Sales Tips to Grow you Business *** Lease a Sales Rep

Growth in the Economy 04/13/2012

Growth in the Economy

In 2012, Corporate America is strong, companies are growing, the stock market is up. S&P 500 companies are making more money today than in the last 5 years. 2-3 trillion dollars of excess cash on the books in large enterprises. Unemployment going down.

Over the last 2 quarters, we as a nation have focused on minute factors and information about certain aspects of the economy, like gas & food prices. These are important issues to families and needs to be addressed.

But, the big picture is we are growing and overall, we are better that we were 2 years ago. The real issue is the “uncertainty”. If you remove the uncertainty, confidence increases, money moves from the sidelines, businesses invest and continue to hire, and we have a BOOM!

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More Sales=No Fear 03/28/2012

Fear is the main obstacle to success in business, as well as elsewhere.

Don’t let it rule your life.

Most people aren’t as successful as they might be, simply because their fear is keeping them from taking action.

Maybe it’s a fear of rejection, or maybe it’s fear of failure. Maybe it’s fear of doing the wrong thing, or fear of the boss, or a customer. The end result is the same: You don’t take the risks necessary to make yourself successful.

This is not to say that being completely fearless is a good idea. Fearless people do stupid things; as the saying goes, they “rush in where angels fear to tread.” When it comes to fears, the trick is to understand them, know why they’re there–and then overcome them when it’s necessary to take action in order to achieve your goals.

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There are five basic ways to do this:

1. Increase Your Familiarity
The more you do something that scares you, the easier it becomes. Take, for example, the most common fear for people who are selling: fear of closing. Treating a sales cycle as a series of small closes makes closing the deal easier when it’s finally time to ask for the business.

2. Rehearse Courage Mentally
When it comes to emotions, including fear, your brain can’t differentiate between what it imagines and what’s actually happened in the real world. If you repeatedly rehearse something in your mind, while at the same time visualizing yourself as being calm, confident and collected, your behavior in the real world will imitate your imagination

3. Reframe the Fear
Create a comparison in your mind that makes your fear seem trivial. For example: There are millions of people in this world who have to worry about whether they’re going to eat today. Against that perspective, what have you got to be afraid of? I mean, really?

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4. Re-associate the Fear
Ever been to a Six Flags amusement park? If so, you probably paid a fair amount of money … for the privilege of being frightened out of your wits. Taking risks in business is, in fact, a lot like getting on a roller coaster — except that you get to do some steering, so you’re actually a bit more in control. It turns out that fear you’re feeling isn’t really fear after all. It’s excitement!

5. Make the Fear Useful
Far from being a debilitating emotion, fear–when viewed from the right perspective–is actually just a signal that you need to do something. If you’re afraid to ask for the business, for example, it’s just your subconscious mind telling you that it’s getting close to the point where you need to ask for the business. It may sound weird, but it’s true: “Feel the fear, then do it anyway.”

Put the above techniques in your mental bag of tricks, and your fears—no matter what they are—will stop holding you back.

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Call 212-518-2477 or e-mail us at:
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Warmly,

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Build Trust: Slam Your Industry 02/25/2012

The initial meeting between a seller and a prospect is a critically important time for the seller. First impressions will almost always determine the trajectory of the sales process. Make a powerful impression and your sales process will be launched upward but just a few missteps at the beginning might cause the whole enterprise to sputter and fall flat. Or crash and burn.

Sellers certainly know this – which is why they get pumped up about securing the initial call. Proposals are prepared and rehearsed. Hair gets combed and clothes get pressed. This is our time to shine.

But, what exactly are we supposed to be accomplishing during the initial meeting? The answers vary by the type of selling in which one engages. For those of us who must uncover needs, wants, desires, goals and objectives prior to customizing a specific solution, the initial meeting is all about two action items: 1) Gauging our level of credibility and 2) Beginning to establish trust.

By far, the harder of these objectives is establishing trust. When someone first meets with a person they don’t know, they do not trust them at all. That’s not just true in sales, it’s just normal human behavior. People are guarded around strangers.

Many sellers attempt to build trust by finding and exploiting commonalities between themselves and the prospect. While this works fine at a cocktail party, this technique is fraught with land mines in a business setting.

Instead of something trite and easily recognized as a selling technique, try something completely different: slam your industry. Let’s face it, the prospect is already thinking that sellers are all the same and that you’re going to try to dazzle them with your credentials whether they be corporate (#1 for the last five years in customer satisfaction!) or personal (President’s Club winner in two of the last three years!).

Instead, acknowledge the problems with doing business in your industry. In practice, it would look something like this:

Prospect: “So, tell me about your radio station.”

Seller: “Absolutely. First, though, I want to let you know that there is a problem with the radio industry in general. We’ve trained sellers to lead with the credentials of their radio stations. So, we trot out rankers and other reports that show we are #1 in this, that or the other. After a while, prospects come to realize that every station can’t be #1, so they don’t know whom to believe. They find it safest to believe no one and we end up starting business relationships with extremely skeptical prospect who are suspicious of our motives. Have you found that to be the case?”

Prospect: (after a stunned silence) “Yes. We have that problem with all media sellers, not just radio but TV, cable, print, billboards – all of them.”

Seller: “Yeah. That is definitely a problem that we’ve created and one of the results is that clients and advertising agencies have tried to find ways to commoditize our business and compare prices between us with artificial means that don’t necessarily measure the nuances that different stations bring to the table. For those reasons and many more, that is why we’ve decided to do something completely different.”

At this point, the prospect will say something but the meaning will always be “tell me more” and you will have a completely engaged prospect who is willing to exchange ideas. The reason for their engagement will be that they trust you – if not completely, then at least a little more than they trust everyone else in your industry.

Let’s try an example for those who sell directly to consumers in their homes:

Prospect: “So, tell me what it’s going to cost me to replace my air conditioner.”

Seller: “Of course. First, though, I wanted to take some time to describe a problem in the HVAC business. Residential HVAC systems are custom built in each home to specifications identified by the seller to solve the problem of effectively heating and cooling the designated space. Since most home owners buy HVAC systems once every 7 – 10 years – if ever – they don’t have the time to become experts at pricing HVAC systems. The result is a very wide price differential between reputable HVAC companies. Even though we’re looking at the same space, we come up with different solutions based on our level of experience, the types of systems we sell, the expertise of our production crews, etc. Home owners end up confused and they view us with a lot of skepticism.”

Prospect: “Wow. I’ve never heard anybody just come out and say it like that. I mean, it’s true but most companies just come here and say they are the best and everyone else isn’t.”

Seller: “Yes, it’s true and it makes us all look bad. That’s why we’ve developed a completely different philosophy.”

And, an example in the financial services business:

Prospect: “Why should I choose your firm for my investment needs?”

Seller: “There are several reasons, but first I wanted to let you know of a problem in the financial services industry. In an effort to establish our mutual funds and other financial products as being best in class, we quote rates of return in time periods that make us look good. If the one year rate of return is the highest relative to our competition, we quote that. If the five year is best, we’ll quote that. Unfortunately, we’ve all engaged in this game and the result is that our customers don’t know whom to believe about what. That’s a real problem for an industry that relies on trust and credibility to grow its customer base.”

Prospect: “Yeah, it’s true. Everybody’s mutual fund performance is ‘best in class’. The sales materials don’t make it easier to choose which firm is going to be best for me.”

Seller: “We agree with you. That’s why we’ve decided to do something completely different.”

By acknowledging what your prospect is already thinking, you become a little more real, a little more human and a little more trustworthy. Pulling back the curtain and exposing your industry makes it appear that you have nothing to hide. That vulnerability builds trust and provides you with an advantage not easily duplicated by your competition.

With all things being equal – and with tough competition in every industry they often are the sale is more likely to go to the seller that is more trustworthy.

Now go close some deals!

Gilbert Pagan
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Most consumers dont buy from Facebook 02/04/2012

Given that Facebook recently filed to go public (probably in May 2012), this could be a potential problem for investors.

They are seeking to raise 5 billion dollars on a valuation of 100 billion dollars, to cash out early investors.

Although Facebook has over 850 million users and they have done a great job in growing the user (consumer) base, they are still having great difficulty in converting those users to buyers of advertiser services. This coming from a sales guy.

Let me put this in context. When Google went public they valued the company share price (at 85.00 per share) at 5x sales, and Amazon went for 2x sales. Facebook will be going for 25x sales! Their revenue model is still being figured out.

It will be very difficult to justify the valuation of 100 billion dollars. Facebook at this time is struggling to monetize their user base. Which means to generate money on each user.

Let’s look at active revenue now for Facebook. For each user they are generating about
$6-7 dollars in revenue. That is lower than what Pandora.com, the online music site gets per user, and slightly above what Zynga, the social gaming site generates. But Facebook’s users are massive in comparison.

You would think the time that people spend on Facebook that the dollar spend per user would be higher than Google. Google is at about $16.00 per user. Google has been around longer and has figured out their revenue model. Facebook is still trying to figure it out.

Much of the Facebook IPO is hype, and although they have a lot of potential, they still need to figure out how to covert users to purchasers of advertiser products and services. Because that will drive revenue and the share price.

My assessment is that people go to Facebook to be social and don’t pay attention, at least today, to advertisers. Those are they ads that show up on the right of your screen when on Facebook.

What this IPO will do, will be to get Google nervous. Because Facebook and Google are are competing for your time, your mind-share and your money.

Next time you go to Facebook look at the ads that show up on the right of your screen to see how you are being targeted by advertisers based on gender, age, professional status and hobbies.

Gilbert Pagan
Lease A Sales Rep
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