Sales by 5 Blog

Yes is the answer. What's the question?

If you developed a company where the attitude was "yes is the answer, what's the question?" what do you think would happen?  Would people talk about you in the same way they talk about the Ritz-Carlton or a Lexus dealership?  Do you think you might stand out from the crowd.  I bet that if you did it, you could most certainly say a dramatic difference for your company was your customer service.  I would bet that because it happens at Salesby5. 

We dramatically increase sales for companies and organizations.  Have we had client's cars washed?  Gone to Lowe's to buy locks for a client's tradeshow booth?  Found deals on electronics, styrofoam cups and set up projectors for Super Bowl Sunday?  Yes!  We also make sure that when we answer the phone, each person feels like they are the most important person we're talking to that day.  Are you skeptical?  Call us now - (210) 403-3916.  Doing this causes people to talk about us!  They want to work with us; they want to be near us!  Can you say the same about your clients and vendors?  Most importantly, it isn't forced!  It comes from within the people we hire and is nurtured by the way we treat each other internally.  Read about how we taught our client, Blue Clover, how to do this (see page 2 of the pdf from John DiJulius - where we learned the phrase "yes is the answer, what's the question?") - You Must Feel It Before You Can Give It  John and his team are truly world-class when it comes to teaching great service.

It's important to note that as seriously as we take giving "high touch" service, we make sure to turn away persistently negative, rude, pessimistic clients, vendors and potential employees.  We don't allow them to waste our energy and enthusiasm!

No Accounting, No Sales. I Sell Instead.

Before starting at Sales by 5, Erik asked me what I'd like to do in life.  I told him I was up for anything except accounting or being in sales.  The funny part is, I sell and I love it.  I don't realize I'm doing it while I'm doing it and I never thought of myself as being a "salesman". 

I don't sell in the traditional sense of the word - knocking on doors, cold calling, etc.  I sell because what I believe in, know, learn about and then recommend, makes people's lives better!  I can't keep myself from selling Blackberrys because I'm convinced that they make people's lives better!  Over 90% of my close friends now own Blackberrys because I told them they needed one and they listened.  They thank me; their bosses, friends and co-workers now want one. 

So you now know that everyone sells, but what is it that you really sell?  Do you sell yourself, your ideas, your hobbies, your passions?  Is there a career buried in there that you should be chasing?  Are there opportunities that are passing you by because you're too scared?  There is no better time than right now to get moving in life.  Become remarkable, do something great, be the person you want to be.  Take action.

Selling Smart with Passion – Part 2 | It Happened To Me

Two weeks ago I was at Gunn Acura and had a similar experience to the one I shared on Friday. My family came in and ambushed a new Acura MDX- occupying the entire car!  Within a minute, a salesman came up and said hello, asked if we had seen the car before and I said yes but the last one had a black interior, I could not really see the vehicle and I wanted to view one with a light interior. I asked if it was the Sport, he said no but he would pull a Sport around so I would see it. 5 minutes later he had a Sport waiting for me to drive in exchange for a copy of my driver’s license. We had no intentions of driving it but he pulled it around with the engine running, ready to go. Not only had he had found a Sport but it had light interior - he listened and reacted to my words.

Here’s the rub. I had no intentions of taking a test drive, but he sold me on driving the car and spending time with it. A see, feel, touch experience sells products and services faster and with less effort. He made me feel happily obligated to test drive the car.  The kids loved it as did my wife. This SUV drove incredibly! Use the real you in selling.  Figure out how to blend your passions with the real benefits that you are offering.  Today, things are different; it is not a dog and pony show. 72% of the USA watches reality TV. Real sells, facades are for your weak competition to excel at. 

Selling Smart with Passion | How I Did It

In 1997 I (Erik) was meeting with then Racquetball and Fitness clubs of San Antonio, Now Spectrum Clubs. They had been an incredible client of mine for two businesses for over 12 years. In this meeting I was the owner and the sales manager of my company. I was talking to them about building a web site for them and how it could benefit them as well as what it could provide to their clients and employees. They seemed to have great interest. I left and got a call from their sales manager within about 10 minutes of leaving. He said he had never seen a better sales presentation. I was shocked and I said “What presentation?” He remarked “the one you just did here,” he said his boss was sold and that was rare. He was sold because I did not try to “sell it,” I just talked about it and how it could help them, then he started to sell himself.

Bottom Line: If you are passionate about a product or service, talk about it in a way where your passion shines while explaining the benefits to the customer. The presentation is not important, it is the way you say it that's most important.

Come back on Tuesday to hear how this happened to me.

How Phones and Technology Can Increase SalesBy5

When I (Nan) first came on board with SalesBy5 I was provided a Blackberry.  As any die-hard 'Berry fan knows, it is THE device for email.  Here's what we didn't realize, without BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), we were only utilizing a small portion of the power of the device!  We got BES and things changed.  Here's the interesting part - we don't have our own server and we don't have an IT department!  Soon, you will be reading a press release about two companies from San Antonio that are making BES and Exchange hosting a reality for companies like ours, while freeing up time for IT.  The Phone Store and Rackspace have teamed up to provide us this rockin' solution.  Everything is hosted at Rackspace, who hasn't had their servers go down for SEVEN YEARS.  How good is your uptime?

Here's what's cool about it.  Having this set up allows for real-time syncing of your contacts, calendars, tasks, notes and email across all your computers and wireless devices - we use Blackberrys.  Imagine this, you're out at a lunch and run into a friend that you want to have lunch with, but your assistant manages your calendar.  Typically, you would be concerned about double booking since she may have made a change and you haven't synced your phone yet.  With this, if she entered a new appointment you know about it in SECONDS!  If you choose to add the lunch to your device, she will know about it that quickly too!  Anything you add on any device will automatically sync to your other computers (PC or Mac).  Did I mention that their virus and spam protection is incredible?  It curbs about 99% of spam and rarely does it make a mistake.

The advantage to having The Phone Store and Rackspace do Exchange and BES hosting is that your IT person now has time to work on helping sell for your company.  You know that your website is a marketing function, don't you?  Why pay your IT guy incredible amounts of money to "change the oil and rotate the tires" when he could be working on your site, increasing visibility and making money for the company? 

So how does this increase sales? Well, can you believe there are still people out there with a paper calendars that no one else on their team can see? There are people using Microsoft Exchange who must connect their smart phone or pda to sync. What's worse is there are business people with a phone and no e-mail “till they get back in town” or “get back to the office." Keep in mind that anyone in sales knows the if you are first, you usually win. So the first e-mail or the first returned call is yours to win or yours to lose.  Our team comes home from a business trip or a day off and has no communications to catch up on.

The #1 cause of stress for business people is unfinished business at the end of the day. Now, we just gave you tips on how to:

• Lower your stress significantly
• Increase sales
• Work smarter, not harder
• Use technology to allow for speed and flexibility in your schedule
• Get out of 1990 and into 2008

Contact the following people to find out more and tell 'em SalesBy5 sent you!

Kevin Kemp @ The Phone Store - kevin AT thephonestoreinc.com

Xavier Rodriguez @ Rackspace - xavier.rodriguez AT rackspace.com

These guys are perfect examples of what Seth Godin spoke of in his post A shortage of digital coaches.

How Fast?

It is a question you are going to hear more of in the future in many, if not all areas of life. Gen X was the want it now generation and today technology allows us to have instant downloads, instant gratification and instant messaging. Gen Y lives as if it was always here. Parents have trouble with text bills with all the major phone carriers due to so many instant messages being sent and received. The Boomers, well, they love their high speed connections, scanning a document and sending a PDF fast versus a bad fax and a crummy copy.

So here is the question: how fast can you learn, develop a strategy and execute? The future depends on our skills of speed. As everything speeds up, people who check their e-mail once a week, or once a day are going to miss big deals, small deals and important threads of communication in between. The luxury of making slow decisions had a time and a place. Today it is has its place for the tough or hard decisions that need lots of time. The decisions that cost a dime or mean firing a de-motivating employee, eliminating a non profitable division can be made fast! How fast?

Multiple field studies show that if you ask 15+ people in a room to put a number to “fast” or “now” or “immediate,” the answers you get range from 1 second to about 24 hours. My favorite is if you ask to have something “tomorrow”, and ask when that is, you will have 15% or more say that it means by 11:59 pm tomorrow.

Winning companies of today and in the future will have a customer service focus of giving numeric precision to when a customer will get something and if they are really good, they will exceed their expectations and it will be sooner. The companies and organizations that are easy to compete with and win customers from are the ones who do not get this, and there are many.

My most recent experience was The Sales by 5 team helping put together an event for my EO chapter at a member’s brand new bar. It had not had an opening yet but the owner told us they were ready. We arrived at 3:30 and the event started at 4:30. At 3:30 the bar chairs were in boxes, there were about 20 workmen doing painting, cleaning the floor and the ice coolers were being put into place. A quick trip to the men’s room found no paper products, soap or trash can, the same for the ladies room. A trip to the bar found that there was enough alcohol for 20 guests versus the 50 we had coming and no tables to serve for the catering company. At 3:35 after 5 minutes of initial shock, the question hit, how fast can we make this happen? Our team using Blackberrys and Blackberry Instant Messenger were ready and in great shape by 4:30! 55 minutes was how fast! At 4:35 anyone who arrived had no idea what we had seen at 3:30. The use of great technology, a great team at the bar and an eye for details can help you execute on the question….HOW FAST?

Fire Everyone Today...

The second time I attended a Rockefeller Habits workshop (we now teach them), Verne Harnish asked us a question:

If you were to fire everyone from your company today, who would you re-hire with enthusiasm?  I came back to town and fired a few. You will be amazed, as I was, at the reactions from your other employees! The number one question from you employees or your team will be "what took so long?" Our question is how fast can you react once you realize you have the wrong people in the wrong seats.  It is simple, but it is not easy. I do not know anyone who likes to fire people. It's not a pleasant feeling and I have done more firing than I ever wanted. What is most important to understand is that every person that needs to be free to find a new career is un-selling your company to your customers and your employees when you hold onto them too long. The speed in which you move sells or un-sells.

Are You Playing to Your Strengths?

A true story from Nan:  I was a pretty good student.  I typically made A's and B's throughout school.  In 5th grade, I came home with my report card having the B's outnumbering the A's.  My dad took this as a sign that I was not focusing on the proper things (school work), so after being scolded, quickly took me to K-Mart.  All my hair gel and shirts were taken away and were replaced by plain pocket t-shirts - for an entire 6 week period, at that time an eternity!  This was my punishment, humorous today, but painfully brutal during the hyper image conscious period of elementary school.  Fast forward to November 2006 when I heard Marcus Buckingham speak in Houston.  He talked about how the large majority of parents would focus on an F rather than an A.  No surprise, it mentally took me back to 5th grade.

When you hear the word "strengths" do you think of "what you're good at" and "weakness" being "what you're bad at"? How many times has someone told you something was a strength of yours but it made you feel bored or tired after you had done it?  You knew you were excellent at that particular activity, say public speaking, but after you did it, you felt small and drained?  These definitions aren't wrong, they're just incomplete. 

What if you thought of a "strength" as something that were good at AND that fulfilled you when you did it?  How cool would it be to work on those projects that you have a natural talent for and that got you fired up to study, read and talk about?  Only 17% of the population claims that they do, in fact, play to their strengths.  On the other hand, what if you recognized a "weakness" as something that you may or may not be good at, but that truly left you weak, tired or annoyed?  What if you and your team developed a way to minimize the time you played to your weaknesses?  How much more productive would you be?  How differently would you treat your co-workers? family? friends?

The definition of a "strength" is an activity that makes you feel strong and a "weakness" being an activity that makes you feel weak.  How would you change your day if I told you and showed you how to use your "strengths"?  Check out some testimonials from interns and employees at Tesoro Corporation who did just that!

Here are some great resources to get you started on your Strengths path today:

Sales by 5 Strengths Coaching

Go Put Your Strengths to Work - Marcus Buckingham

De-motivation in the Workplace & Its Role on Productivity and Retention

When Jim Collins wrote Good to Great, a surprise find was that companies who have gone from good to great hire motivated people and teach management and each other how not to de-motivate one another. They do not spend time and effort motivating as it annoys the highly motivated and only has temporary effects on the un-motivated.

“Psychologist John Gottman created a landmark study on successful relationships both in marriage and in business. He found the ratio of positive to negative interactions to be best at 3 to 1 for business and 5 to 1 in a marriage. This simply means that in your work place having 1 negative interaction or de-motivating interaction to 3 motivating or positive interactions is the lowest you should be. At home, it needs to be 5 positive for every 1 negative.”

In creating an exercise for my clients to initiate the change, we started with these facts and then asked the participants to openly tell us what de-motivates them. My suggestion is that you take management as a group and you take their employees as a group, keeping them both separate. We would whiteboard these de-motivators and then we printed the compilation of all items on the whiteboard. This became an 8.5”x11” card laminated with the title: “What To Stop Doing” and in bold type De-Motivators. These went to each person in the room. The list was also assigned to one person who owned the task of keeping it alive in the organization.

We also initiated and highly encouraged the use of telling each other when someone de-motivates them. It always was a small joke at first, but quickly became part of the company’s language. Simple statements like “Hey man, you are de-motivating me!” became common during and after the exercise. Like anything, good use of internal branding to keep it alive was crucial.  Leadership keeping it in daily, weekly and monthly focus is a key to getting employees to live it and use the language.

I refer back to this often due to my own incredible ability to inspire others and accidentally de-motivate them.  It can “accidentally” happen when you talk to your children, spouse, and what I have found to easily be your employees. Below is a short list of potential de-motivators that seem to be common in groups I have worked with.  It will be easy for you to add to this list.  Do not discount the idea that this 30 minute exercise has amazing potential to increase employee productivity, happiness and inspire others.

Typical De-Motivators

• Closed door meetings
• Not saying good morning
• Not returning e-mail or calls
• Not listening
• Making assumptions
• Checking e-mail during a meeting
• Not using eye contact
• Negative talk of others
• Rolling of eyes when things are mentioned

Ingredients Needed for a Happier Workplace:

• 30 minutes
• Separate the group into two rooms, one with employees, the other with leadership/management
• Ready the half page segment of Good to Great regarding the surprise facts on de-motivation
• Whiteboard the de-motivators
• Combine all de-motivators on one page, print and laminate
• Cross share the information with the all groups
• Assign an owner to help keep this language alive in the organization
• Market it or brand it internally

Copyright 2008 by Sales by 5

Land a Tough Appointment - FAST!

Have you ever tried to get into a meeting with someone who you know could propel your life/career/project but they were always too busy?  You asked if you could get "squeezed into their calendar soon" with a response from them or their assistant saying they were overbooked already?  Here's a tip that serves two purposes, to establish yourself as dependable and of high value.  Request a meeting for 3 minutes at an odd time, for example 9:18 am.  This requires them to not flip through there calendar to see how busy they are, but to look at that exact time to see if they are booked already.  You have now branded yourself in that person's mind as a person who cares about time and precision.  This is perfect for those new sales people that want to prove their dependability but don't know how to prove it without selling something first.  Sell yourself first - you must have a benefit to this person and it must be overt. Also, you need a hook or a dramatic difference that will brand you/set you apart.

Once you are in the door, keep your promise.  Arrive promptly, keep your 3 minute promise and offer to leave at the end of the 3 minutes.  "You have graciously provided me the 3 minutes you promised, thank you.  I know you are busy, would you like to continue speaking now or shall we arrange a meeting for a future date when we have a little more time?"  Typically, if you have brought value to that person, you will be invited to continue the conversation. Those 3 minutes can turn into 45 fast and they do nearly every time!  The least we have seen is 3 minutes turning into 30 minutes.  The key?  Make sure to read our tips on how to not show up and throw up.

Share your great tips to get in the door in the comments.