Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 29, 2008 @ 03:15 AM
This week many of my customers are in "shut down" mode as people take vacations. So instead of giving my usual sales techniques tips, today's post is about a couple of funny responses to objections from my past. Read ahead, and share your own classic objection handling lines with the blog.
"If I had your money, I'd burn mine." I worked with Tim Mattis at the 2001 Dating Service, my first real sales job, where we put lots of nice folks together in the pre-internet dating era. It was commission only, and people would walk in to talk with Tim and I, who were the only salespeople. For $420 a year, each person would receive a monthly envelope with 6 "matches," consisting of a photo and a little background on the person. When a potential customer objected to the price, Tim would respond: "Oh come on, Jim, if I had your money, I'd burn mine."
"It's so easy to use, even Ray Charles could do it!" Vince Amodeo was my sales manager at Modern Office Machines, where I sold photocopiers, coincidentally my next sales job after the dating service. Many of our sales were made by placing a copier for evaluation at a customer site, training the people to use it, and letting it stay there for a week. We closed 90% of our business that way. Occasionally, someone would voice the concern that the controls were difficult to use, and Vince would get a big smile on his face, hold up his hands, and say "This is so easy to use, even Ray Charles could do it!"
Now these are two techniques I DON'T teach in my telesales training course, but when I sit around with other salespeople and have a beer or two, we end up talking about outrageous closing lines we've heard, and these are the two I usually bring up. What are yours?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 22, 2008 @ 12:15 AM
This week and next, many of my customers are in "shut down" mode as people take vacations. So instead of giving my usual sales techniques tips, I'll share a couple of stories from my training world that you might find motivating. If you're at work, they're short, so you can give them a quick read and get back to work.
I've trained and coached hundreds and hundreds of inside sales reps, and there's not one person I've ever given up on, regardless of the perceived lack of sales techniques on the part of the rep. Everyone can be a star, and I'll tell you why I know this. Years ago, I taught school in a Special Ed program. My students ranged from aphasic to dyslexic, and my kids came from east side San Jose, where many of the families were living conditions could be rough. One week, I substituted in another teacher's class. This particular teacher didn't communicate well with the students. She was very set in her ways and inflexible. When I walked into the class, since they knew a substitute teacher would be coming in, the kids were jumping all over the desks, and a bunch of swear words, in English and Spanish, had been written on the chalkboard. Most of them were misspelled. So I stood in front of the class, got their attention, and asked the ringleader to close the door, stand by it, and let me know if anyone was coming down the hall. "Those are some very interesting words you've written on the board," I said, "but they aren't spelled correctly. Let's have a spelling lesson." So I picked the first one, and said "Is this the right way to spell F***?" One girl raised her hand, said no, and spelled it correctly. "Great, I said, let's move on to the next one." And I really had their attention. So we worked through all the words, and got them spelled correctly. Then I erased the words, and said "When you misspell words, it's a sign of ignorance, and I'm not gonna let anyone tell me my class is ignorant." And then I told them something really important. "This lesson is just between us, because if you tell anyone what we just did, I'll be fired, and you'll have Mrs. So and So back here tomorrow, and for the rest of the year. No one ratted me out, and I ended up having them for a whole month. They learned a lot, were attentive, and did their school work extremely well.
The ringleader really had a tough life. Hid dad and two of his brothers were in prison, and he spent a lot of his time beating up on the other kids. But we teachers did everything we could to keep him in school, although privately, many thought he'd eventually end up in prison, too. A few months later, I left teaching school, got into high tech sales, then a few years later started my training company. Ten years after the classroom experience I told you about, I was in a bar in downtown San Jose when I got tapped on the shoulder. Guess who? It was the Ringleader, nicely dressed, and with a cute girl on his arm. I asked him what he was doing now. "I'm a programmer for Sun Microsystems," he told me. I asked him how much he was making, and it was $60,000 a year, par for what engineers were making in those days. He'd made it!
And that's why I know that everyone can make it, and it's what ethics in teaching is all about. When I teach a telesales training course, occasionally someone will hear a concept and tell me it's too tough, that he or she just can't do it. And I remember the Ringleader, and work extra hard to make sure I take a little extra patience in coaching that person. Some inside sales reps I teach are already high level performers. Others are scared, shy, or lack confidence. What they share, along with the Ringleader, is a wish to succeed, even though they may not know how to do it just yet. There is nothing easy about telesales. But the hardest part is getting the job itself. Next hardest is honing the skills it takes to excel. And yes, anyone can do it, you just need the motivation to succeed. Just ask the Ringleader.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 15, 2008 @ 03:15 AM
Today's post is about handling price objections. Overcoming sales objections is a big part of sales, and I'll bet your product or service isn't the cheapest. If you're in the Silicon Valley or in New England, it's probably among the most expensive. I'll also bet that if you're at a high price point, the quality of your product is exceptional. One of my mantras is "when you buy quality, you only cry once." And that's when you fork over your hard-earned money for a high quality product, so you cry a bit. Because it is high quality, it usually performs well over a long course in time, and you've actually saved money, time, and grief over the lifetime of the product, as opposed to what would have happened had you gone cheap and bought inferior goods.
And this is the argument you'll want to use when talking with a prospect that doesn't want to pay your price. There are a few ways to craft it, and here are several of my favorites:
1) Our goal is to build a high quality product that you'll be continually happy with. We can't do this unless we pay our engineers top dollar. We hire the best to build the best product. And we can't hire the best engineers unless we sell our product with enough profitability to pay them.
2) We want to be here for you today and tomorrow, year after year, building great solutions that will make your job (and your life) easier. We can't do that unless we plug a lot of money into R&D every year. This year it was ($XX or X% of revenue --- look it up in last year's annual report for your actual numbers). Corporate America is littered with the bodies of companies that failed because they didn't charge enough for their products and went out of business. That's not our business model.
3) (To be used when the competitor to whom the prospect is comparing you is in your same geographical area). My competitor is a very good company (never slam the competition), but frankly, they're only 50 miles from here, and if I thought they were a better company, I'd be working for them. I want my customers treated well, and I want them to have the best solution. That's why I'm here, and why I want you to be my customer.
4) Our pricing is "fair," not "high." OK, if I could give it to you, I would. But I can't. To arrive at our pricing structure, our executive team asked how we could build the best solution possible, pay for great engineers, support, marketing, and salespeople, and still make a little profit. And they arrived at the price, which is a fair way of doing it. I'll bet your (the prospect's) company does it the same way. So I hope you'll come on board and join us, because we're trying to make the pricing as fair as possible. And we'll never sacrifice quality.
As I was writing this, I reflected on some purchases I made that were tough, because I paid more than I wanted to be the quality I knew I needed to have. One was my car. Another was a house I bought (I did a crazy thing, buying a house I'd never stepped into. Still haven't). And you know, just about every time I make a capital purchase, I ask the salesperson what the next level up is before I buy the product. 50% of the time, I need the higher end solution, and buy it. So go out and be really proud that you're representing a high-end, expensive solution. You can tell a great story about why it's worth the money. And you can tell about a time you yourself spent more money than you wanted, but got a superior solution that cost you less in the long run. You can tell the prospect "when you buy quality, you only cry once." And yes, this is exactly what I teach in every telesales training course I teach. Add this sales technique to your Best Practices playbook. And if you have another technique for handling price objections, post back to the blog and tell me about it!
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 08, 2008 @ 03:12 AM
Frustrating. Annoying. Unusable. These words are three of the most common used by prospects to describe a product or service that isn't working well for them. And they're using these words because they're talking to you about potentially changing to your offering, and telling you why they're unhappy with what they're using now. Many inside sales reps, though, ignore these clue words, and instead of asking the prospect to elaborate on the pain point, begin feature dumping all over the place, describing features and benefits like crazy, but failing to use the clue to begin the process of quantifying the scope and return-on-investment (ROI) value of the problem. Let's talk about how to fix this.
Here's an example of how it shouldn't be done. The prospect is a Testing Manager:
Prospect: "It takes forever to build scripts with our current regression tester, and it annoys the heck out of me and the team, because we're getting pressure to get out the new release. How soon can you get me a demo?"
Salesperson: "I think you'll find that our GUI is terrific, and you'll be able to build scripts faster than your current solution. I can fit you in for a demonstration webinar next Wednesday. Work that work with your schedule?"
Prospect: "Yes, I'll get the team together to take a look."
Salesperson: "Terrific. I'll send you a confirmation email, along with a dial-in keycode. Anything else I can answer before I let you go?"
The problem here is that the rep doesn't know about the problem (he or she didn't ask), and is just going to deliver another unqualified webinar. Maybe the webinar goes well, and the rep keeps calling, but after 2 weeks, there's still no PO. Not only that the rep can't reach the prospect, and the rep's calls aren't being returned. Sound familiar? It should, because it's probably happened to all of us (me included, what I was a junior salesperson). So how do we fix this, and accelerate the sales cycle? By asking the prospect to better explain the problem, instead of jumping prematurely into delivering a demo/webinar. How about improving the call so it goes like this:
Prospect: "It takes forever to build scripts with our current regression tester, and it annoys the heck out of me and the team, because we're getting pressure to get out the new release. How soon can you get me a demo?"
Salesperson: "Tell me a little about that new release, and the internal pressures you're running into."
Prospect: "We have an important upgrade that will fix a lot of the problems in our last release, and included is a new feature set our customers have been asking for. We've got hundreds of customers lined up to buy this upgrade, and they won't buy additional licenses until the old problems have been fixed. Our current regression tester has blown up on several tests already, and the VP of Sales is putting pressure on engineering, because she needs the revenue this quarter."
Salesperson: "Do you have a sense of what kind of revenue is going to be generated when the new release is ready to ship?"
Prospect: "Well, it's conservatively 2000 licenses, and we're charging $495 for the upgrade."
Salesperson: "That comes out to $990,000, does that sound about right?"
Prospect: "Right, and the quarter ends in 60 days."
Salesperson: "I can see why the VP of Sales is concerned. If we divide $990,000 by 60 days, it looks as though there's a lost opportunity cost of $16,500 per day. That's a lot."
Can you see what we're doing here? We're now fully understanding what the ramifications are of not finding a solution. Now you can do your demo webinar. So why hasn't the prospect called us back after the webinar? Busy in the lab, trying again to get the old product working, broken ankle in a pickup game and he or she is out for 3 days, could be anything. But now you have the power to call above the Testing Manager, maybe to the VP of Engineering (and you did begin the sales process by calling high and getting passed down, didn't you?) You can tell the VP that you know that his or her company is losing $16,500 a day in delayed sales, and the VP can accelerate your sale again.
In each telesales training course I teach, we spend a lot of time talking about clues, and how to address them. The clues commonly begin with words like "annoying," "frustrating," or "unusable." When you hear these words, or those similar to them, perk your ears up, stop "selling," and ask for elaboration. It's your key to getting important ROI information that will get you the sale faster. This sales technique will increase sales, and help you to understand your prospect's situation more fully. Add it to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 01, 2008 @ 03:08 AM
Last week I discussed why it's important to be enthusiastic about your solution when discussing it with your prospects, and how it can be a great self-motivator through tough economic times. The business reasons are that you'll increase sales by selling faster and selling more. It also makes your job a whole lot more fun. And if you can't have fun on your job, you've either got to develop a way to have fun, or find another job. Sometimes, you really have to think creatively to generate something new for you to be really enthusiastic about. Today's post is about how you can generate your own enthusiasm through discovering a little more about your customers. I have two quick stories, one about how a customer story from my inside sales days resulted in a story that pumps up my enthusiasm even today. The next one is about something I learned quite recently about my own inside sales training company. I hope both of them will motivate you to think out of the box a bit and find stories from your own world that will enthusiastically motivate you every morning when you get to work.
When I sold software debuggers, one of my best clients was Watchtower Farms. And yes, they were Jehovah's Witnesses, the same group that prints Watchtower, which I'll bet you've had left on your doorstep at one time or another. Now I'm not a religious person, but I sure wanted to know what they were doing buying so many debuggers, so I called up my customer, and asked. He told me that they print Watchtower in every language in which there are over something like 100 speakers, and they had to develop fonts if the language did not yet have a typeface. That's where my debugger came in. He said they also contributed the new font to Stanford University's linguistics department, and Stanford always used it for an upcoming article in its newsletter, the Carrier Pidgin. So my debugger played an important part in documenting the world's languages, and I started telling new prospects about it, because I thought it was really terrific!
Here's another idea on how you can generate enthusiasm. Those of you who've been to my website know I've got some exceptional testimonials. Both sales execs and sales reps are happy to give their real names and companies, and describe quantitatively how we've made their companies lots of money, and their reps a lot happier and more productive. Several people I trained as inside sales reps I knew had gone onto executive sales management positions, and I started wondering how many there were. It wasn't an easy job, but through LinkedIn, Google, and a few other tools, I was able to find over 120 of them. Over 120! Was I enthusiastic? Very much so, because it showed that our training might very well have contributed in several areas to these folks moving up the ladder. So I put their names on my website, because I'm really proud of them. I remember most of them very well, because they were exceptional reps. Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk, was one of them. So was Ingrid Steinbergs, Senior Director of Sales at CT Summation. Ingrid was a Lead Generation rep when she went through my training class, and like Gary, she's really gone places!
In addition to putting the names of these fast-moving sales execs on my website, I tell every one of my prospect companies about them, too. So the point of today's post is that if you think out of the box and analyze what you've done for your customers, you'll find that you'll have great stories to tell about how you've helped people. This is a motivator that generates enthusiasm on the part of both you and your prospect. Prospects love hearing about people like them that are successfully using your solution. So think about some successful sales you've made, and why it made your customers successful. And add these stories to your Best Practices playbook.
Do you have something you do to generate enthusiasm on your call? Share your ideas! Tell us about it and we'll post it right here.