Sales folks are responsible for growth and the future of a company. A good head of sales always wants to ensure that he has a good sales fleet. Today I want to talk about some of the qualities that differentiate between a good and a great sales person. Both know their customers as well as their products and they always meet their quota.  There are however, some differences in the way they work and approach.

• Good sales folks have a positive attitude and are always motivated; Great sales folks stay hungry and are always challenging themselves.

• Good sales folks will make their calls, do their research and of course knows their products; Great sales people will go that extra mile to understand the industry trends and try to find out everything about their prospect before even picking up the phone.

• Reacting to demand is what good sales people do while a great sales person will create demand.

• Good sales people sell ideas and great sales people sell visions.

• Good sales folks have the focus and record conversations; Great sales have high attention to detail & follow up.

• Good sales people are knowledgeable and know how to wow a prospect; Great sales people will first focus on building a relationship and ask the right questions, probe and inquire challenges and will try to understand the prospect’s view. In effect meeting prospect’s needs.

• Good sales people build relationships based on their product knowledge; Great sales people build relationships based on their knowledge of the industry, the trends, and most importantly the ability to identify solutions based on their knowledge.

• Good sales folks focus on individual goals while great sales folks focus on the growth of the company and his customers.

• Good sales people feel that product knowledge is everything; Great sales people think about the prospect’s business & wider implications.

• Both communicate well but a great sales person will not only communicate well and clearly but also present with impact.

Did we just change the “physics” of the classic definition? (The moneyman in me
just read that “cheer you up on Monday” greeting cards are a multi-million dollar
business!) Well! RIP Newton – apparently you spoke psychology and “soothsaid”
the reason for half the problems in the world today when you defined “resistance
to change”.

I wont tread upon the many studies I had to undertake on why people hate
Mondays. It ranged from “BOSS” to “getting back to mundane work and slogging
it through the next 5 days to keep your job on to pay your bills”.

That is if your profession is your means of a living.

But not so when what you are at your workplace is your “everyday state of
being”. My work is an extension of what I did, right from when I was a kid –
Proving to my dad on why I wanted a better cycle, why I needed a raise in my
pocket money, why my mom also needed a pet as much as I did, why one should
also be allowed ice cream for breakfast, why my teacher shouldn’t write to my
parents on my performance (ok this was just on that one occasion), attempting
conversation with that scary looking neighbor to get another buyer for biscuits
from my school sale.

I am a sales person. (Married – there you go. That’s the merit and the sympathy).
I know every product or service I sell alleviates some pain point somewhere or
it muscles a process elsewhere. My customers know I am a call away always and
vest in my sale.

Sales is more than how to cover costs, make profit, when to pedal the gas, when
to lend a patient ear or soothe emotions. You grew up with it – the logic, the
analytics and the interpersonal skills. And yet it was the conviction and poise,
which made it your choice of profession. You build trust, sell, create win-win
situations and make lasting relationships – at home, at work. You continue to be
who you are – it’s just that places and transactions differ.

To all my colleagues and fellow sales friends – you know what I mean when I
say “What Monday blues?”

They are always wearing their thinking cap
Yes, that’s where the Sales Cats’ are at.

The eyes are quick to see
How your apps can gain security

They know their gimmicks
From a bottomless bag of tricks
Just away from a single or a double click

Dollars, Euros and Pounds
This is all where they want to pounce

Roaming in the streets and alleys
Geared with their knowledge of technology

Sales cats are everywhere
They are fearless of a dare
A little stress doesn’t give them a scare
Neither does a threat to their software

They’re always filled with positivity
Brainwaves emitting creativity

Loves his clients, loves his master
If you know cats, you know
They stay here forever after

Never on a low
Because the Sales cats knows
Which way they want to go

-Contribution from a sales rep

7 things you should know about negotiation

• Clarify your misconceptions. Negotiation is NOT bargaining. One does one not engage in it only in buying/selling situations. You are negotiating from the first moment of interaction to long after the agreement is reached, and payment received or made. You might be able to identify when the negotiation begins. But it never really ends.
• Negotiation is the effort by 2 or more parties to reach agreement in such a way that each party has the right to say “I don’t agree” at every step of the way. Seen this way you are constantly negotiating with spouses/bosses/subordinates/clients and indeed everyone else. It has been estimated that we negotiate 400 times a day. In 50 years, you will negotiate 7.3 million times.
• Negotiation is pervasive: F2F, over the phone, on the Internet etc. It occurs verbally, in writing, through your behavior, and your body language. You are often negotiating without being aware of it. This is the most dangerous situation you can be in – personally and professionally.
• In the knowledge and information economy, negotiation is the paramount interpersonal skill required if you want to get things done with others. Your professional success rides on your ability to negotiate with people – both the person who sits in the same office with you and the one who sits at the other end of the world.
• The ability to negotiate effectively is a function of both experience and expertise. As such it can be improved. Great negotiators are not born. Since we humans are creatures of habit, relying on experience alone puts us at the risk of perpetuating ineffective negotiating habits and behaviors rather than developing effective ones. Your career, agreements, relationships, and bank account pay a huge price for your ineffective negotiating skills.
• Becoming an effective negotiator does not depend on becoming tough or nice. Your goal at all times should be to reach agreements without making unnecessary compromises; destroying relationships; and accomplishing what you set out to achieve. Reaching agreements is not made easier, faster, or cheaper because you are tough/nice.
• The cost of ineffective negotiation skills is both unnecessary and hard to quantify. However, the manifestations are visible to all: prolonged and unnecessary disputes, broken agreements, agreements that are not as profitable as they might have been, agreements that unravel slowly, and broken relationships.

Do yourself a favor.  If you are going to be negotiating more than 7.3 million times, the best thing you could do is to develop your ability to negotiate

• Objections are good
  • They are signs of interest and point to what areas concern the customer most.

• Zero objections are a red flag.
  • If a customer is serious, (s) he will have questions for you.

• Objections are inevitable; they can be minimized by asking good questions and listening – not talking.
  • As Thomas Freese states in Questions Based Selling – customers tend to “mismatch” you if you make too many statements.

• The difference between an objection and a concern is in the tone, not the vocabulary.
  • Try it for yourself. Vary your intonation with a statement like “We already have this taken care off” and you’ll see what I mean.

• An objection may be a customer’s way of throwing you off or testing your confidence.
  • A good way to deal with it is to ask more. Say something like “thanks for sharing your concerns with me Mr. Customer. What other challenges do you foresee?”

• Objections are prospects’ style of expressing their desires.
  • Identify with them and their issues.

• Don’t be afraid of objections
  • Encourage them, especially the hidden or unspoken ones – they are the silent deal-killers

• Accept the objection – don’t fight it. It is an emotional expression of concern / fear / desire.
  • Disagree and your relationship with the customer will go nowhere, fast!

• Verify whether you cleared every objection.
  • Remember communication is key – leave no doubt!

Informa Telecoms & Media has reported that mobile advertising revenue surpassed $3.5 Billion in 2010 and will reach almost $24 Billion by 2015. This trend is fueled by an increase in smart phone penetration into the mobile phone market. “In a report released today by International Data Corporation (IDC), the number of smart phone units shipped by manufactures is expected to increase by 49.2% in 2011. It is expected that over 450 billion new units will be shipped, and increase of 140 million units over 2010 numbers. One of the key sectors of the mobile advertising market is the location based advertising niche, which is expected to become a $1.8 Billion market by 2015 as reported by ABI Research.

While small businesses have already begun to utilize location based services to increase foot traffic and build customer loyalty, it has been trickier for technology-focused companies to take advantage of this trend. After all, since many do not sell their products and services out of their own retail establishments, there is often no where to “check-in” during the sales process.

However, check-ins can be a great way to incentivize the sale at industry events. Amongst exhibition rooms packed with booths of hundreds of different companies with different products and services, standing out amongst all the noise and finding the attendees who have a real interest in what you are offering has always been a challenge. With such a wide variety of options and exhibits to visit, attendees can often be overwhelmed and miss out on exhibitors they may actually have a real interest in.

As a result, providing incentives for conference attendees to check-in to certain exhibit booths can be a great way to increase foot traffic to a booth, much like how small businesses use these services to increase foot traffic into their establishments. Anything from free swag to savings on the products and services you offer to free informational products related to your company can be used as an incentive (and off course should be catered to your audience)

Through using location based advertising, companies can effectively switch from a “push” marketing method to a “pull” marketing method. Instead of bombarding and “pushing” out content and irrelevant advertisements to users, companies can send out sample offers and discounts which “pull” users into their exhibitions. Users can select what they are interested in and browse only those offers which are pertinent to their interests. As a result, this technique of drawing users in does not seem as “forced” as traditional techniques can be and only affects the users who have indicated some interest in your product and industry and may turn into qualified leads.

Your company’s first priority with its blog is who it is trying to attract. The end goal of the blog is to attract new accounts, yet what is the best way to do this? In my opinion, you should focus on building a community around the professionals who work in the industry and building your brand through gaining the trust and respect of these individuals.

For example lets take a company in the IT industry like many of the firms we help increase sales and improve productivity. There are three market segments which I believe this firm could target; individuals who work in the tech industry, individuals who own small software businesses or work as freelancers, and other members of the tech business community.

The tech business community offers the greatest potential, but is also the most crowded and broadest field. One look at the TechMeme Leaderboard (which analyzes popularity of blogs covering tech related business), will show dozens of well established blogs with a monthly readership in the millions. Establishing this firm’s blog as an authority in this niche should be the ultimate goal, but is no easy task.

Instead, it should start by focusing on the IT industry and software developers niches. These are smaller, but easier to penetrate. They are also targeted and part of the “tech business niche” so establishing the blog in these smaller niches, can provide the groundwork for establishing it amongst the largest technology blogs on the web.

In the IT industry, there is no established group of prominent blogs. Instead, blogs in this niche are part of larger trade publications like InformationWeek or NetworkWorld. Hence, a personalized corporate blog which is not part of larger media organization could gain traction in the niche. In addition, most of these news sources focus on news related stories. It could differentiate itself through primarily providing advice, using its clients work as examples. This not only creates valuable content, but allows this firm to subtly market its business and show what it has to offer.

As far as the niche for blogs related to software developers, the blogosphere is pretty sparse. A blog called Noop.nl publishes a list of the Top Blogs for Software Developers and in Q2 2009, published a list of the Top 200 blogs in this niche. A quick look at this report shows that the niche is dominated by a group of about 10 or so decently sized blogs, with the rest simply being “personal” blogs with not much traction. Hence, heavily targeting users in this niche could also be a great way to build a blog community.

Now, I should note that there is a lot of overlap between these groups. Readers of blogs exclusively about coding and software development will also likely be readers of blogs about the IT niche as a whole and then the tech niche as a whole. Hence, building traction in the software development community will help build traction in the IT niche community which will in turn help do the same in the tech business niche.

How to Build/Measure Community Growth/Engagement

Visitors are great; however for a blog to have any real clout or branding value, it must have a community. This means that visitors need to comment on posts, subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, become members of the blog’s newsletter and at the most basic level, come back to the blog to read new content. Visitors who come once and leave to never come back are of very little value.

Your firm’s blog should emphasize its RSS subscription icon and e-mail newsletter subscription box in the sidebar. It should also write posts asking for reader opinions and should start discussions on its own posts. Lastly, you should make sure content on your blog is always fresh and that the blog is constantly updated. If the blog is left stale for an extended period of time, any community will immediately disappear.

The key element of the blog as it relates to your firm’s digital marketing strategy is the community it can build and the branding value this can have for you within the industries where you do business.

A blog allows your firm to share content with the world and for members of the blog community to interact with the website, either through subscribing to the RSS feed or e-mail newsletter, or leaving comments, contacting the author, etc. Through building a community of professionals in the industry your clients are involved with, you can establish yourself as an authoritative figure in the niche. The key to successful sales is branding yourself as an expert at what you do and thus, the blog is the perfect vehicle to do exactly that.

Blogging will also have a very positive SEO impact on your corporate domain as there will be new pages for search engines to index and it is commonly known that constantly updated content helps with search engine rankings. In addition, interesting posts will also draw links to your domain, increasing search engine rankings across the board.

In this post, we will discuss the type of content your firm should promote on its blog (after all in the blogosphere content is king) and share strategies to help your firm market its blog and gain a solid readership.

Blog Content

For your blog to be successful, it cannot only talk about the company and the people who work there. Constant self-revolving posts on your firm are of no interest to anyone outside or not working with the company. Hence, your blog will not be successful in its attempt to brand your firm as a leader in the industry.

Instead, the blog must talk about your firm, within the context of your larger industry. Posts can relate to your company; however, the focus of the content should be of general interest to members of your industry.

To illustrate my point, lets take a look at a case study of a company which has done this to perfection, SEOMoz. SEOMoz is a search engine optimization services provider. They help their clients rank better. The company has quickly become one of the leading search engine optimization companies in a crowded industry and they made it to the top via their blog. The SEOMoz blog is constantly ranked among the Top 5 SEO blogs on the web, no small feat considering how oversaturated the market is. Through posting meaningful useful content for individuals in the SEO industry, they were able to brand themselves as an authority in the industry and build a community. When I asked CEO Rand Fishkin what the key to SEOMoz’s success was, he said it was 100% based on providing quality content and building a community around the blog. SEOMoz branded itself within the industry and being considered one of the foremost SEO authorities, anyone looking for SEO services naturally found their way to the site.

A look at the blog reveals posts by company officials with titles such as, Do Former Search Engine Insiders Make Great SEOs?, 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research, 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research, posts which may not relate directly to SEOMoz, but re useful to individuals in the SEO industry and allows the company to showcase its knowledge and insights.

The issue also arises over whose name should be behind the blog? Which employee or employees should be the face(s) of the blog? I recommend that you find a few employees from various branches of the company (marketing, executive board, finance, human resources) to act as the official company bloggers. Your firm is a community and one voice should not speak for the whole community; however, readers like to see consistency and having 100 different bloggers changing every day will detract from the quality of the content. If a company representative outside the group selected to blog wants to make a post, they can do so in a guest post. However, the designated group of bloggers should consistently be adding content to the blog.
As far as post frequency is concerned, the more the merrier. With a group of regular bloggers, each blogger making a post one day a week will keep readers coming back frequently and will keep the blog fresh. The fastest way to kill a blog community is stale content. While you can determine what type of posting schedule works best for you, it should be ensured that the blog does not go more than three or four days without a new post. Still, a balance needs to be struck. Many firms, especially those involved with B2B selling, will have stringent policies regarding the content that it publicizes online. Editorial guidelines must be in place ensuring that the content submitted is not only interesting and relevant, but also secure and does not include any confidential information. When promoting any type of content online, security is a major issue. Implementing these guidelines requires time and effort so you need to determine logistically how often it can afford to make posts on the company blog. Refer to our earlier post on security in social media marketing for more information on this subject.

Blog Marketing

The key to successful blog marketing is to kick start your community. You need a passionate group of users who will continually interact with the blog before anyone else will start to pay attention. Finding this initial group of users can be a challenge, but for any company with multiple employees, the process is easily simplified. Have your network of employees be the original reader base for the blog and ask them all to read posts, post comments, subscribe to feeds, and share content with their personal networks

Through building a community with your employees, new visitors to your company blog are more likely to engage and become regular readers since they are joining an existing community, not starting one. Hence, visitors from search engines or social media websites notorious for never returning to a website will be more likely to stick around.

Aside from simply engaging with the blog, your employees should be encouraged to share content with their personal contacts. At the most basic level, employees can simply tell people they know about the blog and the content/value it provides. However, there is much more that can be done. Employees should be encouraged to link to the latest blog post in their e-mail signatures, share content from the blog through their Facebook and Twitter accounts, and forward interesting posts to friends. However, while getting content around is important, the worst thing you can do is spam everyone you have ever met. This will do nothing but hurt your brand image.

The community and culture you have already built into your company should carry over to the blog.

However, there are many tactics which can be used that don’t simply rely on word of mouth marketing. The practice of guest posting is popular in the blogosphere and is a great way to build authority. A guest post is when a company official makes a post on another blog, in exchange for a byline and description. Hence, the guest poster is given exposure to another blogger’s readership and is given the authority to share what they know and what they can do. Repeated guest posts amongst the larger blogs within a niche can instantly draw traffic and build credibility. This is a topic we will discuss at length in a future post.

Social network marketing and social media marketing are also two great ways to promote blog content. We have discussed both subjects at lengths in previous posts which can be accessed through the links above.

Aside from harnessing the power of social networking and social bookmarking, SEO is another great way to draw traffic to the blog. A blog allows you to keep a steady flow of fresh content coming on to your domain which is good for SEO purposes and creates more pages and context which can be indexed and accessed through long tail search queries. A blog also gives you the opportunity to naturally draw links from other blogs. Hence, you should focus on creating quality content which other bloggers will want to share with their readers. It would be a good idea to send an introduction e-mail to other bloggers in these niches, informing them about the development and launch of your blog. Guest posts will also help with attracting links.

Conclusion

The overall goal of this blog marketing development and marketing strategy is to build a dedicated community of users who are engaged with your brand and the product. While these members may not all be sales leads, they will help build your name in the industry and attract the attention of leads to come. It is a long term strategy which can have huge payoffs.

One of the most valuable tools for any sales professional is the ability to be succinct. From strict space limitations in creating sales copy for advertisements, offline and online, to crafting effective sales messages to be distributed to potential leads, the importance of the ability to be succinct in sales copywriting cannot be understated.

While it can be difficult, here are a few tips to help you be more concise in your writing:

What is your Focus?

In your sales copy, what is the part of the message that you really want to effectively communicate? The key is to focus on this part of the message and avoid spending too much time on either the “build-up” or introduction to your focus or the conclusion after. The easiest way to discover your focus is to challenge yourself to fit your message into certain space restrictions. Even if you have a page for your sales copy, pretend you have to fit your message into a 140 character Tweet or Google AdWords ad space? With such significant limitations on how much you can say, what part of your message are you going to focus on?
Once you create your sales copy based on these restrictions, create the sales copy you actually plan on distributing with an emphasis on what you covered with these space restrictions and only brief coverage of other matters.

A change in perspective can be eye opening. It allows one to gain new insights into the same situation and gain a better understanding of what is going on. It allows one to understand the views of others and get a better idea of what they may be thinking. It challenges one to become more creative and use their imagination. Hence, it is no challenge too see why having a change in perspective can be valuable in sales; specifically, seeing the sales process through the eyes of your customer.

Changing perspective in this manner provides you with one crucial advantage: an insight into what the customer’s wants, needs, and concerns are. Hence, it will allow you to better understand what the customer needs and how to pitch your product in a manner so that it best fits these needs.

This requires a great deal of research into your customer and their industry as a whole. For firms involved with B2B selling, what are your customer’s pain points? Where are they being inefficient and what are they looking for to remedy this inefficiency? How is their company and the industry as a whole doing financially and thus how much can they afford to spend? It also requires research into your firm and your industry. How can you get your competitor to see you differently from the competition? What do you do better and more effectively?

The best way to understand this comment is through example. Hence, I recommend you take a look at a guest post I wrote for designer David Aiery on the logo design process. Personally, I don’t have much design experience and thus have always hired freelance designers for any work I may have. I created this post as a way for designers to better understand what I, the customer, was looking for. This is the kind of information you need to get about your customers.

Getting this information certainly is not easy, but there are a number of ways to go about it. Simple Google searches can provide information on the industry as a whole and perhaps even the company you are selling to. Another way to go about this is to talk to current customers and see their viewpoints on their industry (trends, size, competition, etc.) and their needs as chances are, they are similar to those of the company you are selling to. Try and talk to other companies/individuals in other industries who have worked with the target and see what they have to say about their experiences and what they did.

It can be a challenge to get all the information you need to see the sales process from the viewpoint of your customer, but once you are better able to understand what your customer needs, the better the chances are that you will be able to convince them to work with your company.