specific needs, there isn’t much reason to expect the individual’s sales performance to improve.

Conclusion

Many "80/20" performance disparities result from an over-reliance on subjective information when making salesperson hiring and management decisions. The proposed solution is to add objective information (gathered via specialized sales assessment tests) to "people decision" processes. This one change can help companies increase the proportion of top performers on their sales teams and improve the performance of existing sales team members.

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His company, MySalesTest.com, provides specialized sales assessment tests that help business owners, executives, and managers avoid hiring mistakes and consistently hire more top sales performers. For more information and a FREE special report that will increase the effectiveness of your sales recruiting efforts, visit http://www.mysalestest.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

Business executives and sales managers frequently complain about “80/20″ performance on their sales teams, where approximately 80 percent of sales are produced by approximately 20 percent of salespeople. Why do salespeople perform so differently? What is it about top sales performers that enables them to achieve such vastly superior results?

Certainly there are some sales skills that anyone can learn. For example, it’s easy to learn how to ask reflective questions. These questions begin with the words “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” and “how”, and tend to encourage more detailed answers than questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no”.

You can learn how to ask reflective questions by participating in a simple role play. In this role play, every time you ask me a “Yes/No” question, I’ll answer “No”. Getting stonewalled with a bunch of “No’s” will break you of the Yes/No questioning habit pretty quickly!

Other sales skills are tougher to learn

A good example is teaching salespeople how to ask questions and “follow the thread” in the answers. To explain this concept, let’s use another role play. If you ask me a reflective question, I’ll respond with answers that contain some “pain points”. If you recognize the pain points and drill down into them by asking additional questions, I’ll eventually agree to engage in a sales cycle.

Do you know what my experience has been with the “follow the thread” role play? Some salespeople learn this skill easily. Others struggle, but they eventually master it. However, some just never get it, no matter how hard they try!

Why can some people learn this critical skill, but others can’t?

Reason #1

In their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton report that great managers and average managers have different expectations for their employees. According to Buckingham and Clifton, average managers assume that “each person can learn to be competent in almost anything”, while great managers assume that “each person’s talents are enduring and unique”.

Most sales books and training programs seem to take the “average manager” point of view. In other words, they seem to assume that anyone can learn how to sell. Their unspoken promise is that all you have to do is invest enough time, effort, and money to learn the skills they teach. If you make the investments, you will learn the skills and succeed in sales.

Unfortunately, there are countless examples of sales books and training courses not producing the desired improvement in sales performance. Think about some salespeople you know personally. How many of them are struggling to make their quotas? Why are they struggling?

• Is it the state of the economy? (If other salespeople on the same sales team are making their numbers, blaming the economy won’t earn much sympathy.)
• Is it because they don’t work hard enough?
• Is it because they don’t have enough product knowledge?
• Do they need to work harder on their selling skills?
• Do they need more coaching from their manager?

What if the “great manager” point of view is correct? What if everyone cannot become proficient in sales? What if success in sales requires a unique set of talents?

Reason #2

Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney report this very conclusion in their book, How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer. After correlating hundreds of thousands of assessments that were performed over several decades with actual sales performance measurements, they reached these startling conclusions:

• “55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else”; and
• “Another 20% to 25% have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else”

Wow! Those are some sobering statistics! They indicate that more than half of all salespeople are NEVER going to make it in sales. Another quarter have some chance of accomplishing sales success, but only if they find the right job selling the right kind of product or service.

How can you identify whether salespeople have the talents required to succeed in your company’s sales job? That question will be answered in Part 2 of this article.

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His company, MySalesTest.com, provides specialized sales assessment tests that help business owners, executives, and managers avoid hiring mistakes and consistently hire more top sales performers. For more information and a FREE special report that will increase the effectiveness of your sales recruiting efforts, visit http://www.mysalestest.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

A fact of business life is that quality salespeople are a relatively expensive resource. Yet, many companies ask their salespeople to perform administrative tasks that could easily be handled by $8 to $10 per hour administrative employees.

Why does this happen?

Sometimes it happens because managers are penny wise and pound foolish. They are already paying salaries or draws to their salespeople and prefer to have them perform administrative work rather than hire additional (administrative) personnel.

You know what? Management absolutely IS entitled to ask salespeople to perform administrative tasks. However, doing so often reduces the return the company receives on its sales team investment.

In other cases salespeople are saddled with unnecessary administrative work because their managers have never analyzed the tasks their salespeople are asked to perform with the following questions in mind:

• What is the lowest-cost resource that could satisfactorily perform each task?
• If salespeople were relieved from performing these tasks, how could they apply the extra time to make more sales?

What is an example of a task that could be assigned to a non-sales resource?

One task that creates significant heartburn for both salespeople and management in many companies is populating records in the company’s CRM (client relationship management) system.

CRM data can be a very valuable resource. By capturing information about prospect and customer locations, contacts, conversation notes, etc., companies can ensure a smooth transition when a salesperson leaves and is replaced by another salesperson.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is the data entry required to fully populate CRM records can consume a lot of time. Based upon the number of data elements that must be entered, salespeople can spend between 20 minutes and one hour per day (per salesperson!) entering data into their company’s CRM system. If salespeople were able to apply this time to activities that more directly relate to selling, how much more could they sell?

A second problem relates to a personality quirk of top-performing salespeople. One of the characteristics measured by my company’s sales assessment tests is a salesperson’s interest in process, procedure, administration, and financial tasks. My experience has been that approximately 80% of top sales performers have very little interest in process, procedure, administration, and financial tasks!

We all want to hire top-performing salespeople. But, when we are successful in attracting them, how much time do we want to (repetitively) invest in pursuing them for forecasts and CRM system updates? Doesn’t it make sense to assign as much of this (administrative) work as possible to a lower-cost resource?

What is another example of a sales-related task that could be assigned to a lower-cost resource?

Another excellent example is cold calling. It is relatively easy to find people who can do an outstanding job of convincing prospects to schedule “discovery” conversations. These people are often relatively inexpensive ($40,000 to $60,000 per year in many markets) because they do not have the talents required to effectively manage other steps of the sales process. Why not hire one or more individuals to focus on cold calling and booking appointments (or outsource this activity to a company that specializes in hiring and managing these kinds of individuals), and focus your expensive salespeople on other sales-related activities?

Where SHOULD salespeople focus their time?

The #1 most critical task is doing an outstanding job of sales opportunity qualification, which includes the following steps:

• Asking questions to determine whether a prospect has any of the kinds of business problems your company’s products and services can solve
• Asking questions to quantify the impact of a prospect’s business problems (this provides a context for price discussions)
• Asking questions to determine whether a prospect is worthy of time and resource investments by your company (to prevent scarce time and resources from being wasted on prospects that can’t or won’t buy)

If a prospect’s or customer’s business problems are complex, it may be helpful for your salespeople to be able to leverage expert resources to help them fully qualify opportunities and design solutions. However, your salespeople should at least be able to qualify opportunities from a business perspective on their own.

Other critical sales cycle activities that are good places for salespeople to invest their time include:

• Motivating prospects to take the next step in the sales cycle. (A rather exacting definition of a valid next step is there is an appointment on the prospect’s calendar on a specific date at a specific time with a specific agenda for advancing the sales cycle.)
• Managing product demonstrations to ensure they are focused on the specific product or service features that will solve the prospect’s specific business problems. (I always recommend that expert resources deliver demonstrations. Salespeople should manage the demonstrations and tactfully keep them on track.)
• Reviewing effective selling proposals with prospects. Effective selling proposals minimize the amount of boilerplate and maximize the amount of content that describes a prospect’s specific business problems, quantifies the impact of the problems, shows how the proposed products and/or services will solve the prospect’s specific business problems, identifies the prospect’s key decision criteria, etc.
• Closing sales. When all of the preceding activities have been performed properly, closing sales becomes easy and natural.

Conclusion

Take a look at the tasks that you (or your sales managers) ask your salespeople to perform. How many of these tasks can only be performed by talented (and expensive) salespeople? How many tasks could be performed by lower-cost resources, freeing your salespeople to spend more time on tasks that only they can do?

Financial constraints are a reality of business. However, administrative resources and appointment setters can be pretty inexpensive to hire, especially if you pursue “fractional ownership” by outsourcing to companies that specialize in hiring and managing these kinds of resources.

The bottom line is the more you can focus your expensive salespeople on doing the things that only they can do, the higher your return will be on your sales team investment!

©2008 – Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

If you want to maximize your sales performance, take a strategic approach to selling. After all, wouldn’t you agree that “the 80/20 rule” applies to customers, where approximately 20 percent of customers produce approximately 80 percent of sales?

The starting point for strategic selling is figuring out which customers produce the bulk of your sales, and what they are buying. Armed with this information, you can strategically plan how to increase sales.

Critical Data Elements

If you want to sell strategically, you need to have access to specific data elements. Plus, you need to be willing to perform data analysis.

Which data elements do you need? This list provides a reasonable starting point:

• Customer Name
• Revenue by Month by Customer
• Gross Margin or Gross Profit by Month by Customer (this is only necessary if it impacts your performance measurements)
• Product or Service Name (for each product or service purchased by each customer)
• Product or Service Quantity (for each product or service purchased by each customer)
• Product or Service Unit Price (for each product or service purchased by each customer)
• Product or Service Extended Price (quantity x unit price)

Data Analysis

This data can be used to analyze the buying habits of your customers. Sort it in various ways to answer the following questions:

• Which customers buy the most from you?
• What is the trend for each customer’s purchases? Are they buying more or less when you compare the current month to preceding months? How about when you compare the current month to the same month in the previous year?
• Which products or services are they buying?
• Are the amounts purchased in line with your expectations and the commitments that have been made by your customers?
• Which products or services are they not buying?
• Why aren’t they buying these other products or services?

Once you have completed this first stage of analysis, consider this next set of questions:

• How much time should you allocate to each customer in your territory? (Tip: You should spend 80 percent of your time with the customers that buy the most and/or offer the greatest potential for sales growth.)
• What is your plan for increasing sales to each of your customers? (This includes selling more of what they have already been buying, and selling other products or services that they haven’t purchased from you previously.)
• Which new prospects should you pursue? (Tip: Which prospects can your customers refer you to? Which prospects have the greatest potential to produce significant sales?)

It may not be easy for companies to extract the data that is required to support strategic selling. However, arming salespeople with this data is the best investment a company can possibly make. Strategic selling enables salespeople to maximize their sales, which in turn maximizes the company’s overall sales and profitability.

How frequently should the data be made available to salespeople?

If sales cycles are relatively short, it would be ideal for the data to be available on demand, with the minimum frequency being weekly. For longer sales cycles, providing the data on a monthly basis may be adequate.

Strategic selling begins with data availability. If you are going to maximize sales, you need to be able to analyze your customers’ buying patterns to determine how to prioritize your efforts. Which customers should you spend the bulk of your time with? How much time should you allocate to each customer? How will you increase sales to specific customers? Which new prospects should you pursue?

Plan your work, work your plan, and compare your results frequently against your quota and personal goals. Sell strategically to maximize your sales, minimize unpleasant surprises, and maximize your earnings!

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

What kind of response do you usually get when you present the price of your company’s products or services to prospects? Do your prospects say, “Wow, that sounds cheap — how soon can I get it?” Or, is their response something like, “Oh.I wasn’t expecting to pay that much”?

If you get the second response with any regularity, the problem may be that you are discussing the price of your product or service “in a vacuum”.

What does “in a vacuum” mean?

It means you have not helped your prospects establish a DOLLAR VALUE to compare your price against. To determine this dollar value, you need to uncover the answers to the following questions:

• What problems can your products or services help your prospects solve?
• Does the prospect have any of these problems?
• If they do, what is the financial impact of the problems on your prospect’s business?

If price is discussed in a vacuum, it will always sound high

However, if you work with your prospects to establish the financial impact of the problems you can solve, and you do this BEFORE you discuss price, your price will usually sound very fair. In fact, it may sound downright cheap!

Let me give you a real-life example of how this process works. One of my company’s offerings is a sales assessment bundle that captures objective information about an individual’s sales talents. When a company orders this bundle for either a job candidate or an existing sales employee, they receive:

• Two online assessments
• Two detailed reports that:
  • Compare the individual’s assessment scores against a customized benchmark
  • Predict how the individual will perform in the client’s specific sales job
• A two-page summary of assessment results (which we prepare after reviewing the individual’s assessment results)
• As much time as the client wishes to spend discussing the individual’s assessment results

The price for this sales assessment bundle is determined based upon the quantity purchased. It ranges from $290 for a quantity of one to $80 for a quantity of one thousand or more.

I know from experience that I will get objections if I discuss our sales assessment prices “in a vacuum”. After all, there are assessments available in the marketplace for $25 or less. Of course, there are vast differences between these (personality and behavioral) assessments and the ones we use, but it can be difficult to get prospects to understand and value those differences. So, instead we focus on helping our prospects establish values for the problems we can help them solve.

The questions we ask go something like this:

• Does the 80/20 rule apply to your sales team? In other words, do a relatively small proportion of your salespeople produce most of your sales?
• If the 80/20 rule does apply to your sales team, what is the difference in production (in terms of revenue produced, gross margin produced, or whatever other metric is of most interest to the prospect) between top performers, middle performers, and bottom performers?
• What would the impact be of adding more top performers to your sales team?
• What would the impact be of bringing the performance of middle performers up to the top performer level? (This may be possible if the middle performers have the talents required for top performance in the company’s sales job.)
• How often do you make a hire that doesn’t work out?
• What does it cost you in terms of salaries, recruiting costs, training costs, management time, etc., when this happens?
• What would be the value of adding additional quality salespeople to your team? (These people would come from the job candidates that don’t make the cut today, but actually have the talents required for top performance in your sales job.)

The answers to these questions usually produce numbers in the following ranges:

• Cost of Hiring Mistakes: Thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per person
• Difference in Production (Top Performers vs. Middle Performers vs. Bottom Performers): Hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per person
• Value of Each Incremental Quality Sales Hire: Hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per person

Compared against tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a couple hundred dollars for specialized sales assessment tests doesn’t seem very expensive, does it? In fact, it sounds downright cheap!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This approach is most effective if your PROSPECT is the source of the numbers

Why? In general, prospects don’t trust salespeople. Many have dealt with salespeople who were more interested in making sales than they were in providing value. Plus, prospects recognize that salespeople have a vested interest in building a convincing business case that can be used to support a buying decision. This causes prospects to discount information that salespeople provide. However, if the prospect is the source of the numbers, they are perceived as unquestioned truth!

Conclusion

If you want to increase both your sales volume and the profitability of each sale, stop discussing the price of your products or services “in a vacuum”. Delay the price discussion until after you have worked with your prospect to identify:

• The problems you can help them solve, and
• The dollar impact these problems have on your prospect’s business

When you compare the price of your products or services against the dollar impact of your prospect’s problems:

• Your prices will be perceived much more favorably, and
• You will close more sales at higher margins!

©2006-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com

Written by Alan Rigg

Many recruiting ads and job descriptions include “knockout factors” that can actually screen out qualified sales candidates. One example is a requirement that candidates have an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree, or a degree in a specialized field of study such as Engineering. Another example is a requirement that candidates have a minimum number of years of sales experience.

When my customers’ recruiting ads and job descriptions include these types of knockout factors, I like to have a little fun with them. I say something like:

“(Name), imagine that I have two candidates for your sales job opening. One of them has both the college degree and the five years of sales experience that are listed as minimum requirements in your recruiting ad. The other candidate doesn’t have a college degree, and she only has two years of sales experience. But, she has relationships with dozens of C-level executives that are good prospects for your company’s products and services. She could easily book fifteen appointments during her first week on the job. Which candidate would you prefer?”

As you might expect, my customers always choose the candidate with the relationships. That is when I have to deliver the bad news:

“(Name), unfortunately you will never see this candidate, because she is being screened out by your knockout factors!”

If you want to improve the overall quality of your sales candidate pool, shift your focus away from education and experience and toward performance-based measures. How will you measure your new salespeople’s performance during their first thirty, sixty, ninety, and 180 days? What activities will you expect them to perform? What results will you expect these activities to produce, and in what time frame?

Here is an outline for a recruiting process that focuses on performance-based factors:

1. Write a Performance-Based Recruiting Ad: As you construct your ad, consider the following questions:

• What kinds of companies or organizations are good prospects for your company’s products and services? Your ad should state a preference for job candidates that have existing relationships with these kinds of companies and organizations.
• Who are the most productive people (job titles) for your salespeople to call on? Your ad should state a preference for candidates that have existing relationships with people that have these titles, and/or a proven ability to prospect successfully to people at similar levels.
• What specific sales production (such as pipeline dollar volume, sales dollar volume, etc.) do you expect your new salespeople to produce during their first 90 days? Make this expectation crystal clear in your recruiting ad!

2. Scrutinize Resumes for Accomplishments: Smart salespeople know that results sell. When these salespeople prospect, they talk to potential prospects about the results their companies have produced for customers. When they write resumes, they write about the results they have produced and their other accomplishments (awards, recognition, etc.).

3. Conduct Telephone Screening Calls: For candidates that have interesting resumes, schedule a 20-30 minute telephone screening call. This will give you an opportunity to ask performance-based questions related to two critical performance factors: the candidate’s relationships and their prospecting activities. Here are sample screening call questions:

• Who do you know that might be a prospect for our company’s products and services?
• What relationships do you have that could be leveraged for appointments during your first few weeks on the job?
• What activities do you typically include in your prospecting plan?
• What percentage of your time do you spend on each activity?
• What results have these activities produced for you in the past?
• How long did it take before you started making quota consistently in your current job?

4. Assess Qualified Candidates: For candidates that pass the telephone screen, gather objective information about their talents via specialized sales assessment tests. The most effective sales assessment tests go beyond personality and behavioral traits and examine attributes such as Learning Rate and Reasoning Ability.

5. Conduct In-Person Interviews: Now you are prepared to conduct thorough, performance-based interviews. Why? Look at the information you have collected! For each candidate that you are going to interview, you should have in your hands:

• A resume that lists key accomplishments
• Performance-based information collected during the telephone screening call
• Objective information about talents that are critical to sales success

If you ask performance-based questions and clearly outline your expectations for new hire sales performance, you will attract fewer poor candidates, as some will de-select themselves. You will also attract more strong candidates, as they will no longer be screened out by invalid “knockout factors”. The end result will be a steady improvement in the overall quality of your sales organization.

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

Delivering speeches, seminars, and webinars (online seminars) is a terrific way to generate large quantities of quality sales leads. Why is public speaking such an effective lead-generating vehicle? Here are a few reasons:

• Speaking allows you to deliver your message to multiple potential prospects at once.
• A well-constructed speech, seminar, or webinar can establish you as an expert in your field and increase your credibility with prospects.
• Every speech has the potential to reach far beyond the original audience. If you deliver a compelling message, there is no telling how many times it will be repeated to others by your audience members.

What should you speak about?

Look for topics that are of particular interest to your target prospects. You can offer new approaches for solving especially troubling business problems. You can educate your prospects on compelling new technologies, or other concepts that will help them professionally or personally. You can discuss real-life case studies and share stories about how you (or your company) helped specific customers improve their businesses. Whatever topic you choose must relevant and important to your target audience.

How should you construct your speech?

Constructing an effective lead-generating speech requires walking a fine line. You want to provide your audience with truly valuable information. However, you also want to motivate them to contact you for additional information. As a result, you have to make sure you don’t provide so much information that your audience can solve their problems all by themselves.

This is not a big issue if you are speaking to generate leads for a product, as the audience members will likely need to purchase the product to completely solve the problems you discuss. Where giving away too much information becomes a real issue is when you sell services. If you share all of your knowledge about how to solve specific problems, why will your audience members need to come back to you?

To avoid this undesirable outcome, follow these seven steps to constructing an effective lead-generating speech:

1. Open with an “attention grabber”. This can be a truly startling fact or an emotionally compelling story that relates to one or more of the key points that you will address in your speech.
2. Give the audience a brief outline of the key points you will be covering in your speech.
3. Describe the problem or problems your speech is intended to help your audience solve.
4. Describe the impact of each problem as graphically as you can. Engage your audience’s emotions by asking them to describe how a problem has affected them personally or professionally. Another alternative is for you to tell compelling, real-life “problem impact” stories that describe how (current and past) customers were affected by specific problems.
5. Relieve the tension you have built up in the audience by letting them know the problems can be solved. However, DON’T tell them EVERYTHING they need to know to solve them! Provide a brief outline of the solution. That way the audience will need to come to you for more details.
6. Use glowing word pictures to help the audience visualize how wonderful their lives will be when the problems have been eliminated.
7. Close by revisiting the key points from your presentation and giving the audience a “call to action”.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Be very careful about selling from the stage. Audiences become disenchanted very quickly if they feel a speech is nothing more than a thinly disguised sales pitch. You must deliver truly valuable insights and information to your audiences to reward them for taking time out of their busy schedules to attend your speeches.

What “call to action” should you deliver at the end of your speech?

It is perfectly appropriate to include a gentle “call to action” at the end of your speech. Consider closing with a statement such as:

“If you would like to explore the possibility of applying the concepts that were discussed during today’s presentation in your company, please give me your business card before you leave.”

Here are some other effective calls to action:

• Include a “please contact me” checkbox on a presentation evaluation form that you give to each audience member.
• Give them a form they can use to request a free special report and/or subscribe to a free newsletter.
• Invite the audience to visit your company’s website to download a free special report and/or subscribe to a free newsletter. NOTE: Make sure you require them to provide their name and e-mail address in order to receive the free value-added information!

How should you prepare for your speech?

Preparing for seminars and speeches is a lot of work. Here are some of the key steps:

• Prepare your presentation materials, write scripts, and practice them to the point where you can deliver your presentation smoothly and convincingly without having to rely on your notes too much. If you don’t have much speaking experience, you may want to join a local Toastmasters chapter. They do a good job of teaching platform and presentation skills.
• Secure a facility for your speech and make arrangements for any necessary audio/visual equipment.
• If you are going to serve refreshments, make arrangements for the refreshments.
• Develop and implement a plan for attracting an audience. This might include sending direct mail or e-mails, making phone calls, and contacting trade, professional and social associations and organizations.

What can you do to maximize your return on investment?

If you are going to invest the time and effort required to deliver a first-class speech, you should also develop a plan for maximizing your return on your investment. This could include the following activities:

• Give each audience member an evaluation form they can use to provide feedback and request additional information.
• Provide handouts that include presentation highlights and your contact information.
• Hold a drawing for some type of small prize (books, sample products, etc.) to encourage attendees to give you business cards and/or hand in completed evaluation forms.
• Block time during the day or two following your presentation to make phone calls to audience members. When you make the calls, ask for feedback and offer an opportunity to ask questions that might not have been answered during the event. Also ask for referrals to people they know who might be interested in your presentation topic. These referrals may become immediate prospects. At minimum they should be added to your invitation list for future events.

Delivering properly designed speeches, seminars, and webinars (online seminars) is a terrific way to generate large quantities of quality sales leads. If you follow the instructions provided in this article, you should see a satisfying increase in the number, size, and quality of leads in your sales opportunity pipeline!

©2005-2008 Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Written by Alan Rigg

A question I get asked frequently by clients goes something like this:

“My company’s website doesn’t generate many online sales or sales leads. What can we do to get our website to produce more sales and leads?”

As soon as I hear this question, I have a pretty good idea what I will see when I visit the client’s website. Chances are it will include one or both of the two most common flaws that prevent websites from generating sales leads:

Flaw #1: The home page focuses on the COMPANY rather than the VISITOR.

“We do this.” and “We’re the best because.” and “We’ve won all these awards.” You know what? Website visitors don’t care! At least, they don’t care yet.

When visitors arrive at a website, they are thinking about themselves and their own problems. What they want to learn (as quickly as possible) is whether the company can help them solve THEIR specific problems. There is a time to build credibility by talking about the awards the company has won, its stellar customer list, etc. But, that time comes later in the sales process.

Flaw #2: The language on the home page is stilted, boring, and includes lots of very big (and probably very technical) words.

Maybe that kind of language works for very specific kinds of visitors. What about the average consumer or businessperson? Will they be able to figure out what the company does? Will they be willing to invest the time required to puzzle out what the big words and jargon mean?

Just about every website will generate more online sales and sales leads if it is redesigned to do the following three things:

1. Help visitors RAPIDLY answer two questions:

• “What does this company do?”, and
• “Is there anything here for me?”

How much time do you think your website visitors are willing to spend trying to figure out whether your company can help them? If they are like most website visitors, the answer is probably between three and ten seconds. That’s it! That’s how long you have to grab your visitor’s attention and entice them to learn more about your company’s products and services!

The best way to accomplish this goal is to tell your visitors, in plain English, the kinds of problems you can help them solve and specific, QUANTIFIED results you have produced for current and past customers. That’s the kind of information that really grabs people’s attention!

2. Encourage visitors to OPT-IN to receive free information resources.

If you can motivate a visitor to opt-in to receive information from you, the website visit is no longer a one-shot opportunity. And, if you deliver truly useful information on a regular and consistent basis, you will earn the visitor’s trust and build a relationship with them over time. This will increase the likelihood that the visitor will eventually buy from you.

There is a catch. Many people feel overburdened by the amount of e-mail they already receive. Why on earth would a website visitor sign up to receive MORE e-mail from YOU?

The best way to overcome this reluctance is to offer to offer visitors something of value if they will provide just their first name and e-mail address. (The more information you require visitors to provide, the fewer sign-ups you will receive.) One very effective approach is to offer a free special report or mini-course that will help your visitors solve a specific, important problem. Make sure your special report or mini-course has a compelling title such as, “Twelve Things You Should Know Before You (fill in the blank).”

3. Motivate ACTION

If a website page is going to motivate a reader to take action, the focus needs to change from you, your company and your products and services to your visitors and their problems.

Web pages that motivate action are not distant or aloof. Instead, reading them feels like a one-on-one conversation between you and the reader. The copy invokes the reader’s emotions, plus provides enough supporting details to enable the reader to feel comfortable making a decision. The copy ends with a clear and compelling call to action. This is where you ask the visitor to make an online purchase, contact your company for more information, or take some other action.

This very specialized form of copywriting is called a “sales letter”. You have probably received sales letters in the mail or seen a similar type of advertising in television infomercial’s. Some sales letters and infomercial’s sound pretty “cheesy”; yet, for decades sales letters have repeatedly proven to be one of the most productive forms of direct marketing.

The biggest criticism you’ll hear about sales letters (usually from corporate website designers) is, “This copy is much too long! Nobody’s going to take the time to read that much information!”

You know what? The critics are ALMOST right. Probably 95% of readers will not read any given sales letter in its entirety. That’s OK, because sales letters are not written to appeal to everyone! They are written to appeal to specific individuals who have the specific problems the sales letter addresses.

Most people will skim a sales letter…IF it has a compelling headline or sub-headline that catches their attention. They may read a paragraph or glance at a few bullets. If the paragraph or bullets are compelling, they may read another paragraph. Once they have read several compelling pieces of information, they may decide to go back and read the sales letter from the beginning. At this point the chances dramatically increase that the reader will take the action the sales letter recommends.

Conclusion

If you want your website to generate online sales and/or leads, it needs to do three things:

1. Help visitors rapidly figure out what your company does and whether you can do anything for them.
2. Encourage visitors to opt-in to receive regular, value-added communications (so that you can build relationships and earn trust).
3. Motivate action.

To motivate action, change every page that describes one of your company’s products or services to a sales letter. Make sure each sales letter includes a compelling “call to action”, whether it is making a purchase or contacting your company for more information.

Change the focus of your website from you, your company, and your company’s products and services to your visitors and their problems – and watch the online sales and leads roll in!

©2005-2008 – Alan Rigg

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.