Here are some business tips and sales advice I’ve picked up along the way to maybe help you and your team make more sales and get better use of the leads we send you.
Business and Sales rules that are easy to follow
1. If you are in sales (or any Job for that matter), decide to be great at what you do. Set a monthly goal that allows you to focus in on what you want to achieve. In life or in work. You must want to master your skill. Then follow the way of Kaizen – a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency through small changes. If you are in sales, perfect the art of prospecting, pitching, listening, closing and everything around what you do. If you are a call centre agent, therapist, accountant, welder, mechanic, the exact same applies. There are lots of podcasts, websites and YouTube content to assist you for free – Also Udemy.com is totally affordable
2. Whatever you are selling, understand it as in-depth as possible. Know more about the product or service than you think you need to know. Know your competitors’ products features benefits and pricing. This will build your confidence allowing you to be a consultant and not a sales person. A consultant helps clients and a salesperson closes the deal in the end.
3. Keep a notepad or writing book at your computer and phone at all times and create daily goals and tasks. Write down what you want to achieve that day. Both personal and business related. It could be to book a car service or email 10 new prospects; it could be to read a chapter of a book, watch a YouTube training video or learn a new thing? Then run a line through it once completed. You will feel great and be effective at the same time. Anything not completed move to the next day’s page if it is still important.
4. Focus, Focus, Focus – Focus on your tasks & goals and don’t get side-tracked. If you are in sales and you are selling a product, focus on sales and unless asked, don’t get involved in product development and HR and Accounts. If you see opportunity to improve in any of those areas, escalate it to the appropriate person, but get back to your focus. Keep your eye on your goals and that can usually be found in your job description and employment contract. In Sales, if you notice a trend in objections (more than 3 times) coming up when pitching, send that info to the designated people and then get back to work and do what you were hired to do.
5. Create headlines in your notebook with Do it – Delegate It – Defer it – or Dump it. Put your daily tasks under each appropriate headline. Focus on the important work and dump the rest. This will give you more time to do the important work… or take time off to relax
6. When you are not at your desk with the notepad, use your Smartphone to capture notes and ideas if you want, but transcribe them to the notepad when you can. I use my phones calendar feature and make a meeting for myself as a reminder. I use the subject line to write my note
7. If you are responsible for products or services or innovation – Fail Fast – If you get an idea think about the worst case and best case, try things but fail fast so you can improve or move on – This is also true in sales pitches and strategies.
8. Add visualizations. Visualize how the call will go. Think about every reason a prospect would say no to your product or service and then think about every countermeasure you would answer with. Know how to answer prospects answers before they even ask them
9. Preparation prevents poor performance – Take time before any meeting to think about the prospects and their needs and problems and show that you have prepared.
10. When pitching, add a half second pause after important information to let the prospect think and absorb. Listen to your call recordings of your own sales calls and analyse them.
11. When doing sales, don’t just try sell. Research prospects who choose not to buy from you? Find out why they did not buy from you? Use that info to design new or better products or change your sales strategy. Love your PETTS is something I designed. It stands for Product, Exchange, Target, Trust. Do they actually need your Product? Is it more Expensive or of less value that your competitors or that what they currently use? Having answered the first two questions, are you Targeting the right People and companies? And do they Trust you that you can do what you say or will they take your proposal and simply go to a trusted supplier they already know? If yes to all, then every meeting should end in a Sale. If you answer no to any of those questions you need to look into fixing that issue
12. Ask your prospects the best probing questions that make them come up with their own answers – For example. In my business and probing question could be “What’s the most important measurement for your website? Sales?”
13. Put yourself in your customer or prospects shoes before selling to them – What do THEY want? and knock their socks off.
14. Never waste a phone call. If you are speaking to a prospect and they have no current need for what you are selling, always get something out of the call. Getting hold of decision makers is hard so at least ask for permission to email them information, or cross sell other products you may have and solve other problems or get some research into their business or buying habits or needs
15. Work out what your important numbers and metrics are that will measure your success? Is it revenue, profit, calls made, meeting attended? Work it out – make sure you are working to those numbers and goals, Break them down into micro goals if needed.
16. When in a sales call or meeting, ask questions like you a doctor diagnosing a patient who can’t pinpoint the pain or problem. Help them find the problem. Then offer a solution or cure for their problem. If they don’t have a problem then move on.
17. Learn a new skill every week. Become Good or even great in Excel or Sheets, Power Point – read sales books, or money management book or watch YouTube podcasts, read books relevant to your field or Job, improve your vocabulary, become an expert. Think about what you would know if you learned one new thing every week for 5 years.
18. Check all your outgoing emails and ask yourself if it is professional? Uniformity of font size and font. Spelling, line spacing and very importantly your Signature. If it is not great then get it fixed. Do not send out badly formatted emails.
19. Google Search is your friend – Be good at it – https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-google-search-efficiently.html
20. Computers are your friend – Be good at it – https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/some-cool-keyboard-tricks-that-few-people-know-about and https://blog.grantmcgregor.co.uk/2015/keyboard-shortcuts
21. Read books on sales and business. Read lots of books, but note the source – Not everything written comes from an expert (Beware Blogs) don’t simply read books and expect everything to work the same. Read and think.
22. Use social proof to help sell. Show your prospects testimonials and get many testimonials from happy clients. Write case studies (one page or two pages max)
23. If you work from home, think about using an object to put you into the right frame of mind. If you are in sales put on your fancy watch or a good button up shirt that transitions you into a successful sales person. If you can afford it get a big executive leather chair to work from or a high quality extra large monitor. Make sure your workspace has good sound and microphone. However the best advice i can give is get a good laptop with SSD drives. This makes your computer super fast and you will be amazed how effective good tools are – You can even take an old working laptop and put in an SSD drive to see amazing results.
Business Owners and Managers
1. Do the PETT’s test to find your target market – Love your PETTS (Do they actually need your Product? Is it more Expensive or of less value that your competitors or that what they currently use? Having answered the first two questions, are you Targeting the right People and companies? And do they Trust you that you can do what you say or will they take your proposal and simply go to a trusted supplier they already know? If yes to all, then every meeting should end in a Sale.
2. KISS = Keep it Simple Selling. In my opinion before implementing fancy CRM systems, think about the size of your sales team. If you have a small team, will a well-designed spreadsheet works better? What about a CRM Assistant? Think of the sales person and remove all obstacles preventing them from prospecting and setting up meetings or doing demos. Think about the staff turnover and how much time you need to on-board and train the new staff on CRM basics and advanced use.
3. Create template questions that are used to help sales people but also help the prospect identify their need. These questions are easy to answer and relate to your industry, product, prospect mind-set? In my business, questions like: “Have you used live chat in the past? What where those tool? What did you think of them? Have you considered outsourcing your website live chat?
4. Is your product unique? If not, make sure you have a Compelling Offer – Differentiate but don’t discount if possible. Bundle if in a competitive market
5. Beware Fredkin’s paradox. Make your products easy to choose and distinguish the value from each other – Fredkin’s paradox concerns the negative correlation between the difference between two options and the difficulty of deciding between them. The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less. Thus, a decision-making agent might spend the most time on the least important decisions.
7. If you have a sales team – Consider the benefits of having one sales person that does everything from prospecting to closing, versus making 80% of them experts in cold calling and prospecting then handing over the demo and sales portion to your senior sales people. In my business I have prospectors and i do the demo and sale (I am a small business)
8. Michael Gerber says Systematize and document the way you want things done. Write an employee handbook and treat your business as if you plan to sell the business as a franchise. Even if you don’t plan on franchising or selling your business. Create a business handbook that covers all your procedures. And make sure your employees know what to do and have no reason to say “I did not know that”
9. Every year, take time out with your team and ask this question.. “If I started this business today, from scratch, what would i do differently? Think about the product, IT, systems, Balance sheet and P&L, business location, staff positions, individual employees, etc. Then take action to get rid of the bad and implement the new. Cut bad product lines or employees. Launch new incentives or procedures. Add product lines or change products or suppliers. Ask yourself; knowing what I know now, what would I do differently? What can I change that is within my control?
10. Take action – Make decisions – If it’s a big decision, then wait 24 hours if you need to – and get it done. But beware of Intuition’s Allure. Intuition has its place in decision making — you should not ignore your instincts — but anyone who thinks that intuition is a substitute for reason and data is indulging in a risky delusion. Detached from rigorous analysis, intuition is a fickle and undependable guide—it is as likely to lead to disaster as to success. And while some have argued that intuition becomes more valuable in highly complex and changeable environments, the opposite is actually true. The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.
