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Take Our Monthly
Sales Survey
Here
This month's question:
"When prospecting, how many voice-mails do you have to leave before your
average prospect calls you back?
Give us your answer and we'll publish the results in next months newsletter.
Results of November's
Survey:
"What is the length of your average 'face
to face' sales call?"
- 35% identified their average call is less than 30 minutes.
- 43% identified their average call is over 30 minutes but less than 60
minutes.
- 22% identified their average call lasts over 60 minutes.
Review the new audio
program in our Audio Sales Accelerator Series,
"You Can Always Sell More - Even in a Tougher Economy!"
Click here to read a description
of the program, hear audio samples and order the program on CD or in an MP3
download.
Free
Stuff to Help Increase Your Competitive Advantage:
Take an online
Sales or Sales Leadership skills 20 question
evaluation and receive a 5-7 page report to help your
improve your skills.
Free at GreatSalesSkills.com
Receive free sales tips
by listening to Jim's audio interviews or watching two video clips, "The X's & O's Test" and "Where are You
Now - Becoming More Proactive" at
Pancero.com.
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2007 Jim Pancero, Inc.
GreatSalesSkills.com
Jim Pancero, Inc. 433 S
7th Street, Suite 1908 Minneapolis, MN 55415
800-526-0074
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Listen
Cold
calling, or contacting prospects you have never talked to, is one
of the single toughest activities any salesperson can do. It’s not that cold
calling is hard, it’s just takes a lot of work to generate a little new business
and involves the highest rate of selling rejection. Most salespeople hate cold
calling, not because it’s hard work, but because they can’t handle the high
degree of negatives you hear when cold calling. No one likes to work in a
negative environment where people are always telling you no.
Someone once related selling to farming. Most salespeople just keep replanting
and harvesting the same old fields. The older the field, the lower the crop
yield, and you keep loosing prime acreage to erosion (the slow, but ongoing loss
of existing client’s business).
Cold calling is like clearing a forest to make a new field, very time consuming
but will yield a much higher rate due to the “fresh soil” you now have to work
with. How do you feel about all of the time it takes to clear a new field vs.
planting and harvesting your existing ones? The ultimate goal is to spend time
each week doing both.
Now a lot of salespeople are completely against any type of cold calling
efforts. Reasons given include the low odds of success and the difficulty of
finding and then talking to the people you want to reach. Both of these
complaints are accurate. But how will you add now contacts to your sales
territory? Would it be a worthwhile investment to try cold calling a number of
prospects for awhile to see if this idea can help you expand your selling
contacts?
I always viewed prospecting/cold calling as a game. I knew the majority of time
prospects would tell me no or would not change over to me but I had a goal to
wear them down with my tenacity and professionalism. After awhile, and after the
time period most of my competitors would have already given up, I tended to
begin winning this new business over. I’ve always believed that I can increase
my personal competitive advantage if I’m willing to work harder, smarter or more
creatively than my competition.
One of the mental attitudes I always thought about was to think, anyone can
sell, but it takes a real sales warrior to stay in there long enough to win new
cold calling business. Sometimes the toughest part of cold calling is just
getting over the fear and negative feeling of not making any progress for all of
the hard work you are investing. Once the mental attitude is under control, you
now need to focus on your selling skills.
Do you need to improve your foundation skills of selling? How strong are your
cold call selling “best practices?” The most important selling skill to improve
is your ability to answer the question of “Why, based on all of the competitive
alternatives available to me, do I want to buy from you?” That is the toughest
question to answer in selling today, but also the most critical issue you need
to cover to win over anyone’s business.
The reality is that every new prospect you call on is already buying from
someone else and is most likely satisfied with their current relationships. You
have to prove to them that you can do things better, cheaper, with lower risk,
or greater service than their current supplier. How will you change your selling
message to reflect these issues?
Prospecting for new business is definitely hard work, time consuming, and one of
the few ways that can help you significantly grow both your territory and your
income. What can you do this month to either increase your cold calling efforts,
or to see if cold calling can work for you?
We also
want to hear from you! What are your suggestions? Your challenges? Ideas that
can make this e-newsletter even more valuable to your daily selling efforts? You
can e-mail us at
editor@pancero.com.
For Sales Managers:
“Increasing Your
Sales Leadership Skills
By Being A More
Proactive Manager”
by Jim
Pancero
How much of
your management time do you spend being ‘proactive’ vs. ‘reactive?’
A ‘reactive’ manager approaches his or her work life with a “If it
isn’t broke, then don’t waste time trying to fix it” mentality.
With other departments, you can still be successful managing your areas with a
predominately ‘reactive’ style. You can be a ‘firefighter,’ only
fixing problems as they arise before quickly moving onto other challenges.
Though you do occasionally invest time helping your people understand what can
be done to prevent these problems from occurring in the future, this type of
proactive planning and coaching is definitely in the minority of your time
allocation.
But successful sales leadership demands a more proactive style of management. A
sales team needs to be led, not just fixed. You cannot build a successful sales
force by just fixing problems as they occur. The goal of sales management is to
significantly grow a sales force, not just maintain your current performance
levels. How much effort have you invested in profoundly improving your sales
team compared to just maintaining? One of the most critical errors of sales
managers is trying to manage (and grow) your sales levels by only managing with
a ‘reactive’ maintaining style of management.
Even with your full work schedule it is still critical to somehow find
additional time to devote to proactively coaching and guiding your salespeople
in addition to all of the more reactive transactional discussions you have with
your team.
The first consideration to shifting your managerial style is to review where you
focus your attention when talking with your salespeople. When working with their
team, most sales managers divide their conversations spending approximately 50%
of their time on ‘History’ and 50% on ‘Today’ focused issues.
‘History’ focused issues deal with understanding how things progressed to
where they are now allowing you to identify the necessary background
information. ‘Today’ focused conversations allow you to identify what
immediate actions need to be taken to resolve the identified problem. Both
conversations, though positive and critical to any problem resolution, are still
only functioning in the ‘reactive’ management style.
A ‘Proactive’ manager, before ending the discussion, will pull the
salesperson into a third conversation focusing on the ‘Future’ issues of
what extra efforts can be accomplished to either prevent this problem from
occurring in other accounts or to turn this situation from a negative problem
into a positive selling opportunity. As you work with your people solving
problems, consider ending each problem resolution discussion with questions
like:
- “So what can you do to make sure this never happens again with this
customer?”
- “If this happened with this account, then lets talk about how many of
your other customers are
most likely headed toward this same problem?
- Now that you’ve solved this crisis with your customer, what can you do
as an extra effort to rebuild, improve or strengthen your relationship with your
client?”
- “What have you learned from this problem and how can you now change the
way you sell to improve your overall success?”
Most of the problems facing experienced salespeople do not involve personal
productivity or functional implementation issues. An experienced sales rep
usually has these skills under control. Growing the sales volumes and
profitability of an experienced salesperson requires you, as their sales
manager, to help change their focus, approach, messaging or persuasive style.
These kinds of changes involve more than just reactively ‘fixing’
problems but instead require your proactive coaching and guidance to help your
rep redirect and refocus their efforts.
Becoming more ‘proactive’ as a sales manager is more based on the focus
of your comments and coaching efforts than it is the additional time you can
devote to working with your salespeople. The job of a sales manager is to help
each individual achieve more than they would have without your involvement. How
are you proactively helping and leading your sales team to be focusing on the
really big stuff as they improve the way they sell and build their
profitability? And what else can you try doing as a sales manager that can make
you more proactive as a sales leader?
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