Motivation and Enthusiasm Part II: Create enthusiasm from your past sales!
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.