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Train Your Mind To Hit Your Sales Target

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To be a successful salesperson you’re going to need to get comfortable with the number of rejections you’re going to face during your journey. This requires a complete upgrade of your mental software.

Adopt A Growth Mindset

Because of our educational systems and cultural narratives, many of us grow up with a fixed mindset as defined by Carol Dweck, the author of Mindset[1], where we believe that we are born with a fixed set of gifts and abilities that cannot change with time.

People with a fixed mindset tend to perform poorly as they’re more likely to avoid challenges or give up easily if they take them on. They also bnike air max 1 ultra moire black white ราคา welche kaffeemaschine für 1 person nike calças de treino mascarilla pelo sebastian nike air max aliexpress ipad 2019 hülle mit tastatur und stifthalter babyphone mit alexa verbinden veste femme pied de poule marron ipad 2019 hülle mit tastatur und stifthalter hängemattengestell preisvergleich welche kaffeemaschine für 1 person astro a50 ps4 and pc jayden daniels jersey billige matratzen gepunktete strumpfhose elieve their abilities are predetermined, so have a hard time accepting feedback and criticism because they take them too personally. They’re the ones who believe, “I’m just not a good salesperson. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

However, once you adopt a growth mindset, you believe that every failure is an opportunity to grow, and that you can do anything that you set your mind to as long as you’re willing to work hard. Such people are more likely to rebound stronger after setbacks, because they believe in feedback being constructive.

Have a Balanced View of Yourself

One thing that can easily erode your self-confidence is a negative view of yourself. Rather than beat yourself up every time you make a mistake or get rejected, you must learn to have a balanced view of yourself. Accept your strengths as well as your weaknesses. This requires a self-discovery process whereby you reflect deeply on the following questions to identify the overarching themes[2]:

Strengths:

  • What compliments do you usually receive?
  • What challenges do you usually overcome?
  • What’s an important task you usually tackle?
  • What are the times you’ve helped others?

Weaknesses:

  • What are weaknesses you’re aware of?
  • What’s most likely to make you give up?
  • What roles do you actively avoid?
  • What feedback do you receive that may indicate a weakness?

Once you have a clear image of what your strengths and weaknesses are, work actively to leverage the former and reduce the latter.

Practice Self-compassion

Understand that it’s normal for you to make mistakes in your life and professional career. So instead of obsessing over them, focus instead on retrieving the lessons learned, and then moving on. Kristin Neff, one of the pioneers in the field of self-compassion research, has discovered that the three main elements of self-compassion are mindfulness, kindness and the realization that you’re not alone. When you’re mindful, you become aware of the mistake you’ve made and its emotional impact on you, such as the pain you feel. When you’re kind with yourself, you provide the same encouragement and support you would give a good friend. Finally, when you realize you’re not alone, it lessens your suffering.

Make Selling a Habit

To get any good at selling, you’ll need to do a lot of it, so it needs to turn into a habit — a behavior that you do often. This will mean multiple instances of cold calling and facing strangers to sell them something. All habit loops usually consist of three parts: the trigger, the behavior and the reward.

Because getting rejected after a sales call is not your usual definition of a reward, you might need to consciously attach a different reward regardless of the outcome of the sales pitch. This means, you might tell yourself, “If I do 5 cold calls today, I’ll get myself a treat regardless of how those calls go.”

Another mental hack to take action is what Mel Robbins calls the 5 second rule, which goes as follows: If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it [3].

The 5-second rule is about taking control of your life, so whenever the instinct to act on a goal comes up — like when a window of opportunity for making a sale presents itself — you count down from 5, and then take action. The problem is once that window passes, we’ll be less likely to act on it, because our minds are wired to stop us from doing things that are uncomfortable.

Co-written with Amina Islam

References

[1] Dweck, C. (2017). Mindset. New York: Robinson.

[2] Markway, B. and Ampel, C. (2018). The Self-Confidence Workbook. Emeryville, California: Althea Press.

[3] Robbins, M. (2018). The Five Elements of the The 5 Second Rule. [online] melrobbins.com. Available at: https://melrobbins.com/blog/five-elements-5-second-rule/ [Accessed 3 Nov. 2018].

 

 

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5 Common Sales-Related Mistakes Startups Make

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5 Common Sales-Related Mistakes Startups Make

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Even though we broke down the sales prockoaxialní kabel hornbach meia com pompom air nike sneakers nfl jersey sales brandon aiyuk jersey detske lyžiarske nohavice 134 140 kilpi predam dänisches bettenlager lounge set miroir terzo callaway reva femme estiti eleganti max mara nike technical cross body bag ciorapi compresivi pana la coapsa játék hajszárító árukeresö balmain carbone fragrantica Purchase college team jerseys at a discounted price and of high quality ss to the three main steps of prospecting, pitching and closing, as a person who has been selling within the African market for 20 years, I wish I can say the practicalities of day-to-day operations were as easy as they sound.

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Because selling is a difficult skill to master, there are a lot of nuances that can trip startups if missed, and in this post, I’ll cover some of the sales-related mistakes being made within the ecosystem.

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  1. There is No Product to Sell

Sometimes what startups try to sell — mainly to investors — is the idea. Instead of taking time to build a prototype or a minimum viable product (MVP) using the resources they have, they jump from one investor meeting to another to sell them the idea.

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They’ll present facts like what the potential size of the market is, and how their research shows the problem they’re trying to solve is a huge one, and how they’re well-placed to build the solution. However, investors would rather see an MVP that has already been tested in the market with relevant preliminary metrics (number of sales made, etc…).

This is not to say that selling an idea to investors with no product doesn’t work at all. We live at a time when it does — sometimes — but it shouldn’t, because it’s really hard to prove product-market fit with no product.

2. There is No Sales Team

It’s strange to walk into the offices of startups and discover there’s a tech team and a product team, but no sales team. If the startup is at its inception and it really, really, really cannot afford a sales team, then the founding team should dedicate a percentage of their time selling.

Unfortunately, co-founders/CEO’s tend to value meeting investors rather than potential clients even though a strong sales record would help present evidence so the company could receive funding.

3. Selling to the non-decision makers

Just because a company is a prospective client doesn’t mean your point of contact within that company is a decision maker. Ideally, as a sales representative, you would want to bring in the decision-maker to the first meeting, and determine if your solution is within their budget. However, that’s not always possible because of hierarchical charts within organizations so you might need to meet and pitch to several other people before you reach the decision-maker.

4. Targeting non-consumers to pay for consumers

This is interesting and while it’s commonly seen within a diverse group of startups, we’ll use Edtech to illustrate. Products are built for potential students, but then instead of investing in a sales team to sell the product to schools and students, the sales team goes to the CSR department of corporates to sponsor hundreds of students at one go.

Similar to the “sell company to investor” path, this is seen as a path of least resistance. However, even if it appears lucrative in the short-term, it’s ineffective in the long-term because it’s not sustainable.

This action may lead to deals being made and cheques being signed, but the startup isn’t capturing the market directly. Instead of selling to the students and relieving their pain, they sell to the CSR department to create more gain for them in terms of a good press release, etc. This leads to a disconnect from the actual market, because you’re selling to someone who doesn’t really need to use your product.

Also, not many corporations have CSR programs to begin with, and just because a company paid for your program once doesn’t mean they’ll pay again. When it comes to CSR projects, companies like to vary them from year to year, or else they become monotonous.

5. Not following up with clients

Startups think the selling process ends with closing. However, following up with clients to understand their satisfaction with your product or service.

Selling to the market directly is hard.

It’s slow and time consuming but it is the best long-term strategy for any startup. It provides useful market research and as a startup you’ll be informed early on if there’s product-market fit for your product.

Co-written with Amina Islam

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Stand Out By Selling Creatively

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Stand Out By Selling Creatively

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Stand Out By Selling Creatively

Creativity is a very important skill to hone during your sales career. Not only will you need to capture the attention of your prospective clients, but also their hearts as that would help them act on your proposal.

Simply said, creative thinking is the ability to think in new and original ways. For prospecting clients, you’ll have to be creative at getting their attention. Due to the hyper-connectivity of our modern life, most people are suffering from information overload. As a salesperson, you need to take this into consideration every time you prepare a sales pitch: attention is a rare commodity so be creative. This could mean applying your creativity in your marketing channels or in the way that you find leads. For example, for the latter, being creative might mean finding a way to bypass the gatekeepers to reach the decision-maker, which could mean researching where they play golf or which social clubs they’re part of and joining those just to get access to them.

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Following that, while presenting your sales pitch, you should aim to connect with them at a visceral level rather than an intellectual one. Filling your presentation with metrics and data may sound compelling, but social science research has shown over and over again that people are not rational beings. Emotions drive a lot of decisions. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied people who had received brain injuries that specifically damaged the part of the brain where emotions are generated and found their decision-making ability was seriously impaired.

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Data Tells, But Stories Sell

Stories work because they’re an effective means of communication that can capture the imagination and be internalized. Most importantly, stories have the power to evoke emotion. So whenever you’re interacting with a potential client, as yourself, “What am I trying to make them feel?”

Definitely, the goal is never, “Repelled by me.”

You want them to connect with you and trust you. You also want them to be engaged and entertained by you so they’ll like you. Persuasion research has shown that people are more likely to say yes to people they like. Nobody likes to get bored, and definitely, not during a process that might end up with them parting with their money.

Storytelling in selling doesn’t mean dabbling in fiction, though. Any stories told need to be true. Otherwise, engage the potential client’s imagination by saying, “Imagine a scenario where you…”

Also, everytime you go through a pitch with a client, pay attention to their reactions, validating the exact parts that work and the ones that don’t.

Storytelling is a skill that heavily relies on creativity as it requires a person to take different perspectives.

So how do you become more creative?

Creativity is a skill that can be developed through practice. It requires lateral thinking, which helps people generate new ideas and solve problems by looking at the world from different perspective.

Just like any skill, creativity can be learned through practice:

– Because creative people are good at noticing things around them, practice your observation skills. For e.g. Everytime you find yourself in a new environment, imagine it’s a setting in a novel and describe what you see. How do the windows look like? What is the kind of floor? What color were the tables? Another thing you can do is find faces in clouds.

– Borrow ideas from different fields. Creative people read across genres as it allows them to implant ideas from one field to another. Think of how James Dyson used cyclone systems to suck up sawdust in sawmills and applied them to the home vacuum.

– Hold regular brainstorming sessions with your colleagues or your potential clients. The main ground rule for brainstorming sessions is to not criticize any idea and to have ideas build on each other.

– Apply the SCAMPER method. SCAMPER is a mnemonic that instigates answers to the following generic questions:

● Substitute: What can you substitute in your solution to make it better?

● Combine: What two elements within your solution can you combine?

● Adapt: How could you readjust your solution so it would serve another purpose? Modify: How could you modify your solution to make it better?

● Put to another use.Who else could use your solution?

● Eliminate.How could you simplify your solution?

● Reverse.What if you try to do the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do now?

  • Hang around children. Creativity is usually associated with play, and hanging around children gives one more opportunities to play and experience the world from a different point of view.

Co-written with Amina Islam

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Harness Your Energy This 2019 To Become a More Successful Salesperson

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With regard to selling, it’s very easy to instigate the nature vs. nurture debate. Are salespeople made or born?

While we do believe that anybody can build their sales skills through practice, some inherent personality traits can make you a better salesperson than others. Take for example, where you lie on the introversion-extraversion spectrum. Introversion is the tendency to gain energy from internal pursuits, while extraversion is the tendency to gain energy from interacting with other people.

The general idea is that extroverted peoplenike calças de treino billige matratzen meilleur lampe uv koaxialní kabel hornbach balmain carbone fragrantica brandon aiyuk jersey carhartt uk ipad 2019 hülle mit tastatur und stifthalter isolateur cloture electrique ruban checkerboard vans ochre callaway reva femme nike air max ivo black and white nike wiki archivador cajonera carpetas colgantes nike air max ivo black and white make the best salespeople. By nature, they’re more sociable, assertive, lively, and gregarious. It seems easier for them to approach and talk to people, and because they get energized by the presence of others, their enthusiasm can be conducive to influence and persuasion.

Or that’s what we tend to think.

Research shows that it is not the extroverts but the ambiverts who perform the best when it comes to selling [1]. Take for example, a study conducted by Adam Grant, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who tracked the sales representatives’ revenues of a software company over a period of three months after having them complete several personality assessments. He found that introverted sales reps earned an average of 120 $ per hour compared to the 125 $ per hour earned by extroverts. Ambiverts outperformed both groups by earning 155 $ per hour[2].

Ambiverts fall in the middle of the introvert/extrovert continuum and have the right blend of personality traits from both ends to make them comfortable in a range of social situations. Ambiverts can be excellent conversationalists as well as excellent listeners. This could explain their advantage over extroverts whose assertiveness and zeal may lead to a lot of talking but not enough listening.

Selling requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. If we are to liken it to the analogy of a dance, extroverts try to lead so fast that their partners trip over their feet, while introverts get so shy they don’t even approach the dance floor. Ambiverts, on the other hand, have the perfect balance of traits to dance just right.

But what if you were not a born ambivert? Is there a way to control your energy level and build your mental fortitude so you can be a superstar salesperson?

Since introversion and extraversion are personality traits that deal with energy management, there are other ways to harness your energy, including nutrition, exercise, meditation and sleep.

While nutrition and exercise are important, we’re going to focus in the next section on sleep and mediation, starting with the latter as it can help you find an ambivert’s balance.

Meditation is a set of techniques intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness and concentration. There are many types of meditation but in the most popular one — focused-attention meditation — you focus on your breathing, and whenever thoughts spring up, observe them without judgement, continuously bringing your attention back to your breathing.

Meditation is known to improve your ability to introspect (which is good if you’re naturally an extrovert), and also increases your emotional and social intelligence (which is good if you’re naturally an introvert). It also increases positive emotions such as love, joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, pride, interest and amusement [3]. All of these build towards the positive attitude required to face the multitude of rejections that come with a sales career.

However, you can’t expect to reap the benefits of meditation by doing it once. It needs to be a continuous practice, and you can start with the simplest form as delineated below:

  1. Set a timer for five minutes
  2. Sit or lie comfortably.
  3. Close your eyes.
  4. Breathe naturally.
  5. Focus your attention on the breath and on how the body moves with each inhalation and exhalation. Observe your chest, shoulders, rib cage, and belly.
  6. If your mind wanders and thoughts start appearing, imagine they’re clouds that are passing by and return your focus back to your breath.

Sleep is another important key to mental health. Besides processing complex information, consolidating memories and clearing out toxins that can contribute to neurodegeneration, sleep carries a number of benefits for health and cognition. For example, a study reports that morning-type individuals report higher levels of positive affect and score higher on measures of energy-alertness and lower on tiredness compared with evening-type individuals [4].

Unfortunately, despite all the benefits of sleep, we don’t get enough of it thanks to the omnipresence of smartphones and tablets. Research has shown that the bright light emitted by smartphones disrupts sleep by interfering with the production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate the sleep-wake cycles [5].

In conclusion, it’s important to know where you lie on the introvert-extrovert spectrum as a salesperson, and to take positive steps towards managing your energy and building your positivity and mental fortitude through different means including sleep and meditation.

This post was co-written with Amina Islam

References

[1] D. Pink, To Sell is Human. New York,: Penguin Group, 2012.

[2] A. Grant, “Rethinking the extraverted sales ideal: the ambivert advantage”, Psychological Science, vol. 24, no. 6, 2013. [Accessed 25 December 2018].

[3]B. Fredrickson, M. Cohn, K. Coffey, J. Pek and S. Finkel, “Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 95, no. 5, pp. 1045–1062, 2008. [Accessed 25 December 2018].

[4]R. Biss and L. Hasher, “Happy as a lark: Morning-type younger and older adults are higher in positive affect.”, Emotion, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 437–441, 2012. Available: 10.1037/a0027071.

[5] Mayo Clinic. “Are smartphones disrupting your sleep?.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 June 2013.

 

 

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How To Build a High Performance Sales Team

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Teamwork.

It’s a crucial necessity in today’s workplace. Many leaders subscribe to the idea that hiring only A-players will take their companies to the next level. However, there is an inherent assumption being made: that A players will result in A-playing teams.

In a talk given by Margaret Hefferman[1], she tells the story of a man who studied chickens and wanted to know what could make them more productive;

“Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. But then he created a second group of the indinike daybreak uomo checkerboard vans ochre hängemattengestell preisvergleich costume leopardato triangolo Italy nike air max aliexpress scarpe eleganti senza lacci años 20 hombre disfraz corsair ddr3 1600 balmain carbone fragrantica jayden daniels lsu jersey custom baseball uniforms meia com pompom aiyuk jersey jayden daniels jersey converse blanche et doré vidually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding. After six generations had passed, what did he find?

Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They’d pecked the rest to death. The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.”

Unlike common wisdom, the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes it’s less.

So what does it take to build a superteam?

During the last quarter of 2018, I lost one of my best sales teams due to an administrative error. That left me with only 2 weeks to recruit and induct a new team into a project whose aim was to acquire customers for one of my clients during the festive period. That presented a huge challenge as the minimum time I usually take to recruit and train is one month.

Undaunted by the task, I immediately got on my database and pulled out a list of 6 top sales resources that have previously worked on my projects and exited positively. After requesting every one of them to refer at least 5 people, I ended up with 38 resumes to sift through. Basing my selection on the following criteria, I built a new team:

  • Proximity of where they live to the site we work from: Due to the high transport costs in Nairobi, it was important that salespeople lived close to their work stations.
  • Attitude: I looked out for positive attitude, hunger for the job, language proficiency (both English and Swahili) and other basic communication skills.

Despite being a new team that didn’t know each other and neither had prior sales experience nor university degrees, they surpassed the monthly sales target by 36 %.

What was the secret sauce?

I don’t know exactly, but I suspect it was their chemistry; how they worked together.

They coordinated, supported each other, and covered for each other. In other words, they defined their own constitution and played — or rather, worked — well together.

This idea has been shown in literature by an initiative code-named Project Aristotle that Google embarked on to study teams and figure out what made the best teams. In his article titled, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team”, Charles Duhigg wrote [2], “As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘group norms.’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather.”

Other lessons I’ve learnt in my history building high-performance sales teams for clients across the years are as follows:

1)Hire for positive attitude

It’s very important to filter for attitude. Bad attitude will ruin your team. Even if it’s just one person who is toxic, they can spread it to the rest of the team. The upside of this is that positive attitude is also contagious so hiring for positivity works wonders. Since selling is a road paved with many thorns in the forms of rejections, positive teammates have a tendency to encourage one another, keeping their collective spirits buoyed.

2) Share the sales vision from the beginning

Zig Ziglar said, “You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.” It’s important that the sales vision and targets are communicated to the team from the very beginning so they’re clear on what they’re trying to achieve. This also gives them a clear way to benchmark their performance and measure their progress.

3) Lead from the front

While leading your sales team, it’s important that you dedicate time to sell alongside your teammates regularly. This gives them a chance to learn from you and improve their selling skill through imitation, making the best use of mirror neurons; neurons that fire not only when someone performs an action, but also when they observe someone else take the same action [3].

While leading, it’s important not to forget other leadership qualities, such as owning up to your mistakes whenever you make them, rather than throwing your salespeople under the bus. Also, whenever a problem arises, it’s important to focus on fixing it rather than wasting time pointing blame.

4) Convey the terms of service clearly especially incentives

The terms of service need to be clearly communicated to the team, especially when it comes to defining incentives. I can’t emphasize this enough, as nothing breaks a good sales team like vague terms or service, especially when they realize after making sales that the terms were different from what they had initially thought. Such a scene leads to mistrust and an immediate drop in motivation. Also, monetary incentives need to be paid on time.

5) Conduct continuous performance reviews and peer-driven training programs

The last habit of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is, “Sharpen the saw,” which involves taking deliberate steps for continuous improvement[4].

It is hard to build a high-performance team without a system in place for regularly evaluating the performance of your team to define how they can grow and be better. This usually involves continuously reviewing their performance and training them. Rather than overloading the, with a lot of content from the start, I personally prefer to focus on multiple refresher sessions bi-weekly. This can be made sustainable by having team members trained by their fellow colleagues who are at the same rank. That way, they can modify content I’ve developed by giving practical examples from their own personal experience selling.

In summary, these are the main ingredients for hiring a sales team that performs superbly:

  1. Hire for positive attitude

2. Share the sales vision from the beginning

3. Lead from the front

4. Convey the terms of service clearly especially incentives

5. Conduct continuous performance reviews and peer-driven training programs

References

[1]M. Heffernan, “Forget the pecking order at work”, Ted.com, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work. [Accessed: 07- Feb- 2019].

[2]C. Duhigg, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team”, Nytimes.com, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html. [Accessed: 12- Feb- 2019].

[3]”Mirror Neurons”, Brainfacts.org, 2008. [Online]. Available: http://www.brainfacts.org/Archives/2008/Mirror-Neurons. [Accessed: 12- Feb- 2019].

[4] Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic. New York: Free Press, 2004.

 

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From Leads to Clients

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From Leads to Clients

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Have you ever followed up on a lead for 8 months without closing a deal then realized not only will your lead not give you business but also that they cannot? As a salesperson, you want to maximize the number of leads you convert to clients using minimum resources. Many salespeople approach this by increasing the number of leads they have. However, they can waste fewer resources by focusing on quality leads rather than just more leads. This makes it really important to qualify your leads.

Superficially, someone can say qualifying a lead is about who you reach in the organization, what their role is and where they stand in the hierarchy of the organization. But qualifying leads is more of an art than a science, and it requires high levels of both emotional and social intelligence as well as a deeper understanding of human relationships and dynamics.

First of all, let’s discuss why it’s important to qualify a lead:

  • According to entrepreneur Steven Tulman, 67% of your lost sales come from sales reps not qualifying leads properly before going ahead with the rest of the sales process.
  • Qualifying a lead helps evaluate sales projections by estimating the size of expected business from the prospect, thus aids in the allocation of appropriate time and resources to the lead.

Even though qualifying leads would vary from one type of lead to another, having a general process helps streamline operations and leads to a bigger impact on your sales growth. So what are the ingredients of a good process?

  1. Build an Ideal Buyer Persona Profile. This can be as detailed as possible with imaginary — or not — names, ages, occupation. In the profile, answer the following questions:
  2. How does he find you?
  3. What are his pain points?
  4. What is his budget?
  5. What role does he play within his organization?
  6. What does he need to know prior to purchase?
  7. Why would he buy from you and not someone else?

Building a profile shouldn’t be an imaginary exercise especially if you’re already in business. All you have to do is call your best customers and find out the similarities between them. If you’re not in business yet, that information would come out of your product-market fit research.

  1. Understand how long the sales cycle is for the type of deal you’re trying to make in that particular industry- If you’re a salesperson who works across industries, you’ll need to understand that sales cycles vary depending on many factors such as the size of the company, whether it’s a startup or a traditional organization, whether there are many technical aspects in the deal that might require customizations, etc. In other words, just because following up might take 12 months, that doesn’t necessarily mean the deal won’t close eventually, as it could just mean there are many fine details that need to be agreed on.
  2. Know the difference between interest and intent. People who are only interested in buying will ask general questions about the company, but those with intent will ask specific questions related to your demo and pricing, information about maintenance, etc.
  3. Know how much your lead usually spends on solutions similar to yours. Understanding that not only helps you price your solution better but also helps you drop those for whom your product or service is too expensive.
  4. Most importantly, understand the true decision makers in the companies. Just because a person has a role or a job title doesn’t necessarily translate to them being able to influence the project. This is where social intelligence comes in as you’ll need to connect with many people within the organizations to understand where the true power really lies, and who makes all the decisions concerning budgets.

Ride the wave before it forms

Another thing to consider in the pre-qualification process is whether the demand for your product or service is established or emerging. This helps pre-empt qualified leads and get to them before your competition.

Most salespeople are familiar with Established Demand. It’s when customers have figured out what they need and how much they’ll pay for it. General attributes for Established Demand are as follows (Link Here):

  • Senior decision-maker involvement
  • Buying authority
  • Customer consensus
  • Approved budget
  • A clearly articulated need

Emerging Demand is one that is driven by some form of internal or external change. Internal drivers of organizational change could be ongoing poor commercial performance, senior leadership turnover etc. External drivers of change such as changes in legislation, technology or macro-economic trends usually impact multiple organizations at once thus widening your leads. For instance, Kenya’s ban on plastics brought about a demand for alternatives.

Once you’ve qualified your leads, the number of leads you have might be less but their quality would definitely go up so you could focus your resources on each one, naturally increasing your conversion rate.

Co-written with Amina Islam

 

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Why You Should Use a Sales Script As a Compass Not a Map

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Why You Should Use a Sales Script As a Compass Not a Map

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Why You Should Use a Sales Script As a Compass Not a Map

There once was a person who wanted to experience indoor skydiving in Dubai. Before going in, the gatekeeper asked them a question to ensure their safety, “Are you pregnant?”

Funny enough, the person going in was a man.

Now, this is an extreme case of following a script without considering who was standing right in front of them.

But, what does this have to do with selling?

In today’s post, I give my two cents on the debate around whether you should use a written script during cold calling or not [needless to say, a written script during an in-person interaction is a total no-no though the following discussion could apply to a memorizedscript].

My personal opinion is that using a sales script will depend on where you are in your sales career.

Experienced salespeople suggest that you use written scripts sparingly as they could make you sound either like a monotonous robot or an overcaffeinated, high-strung one depending on how fast you speak. This could totally ruin your chance to connect with your potential customer.

You might also become so focused on reading from the script that you spare no cognitive energy on actually listening to what your prospect is saying, again missing out on a real connection and introducing you to the phone’s dial tone more often than you would like to hear.

However, I still think sales scripts are a good training tool when an experienced salesperson wants to pass the baton of knowledge to new sales recruits. As a new recruit, you need to build your self-confidence, and scripts can do that by keeping your thoughts organized and coherent. That way, you’re more likely to succeed in your pursuits and less likely to turn into a bumbling mess during the call, which — depending on your level of self-esteem — could turn into self-bashing and consequently impact your self-confidence negatively.

A sales script also helps you stay ahead of the conversation by keeping key details close by in case a customer asks very specific questions about the product. Also, you can address common objections around your offering before the customer brings them up.

Essentially, the main benefit of having a script is preparation. As an inexperienced salesperson, role-playing the script with your team allows you to imagine different scenarios that could unfold and help you be prepared for each and every single one of them.

Scripts also give you a safety net on days when your performance is not stellar, which is something that everybody goes through.

Having listed out the merits of using a script, it must be seen as a compass, not a map. In other words, it only exists as a reference and a guide to the conversation, not as a detailed map.

When it comes to interactions between people, the secret behind building rapport is personalization. If that were not the case, selling would be one of the occupations at risk of complete automation.

As it stands right now, according to a study conducted by McKinsey to estimate the percentage of tasks that could be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology in various occupations, 49 % of day-to-day of sales-related tasks could be automated.

The remaining 51 % is where you bring in the human factor to build trust and make a personal connection. Which is all good, because artificial intelligence and automation can handle tasks such as scheduling and keeping a sales pipeline organized, but can it really make someone laugh or feel like their lives will be turned around by the product or service you’re selling?

With that said, as you gain more experience as a salesperson, you’ll learn to take control of any conversation with a potential customer. We live in a cluttered world, and to rise above the noise, it is imperative you grab their attention and be memorable by eliciting positive feelings through personalization.

Also, because we live in a world where the buyers themselves have changed, sales people have to be more responsive to that change. In studies on experiences that are designed to be purely digital like e-commerce, results have shown that people still crave human interactions.

In conclusion, remember that selling is a human process and though cold calling might have its perks in terms of efficiency, the real foundation of selling is long-term relationship building, which means at some point you have to get off the phone and meet your potential customer in person.

“The big trend for 2018 is conversational selling…Trying to treat them more like a human, really engaging with the prospect on a one-to-one basis, and tailoring the message to who they are and their needs at the time.”

— Marko Savic, CEO and Founder, FunnelCake [ Source]

 

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Why You Shouldn’t Fall Off The Bandwagon of Lead Generation

success, strategy, business

Why You Shouldn’t Fall Off The Bandwagon of Lead Generation

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Being at the helm of your own company has many challenges. One of the main ones is balancing client acquisition with work execution. With only twenty four hours available to you every day, it’s always tempting to lean towards the task you find easier or more enjoyable.

For me, that’s usually work execution.

Which means that I struggle when it comes to staying religiously disciplined while generating leads and acquiring new clients.

What usually happens is this: at the beginning of every quarter, I start off with enthusiasm, but then I slow down the process of generating new leads, as I turn my focus towards work execution.

However, this would eventually catch up with me due to the turbulent nature of the market I work in.

What should drive your sales process is actively generating leads rather than relying solely on referrals and upselling to current clients. Also, keep in mind that industry statistics show that 63% of consumers requesting info on your company today will not purchase for at least 3 months, so you need to always stay ahead of the game.

Referrals are usually a good thing as they’re a sign of clients who were satisfied enough to pick up the phone and recommend you to their peers.

But you can’t always count on them.

Also, clients will primarily refer new clients who are at their level of the financial spectrum, which could make you plateau if your aim is to continuously acquire bigger projects.

Focusing on expanding business off of our current client base is another easy thing we tend to do as business owners but it can be very risky.

I learned this lesson the hard way when during the second quarter of 2016, a new marketing director joined one of my top clients. The new head was skilled at pitching for extra budget and within 3 months, the marketing activities we were executing lead to a spike of 40 % in revenues.

However, during the first quarter of 2017, a new regional management team took over, drastically cut the budget, sending our revenues into a nosedive. This sent us scampering and suddenly, we had to ramp up our lead generation machine.

It did not have to happen that way.

The mistake we made there was relying on that account to generate revenues when we could have diversified by acquiring more clients.

Define Lead Generation Goals Rather Than Revenue Related Goals

It is common for salespeople to define revenue-related goals. So when you close enough deals to hit that revenue (even if it’s just from a single client), lead generation takes a backseat.

However, what you need to do is set goals related to lead generation activities:

  • Number of leads reached out to (on Linkedin, through cold calling or referrals)
  • Number of referrals followed up on
  • Lead conversion

How I learnt to set those goals is to use my own team’s historical data to determine the number of leads we need to periodically generate to guarantee growth. For example, in one of our most productive quarters to date, we had 21 leads, followed up on 16 of them, and converting 25 % to business that lead to our surpassing our revenue targets by 49%.

Armed with this information, generating 20 leads every quarter has now been set as a goal so we can plan ahead.

What if you don’t have capacity?

Maybe you shy away from generating leads because you’re worried about converting so many of them into clients that you find it difficult to deliver due to stretched resources. The truth is, you don’t really know your capacity for execution until you’re operating at your limits. One of the quotes by Grant Cardone, the author of 10x rule, “Never lower your target; increase your actions.”

Unless you’re working on a reimbursement system, where you have to put your own resources to run projects before you get paid, new clients can also help you expand your capacity as they come equipped with resources that could help you free up some of your time — e.g. training a new sales team. You’ll never know until you have those conversations with your leads.

Overall, remember that if you’re focusing on growth, you’ll always need to keep your lead generation running in the background

 

 

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How to Maximize Your Landing Pages

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How to Maximize Your Landing Pages

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In Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go. He tells her it depends on where she’s going.

“I don’t much care where,” Alice said.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Sometimes you find people set up websites for their products and services without any inkling of an idea about what their goal for it is. What happens is website visitors stumble onto it, and quickly stumble out of it.

Money and effort spent posting blog posts, optimizing content for SEO, and driving traffic to the site go wasted when you succeed in getting your target audience’s attention but fail toconvert them to paying customers — unless your goal is purely to educate and brand.

If the purpose of your website is to sell a product or service, however, then it’s important to steer your target audience in the right direction, and set up an effective landing page.

A landing page is a powerful sales tool as it is a dedicated webpage that drives visitors to complete a single goal or call to action. Its main mission is conversion — of prospective customers to paying ones.

So how do you maximize conversion on your landing page?

There are best practices to remember while designing landing pages, and those are:

  • Speak to your target audience. Empathize with them by highlighting how you’re removing their pain points. More importantly, in line with what Simon Sinek talks about in his famous TED talk, tell them why they are parting with their hard-earned money to buy your products/services. Most importantly, remember that a landing page is not yourblog where you rant or wax lyrical about your life. That’s what your blog is for.
  • Make sure your content is engaging. With so many landing pages copying each other’s style, be a little creative to engage your audience. Provide short videos rather than text. However, if your target audience is in rural areas of developing countries where the cost of data is high and connection speeds are low, you might want to stick to text.
  • Be concise. Besides the fact that it displays simple courtesy when you make it clear you don’t want to waste anyone’s time, an eye-tracking study shows that it takes users 2.6 seconds for their eyes to land on that area of a website that most influences their first impression. So the sooner you get to the point, the better.
  • Provide testimonials and case studies of people who are happy with your solution. Also, provide a money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work for them.
  • Give a clear, bright call-to-action that draws the reader’s attention.

How effective is an effective landing page?

To measure the effectiveness of a landing page, you’ll need to calculate its conversion, which is defined as the ratio of the number of people who buy the product and/or service to the number of people who visit the landing page.

But to understand how effective is effective, you can benchmark it against statistics provided by ImpactBound that states, “The average conversion rate falls around 2.35 %. The top 25 % are converting at 5.3 % while the top 10 % are looking at 11.45 % and above.”

However, it’s important to note that various factors such as your industry, product or service, target audience greatly influence the conversion rate.

“I’m here to help you.” — Adding Interactive Chats to Your Landing Page

Due to their prevalence, landing pages could sound both spammy and impersonal, so nowadays, companies are modifying them by adding an interactive chat window manned by actual people who ask, “Do you have any questions? I’m here to help you.”

This helps personalize the experience for the prospective customer. This tool comes with its own set of best practices, such as:

  • Give the visitor some time to peruse your website before letting the chat pop open. Otherwise, they’re more likely to close it as they wouldn’t have had any questions yet.
  • Mix up your default chat greeting and offline messages. When the greeting always starts the same way, it makes the chat sound like a bot, which defeats the purpose of personalization and interactivity that these tools are supposed to add.
  • Respond to chats quickly. Waiting for someone to reply to you is frustrating. It’s better to not have the chat if you’re not going to manage it well.
  • The people responding to visitors should have some sales experience. Rather than pick entry-level workers who are focused on customer service, man the chat with salespeople as those are more driven to close to the sale.

Keep Testing, Tracking, and Learning

The good thing about websites is the ease with which tracking can be done. Also, perform A/B tests to measure the effectiveness of different designs, and see how each impacts conversions.

Just like many things, designing an effective landing page is more of an art than a science, so keep on learning and visiting different landing pages to see what works and what does. There are also various blog posts that list out the best landing pages, and break down the reasons on why some elements work and other don’t, such as this one.

Last but not least, remember to use landing pages as any other sales tool. Make sure to quantify the goals attached to it, and work to hit those goals.

Written with Amina Islam

 

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Frame Your Product As a Painkiller Not a Vitamin

pill, capsule, medicine

Frame Your Product As a Painkiller Not a Vitamin

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Pain is a powerful motivator.

It drives people to do anything in their power to stop it.

Now.

It’s very good to understand this while framing your product for sale because in some cases you need your potential customer to view it as a painkiller rather than a vitamin. It comes as no surprise that due to the complex and challenging nature of the market, customers’ expectations are rising. It’s getting harder to do business nowadays, and rise above the noise to convince customers to part with their hard-earned cash.

So when you frame your product like a vitamin that is nice to have and might get your customers benefits in the long term, you are more likely to face more rejections because they don’t find the delayed gratification enough reason for immediate purchase. However, when your product addresses short-term pains, then your probability of closing more sales increases.

For some products, the classification between painkillers and vitamins is easy. For example, productivity tools, and content aggregators tend to fall under the vitamin category, while products that help you satisfy a regulatory requirement or win sales.

However, if you’re unsure, how do you even know if the product you’re trying to sell is a painkiller or a vitamin?

  • Measure the length of your sales cycle — people and businesses with real pain push for short sales cycles
  • Take note of how your customer acquisition metrics. When you get more customers through referrals and inbound leads rather than outbound leads, chances are high you’re in the painkiller business.

But just because you see your product as a vitamin doesn’t mean that the customer shares that perspective. If you talk to enough customers and listen to them, you might realize there’s a pain your product is relieving you might not even be aware of. And listening to your customers doesn’t need to happen in person, but could be done by gathering stories around your product through customer service channels, and on social media.

Another thing to understand while selling is how context always matters when it comes to making a purchase. Sometimes how one product is perceived would depend solely on your customer, their needs and problems. Some might view your product as a vitamin while others might view it as a painkiller. To understand the context, you’ll need to do in-depth interviews with your current customers to understand a few basic things. For B2C customers, you would need clarity on what was happening for them to purchase your product? How does it tie in with any personal goals they might have? For B2B customers, how was the business performing, what was happening around them to make them reach out to your product?

This makes it necessary to have a clear understanding of who your user is, or defining your user profile, which is why there needs to be continuous alignment between sales and marketing departments. Some of the activities the two departments would need to align on are:

  • Persona Profile Development: Persona profile is a detailed description of your target customer, capturing everything from demographic information to hobbies, values, fears, goals, and challenges.
  • Brand Positioning and Messaging: Understanding how your brand is perceived internally and externally is crucial for your organization. Sales teams can help marketing teams identify gaps in brand consistency, and together they can address a plan to improve them.

But what if your product is a vitamin that can’t be framed into a painkiller in any way? There are some sales strategies you could use:

  • Talk money: At the end of the day, if you can make a case about how your product increases revenue or reduces cost, clients will be more willing to be sold on it.
  • Build Credibility: This is done through testimonials, case studies with real clients, focusing on the impact of your product. Because the timeline between the purchase and the value might be more extended for vitamins, the more real-life examples of the ‘ultimate’ value — even if delayed — would need to be communicated, for the clients to be able to make a decision now.

Last but not least, remember that sales is a numbers game. No sales call goes to waste. Even rejections can be seen as good market research as even if you do not close a deal with a lead, you still gain enough by listening to them to understand their perception of your product.

Co-written with Amina Islam

 

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