Author Archives: Logan Rivenes

Why You Need An Email List To Grow Sales

Posted on by
Reply

Social Selling is an exciting topic. As a sales professional, it means a new way to groom and find prospects. Social selling is another tool in the sales professional’s bag of tricks. A sales professional still needs a strong foundation of traditional sales techniques.

What is Social Selling and how do you incorporate it?

In the eyes of the traditional Outside Sales Professional, Social Selling is a way to groom prospects. Help move them through the buying decision using online platforms. The Sales Professional is always going to ask, how will this help me close sales today?Starting an email list is a basic way for a Sales Professional to begin Social Selling. The goal of Social Selling being to move prospects through the sales cycle. I see the email list as a very

Starting an email list is a basic way for a Sales Professional to begin Social Selling. The goal of Social Selling being to move prospects through the sales cycle. I see the email list as a very low-cost way to move prospects through your sales cycle.

You have control over the information your potential buyer sees. You can steer your potential buyer to online resources. Also, you have more constant contact with your potential buyers.

There’s no preventing a potential buyer from looking at competitors. An email list will provide a vehicle to connect with your potential buyers.

Why an Email List

With more of the buying decision occurring online, the Sales Professional needs to find a way to have their message in front of the buyer at an early stage. An email is a very low commitment item to get, and through emails, you can provide value and an effective message.

If your Sales Professionals are anything like me, then they will question the need to adopt new techniques. Usually, it comes from a place of will this help me make quota this quarter (or month).

The beautiful thing about an email list is most sales professionals already do some form of this. It is for an end of month promotional scramble to get a few extra orders.

This is adopting a value-based email rather than a promotions email. Now you provide what Gary Vaynerchuk would call, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.”

The concept is to provide immense value to your potential buyers. The result is establishing credibility. Thus, you can ask for the sale. This is the power of the email list.

What This Means To Your Sales Cycle

The email list means you are constantly grooming your prospects for a sale. The goal of doing this through email is, as your prospects are doing their online research, you get your message in front of them at a critical stage.

The direct effect of this to your sales cycle is having full sales funnel. The full sales funnel will allow you to spend time creating engagement with your prospects. So, as you begin the purchasing process, you have a deeper relationship with the customer.

Actions To Take Today

A few steps you can take today are:

Today, you can craft an elegant email to all your contacts in your CRM or customer database. This initial email is to alert your prospects, customers, and contacts you will be sending them informative information about industry trends, company updates, and any other relevant information.

Send only one email alerting them of your newsletter.

After the initial email, you will want to remove any prospects that ask to be removed. The last thing you want is to get off on the wrong foot with your prospects and customers. Also, for the purposes of this email, it’s better to have your contacts needing to opt out rather than opt in.

At the beginning, a weekly newsletter would be a great frequency, which is not too Spammy. With this in mind, forcing the opt out is not unreasonable. This will retain more emails to your list, as the likelihood of an opt-out is low.

Once you have your list determined, a great starting point is to begin a weekly email newsletter. The newsletter should consist of industry topics that interest you (so you are consistent). Also, it needs to provide value to your prospects and customers.

This requires you have a deep understanding of your target market. Understanding the struggles of your customers and leads.

Once you are ready to send an elegant newsletter, the following resources can help.

Resources

MailChimp – Great, easy to use email marketing program. Uses elegant templates. Allows you to create signup pages. And tracks the success of your email campaigns.

Salesforce – If your company is using Salesforce then you can send email newsletters from the CRM. Most other CRM programs have a similar feature, Salesforce tends to be the most used.

As more and more of the buying decision moves online, it’s essential that Sales Professionals work to get their message in front of their potential buyers early in the research stage.

The use of an email list can be the tactic to get there.

Good luck and good selling!

Your Cold Calling Strategy Is Out Of Date

Posted on by
5

Social Selling is a buzzword. I get the feeling, marketing fuels a lot of the discussion. Possibly sales professionals too. Social Selling is about cold calling strategy.

Why is there buzz around Social Selling?

For most sales professionals, social selling is a cold calling strategy. It’s for getting appointments. Making contacts and getting leads with potential customers.

When we look at social selling, we’re looking at how cold calling and prospecting is evolving. It is evolving to make this process more efficient.

The result when you’re in the field, you are in front of qualified prospects. This is how the role of the sales professional is changing.

The Old Cold Calling Strategy

Only a few years ago, my old cold calling strategy was to use the shotgun approach. I’m talking spray and pray. I would send mailers, fax blasts, drop off literature, call any phone numbers I had to get a name. Then, I would narrow my list down and target many individuals to try and get in front of them.

Why this strategy is working less and less is because potential buyers no longer need to listen to Sales Professionals. Sales Professionals aren’t the source of new industry information. All prospects need to do is Google their interest, and they get the most updated information.

Understanding this, Sales Professionals can now discuss different ways to get our message in front of our potential buyers. Also, we can determine how we are going to get in front of our potential buyers.

Why Is This Concept Important?

Potential buyers will ignore the Sales Professional until they are ready to buy. The potential buyer will not look at mailers. They will delete your voicemails. And they are ignoring your emails.

The result is needing to find a new way to get in front of potential buyers. Enter Social Selling. Or, more accurately, Social Cold Calling.

What does Social Cold Calling actually look like?

Social Cold Calling is utilizing social media outlets, email lists, as well as internet message boards, to get to your potential buyers. With the gatekeepers getting better, you need to determine how to avoid the gatekeeper.

Ask yourself where are my potential customers? How do I get to them?

First, you need to determine where people in your industry get information.

Next, you can get to them through a secretary, a colleague you know, or directly. The goal is to gain an introduction, and use social media and internet searches to do this.

Where Do You Begin

To use the Social Cold Calling technique, the best place to start is LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn you can search for your specific contact, the company your contact works for, and determine if your potential buyer has any similar connections.

The next place to search is places like Twitter. Also, industry job boards to see if potential buyers in your area are active in an online community. Using these techniques will separate you from the competition. They are far more cost effective methods for a cold calling strategy.

Social Cold Calling is going to become a larger part of the sales cycle. Especially as more people move online. No longer is Social Media a place to see what your friends did this past weekend.

It is becoming another avenue for selling.

Good luck and good selling!

You Need A Better Email Signature

Posted on by
Reply

Did you send another email from your phone with “sent from my iPhone” at the bottom?

If this is you, you’re committing the most basic of all email signature crimes. The crime is missing out on a beautiful opportunity to engage with your customers. Alert them to ways to connect with you. Build a better email signature.

By not taking the time to craft a better email signature, you’re telling your customers you don’t pay attention to detail.

All this is conveyed in an auto-generated four-word phrase. That’s pretty powerful. But, there’s no need to worry. You can remedy this with a few tricks from the marketing department. It will increase your use of technology in your sales strategies.

Why a Better Email Signature

You need an elegant email signature. It’s a simple way to convey legitimacy. An email signature provides ways for you and your customers to connect.

This can be through social media, directing them to a website, or alerting them of all the products you represent.

I am a believer that all contact with a prospect, colleague, or customer is an opportunity to provide value. We can educate them.

This means every email should have a place for a call to action. A resource your customer to use, and a way to track all this information.

What Your Email Should Include

There are some obvious items that an effective email should include. Also, some not so obvious, but very effective ones. A great email signature should have:

  • Name
  • Job Title
  • Company
  • Contact Information (phone, email, fax, address, etc.)
  • Social Media Profiles
  • Websites
  • Products of Interest
  • Resources

The above list is quite extensive. You don’t need to include every item. You should focus on what is relevant to your customers. If you find that social selling is becoming a large part of your business, then social media profiles are important.

Resources and products of interest are great ways to alert customers of new products. You can provide pertinent industry information. Really, anything you believe could aid them in a purchasing decision.

Email Signature Design Inspiration

Once you have determined what items are relevant to your customers, it’s time to find some inspiration.

You don’t want an email signature that is large and filled with images. A prospects email server may view your email as SPAM. Here are a couple examples for inspiration:

better email signature example better email signature example 2

Where To Begin Building

Now that you have some inspiration and have determined what to include in your signature, there are a few places you can build your email signature.

As you build links in your email signature, whether it is for resources, website, or social media profiles, you want to be able to track what is being clicked. A few great resources for link shortening and link tracking are:

Google Link Shortening

Bitly

Next, you will want to have ways for your customers to follow you on social media. This is a great way to stay in touch on a daily basis. You can use the above resources to create a trackable link. Then, you can place that link in an image of the social media platform you would like to direct your customers. The following article has a great detailed process for this.

Add Your Social Media Icons

Now that you have an idea of how to build your email signature, you can take some time to craft a thoughtful email signature for your audience.

Good luck and good selling!

Is The Customer Always Right?

Posted on by
Reply

No.

At times the customer wrong.

Sometimes they don’t even know what they want. This is where you have the opportunity to educate.

A great example is airline travel.

The Airline Customer is Wrong

Airline travel is a great example. Despite what customers say, they have spoken with their wallets. What they say with their wallets is very different than what they say with words.

When people fly, it’s inevitable they are going to complain. But let’s be honest, flying is a terrible experience.

Although it is a pretty amazing feat, sitting in a seat in the air, making trips people used to die making (please see Louie C.K. for a hilarious explanation).

But, contrary to popular belief, airlines really listen to their customers. So much so, that they redesign planes for customers based upon what they are telling them with their wallets.

An example of this is passengers are always complaining about leg room. The feeling is that passengers are cattle in the air. So, airlines redesigned planes to give people more leg room. With that increased leg room prices went up. Customers said they were willing to pay more for more leg room.

What was the result?

Customers still went for the lowest price tickets without regard for the leg room. The customer said they wanted more leg room, but what they really wanted was the lowest price.

In this example, the customer was wrong in explaining what they wanted. The customer is not always right, despite what they are telling you.

How do you determine what the customer wants?

A few ways to determine the truth are:

Discovery Period

The discovery period is essential. This is where you have the opportunity to ask questions and determine what the customer thinks they want. If you ask the right questions, then you will get to what will actually get the customer to buy. Asking the right questions is the most efficient way to get the customer to tell you the truth.

Patience Is A Virtue

Exercise patience in the sales cycle. Unfortunately, patience is not in the DNA of most Sales Professionals. It can be developed and is a skill worth developing.

To determine whether your customer knows what they want, you need to spend enough time in conversation to get them to open up.

I know from experience this may not always be possible. But, unless we take control of the conversation and the sales call, we will never have the opportunity to stay in discovery period.

Patience will keep you in the discovery stage long enough to determine the truth.

The Trial Close

Utilizing the trial close is a great way to qualify the potential buyer to see if they have given you the real reason they will be purchasing.

The intent here is to know that you are going to be going back into discovery when you get the no answer. This is the sales conversation game that we all play.

The customer may believe they are always right. But, with the correct discovery questions, patience, and using the trial close, you can determine what the customer really wants.

Good luck and good selling!

Do You Actually Listen To Your Customers?

Posted on by
3

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Nein, ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.”

Okay, then let’s do this in English.

I often find myself in this exchange, as I have relocated to Germany. Although I am learning the language, people love to speak English to me.

I think this is because it’s easier for the individuals I speak with. Also, they get to practice their English. But, this is not an article about my language learning woes.

This is a look at what learning a language is teaching me about how to better listen to your customers.

Listen to Your Customers

Before learning German, I had only “pretended” to learn Spanish. I took Spanish classes for four and a half years in school, and never gained fluency. I was never even close. In my short time learning German, I am further along than I ever was in Spanish.

This could be the result of need. I never had to use Spanish. As a result, in school we just kind of went through the motions. More important than learning a language to communicate, is what the learning a language is teaching me.

It is teaching me to become a better listener. I now need to listen better when speaking German, as I have to translate and interpret what is being said.

What this has revealed is that I am not a good listener.

In fact, I’m a terrible listener. I continually think of what I am going to say next. Either to one up the person I am speaking with or to tell them how great my product or story is.

This is not a good trait to have in Sales.

Listening becomes the foundation of customer relationships. The only way to find out the customers need is through listening. Listening is how we decipher our prospects black box.

If you listen to your customers, it provides empathy and understanding. It’s the best way to understand their business.

Poor Listening exposed

I have been on many initial sales calls where I probably missed a customer queue. The customer letting me know their problems.

The real problem is not understanding the extent of the problem. I now know I need to continuously practice my listening skills. Engage better in conversations. This means conversations may have awkward pauses while I get my thoughts together. That’s ok.

If I understand and am engaged in the conversation, the awkward pause will be outweighed by the solution I provide.

Moving In The Right Direction

What am I doing now to improve my listening?

For starters, I am speaking to people to practice my new language. You don’t need to learn a language to practice good listening skills. A few tricks that I have come across are:

1. Ask A Recap Question

This is an important concept and provides two benefits.

The first is it helps you clarify the customer’s thoughts. You can ensure you’re both on the same page.

The second is that it will give you a bit of time, with no awkward pause, to gather your thoughts.

You Win!

2. Put Your Phone Away

Having your phone out during a sales call is a recipe for distraction. Not only are you continually looking to see if someone has texted or called, but you portray that your customer is unimportant.

This leads to distraction. To the customer, it seems like you’re not listening.

3. Prepare For A Conversation

Preparation for a call can’t be overstated. This is more than just looking like you want the business. It will help keep you engaged so you can ask insightful questions.

The engagement the questions provide will help you listen to your customers.

For me, becoming a better listener is a work in progress. With better listening, I think I will close more sales and build better relationships. Now if my German would improve I’ll be in great shape.

How do you listen to your customers?

Good luck and good selling!