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Don't "tell 'em what you told 'em…."

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 12th, 2008.

One of the most frequent pieces of advice I read and hear for fledgling speakers is “Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em”.

In other words: signpost, present, summarise.

The problem is that this leads to deathly dull presentations. By the time you're “telling 'em what you told 'em” half of your audience has either walked out or fallen asleep.

Don't get me wrong – the signpost-present-summarise approach has it's place. But it's primarily for training-type events where you are presenting complex information which needs to be remembered. Hence the need for repetition.

As a speaker/presenter, when you are called upon to “do your stuff” you can have one of three main objectives:

To make a speech – essentially to get one main point across to an audience
To entertain
To educate and train

Most speaking roles at conferences or for corporate events tend to be from 45 minutes to 90 minutes timewise. That's just not enough time for education or training. So as a speaker, your primary function will either be to get a singe point across – a message the audience wants or needs to hear – or it will be to entertain. Sometimes both.

If you're speaking after dinner, the chances are that the emphasis will be on entertainment (especially in the UK, where corporate dinners usually involve the imbibing of significant quantities of alcohol). That doesn't mean you can't get a more business related point across. But it does mean that you must do it in an entertaining manner. Your point must be illustrated with interested anecdotes or stories – rather than dry facts & figures.

So in reality, the signpost-present-summarise formula that works for training just isn't suitable for most speaking engagements.

Instead you need to treat your talk much more like a book or film. It needs to have a compelling narrative, a strong opening, and a strong close.

Personally, I use one of three types of “opener”:

A question to the audience – to get them engaged
A story or anecdote related to the theme of the talk (for example, a story from my early days selling consulting services – usually illustrating a common example of “what not to do”)
Something shocking – perhaps a carefully thought-out insult to the group or their profession, or a prediction of a dire future unless they change

On the subject of shock as an opener, one of the best talks I ever heard was from Kjell A Nordström – co-author of “Funky Business”. Kjell (a 6'6″ tall, thin Scandinavian economist with a shaved head) stood centre stage dressed all in black and waited in silence for 10 seconds after being introduced – then opened with the immortal line: “Shopping and Fucking”.

It certainly woke up an audience of tired executives who'd spent the day planning and strategising. And we certainly remembered what he had to say about creativity.

Ian

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Getting Past First Base

Posted by

Ian Brodie on November 8th, 2008.

Getting Past First Base How do you turn an initial contact with a prospect into a fully-fledged business relationship? It's the essence of sales – but it's an area where many people really struggle.

Robert Middleton has an excellent analogy for this process which he calls “Marketing Ball”.

By the way, if you're an independent professional (a consultant, coach, therapist, psychologist, etc.) and you want to attract more clients and win more business then head over right now to Robert's Action Plan Marketing site and sign up for the free marketing audio and workbook. I must warn you though – within a week of reading his free material I had been so impressed I bought his “whole shebang” package.

One of the core principles Robert introduces via the analogy is the importance of progressing “one base at a time” in sales. You can't expect to go from initial contact to a sale in one hit. In fact, it may be too much to expect to go from first contact to even a meeting directly. You need to take things one step at a time by adding value and providing information to your potential client to build up the trust needed for them to take the next step.

A case in point: one valuable source of new opportunities for service businesses is new startups. Lacking an incumbent, there's a much better chance than normal for accountants, solicitors and other providers to establish a relationship.

When I started my new business, I had nearly a dozen letters from accountants, web designers and marketers – each keen to talk to me about how they could help me (or perhaps, more accurately, how they could get business from me).

To give them fair credit, they had at least made the effort to scan for new business formations to identify high potential clients for themselves.

However, none of them took it further than that. Other than sending a letter to make me aware of their services – none of them did anything for me that would make me want to do business with them.

If they'd perhaps sent me a short guide to start-up finances, or successful small business websites or other useful information related to their business. Or if they had offered me something of value for free – 30 minutes of their time to share some of their experiences on what works well in their field. Perhaps even mocked up a website for me or made suggestions for my marketing approach. Any of this would have demonstrated both their competence and their client-focus – their desire to be helpful and their willingness to invest in doing so.

But no. Just an advert. Just them telling me how good they were.

All that effort to find me, then they couldn't get past first base.

Ian

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Sales Wisdom from Spongebob Squarepants

Posted by

Ian Brodie on October 29th, 2008.

Spongebob Squarepants Ok, so perhaps not the person you'd most expect to be dishing out vital sales tips – but as it turns out, this year's Spongebob Annual (UK edition) has avery useful piece in it.

Here's the plot: Plankton's wife/computer has run away. Plankton, by the way, is the rather tiny, evil nemesis of Spongebob & Mr Krabs (Spongebob's boss). In order to win her back he writes her a love letter as follows:

Oh Karen, you are my computer
Crawl back to me, the world's best suitor!
I went to college, don't you forget
The smartest guy you ever met!
I am so great, I am so fine
And I own you, so you are mine
Remember though it may annoy you
Do as I say, or I'll destroy you!

Spongebob, of course, is horrified by this self-centred poem and so re-writes it. As it turns out, Karen much prefers Plankton's original. But in the real world, very, very few customers have Karen's tastes.

Unfortunately, a great many sellers do seem to have Plankton's writing style though. Perhaps not the “do as I say, or I'll destroy you” elements – but certainly the self aggrandizing, self-centred approach to writing.

Sales – particularly sales of large, complex or intangible products – is very similar to the process of courting: of attracting, maintaining and growing the attentions of another.

You can't demand that someone falls in love with your product, just like you can't demand someone falls in love with you. It has to be earned. And although courting often begins with a certain amount of attention-grabbing behaviour, if it is to succeed over time it must switch to attention-giving. A successful relationship is characterised by growing mutual giving and growing mutual trust. The self aggrandizing attention-grabbing must give way to thoughts and acts focused on the needs of the other.

And it's the same with sales. Once you have the attention of a prospect you must focus on their needs – and your communications must reflect this. As the old saying goes: Before They Care What You Know, They Need to Know You Care.

Onward!

Ian

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Avoiding the "Treacle Effect" when Selling to Big Companies

Posted by

Ian Brodie on September 22nd, 2008.

Treacle Selling to large companies can often feel like you're “wading through treacle”. Progress is slow at best, and it often feels like you've taken one step forwards only to take two steps back.

Often the challenge is not the company itself, or even their slow decision-making processes – it's the salesperson's lack of knowledge of how decisions are really made in the company.

When you're selling products or services of any significant size to a large company you'll almost always have to deal with a complex decision-making process. And unless you're lucky enough to be selling directly to the CEO, there'll be multiple levels of decision-maker, multiple budgets to be allocated, and an approval process of seemingly Gordian complexity.

Veteran salespeople who have worked on key accounts over a long period of time gain one of their critical advantages over “outsiders” by knowing how the decision making process works. But smart newcomers can begin to cut through the complexity – provided they are prepared to address the issue of the decision-making process openly with their potential customer.

Sometimes this can feel embarrassing or risky. It can feel like you're trying to “play the politics” of the situation. But the reality is that effective selling relies just as much on the politics and emotion of client decision-making as it does on the rationality of product features and benefits. If you believe in your product and it's in the client's best interests to buy it – then it's your duty to make sure it happens. And frequently, your clients themselves are less than expert in steering through their own decision-making processes – the coaching you can provide to guide them through this will be much appreciated.

The key to working your way through the decision-making maze is – like many things in sales – down to good questioning.

Firstly, it's vital to identify the key players in the decision making process and to understand their motivation. Typical questions you might ask are:

Who else in the organization is touched by this issue?
What do they see as the root of the problem
What benefit would they see from getting these issues resolved?
How important is this issue for them and is now the right time to be addressing this issue?

Drawing out a decision or stakeholder map with the client at this point can be hugely beneficial – as long as they don't begin to feel you're being too manipulative or self-serving.

In addition to the key influencers of the decision, it's vital to understand the decision-process itself. For example:

What level of approval is needed for different levels and types of expenditure
What is the timing of key events – tor example it's quite normal for project or financial approval boards to meet only quarterly and require all documentation weeks in advance – you need to know this timetable and the requirements – and know how to get on the approval schedule

Armed with this information you'll be in vastly better position to know who to meet up with, what to discuss – and ultimately, how to get your product or service sold.

Ian

PS – Many thanks to my good friend Rick McCann for providing the inspiration for this post. It was a discussion over a coffee with Rick a few years ago which provided the raw material and questions which I've used in this area ever since.

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A Sales Conundrum: Do We Need a Sales Meeting to Sell Nowadays?

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 22nd, 2008.

If there's one thing I know about selling professional services – it's that my chances of making a sale go up exponentially if I can meet my prospect face to face. In fact in my 20+ years in business and over £20m of consulting projects sold – I've only ever sold one engagement (and a very small one at that) without at least one face to face client meeting.

Yet in my life as a buyer of services, I'm becoming increasingly reluctant to meet salespeople face to face. Perhaps it's my age, or perhaps it's that I'm increasingly used to being “in control” in other aspects of business life – especially on the internet. For whatever reason, I basically don't want to be sold to. And I am confident enough in my knowledge of most service areas that I don't need the “help” a salesperson to guide me.

In fact, when I recently bought some marketing information services, I selected a supplier I'd never met – but one that was prepared to provide me with all the information I requested over email. The other potential supplier insisted on trying to set up a meeting. Despite my requests for them just to tell me what I needed to know, they insisted they would need to meet me face to face to properly explain what they had to offer. As a result, I simply put off the meeting to a much later date (that will never happen) and went with the first supplier.

So should a salesperson push for a meeting with a potential client or not? There's no easy answer to this conundrum. Obviously, the simpler, easier to specify the service is, the more possible it is to buy without a face-to-face meeting.

But the key determinant of whether a meeting will progress a sales is the attitude of the buyer. Is the buyer the sort of person who will resent a push for a meeting – or will (perhaps despite some initial resistance) it work in your favour? An experienced expert buyer is more likely to be able to buy without a meeting – but might not necessarily want to do so.

It takes skillful reading of the buyer – knowing when to push and when to back off – to navigate through this. One thing I can tell you though – don't try to push me for a meeting.

Ian

Postscript It's now May 2011, nearly three years after I wrote this post, and this trend has continued. In fact, it's accelerated.

Back then, I'd only ever sold one project without meeting the client face to face. Today, almost all my coaching clients sign up after talking to me on the phone rather than meeting face to face.

Part of the change is that people are increasingly used to buying without meeting people. And part of the change, I think, is that because people do so much research on the web in advance of calling a business. In may case, theyll see my blog posts, videos, podcasts and a host of other material I've produced. They'll get to see if I know my stuff – and they'll get a feel for who I am and if they can work with me. If they can't – they don't call and they don't waste their time or mine.

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Sales: It's the Small Steps that Count

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 14th, 2008.

The element of sales most visible to outsiders is the “big win”. The “rainmaker” seemingly works some magic in a presentation, or big meeting and returns home with the sale in the bag.

This often leads to a belief that the crucial element of the sale was that final event. When people look at what the professional or salesperson did, and what skills they have; they focus on the final event. When they then try to reproduce that performance themselves or train and foster it in others they focus again on that final event – on big presentations and “closing”.

Of course, what they miss is all the small things that person did over time to make the sale happen.

Their initial persistence in sending useful material to the potential client to eventually gain a meeting. The ongoing networking at client associations that meant they were well known and trusted by the key decision-makers. The connections they made to third parties who were able to help and advise the client in related areas. The careful listening to differing client perspectives – and the meeting they organised to help them reach consensus on their needs.

None of these steps individually was enough to guarantee the sale – but added together theya situation where the final presentation was simply to confirm what had already been decided.

Effective “salespeople” (and by that I mean anyone responsible for bringing in new clients whether sales is in their job title or not) seem to instinctively know that they need to repeatedly go the extra mile and plug away at these small steps. Day after day, week after week, month after month. It's not glamorous – but over time it's effective.

If you want to reproduce effective sales behaviour it's these seemingly little things you need your team to be able to do. And it's often these things which are the hardest. Presentation and closing skills are so much sexier – and often easier for trainers to focus on than the real sales drivers – the persistent plugging away at all the small steps.

Ian

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Sales Tips from Angelina Jolie

Posted by

Ian Brodie on August 6th, 2008.

Angelina Jolie One of my favourite resources for professional services marketing is David Maister's series of podcasts. In his Business Masterclass episode “Cultivate the Habits of Friendship” he shares a lovely anecdote about building relationships that bears repeating:

The actress Angelina Jolie was interviewed on television and asked if she had to like the characters she was portraying in order to act them well. Her answer was brilliant. She said something like: “You can’t love everything about everyone. But there must be something there. The key is to find that one small slice of overlap between you and them, and focus intensely on that overlap, ignoring everything else.” I don’t know about acting, but that sounds like a perfect recipe for human relationships to me.

The reality of relationships is that everyone is different, and everyone is flawed. There will be things we like, and things we dislike (in differing proportions) about everyone.

Although it's often said that you get 30 seconds to make a good impression – and that's great advice for how we should present ourselves – we absolutely must not treat others in this way. Yes, our time is precious. Yes, we cannot have deep relationships with everyone and we must be selective. But we must not make that selection based on the first 30 seconds.

We've got to take time and make an effort to establish a relationship with people before making that selection. In my life, the scouser who looked so much like a “scally” at our first meeting I feared for my hub-caps is my oldest friend; and the irascible Scot who everyone else steered clear of was the guy who gave me some of the most insightful advice on sales I've ever had.

Angelina's method of focusing on the areas of overlap and ignoring the rest is a great way of starting relationship and of beginning to find out enough about people to know whether to continue the relationship rather than making a snap decision.

Ian

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Image via ThisParticularGreg

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3 Quick and Simple Steps to Improve Sales in Professional Services Firms

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 18th, 2008.

3 quick and simple steps that professional service firms (lawyers, accountants and consultants) can take to hugely improve their sales:

Cut the marketing and advertising budget in half
Take the money you've saved from this and use it to reduce the billable hours targets of your partners and get them to focus on business development activities instead
Ensure that the business development activities are being carried out effectively

Typically professional services firms spend too much on ineffective “getting our name out there” marketing and advertising – and don't spend nearly enough money and more importantly time on more direct business development activities.

Professional services are complex, intanglible products. Before people can buy, they must know that you are credible and that they can trust you.

Activities which can build credibility and trust include: getting referrals from people your clients trust, speaking at client industry conferences, networking at client industry events, writing and publishing relevant articles (in publications your clients read), organising small-scale seminars, performing and publishing relevant research and face-to-face issue-led discussions with clients.

And, of course, having a content rich website.

They don't include generic corporate advertising and marketing.

Onward!

Ian

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On Passion

Posted by

Ian Brodie on June 5th, 2008.

The importance of passion for salespeople seems to have sparked the imagination of many bloggers recently – myself included. Reading the posts reminded me of my all time favourite Winston Churchill quote:

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.

I can't think of any more eloquent way of highlighting the criticality of passion and belief if you want to sell anything from a product to an idea.

My original “In Praise of Passion” article is here

Ian

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What Makes a Good Salesperson? Answering the Impossible Question

Posted by

Ian Brodie on May 26th, 2008.

There comes a time in every consultant's life when for some unknown reason they feel the need to document their thoughts on the defining characteristics of successful sales people. Well, now it's my time.

Of course, this is a very risky proposition. Inevitably, we all see the world through our own biases and prejudices. No individual's personal view on the characteristics of great salespeople (or great anything) can ever really compare with a more rigorous, scientific study. But often, it's the insights from the experience of individuals that informs and triggers the studies and eventually leads to firmer, more evidence-based conclusions.

I've been lucky enough to work with hundreds of salespeople from over 20 different countries – so at least my own personal, biased thoughts are based on a reasonably large and diverse sample.

So here goes – my top 3 and a bit characteristics of world-class salespeople. Bear in mind that my viewpoint and experience is biased towards people who sell high value professional services:

1. Passion
It's a characteristic that's been highlighted many times before, and something I talked about in In Praise of Passion. My experience has been that the fundamental characteristic all great salespeople share is an absolute belief and passion in the product or service they are selling. That passion infects customers and makes a major difference in the trust they place in the salesperson.

It's sometimes joked that if you can fake sincerity you've got it made. But I've found that almost no one can fake real passion for what they sell. Somehow, some way, customers just pick up on it.

What do you do if you're not passionate about your products? Either get passionate (talking to customer about how they benefit from your product is a good start), get another product you can be passionate about, or get out of sales.

2. Likeability
Before anyone will buy anything from you, they need to trust that it's going to do what you say it will. Sometimes the product or the evidence speaks for itself – but more usually, it's the salesperson who will need to be trusted.

Now it is possible to trust someone without liking them. But in the world of sales, someone who isn't likeable never gets the opportunity to prove their trustworthiness. It's a basic pre-requisite to building relationships.

3. Resilience
As I pointed out in Rejection – Sometimes It Really is Personal, being turned down is just part of the job of a salesperson. Successful salespeople can’t afford to need everyone to like them – they need a thick skin and an ability to learn and move on quickly from failure.

And the final bit – Willingness and Energy to Learn
The pace of change and the need to continually adapt and improve approaches has never been as great as it is today. The salesperson who commits to continuous learning, and applies themself wholeheartedly will soon catch up and outpace more talented rivals who rest on their laurels.

So that's my little shortlist. Passion, likelability, resilience and continuous learning.

Onward!

Ian

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