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Selling During The Holidays

October 21st, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Sales

The Holiday Season is upon us and for Sales Professionals and sales managers this time of year adds special challenges for maintaining focus and sales productivity. In this episode we’ll discuss some quick and dirty tips for keeping your sales up and spirits high during the holidays.

I love the holidays. The time between Thanksgiving and New Years Day is my favorite time of year. The familiar music, parties, seeing old friends, spending time with my family, and all of the amazing food make the holidays special. It seems like everything about the holidays is wonderful except – selling.

If I had my way I’d take the whole month off and just start over in January. And after years of working with Sales Professionals I know I’m not the only one. Unfortunately business doesn’t stop for the holidays and without those commission and bonus checks it is hard to pay the bills. And going into January behind the eight ball with your quota is a horrible way to start the New Year.

During the holidays salespeople struggle to maintain their activity targets, and prospects and customers routinely put off decisions until the New Year. In the midst of a joyous season the sales environment can be brutal.

The good news is that you can take control, maintain your focus, and close deals. The key is in staying true to the fundamentals of selling, and maintaining self-discipline combined with a sprinkle of creativity.

One of the hardest things about selling during the Holiday Season is getting customers to make buying decisions. For many salespeople is seems that all of their prospects have found the perfect excuse – they will wait until the New Year to make any decisions. If you’ve been around selling long enough you know, by the time you get to the New Year, most of these deals will never close.

The problem is it’s just too easy for customers to put off decisions during the holidays. To them it makes logical sense to wait until the New Year. And salespeople willingly accept this excuse as logical too. But to have any chance of closing these deals you have to strike when the iron is hot. You cannot allow emotions to wane. So during this time of year you have to give your prospects and customers a more compelling reason to make a decision now than to wait until later. This means getting creative with your offer, price, value added services, or signing bonuses. It means you may have to give up more to get the deal done than during other times of the year. However, if you don’t close now it is highly likely that you never will.

In sales, like it or not, activity is everything. If you are not prospecting, questioning, presenting, and closing you will fail – no matter what time of year it is. The problem many of us face during the holidays is that we slack-off and let our self-discipline slip. We also have a tendency to allow the holidays to move us out of our normal daily routine. The result is reduced activity.

This slip has two consequences. In the short-term it hurts our closing ratio during the month of December. In the long-term it impacts our sales pipeline during January, February, and March which can have a major impact on our stress level and future income.

To keep this from happening to you, it is critical that you sit down with your daily planner right now and ensure that you have your calendar blocked properly for daily prospecting and lead generation, as well as information gathering, presentations, demos, and closing meetings. Take into account all of your holiday activities and build them into your planner. You may have to do some work arounds, but the key here is to get everything planned out in advance. To stay on track set daily activity targets and commit to reviewing those targets each morning and afternoon. You will be amazed at how powerful this forward planning process is for keeping you on track and focused during the holidays.

Most importantly, by planning in advance and developing creative ways to close more business, you will find that you feel less stress, cash bigger commission checks, and have plenty of time to enjoy the holidays with the ones you care about the most.
By: Jeb Blount
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Holiday Hints for Better Sales: Keep Your Best Customers Happy This Holiday Season

October 21st, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Sales

The adage “Take care of your customers, and your customers will take care of you” speaks for itself. But it’s especially true for your best customers. Treat them like the great asset they are, and they’ll respond with loyalty and increased sales for years to come. That’s never truer than during the holiday shopping season.

 

The fact is that long-standing satisfied customers cost less than their dissatisfied or newly acquired counterparts, and generate more revenue. For most businesses, about 80 percent of revenue comes from about 20 percent of customers ? and that 20 percent needs to be treated well, even better than your other customers.

 

If you want your customers to be more loyal, shift your focus, says Alan Zimmerman, motivational speaker and author of PIVOT: How One Turn in Attitude Can Lead to Success . “Many organizations have the wrong focus. They spend too much of their time and money trying to win over ‘dissatisfied’ and ‘highly dissatisfied’ customers, and they spend too little of their time and money trying to turn their satisfied customers into highly satisfied customers. It’s a big mistake.”

Zimmerman doesn’t advocate ignoring dissatisfied customers. “Not at all,” he says. “In fact some of the most loyal customers were once dissatisfied customers.

 

“I’m just saying you should devote more attention to your satisfied customers. Your payback will be much greater.”

 

In a crunch, concentrate on keeping satisfied customers satisfied. If you’ve fallen behind and then add resources to catch up during this period, your natural instinct might be to fulfill your oldest open orders. But once you know you can keep up with new orders, you should draw a line at that point, service those and then gradually reach back to satisfy the older backlog.

 

“With the newest customers, give them the kind of excellent service that you had intended to give everyone all along, then begin working the backlog,” says Paul Kowal, a customer-service expert in Cambridge, Mass. “Otherwise you’re going to have twice the number of dissatisfied people and problems on your hands.”

 

Not only do satisfied customers generate more revenue than dissatisfied ones with their repeat business, but there’s another plus: They generate new business through word-of-mouth advertising. Once you’ve taken care of them, then you can turn your attention to those who aren’t so satisfied. Take care of their complaints and they’re likely to become customer advocates, too.

 

That’s a holiday bonus just for you.

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Marketing Mindset When Times are Tough

May 20th, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Marketing For Less, Sales

By Karen Scharf

When the economy gets tough, an ironic thing happens… people stop marketing their business and services. I call it ironic because now is the best time to ramp up your marketing, not cut back on it.

As an entrepreneur, I’ll bet that you, too, are tempted to scale back on your marketing activities. When you’re in unchartered waters, it’s a natural reaction to do what everyone is doing. If you’re new to business, and you see all your competitors cutting back on marketing, you automatically assume that’s the right thing to do.

And marketing when times are tough can feel just plain ol’ “icky”. You see people around you struggling, you hear about job layoffs and house foreclosures and constant doom and gloom, and it feels a little weird to ask people to do business with you.

But that’s because you’re looking at marketing wrong. Instead of a “you give me money” attitude, you need to adopt an “I give you value” attitude.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before - and you’ve probably noticed it yourself - even in these “tough times” people are still spending money. And they’re spending on more than just the essentials. In fact, a few weeks ago when I took a trip to the Indianapolis Zoo, it was absolutely jam packed. There were so many people there, we couldn’t even find a place to sit down at lunch time. We had to get to the dolphin show 30 minutes early just to make sure we could get in. And you can hardly call a trip to the zoo a necessary purchase. In fact, by the time you add up parking, entrance tickets, overpriced lunch, show tickets, souvenirs… it can almost qualify as a luxury purchase.

So why was the zoo so crowded? Well, it was early spring, the weather was starting to get nice, people were looking for an excuse to get out of the house, and the zoo had recently run an amazing advertising campaign. Every other attraction in town had cut back on advertising, so when it came time to choose an activity, the Zoo was forefront on everyone’s mind.

You see, when everyone else around you is reducing their marketing for “budgetary” reasons, increasing your marketing by a mere 10% will make you rise so far above the crowd, there will be no competition. When a prospect needs your services, you will be the only option she considers, since you will be the only option in front of her.

During tough times, you might be tempted to lower your price to make your marketing feel less invasive. But don’t do it! There are so many reasons not to lower your price, I could turn that discussion into an entire book. Rather than focusing on price, focus on value.

The majority of shoppers do not buy based on price alone. Remember, there are many more stores out there that are *not* Walmart. What your customer is really looking for is value.

I heard a great explanation of value given by Don Taylor of Minding Your Own Business. As he explains it, value is like a seesaw. Price is one side and quality and quantity are on the other. As long as you can balance the seesaw, or tip it toward the quality end, your customers will buy.

Your job as an entrepreneur is to create value. And then promote that value. And then promote that value just a little bit more, especially as your competitors are cutting back. You’ll soon rise above the crowd and your business will flourish.
 
Now, go find some more clients!