by Susan A. Enns
Do you find that there are just not enough hours in a day? Are you working long hours, making call after call, but you still don’t sell enough to even come close to reaching quota? If you answered yes to these questions, you may be one of the many sales representatives who mistakenly believe that being busy is the same as being effective.
You can be successful in sales and not have to work 24 hours a day. It may be an old cliché, but you just need to learn to work smarter, not harder.
For example, I was coaching a sales representative who was a cold calling buzz saw. From morning until night, he would bang on doors, rarely stopping to even eat. Was he busy? You bet! Effective? Not even close! In fact, this sales rep was on the verge of dismissal for lack of sales production.
It wasn’t that he was new to sales either; he had been selling for over 10 years. The problem was he didn’t have 10 years sales experience, he had 1 year’s bad experience repeated 10 times!
This sales rep knew he had to make prospecting calls to be successful. The problem was that he really didn’t know how! On every call, instead of qualifying the prospect, he was just dropping off his business card at each door he called on. When you think about it, a postal letter carrier could have done that for him!
The purpose of any prospecting call is to for you and the prospect to agree to move to the next step in the sales process, normally the fact find. Not only must it be the right solution, it also must be at the right time.
In other words, a prospecting call is considered successful if you can answer the following questions:
1.Is this company actually a prospect?
2.If yes, are they a prospect today?
3.If not today, then when?
Whether you are knocking on a door, telemarketing, or about to send an email to another social network contact, if you do not plan to answer these questions, you are only wasting your and the prospect’s time.
Before you make your next prospecting call, rehearse a headline that generates interest. Then create 3 to 5 qualifying questions to help you determine if you are working with the right prospect at the right time. For those that are not prospects today, create a follow up file system to make sure you contact them when they will be. Lastly, script a question that obtains agreement from your prospect to move to the next step in the sales process.
Would the sales rep I told you about agree this works? I think so, however, we’ll have to wait until he gets back from attending another one of his company’s monthly quota buster’s lunch before we can ask him.
Susan A. Enns is Managing Partner at B2B Sales Connections, which provides Coaching, Training, Recruiting & Resources for Business to Business Sales. www.b2bsalesconnections.com, http://www.b2bscblog.com www.linkedin.com/in/susanenns, or www.twitter.com/SusanEnns, email or call 613-825-9139.
Sharing best practices in sales and sales management www.salesassociation.org
Showing posts with label qualifying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label qualifying. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Just Making More Calls Doesn’t Guarantee Sales Success
Monday, February 28, 2011
BANT is Bunk!
by Bill Barr
I keep hearing that some sales organizations expect their marketing department to “qualify” their leads with Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT). So Marketing sets up a call center, or uses other ways to “qualify” the lead so that sales can close it. Or sales organizations set up inside sales to move the opportunity to BANT qualified before handing it over to field sales to close.
If all sales managers want to do is get that kind of lead, then more power to them. I think that is Bunk! That’s not what professional sales people do. Professional sales people are the ones that need to do the BANT job. How else will they develop thought leadership, relationships and be able to establish the benchmark for the buying decision?
If all a sales leader wants is for the sales people to negotiate and close, all s/he needs to do is hire fast food workers for the job – “There you go, out the door, next guest please.”
If you are in commodity sales, then go there. If not, read on.
Real sales people should be living in the proactive qualifying stages of a buying process, not just in the reactive “get three bids” stage.
So then, what is a real “lead?” They come in all stages of the buying process. But research says that most don’t get worked because they are not “ready to buy.”
I like ones that are investigating, inquisitive, or not even looking. In other words, early in the buy cycle. Sure, I’ll take the active buyer leads as well, but that is not where the real eagles fly. Eagles want to know the basics of how to reach/contact them and what their job title is, but they also want to know what they found interesting when they looked at us. What was the topic of the trade show speech they followed up on? What was the gist of the ad campaign that got a name? Was it product push, needs focused, centered on new ways of working, or the payoffs of our offerings?
If you know what to do with it, any name is a good lead.
Bill Barr is owner of Sales Candy, a company that offers games providing experiential training in B2B selling. His blog is http://www.salescandy.com/wp/. You can reach him by email or call 336-937 0972. Visit www.salescandy.com.
I keep hearing that some sales organizations expect their marketing department to “qualify” their leads with Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT). So Marketing sets up a call center, or uses other ways to “qualify” the lead so that sales can close it. Or sales organizations set up inside sales to move the opportunity to BANT qualified before handing it over to field sales to close.
If all sales managers want to do is get that kind of lead, then more power to them. I think that is Bunk! That’s not what professional sales people do. Professional sales people are the ones that need to do the BANT job. How else will they develop thought leadership, relationships and be able to establish the benchmark for the buying decision?
If all a sales leader wants is for the sales people to negotiate and close, all s/he needs to do is hire fast food workers for the job – “There you go, out the door, next guest please.”
If you are in commodity sales, then go there. If not, read on.
Real sales people should be living in the proactive qualifying stages of a buying process, not just in the reactive “get three bids” stage.
So then, what is a real “lead?” They come in all stages of the buying process. But research says that most don’t get worked because they are not “ready to buy.”
I like ones that are investigating, inquisitive, or not even looking. In other words, early in the buy cycle. Sure, I’ll take the active buyer leads as well, but that is not where the real eagles fly. Eagles want to know the basics of how to reach/contact them and what their job title is, but they also want to know what they found interesting when they looked at us. What was the topic of the trade show speech they followed up on? What was the gist of the ad campaign that got a name? Was it product push, needs focused, centered on new ways of working, or the payoffs of our offerings?
If you know what to do with it, any name is a good lead.
Bill Barr is owner of Sales Candy, a company that offers games providing experiential training in B2B selling. His blog is http://www.salescandy.com/wp/. You can reach him by email or call 336-937 0972. Visit www.salescandy.com.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Insatiably Curious
by Jeff Goldberg
Insatiable curiosity is a characteristic that the best salespeople have in common. The most important part of the sales process is the questioning phase, so you either have to be curious or act like you are.
The more you know about your client’s world, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to help them. If you don’t find out who they are and what they need, it’s unlikely you’ll sell them anything.
Great salespeople are genuinely and insatiably curious about everything having to do with their prospects. They ask lots of questions, over time, about their personal lives (to establish rapport), their business, how they do what they do, what they want to accomplish, and more to help them to develop a relationship and uncover what makes sense to the prospect.
If the key to selling is asking the right questions, and plenty of them, then the key to being a better question-asker is to make it more conversational.
Nobody likes to be interrogated. It brings pictures to mind of movies where detectives have hot, blinding lights shining directly in the face of their prisoner as they hammer the prisoner with question after question. The prisoner has a sweat-covered face and a wild look in their eyes. Not a pretty picture and certainly not the way to gather useful information from your prospects.
A very simple method for turning what could easily be seen as an interrogation into a conversation is using what I call "softeners." A softener is a word or phrase that comes before your question, and softens it. I'm just curious, would you like an example? Hey, I just used a softener! In the preceding sentence, "I'm just curious," softens the question, "Would you like an example?"
You'll also want to be sure you're prepared to ask questions when you go on a sales call. Once you're sitting across from your prospect, it's too late to prepare. You're already "on stage" and need to be completely focused on your interaction. Before you go on a sales call, you should stop and ask yourself, "What information do I need to gather today in order to consider this a successful meeting? What questions will I need to ask in order to get that information?" Amateurs "wing it" but professionals plan in advance.
The fact is, if you ask the right questions, then SHUT UP AND LISTEN, your prospects will tell you everything you need to know in order to help them get involved with your product or service (Sell them).
Practice being more curious. Ask friends and associates lots of “why” questions. Try to get enough information to figure out what “makes them tick.” If you can do it with friends and associates, you can do it with prospects and customers.
Jeff Goldberg & Associates
http://www.jgsalespro.com/
blog: http://jgsalespro.blogspot.com/
Insatiable curiosity is a characteristic that the best salespeople have in common. The most important part of the sales process is the questioning phase, so you either have to be curious or act like you are.
The more you know about your client’s world, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to help them. If you don’t find out who they are and what they need, it’s unlikely you’ll sell them anything.
Great salespeople are genuinely and insatiably curious about everything having to do with their prospects. They ask lots of questions, over time, about their personal lives (to establish rapport), their business, how they do what they do, what they want to accomplish, and more to help them to develop a relationship and uncover what makes sense to the prospect.
If the key to selling is asking the right questions, and plenty of them, then the key to being a better question-asker is to make it more conversational.
Nobody likes to be interrogated. It brings pictures to mind of movies where detectives have hot, blinding lights shining directly in the face of their prisoner as they hammer the prisoner with question after question. The prisoner has a sweat-covered face and a wild look in their eyes. Not a pretty picture and certainly not the way to gather useful information from your prospects.
A very simple method for turning what could easily be seen as an interrogation into a conversation is using what I call "softeners." A softener is a word or phrase that comes before your question, and softens it. I'm just curious, would you like an example? Hey, I just used a softener! In the preceding sentence, "I'm just curious," softens the question, "Would you like an example?"
You'll also want to be sure you're prepared to ask questions when you go on a sales call. Once you're sitting across from your prospect, it's too late to prepare. You're already "on stage" and need to be completely focused on your interaction. Before you go on a sales call, you should stop and ask yourself, "What information do I need to gather today in order to consider this a successful meeting? What questions will I need to ask in order to get that information?" Amateurs "wing it" but professionals plan in advance.
The fact is, if you ask the right questions, then SHUT UP AND LISTEN, your prospects will tell you everything you need to know in order to help them get involved with your product or service (Sell them).
Practice being more curious. Ask friends and associates lots of “why” questions. Try to get enough information to figure out what “makes them tick.” If you can do it with friends and associates, you can do it with prospects and customers.
Jeff Goldberg & Associates
http://www.jgsalespro.com/
blog: http://jgsalespro.blogspot.com/
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