Sales by 5 Blog

Getting Your Culture to Sell Internally and Externally

Today we had an interesting discussion about our culture and how it has dramatically changed. We used to allow the unacceptable and in my previous business it got to the point of ridiculousness. So if you want to change it so that your people are not de-motivating (un-selling) each other, you, your customers, what do you do? Remember the flywheel Jim Collins referenced in Good to Great. Imagine a giant, heavy wheel that moves an inch after much pushing.  With continuously dedicated pushing in a consistent direction you start seeing it speed up. Finally it is spinning.

Once you have your purpose, core values, brand promise and goals and BHAG in place and the leaders are living them, the flywheel starts to move! It is not over a week, but the movement in one month can inspire.  The movement in six months will make you shudder at where you were six months ago and in a year, it is all clarity so you can focus on the vision (BHAG). It can be fun if you have a great coach or a great team pulling, pushing and providing the inspiration. Once you get to this stage, you do not get to rest or relax, you then get to make sure that everyone is realizing how each person is living that brand promise and living the company's purpose. How cool would it be if everyone is moving in the same direction with enthusiasm?  This is similar to a rowing team. What if one person did not row in the same direction once? What if they did not row the same direction two of five days? The rowing team would not allow it, why should you?

Summary: Selling starts with an attitude and reaches success with momentum. Selling on the inside gets sales on the outside and keeps the flywheel moving.  When were things the best?  Who is rowing against the team now and how fast can you fix it?

The Project You Were Born To Do - Today's the Day!

Is there a project that is waiting for you to start on it?  Something burning inside you that won't go away, but you haven't taken action yet?  Are the books on your nightstand indicating what that project is?  Why not start on it today?  Have a laser focus on what it is you need to be doing and battle the Professional ADD, as Keith Ferrazzi puts it.  Expect people to tell you that you can't do it and others jumping in your way to sabotage your progress.

The cool part is the momentum will build along the way, others will see the progress and, oftentimes, will want to join you.  If you can speak passionately and clearly about what it is you are trying to accomplish, you will help sell the program to others.  Check out these tips to sell your idea faster, with less effort.

Once the flywheel is moving, take the time to see it through.  Overnight successes take about ten years.  Need help seeing it through? Call us, the Salesby5 SWAT team is ready!

Pic from Flickr - thanks heyjohngreen

What If Your Best Salesperson was Your Website?

We run across companies weekly that have a website and say they get no leads from it. We also have some of the same companies that have a site that has not been touched in 4 years, but are expecting something from it. Your website can be your most profitable salesperson. No medical, no dental, no vacation, and most importantly, no bad attitudes.

We recently worked with an electric car company. They had sold only 1 car in over a year.  It was sold from their website and their retail location was not selling anything. In two months time, we have gotten them a 3000% increase in inquires, meaning people who want to place deposits and interested buyers.  Sales have increased by 700%. Their biggest hurdle now is getting inventory; a problem that did not exist 60 days ago. We did not redesign their entire site, as it was good. The product is the same.  The words were bad and did not sell. The difference was making the site sell and making it visible to the market.  Now, when people are looking for electric cars, we know what they'll find.

Next time you're looking to hire a salesperson, crunch the numbers on the travel, phone, car, insurance and other perks, then give us a ring about your website.

Sell More, Faster - Make It Simple!

Are you interested in selling more hamburgers, phones, music or (fill in the blank)?  Have you thought about making your offering simple?  In-N-Out Burger has become known for their ultra simple menu.  Jitterbug has created cellphones with stripped down features and menus for the elderly.  For those of you that have been living in a cave or have been cryogenically frozen, iPods have made scary mp3s easy enough that my dad uses one.  Push the simplicity to the edges.

A store in California was selling jams.  When customers had 24 flavors to taste test, 2% of the people purchased.  When they reduced the taste test to 6 flavors, then number jumped 6x to 125%!  Too many choices overwhelmed potential customers! - data from our friends at Eureka! Ranch.

Review your offering and see what things you can strip away to leave the really good stuff.  Maybe you can be the genius that makes tough concepts easy. 

Have you subscribed to our blog via RSS?  Check out this simple (and awesome!) video below from Lee and Sachi LeFever of CommonCraft.com to understand why RSS is worth knowing about and why you should hit the subscribe button to the right of these blog posts to subscribe right now!

Ten Days to Selling More with Less Effort - Selling It!

For day 10, we need to add a few last tips and cover the latest data.  Today, you should be able to articulate the benefit you have in 10 seconds or less. You should be able to stand out by not selling salt and pepper. You should be able to offer a dramatic difference from your competitors that is easy for a 5th grade student to understand.

Try the following and eliminate any old way that has not worked extremely well. You should be surprised at the change. If you have a question, e-mail me at [email protected], I will respond fast.

Tips:
#1 way people in business want to be communicated with today is e-mail.
#1 way people in business screw up a sale is THEY TALK TOO MUCH!
#1 way people lose a sale is letting a customer say "no" because the customer didn't understand what benefit they were being offered.
Latest data shows that if you have exclusivity and/or scarcity in the offering of your product or service you will have an overt advantage.

The best of the best have a coach, who is yours? If you think you know it all, you are easy to beat!

Use the tips above and tell us how it changed your sales.

Photo by The Justified Sinner - Flickr

Ten Days to Selling More with Less Effort - Living It!

Yesterday: Great stories start inside the company and go out. Great stories capture the hearts of people including buyers, prospects, and even cold leads.

Today: Living It! "It," is your product or your service.

A few years ago I walked into a nice department store, I wanted to buy nice shoes and a nice suit. The man, a "fashion adviser", selling the suits and shoes was dressed in an  unattractive suit and bad shoes!  His credibility was lost because he wasn't living “it,” so I didn't buy anything from him.

Here's a story from our friend and former intern, Carlton Douglas.  We were blessed to have him and we're proud to know him.  Carlton "lives it" and we could feel it when we hired him. Here's his story, in his own words. 

From the Desk of the FORMER Intern

I logged onto the website to get the address of Sales By 5 for a resume (I’m trying to get a Promotions Manager position at Indie 103.1 here in Los Angeles). Seeing the familiar SB5 color scheme and then Erik and Nan’s video posts, my mind jolted back in time to the months in which the company employed me.

Some people feel like crap thinking about past jobs. I, too, have a few of those jobs, but Sales By 5 wasn’t horrendous enough to make the list. In fact, it was the best job I’ve ever had. Out of everything it taught and reinforced in my working behavior, the most important was that I could do anything. ANYTHING. I don’t mean that in a sappy, Reading Rainbow way, either. If someone asks me to do something, the truth of the matter is that I can do it… if I want to do it.

Present Day: I’m in Hollywood. That’s pretty cool. I met a guy on Sunset Blvd. and La Brea, Antonio, whose brother writes music for Lil Bow Wow. He hooked me up with these guys who do just about everything in music business – booking, management, PR, and pretty much anything else you can think of. I snag a short gig doing miscellaneous work for them.

I get a call the night I might them telling me to get them a list of all of Whitesnake’s managers and label affiliations since the mid-70s. I tell them that it’ll be done by morning - without a doubt. Then, I realize that its one in the morning, and I’m still too poor to have Internet access at my apartment. I don’t want to disappoint these guys, so I proceed dialing every number in my phone to get some help, but everyone is asleep. Just great! Thirty minutes later, I remember that I have web access on my phone, and I’m off searching through Google to find almost 40 years of management and label information about a band I’m too young to care about. By four in the morning, my task was complete, and I had impressed guys who would end up giving me a few more gigs.

Hopefully that sounds impressive to you. If not, you should give it a try. On top of doing the research, try it ON A CELL PHONE! It was the Sales By 5 attitude I had embraced that got me through this trying task.

My first day on the job, Erik had me figuring out where to get beer bottles with custom labels, filled with beer of course. Oh, and it wasn’t just your average Sunday afternoon football 24 case of Budweiser. I needed to find 1,000 bottles! Google was always my friend, but I wasn’t that great at it. Erik tosses a few pointers my way, and I’ve got at least 10 options in front of my face in 5 seconds. I never knew that being a Google Master could be so beneficial to your career!

Six months after last stepping into the office, I still use my Sales By 5 learned abilities. It wasn’t that one instance in which what I learned while working with the company helped me out. Most recently, I wrote up a bio for a country singer at the request of Shakira’s former publicist – using a similar format to press releases done for SB5. She wants to give me more work! I “marketed” myself to a wealthy jazz enthusiast, who heard me playing sax on Hollywood Boulevard, about financing the recording of a jazz album. He’s digging the idea.

Sales By 5 didn’t change my life. My life had yet to begin before working with them! Things are beginning to take off, and I can credit so much of that to this company.

Erik & Nan -keep your eyes on the mail. Your million-dollar check will be there soon enough.

Carlton D.

------

Do you see the difference between living it and just going through the motions?

Telling Your Story

Yesterday was about focusing on one or two things and maximize them by figuring out how to become the best in the world at it.

Today: Telling the story!

Selling more with less effort: Pictures tell a thousand words. A thousand words is a lot. Pictures are remembered when viewed and words are remembered when read. Stories are forever. Stories move people, products, and services. What story are you telling? We know that most sales people show up and throw up, which is the problem. If they aren't, they are taking facts, figures, features and faux reality. What people want is the story of how this worked, helped, solved pain, created revenue, eliminated the problem or as we call it, the real reason to believe. When you were a kid, stories were gold. Today, stories are gold too, we just forgot to master telling the great ones of what we do and how we do them. Great stories start inside the company and go out. They are the news in the huddle at 9:15am each morning and the topic at lunch.

Summary: write your story, tell it well, tell it true, and tell it to many!

Photo by marklarson - flickr

Ten Days to Selling More with Less Effort - Dominate Your Market

Yesterday was all about future focus being 10x more predictive of success.

Today: The ability to dominate your market!

You have it or you do not. The data proven number one reason people do not sell is they talk too much, and number two, they have no true value that they offer. It happens to us weekly and sometimes by people interviewing with us. The most (sadly) remarkable, are the ones you have two and three meetings with and you still have no idea what value they offer or what benefit they provide.

This reinforces the importance of your message clarity verbally and in writing.  If you advertise, does it work?  And how do you know?  We have seen our clients, prior to us getting involved, spend $30,000 in one business journal without ever getting any response or business from the advertising. What you say and what you do must have a dramatic difference to make an impact.  Just to be clear, you have a 370% greater chance of success and profitability if you have dramatic difference. What is dramatic difference?  Let’s say you are selling a Honda Accord that gets 21 mpg in the city, meanwhile the Toyota Prius is getting 48 mpg in the city. Though both brands are great, Honda becomes low value and Toyota, high.  You now have to find a way to make your offer twice as valuable as your competitor’s. Get serious about value.  What can your customers not live without?  What can you make available that hasn’t been done yet?  That is your start and your finish to the dramatic difference!

Summary: Get serious about where you can dominate your market. What can you really offer? Focus on that for all of your customers. Do not try to be what you are not.  Just focus on one or two things and maximize them by figuring out how to become the best in the world.

Fuel Economy Source - http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/bestworst.shtml

Photo by flickrsquared

Look to the Future for Success

Yesterday was about giving people something to talk about. They talk, so stop blending in and start being as you as you can be.

Today: A future focus is 10x more predictive of success. A person who asks "what do your customers want?" is salt and pepper. Your need to focus on what your customers want, from price reductions to time savings and communication enhancements are a priority. As Wayne Gretzky says "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Summary: What can you do today to help your clients with something they need or will need? What is it they will not need today or tomorrow, but 3 months, 12 months and 3 years from now?

Who asked for an ipod, tv or radio?

Photo by happylandfill - Flickr

Ten Days to Selling More with Less Effort - Day 5 - Get People Talking

It’s a fresh week and a fresh start. Today it is about your story. Do you provide something that gets people to talk? Talk positive? When I get excited about a product or service that surprises me, I talk about it. I know that this is not common for 100% of all people, but it is significant! Consider the food you serve, your customer service, the way you answer the phone. What is special?  Insurance is a commodity and there are more agents, in my opinion, than there are buyers. My agent with State Farm always knows my name and always helps me in minutes.  They never need to call me back, as they are working on my request in seconds! Other companies I deal with that are small or large have entangled voice mail systems that scream "go away and leave us alone!" So today, find your WORD OF MOUTH, or WOM and exploit it.  Here are some ideas so you can get people marketing for you.

1.  Take 4 different company owners or decision makers, that you do business with, to lunch this coming Friday and have them meet each other- be the catalyst for the introductions. Make yourself the expert in putting people together. What does that do for business?

2. Find a company you want to work with, shop them or find their biggest problem and solve it, then go to them with the solution to the problem.

3. Find a company that needs help and help them find the help!

4. Always deal with fact and never assume!

5. Ask for what you want!

Summary: Find what you can do that people will talk about. People will talk no matter what, so give them something to talk about. Ten years ago, it was ties for me, before and after I dressed in very bright colors.  In college I wore florescent t-shirts. Today, no ties but bright shirts. This is one of many things, but SalesBy5 stands out in any crowd! What can you do by 5PM today to make people talk or make people want to talk about you, your service or your product?