Thoughts from McCann Motivations

Email Etiquette

2009-10-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

Many people are not using proper etiquette when they send email messages – to friends or to business prospects. There are issues of etiquette in emailing that we need to think about every time we send a message.

For example, do not write your note in all capital letters or in all lowercase letters. Writing in all capital letters is the equivalent of shouting in email. (My wife’s cousin writes all his messages in lower case letters. Some people not only write in that style, but will not use any punctuation. That can be very frustrating and makes reading messages very difficult and time consuming!)

How often do you get an email with a return receipt request attached? I have some friends who always ask for a return receipt on all their emails, even after I suggest to them that they can turn that function off. If it upsets us, imagine what it would do to a prospect that we are trying to get in to see? We always want to be professional in everything that we do and our email messages is one of the first ways that a prospect begins to determine how prefessional we really are.

Excessive use the high priority setting for messages is like crying wolf! If we continue to use it on all our emails, the first time that we are trying to send a really critical message, we will have lost the effect of the priority setting.

Be sure to reread your message before you hit the SEND button! How many times have we sent an email and gotten a reply back that when we read it, we wished we could dig a hole and climb in? Reading our own screwed up words and sentences that come back to us is way too late a time to think about how we wish we had reread the note and made corrections before it went out!

Often we are writing to prospects who are very busy people, so we need to learn to get to the point in our emails. Make your email messages short and to the point. Don’t send unnecessary files either. Be sure to answer email messages back right away. If you don’t have time to provide needed details, do your prospect a favor and write a short answer back telling them approximately when you can deliver the needed information. People tend to use email because they’re very busy and they assume that you are busy too. However, common courtesy always wins the day!

Next time, we’ll discuss how go from “Hello, my name is Joe” to uncovering customer needs. We will discuss how to begin our sales calls. There are trainers out there giving bad advice to sales people on how to start a sales call and we'll talk about that in detail.

Good selling!

If you have any questions or comments, please email me at john@mccannmotivations.com. (I promise I won't critique them!)

Using Email to Obtain Sales Appointments

2009-08-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

Previously I was talking about using voice mail messages to obtain sales appointments. In conjunction with voice mail, we can also use email messages to get in to see potential clients. However, before we can use email to get sales appointments, we first must leave what I call a “business footprint” with our target account.

First we must be leaving well-thought out voice mail messages. One of these messages can be used to alert a prospect that we will now be sending an email message with additional information that will be of interest to them. One of my own clients does most of his “business” by email as opposed to phone, so if anyone wants to get in touch with him, they need to be using email to do it. My voice mail message will tell him that I have some important information that I am forwarding to him in an email message that will go out this afternoon. At the same time, if I need to see him in person, I will ask that he let his assistant know which day and time would be best for me to come by.

Well guess what? You can do the same thing with people that you do not know personally, as long as you have created that “business footprint” beforehand. The prospect has to know who you are, who your company is and what you do in order for them to want to allow you in the door. This starts with a sound voice mail message – usually a question-based message designed to get the prospect to think about their current situation.

We are most likely not going to get in after just one voice message, so we will need to leave several over time. Each message needs to be different in content from the others, so we need to be creative. After leaving perhaps four or five messages, one last message would alert the prospect that you are going to be sending an email note.

One of the keys to getting a prospect to open our email message is the subject line. We need to pique the prospect’s curiosity here, just like we did with a question-based voice mail message. We can include a question in our subject line. We might ask something like: “What would happen if you could lower the overall cost of lighting in your plant?” (Here I am trying to link back to a question-based voice mail message that I talked about leaving a prospect in my last blog where I referenced the potential affect of relighting a building in order to improve the overall lighting effect while dramatically lowering costs.)

We need to pique the interest of our prospect first and then use bullet points to outline the key benefits of our program while not giving away the whole story. Our goal should be a personal visit to the prospect’s business. We need to save some “meat on the bone” for our in-person sales call.

Next time we’ll discuss ideas for proper email etiquette when writing to prospects and also some suggestions on the flow of our message.

In the meantime, be sure to visit my website at www.mccannmotivations.co. If you have a comment or question, email me at john@mccannmotivations.com or you can call me at 864-968-0262. Until next time, good selling everybody!

Voice Mail Suggestions for Sales Appointments

2009-06-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

In my sales training classes I always ask my class how many sales people always leave a voice mail message when they find themselves in the prospect’s voice mail system. You might be surprised (because I know I was), to learn that over half of my classes report that they DO NOT leave a message! They don’t want to leave a message but instead will try again to get through to their prospect at another time. The problem is that if they are in voice mail today, they will be again tomorrow!

Years ago I had a lady in Human Resources for a large national company who was referred to me by the President of another company. He told her that he was going to have me call her, so when I got into her voice mail, I thought nothing of it and left a message referencing my conversation with the President. She never called me back. I left a second message a few days later, then a third and after many repeated attempts, I left a sixth message, each one referring to why the President asked me to call her. I was very frustrated. I had even called the President back to see if he did in fact talk with her – which he had.

Immediately after my sixth message I had hung up the phone and shortly thereafter, my phone rang. When I answered it, I was shocked to hear the HR lady on the other end. What she told me shocked me again, but I have always remembered the conversation to this day. She said, “If I don’t I don’t personally know the person calling I do not call them back until after they have left me six voice mail messages. I feel that if they aren’t that interested in speaking to me, why should I be interested in speaking to them?”

This is a bit of an extreme, but it does tell a useful story. We do need to leave messages for our prospects giving them a reason to call us back. Tom Freese in his book “Question Based Selling” talks about the Charlie Brown Syndrome. No one ever saw Charlie Brown’s teacher, but we all know what she sounded like, “Waa, waa, waa.” He says that is exactly what most voice mail messages sound like when left by sales people. They all sound alike. Instead, he says that we need to pique the interest of our prospect by leaving questions in our voice mail messages instead of making statements. Questions will cause our prospect to want to know more information.

Suppose that you sell lighting products (fixtures, bulbs, etc). And suppose further that by re-lamping a facility a customer could save a lot of money based on the types of bulbs and fixtures that they use. One way to leave a voice mail message about this idea is to make statements such as:

“We are the largest supplier of electrical fixtures in the Upstate.
We carry a wide variety of lighting products from GE to Sylvania.
We can provide you with the latest in lighting technology that can save you money.”

This approach will probably not get a prospect to call because it’s similar to what they hear all the time, every day. But instead, what if we left a voice mail message like this:
“The reason for my call today is to answer any questions that you might be asking yourself such as:

How much of my monthly electrical bill is directed toward the lighting in my plant?
Is there a way that I can change my current lighting program in order to increase the overall lighting affect in my plant, while decreasing my monthly electrical bill at the same time?
What would my ROI be if I totally re-lamped my entire building?

If you have been thinking about any of these questions, then you and I need to meet because my company and I can help!”

As you can see, this is a totally different approach – moving the focus away from us and our company and products, and shifting it over to the customer and their problems. We need to think of the various problems that our product or service can solve and then create some questions for a voice mail message that get prospects thinking about their own situation. This shift in focus may cause the prospect to want to learn more and therefore increase the chance that they will call us back.

Next time we’ll focus on using email to obtain sales appointments. In the meantime, you can contact me at john@mccannmotivations.com or by phone at 864-968-0262. Until our next meeting, I wish you good selling!

Using Voice Mail to Obtain Sales Appointments

2009-05-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

Please visit my website at www.mccannmotivations.com for more information about sales training and other topics.

If you haven’t figured out by now that voice mail systems are for the benefit of the user, as opposed to being for the benefit of the caller, then you’ve not been making many phone calls trying to get in to see people in business these days. Voice mail is a very handy screening tool for buying influences and managers within the accounts that we are trying to penetrate. In order to become more successful we have to be prepared to use voice mail when we are asked to use it by the person’s recording.

Most people in sales are not very prepared to leave a professional voice mail message. Maybe we sales people are always thinking that the glass is half full, and because of that attitude, may constantly believe that the person we are calling is actually going to answer the phone. That very rarely happens in today’s busy business environment. In fact voice mail is great for managers who don’t want to be bothered by incoming phone calls.

In order to be prepared to leave a message, we need to know some basics about it. Busy executives are not going to rewind a voice mail message in order to catch the name and phone number of the person calling, so we have to do that for them. To do this, we must leave our name, company name, and phone number at the beginning of our message and then leave our name, company name and phone number at the very end of our message. However, we’re now faced with a problem that was covered in our last blog about speaking into the phone in a manner that enables the listener to understand what we have said.

We need to insert a pause between our first and last names and between the words in our company name. For example, I would say, “This is John (pause) McCann of McCann (pause) Motivations.” When it comes to leaving a phone number, I got a wonderful suggestion years ago in one of my sales training classes from one of the students. This guy was a salesman for a janitorial supply distributor in the Southwest. He suggested writing the phone number down as you say it into the phone. By doing this you will tend to slow down dramatically. We all can speak much faster than we can write. This is one of the best ideas I have ever heard with respect to using the phone in a professional manner. (I wish I could remember this guy’s name because I’d love to give him my personal thanks again and a lot of credit in this forum!)

In our next session we will cover approaches to use when leaving a voice mail message. You can contact me at john@mccannmotivations.com or by phone at 864-968-0262. Until our next meeting, I wish you good selling!

Phone Etiquette When Making Sales Appointments

2009-04-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

One of our biggest assets when making sales appointments is the telephone. However, we need to use proper telephone etiquette because this is often times the first contact that a prospect has with our company. We have a great opportunity to shine in the eyes of our prospect, so we need to show that we are above our competition. This also points out that we are care very much about our prospect. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Years ago I got some great ideas on phone etiquette from a training company that Johnson Wax Professional brought in to work with our distributors. They were called the Stanley Brothers from Texas, Bill and Jack, and they had great suggestions that I still use to this day.

When making phone calls to prospects expecting to obtain a sales appointment, we need to practice several important things. First, we should stand up when making these phone calls. If we remain sitting, we compress our diaphragms, which changes the tone of our voice. When we stand, we come across in a more commanding manner with a more powerful voice. Try this for yourselves. Call a friend and be sitting at your desk at the beginning of the call. Ask your friend to tell you when they notice something different in your voice. (Tell them that you are trying an experiment.) After a sentence or two - stand up! Your friend will tell you that something just changed. When you ask them to describe the change, they’ll tell you that your voice just got much better, more commanding.

If you get lucky enough to actually get to speak with your prospect LIVE, rather than being put into his or her voice mail system, you must be prepared with what you want to say. There are some calls that I make that I feel are very important and I really want, or need, to obtain an appointment. With these calls, I usually write a very short list of bullet points to refer to during the call, especially when I get nervous. On really important sales phone calls, I always get nervous! There have been times in the past when nerves have caused me to forget the reason that I was calling! These bullet points help bring me back to business.

At the beginning of the call, I always give my name and my company name. The problems that many people have are that our names and company names are words that we say many, many times a day. In the excitement of the minute, we tend to rush these words together when speaking and it’s often difficult for our prospect to understand what we just said. It can be very difficult for people to place a long pause between their first name and their last name. (It actually took me three months to practice this to the point where I can speak my name very slowly when talking to someone.) This is very important when speaking to someone who does not know who I am and did not expect my call.

Here is another thought. If you have a very difficult last name to pronounce, (one with many consonants, for example) you might be better off just using your first name and then your company name, such as, “This is Jerry, with ABC Company.”

Out of common courtesy, we must get in the habit of asking the prospect if they have time to speak with us. My method of doing that with strangers is to ask, “Do you have a minute, or is someone with you?” With people I already know, like my clients, I’ll ask, “Do you have a minute, or are you in the middle of something?” If you get in the habit of asking a question similar to this, you will actually receive compliments from people you are calling for the very first time. This helps to set yourself above your competition as being someone who cares more about other people than they do about themselves.

Next time, we’ll follow this section up with some suggestions for using proper etiquette when leaving voice mail messages.

Visit my website at www.mccannmotivations.com or email me at john@mccannmotivations.com. You can also call my toll free number at 866-603-1578.

Warming Up Our Buyers

2009-03-01T11:17:00.000-08:00

Visit my web site at www.mccannmotivations.com for more information on sales topics.

During my past thirty-five years in sales and sales training, I have constantly heard about the best ways to warm up a buyer when meeting them for the first time. Until recently, it seemed that trainers would suggest that sales people should pay attention when entering a buyer’s office. We were told to notice if there were articles or pictures or something displayed that could be used to build rapport with this person.

Some trainers have suggested that we should notice if the buyer plays golf, or if they fish, or if they display a model car or plane – anything that we could use to open conversation. It has been suggested that this will show our buyer what a great person we are to know by demonstating that we care about the person! Be careful here, because you could fall into a major trap that could actually get you thrown out of their office.

Years ago I learned of a website called SalesAutopsy.com. The author, Dan Seidman, writes stories about sales situations that people have submitted to him about screw-ups that have occurred during sales calls. One of the more dramatic examples centered around a sales rep who noticed a picture of his potential customer standing with John Madden, or at least someone very large and burley who looked like John Madden. The sales person asked: “Wow! How did you get to meet John Madden?” The buyer seemed confused and asked what the sales person was talking about. The rep pointed to the picture sitting on a credenza. The buyer then said sternly: “That’s not John Madden. That’s my wife!” How much do you think that guy sold that day?

Instead of looking around a buyer’s office for pictures of the buyer fishing or for a golf trophy, we need to get down to business and minimize the small talk. 85 % of buyers in a survey indicated that they don't have time for small talk and frankly don't want to be “warmed-up” with discussions of personal business.

Instead we should be asking questions that have to do with information that the buyer knows better than anyone else – the buyer’s job, their department, and his or her company. We need to focus our questions on business-related topics dealing with what is happening in the buyer's department or company right now. Through this discovery process we are looking for opportunities to uncover the hidden, or latent, business needs of our customer. More on this topic in another issue.

Next time we will discuss how to use the phone and email to obtain sales appointments.

For questions or comments, please email me at john@mccannmotivations.com or call me at 864-968-0262. Thank you and good selling!

The Process of Building Client Trust

2009-02-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

A client’s trust is one of the most valuable assets for sales people. It can generate new leads for us in the form of referrals – those that are asked for, and those that come our way without being asked. One of the best lines that a sales person can hear on the other end of the phone is, “You don’t know me, but your client, Joe Smith at ABC Company, said that I needed to talk with you.” It just doesn’t get any better than that in selling!

Trust that is cemented in our customers whenever they think of us takes a long time to build, but we can start that process right from our very first contact. Let’s suppose that we receive a referral of a person at another company and we intend to call them on the phone to secure a person-to-person appointment. Assuming that we are really lucky and manage to speak to them on our very first attempt (we’ll talk later about dealing with voice mail), there are some things that we can do to immediately start the trust building process.

When we introduce ourselves on the phone we should be aware of several things. First, we need to say our name and our company's name very slowly. Most people say their names so many times during the day that to them it seems like everybody should easily understand them. The problem is that the person on the other end of the line, who doesn’t know that Joe Smith from ABC Company is going to be calling at 3:05 PM today, often has difficulty understanding what we are saying. To them, we are apeaking way too fast.

By slowing down our pace when talking, we're showing that we care a lot about the other person. We don’t want them to have to ask our name a second time after our introduction. Some people may even feel a bit embarrassed at not catching our name the first time. Because of that, they may not ask us to repeat our name. A valuable personal connection can be lost here.

We need to speak very clearly and at a rate of speed that allows not only that we are heard, but that we are also understood. One way to do that is to pause for at least a one second between saying our first name and our last name. I can hear some of you now questioning that one second is not very long, and you are right. However, to the person on the other end of the line, it’s enough time for them to hear both words plainly, as long as we don’t mumble when speaking.

A suggestion here. If you have a difficult name to pronounce (for example, one that has many consonants and not many vowels) you might consider just using your first name and company name when introducing yourself. You may even be able to use the spelling of your last name as an additional reason that you two need to meet in person so you can give them a business card and help them with pronunciation!

After giving your name and company, be sure to ask the prospect if they have a minute to speak with you. This shows that you are courteous and concerned for the other person’s time. It’s also critical in the very beginning of your sales process to build the prospect’s trust of you, before they have even met you. This will help separate you from the vast number of sales people who don't use this approach when calling. If I am talking with someone for the very first time, I always ask a question like, “Do you have a minute, or is someone with you?” If you’re calling clients or people that you have known for a long time, the approach is similar, but using slightly different words. I will often ask, “Do you have a minute or are you in the middle of something?”

On one occasion, I was calling the CEO of my largest client and I asked him, “Do you have a minute or are you in the middle of something?” He responded right back to me, “You know you always ask me that!” To which I responded that I was just trying to be polite. He told me he knows why I ask the question, he was wishing more people would take the time to ask it as well. I’m very proud of the trust that this client has in me. This approach helped me generate that trust from the very first day I called this man and it continues to help me to this day.

Next time, we’ll talk about continuing the trust-building process during our warm up time when meeting our buyers during our initial face-to-face meetings. Good selling!

John J. McCann III
McCann Motivations
864-968-0262
www.mccannmotivations.com
I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn

Buying Roles within our Accounts

2008-12-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

Due to the holidays, I have been negligent in writing, but that will change as of right now. This installment will cover the four “buying influences” within our accounts that we need to know and with whom we need to have a positive business relationship. We will discuss the responsibilities of each “buyer” and some of their concerns in our sales process. We will give examples of who these buyers might be within our account and how their position can be of help to us in making our sale.

There are four distinct buying influences in each account. These are not necessarily purchasing people and in some cases these people would not even be asking to purchase our product at all. However, each may have a say in the buying decision and as such, they are very important to our sales success. Therefore, we need to have a good business relationship with each of them.

The first buying influence is called the Economic Buyer. There is usually only one of these in each sale. This is the person within the account who can say “Yes,” when all other buyers have said “No!” For example, if you have presented your product idea to a buyer and the buyer tells you that they do not have any money left in their budget year, you are now out of luck. But if you have a positive, business relationship with the Economic Buyer – the Decision Maker in the account - this is a person who can find the money for the sale when other departments have no more money to spend.

Your presentation to this buyer should reference ROI – return on investment. This buyer thinks in terms of investing in something that will either save time, improve productivity or help to generate new revenue for the company or department. Therefore, if spending dollars today, will generate a substantial return tomorrow, this person is far more likely to reach into another source of money within the overall company budget to make that purchase. You may find that the Economic Buyer is the owner, the President, or a high-level company officer, or perhaps a board member of the company. You need to know who they are and they need to know who you are for that to happen in order to have any sales success with them.

Our next buying influence is called the User Buyer. There are usually many of them in our accounts. These are the people that use our products or services and often times are department heads. Their concerns are centered on solving problems and making their operations easier and more efficient. They are concerned with proper installation of our product and training for their people to ensure proper use and safety for ease of operation. They also are concerned with customer service in the event that a problem arises.

User Buyers can be responsible for departments such as maintenance, plant operations, food service, housekeeping, accounting, etc. They will each have their own budgets and can normally order your product directly, unless the size of the purchase restricts that ability. In that case, you will definitely have to have input from the Economic Buyer to complete the sale.

Next we have the Technical Buyer. These buyers may seem to be in place with the sole purpose of saying “No!” to your recommendation. It’s not unusual to have a technical buyer using their own personal feelings or beliefs to guide their approval process for a product. On one occasion in my Johnson Wax days, I ran into a technical buyer who refused to allow any product into the account that contained any ammonia whatsoever. I tried to explain that the ammonia actually enhanced the performance of the product an was very safe, but this buyer refused to change her position. What finally won the day for me was to have this buyer speak directly to a product development manager in our R & D department before she agreed to let me even demonstrate the product in her facility, never mind to allow the facility to purchase that product.

There can be many technical buyers within an account. These buyers serve a very important purpose for the facility. In manufacturing companies, the technical buyer may serve on a Safety Committee. In this case, they have very stringent rules on what is allowed into the company. In healthcare accounts, patient care is critical to nursing, so any product that could have a potentially negative effect on patients will need to be approved by someone from nursing. In this case, the head nurse, surgical coordinator or operating room nurse is serving as a technical buyer. Detailed documentation is usually what is required to prove that your product is safe to use.

Our last buying influence is called the Coach Buyer. The Coach Buyer could be any of the above buyers or they could come from outside the account all together. Our coach is someone who is known and trusted by the account as well as respected, with a high degree of credibility, in order to be valuable to us in selling the account.

The coach can provide us with valuable information in our attempt to sell the customer because of their knowledge of all the players within the account. They want us to sell the account for “their own reasons.” In the case of the User Buyer, they may want to have our product used in their department because of their past experience from using it in another account. In the case of the Economic Buyer, they may feel that before they spend money on a new product or service, they want us to present it to our product to their user buyers to ensure proper buy-in from them. It’s not uncommon to hear an economic buyer say that they don’t want to spend money for something that their people are not going to like to use and use properly, so they become our Coach Buyer providing hints on how to sell other buyers within the account.

An example of someone from outside the account might be a sales manager who used to call on the account prior to our taking over sales responsibility. Since they still know many of the influences within the account, they can suggest a strategy to use to close the business. They obviously want us to succeed in selling and they may know where all the sales “land mines” are buried. As you know from your current sales experiences, selling in large accounts can be difficult. If you don’t know all the players and how they connect to one another, you may not be able to close the deal. A Coach Buyer can be our biggest asset in situations like these.

For more information, read “Strategic Selling,” by Robert Miller & Stephen Heiman.

Please visit my website at www.mccannmotivations.com for more information.

Buying Influences within Our Accounts

2008-11-30T09:28:00.000-08:00

Buying Levels within Our Accounts

There are many different people within our accounts that have a control over our sales results. At a minimum they can have a degree of approval in the decision to buy our product or service and even whether to buy it from us or our company. That is why we need to be positively positioned within our accounts with all of these levels of buyers. The larger, more complex the sales opportunity, the more critical this statement becomes.

In each of our accounts, no matter the size, there are always three levels of buyers. The top level is called the CEO Level – often described as the C-Level. Every C-Level officer within an account falls into this group, from CEO or owner of the company, to CFO, to CTO, to CIO. (These are Chief Executive, Financial, Technology and Information Officers.) We don’t need to be on an extremely intimate level with these people, but we do need to know who they are and what they do within the account. They also need to know us, who we represent and what we can do for their organizations. When the time comes to bring them into the selling process, if needed, then we need to have already come in contact with them prior to this point in our sales process. Otherwise, any competitor who is selling the account from the Top – Down, has a definite advantage over us.

The C-Level of management is dealing with three primary concerns. They are constantly thinking about and living with the need to accomplish the following:

1. Increase revenues,
2. Increase productivity, and
3. Decrease net operating expenses.

To increase revenues, manufacturing operations must produce more widgets to sell to more customers. Educational accounts need to find ways to put more students in more seats within their institutions. Health care accounts must find way to attract more patients to their clinics to increase their daily census. Competition is strong in every factor of our economy and it is a major concern for everybody in the C-Level. Larger institutions are finding way to purchase smaller competitors and even the other way around, in order to gain more market share. The CEO Level is charged with finding new approaches to cutting costs in their operations, as well as gaining a competitive advantage over others in their industry.

The next level down in our accounts is called the Core Level. The department heads that we will be calling on in our accounts are found in this level. These departments consist of manufacturing, plant operations, environmental services, security, food service and sales, to name a few. These managers have to accomplish the goals pushed down from the C-Level above, especially in the areas of increasing productivity and decreasing expenses. They constantly hear that they must “get more done with less.”

Core Level manager concerns are solving problems in their operations NOW! They must find new ways to become more productive, yet stay within their operating budgets, which often can be severely cut depending upon the results of the company. They look to their suppliers to find new ways to improve their overall operation. Innovation is important to them. “If you have a way to help me get more done with less, then I need to speak with you.”

The last level in our accounts is called the Support Level. This level consists of departments such as Safety, Legal, Accounting and Purchasing. People working in this level are reacting to the requests of Core Level management who have the budgets available to accomplish the goals of business. For example, someone in Purchasing is not going to call a supplier to order a new phone system because they think the company needs one. In fact, that kind of request comes from above Support Level personnel. The Support Level people take action to accomplish the goals of the Core Levels and higher within the company. While the request for the new phone system comes from above, we still must be positively positioned with this Support Level in the company as well.

In the case of the Safety department, I have found it a good idea to make a short presentation of my proposed product before bringing any ideas to my Core Level manager. I need to find out how my product is going to be received by this department. If there is something that the Safety department will not approve about my product, I need to get that issue addressed or else change my product recommendation, or I am not going to sell that product within this account. In this case, since Safety would ultimately have to approve my ideas, I need to get that approval first and make my sales presentation last. Too often sales people, including myself, have given a sales presentation, conducted a lengthy demonstration of a product, only to find that something about the product will not get approval by the Safety committee. This causes a lot of wasted sales time.

Next time, I will cover the many buying roles within our accounts and how they affect our selling success.

Top Down Selling

2008-11-16T08:36:00.000-08:00

Of all the sales training classes that I teach, by far the most popular one is my Top – Down Selling program. I am asked to speak about this one subject more than any other by all sorts of groups and sales organizations. Before I get into this topic, some information about my background might be in order.

Prior to starting McCann Motivations in 1998, I spent six years in Navy nuclear submarines, seven years with New York Life, and twenty years with Johnson Wax. Fifteen of those twenty years were spent in the training department, which was the best job I ever had. I loved it!

My responsibilities involved training all new Johnson sales people in the Northeast. That later expanded to the entire east coast. In addition, I conducted motivational programs for large end user customers like Kodak, US Air and Notre Dame University. We would offer supervisory training and other motivational programs to these customers at no charge as a value-added benefit for their having bought our products. As a trainer I learned a tremendous amount of information about how our products were manufactured and how they performed, and about selling techniques. As our VP of Sales once said, “You have to learn it before you can teach it.”

In 1996, the training department reorganized and I went back into sales. My target market became large supermarket chains and the large national contracting companies who cleaned these types of retail accounts. My biggest client was Safeway Supermarkets in WA, OR, ID, MT, and AK (Sarah Palin country). I also had responsibility for Albertson’s Supermarkets, Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom Department stores. My target “buyers” were now high-level buying influences that each had responsibility for as many as 250 – 300 retail outlets. This was totally different from the work I used to do as a salesman and then a trainer working with local distributor sales people. In those days, we used to call on individual end user accounts like schools and hospitals or nursing homes.

Selling on a direct basis to retail chains was my first experience with top – down selling techniques. Our goal is to get in to our accounts at the highest level possible. We need to introduce our company and ourselves to high-level buying influencers so that we can be positively positioned with them for future selling. A critical point here is that these people, who are at the highest level of responsibility within an organization, have limited knowledge about the products that we are trying to sell to their company. A sales person who attempts to present product at this level is making a deadly mistake. All we need to do at this point is to spend a few minutes to make a personal introduction, exchange business cards, describe how we work these types of accounts, and get this person’s thoughts on the direction we should take to begin selling within the account. I will have more ideas on this in my next Blog.

For example, if you are talking to an Executive Vice President of Operations of a retail chain, chances are pretty good that if this VP ever did mop floors, it was many, many years ago. Floor maintenance programs and products have changed dramatically since the VP's days on a mop. If we started pitching our products to this level buyer, we may only cause them to be embarrassed by not knowing what we are specifically talking about. This is true if we are selling computer products or insurance, or any other product line. Products usually have nothing to do with these high level buyers but are normally the responsibility of people far lower on the organizational chart within the organization. These other buyers are the people that we will talk to about our products and services.

Our main sales goal for these introductory, high levels sales calls is to “get invited back” into the account. We are looking to be personally introduced to lower level buyers within the account – the people who actually use our products, but who are often very busy and could be difficult to get to see. When we are introduced to these lower-level buyers as a result of our contacts with upper level management, there is NEVER a problem getting in to see them. This top – down approach allows us to manage the account in two directions: vertically from the top down, and horizontally in any direction that we want or need to go.

In my next Blog, I will review the different types of buying influences that exit in all of our accounts. We need to be “positively positioned” with each of these buyers. In some sales situations, we may need to involve each of these different buyers in order for a deal to come together. We will not be able to do that unless we have some sort of positive business relationship with each of them. We will review each buyer type, what their needs and concerns are, and discuss how to contact each of them during our sales process.

I'm in the Blogging business!

2008-10-28T13:33:00.001-07:00

Good afternoon to one and all!

This is my first attempt at blogging and it comes after many people have suggested that I create some sort of method to provide advice or thoughts on issues pertaining to selling.

I have been connected with sales, or sales training for the better part of 35 years, if you don't count my days selling Ribbon Candy for the Boys Scouts back in Durham, NH. I love selling and especially love sales training. My plan is to post something to this blog at least every two weeks in hopes that I can help people enjoy selling as much as I have over the years and still do today.

Let me hear back from you. If there is a topic that you would like me to address, please let me know. Maybe I can give an idea or two that will help you get that sales appointment or close that sale. If an idea of mine helps you in sales, please let me know so that I can share in your excitement vicariously. We all love to win!

Good luck and I will be back in touch.