OCTOBER | ISSUE 109
How to Breathe Life Back Into Cold Clients Page 6
Reprogram Yourself to Overcome Your Fear of Selling Page 16 Banish Negativity with a Success Journal Page 20
NZ’S E-MAG FOR SALES LEADERS | WWW.NZSALESMANAGER.CO.NZ
From the Editor I
’ve always been a firm believer that the results we’re getting in life are a result of what we’ve learnt and have put into action.Not getting the results you want? In my experience, there are only two reasons for this; you either haven’t learnt how to achieve those results or, you’re not doing the things you know you should be doing. Interestingly enough, when I’ve attended training or learning sessions in the past, there are always people who come away learning nothing, thinking it was all a waste of time. ‘What’s going on here?’. I would wonder… ‘I know more about this stuff than they do, so how come they learnt less than me?’
the ones who need it the most.The question is – what can we, as sales and business leaders, and managers of our workers, do about it? To me, there seems one obvious answer and it’s an answer that doesn’t have to cost anything except a change in attitude. Quite simply, we all need to build a culture of ongoing learning and development into our organisations, and, like any meaningful culture change, it starts at the top. So take one of the articles from this month’s issue, share it, talk about it, and most importantly help your team learn something from it.
Back in my days as an accountant, part of our KPI's were to ensure we kept up with our monthly industry reading. Who knows what the impact could be on our top line if we The truth is that good learners learn lots from implemented something like this in our sales everything, and bad learners learn nothing from and marketing teams? anything. No wonder training is often wasted on
Richard
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ISSN 2230-4762 EDITOR Richard Liew ART DIRECTOR Jodi Olsson GROUP EDITOR Richard Liew CONTENT ENQUIRIES Phone Richard on 021 994 136 or email richardl@espiremedia.com
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contents
OCTOBER THIS MONTH'S MUST READ...............................................................................................................6 HOW TO BREATHE LIFE BACK INTO COLD CLIENTS
CREATE STRONG CUSTOMER ADVOCATES FOR YOUR BRAND ...........................................12 REPROGRAM YOURSELF TO OVERCOME YOUR FEAR OF SELLING...........................................16
QUICK FIX..........................................................................................................................................19 It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell
TWO MINUTE TOP-UP.......................................................................................................................20 ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
BOOK REVIEW...................................................................................................................................22
How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger
DID YOU KNOW?................................................................................................................................24 THE CLOSE........................................................................................................................................24
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MUSTREAD
How to Breathe Life Back Into Cold Clients Words by Mary Crampton
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I
f you’ve been in sales long enough, sooner or later you’ll be called on to breathe life back into cold clients. And yes, you can do this!
I’m talking about winning back those customers who used to buy from you or from your business, who have gone cold and are no longer your customers. Many businesses have great sales, great clients, a great team. They can get so busy with ‘business as usual’ that it becomes hard to keep in touch with customers not in their top tier. It is important to put energy and focus into understanding your top tier clients. However, tiers two and three are also an important base for your business.
Right now – how is your business doing with these two lower tiers? Have a look through your sales data, even a couple of years back. Are all those clients still buying from you? How long is it since you’ve spoken to them, chatted on Skype, taken them out for a coffee? Do you know their current pain points? How are things in their industry? Have there been any staff changes – your list of contacts may need updating. Now add up how much revenue that these clients used to spend with you. Consider what the total customer lifetime value could be to your business. These clients are worth a second look.
Hmmm… wouldn’t it be great to see those numbers back on your company’s books? Perhaps they have all gone out of business - unlikely. What is more likely is that they are happily buying from your competitors. So, how do you breathe life back into cold clients? How do you wake them up so that they become your customer again? Customers who used to buy from your business were once passionate about your company, your products and services, your salespeople. What happened? www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz |
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Here are some reasons why customers might have stopped buying from you: • The client did not like your people. • The client did not like your new people.
If you can change five out of this list of seven reasons – then yes salespeople, you can absolutely breathe life back into cold clients!
• Your products or services have changed and don’t meet their client needs. • Their business has changed, so your products or services don’t meet their client needs. • The decision maker at your client’s company has changed and, the new person does not know you or your business. • The new person has a relationship with your competitor. • They felt you pigeon-holed them as a ‘small’ customer – so when they grew, they looked elsewhere. Something went wrong with your company’s products or services, and you: • Didn’t fix it • Disagreed that there was a problem • Fixed it, but wanted to charge them for your company’s problem The great news is – from the seven reasons listed, reason number three and four are the only ones that you can’t do anything about. In these situations, where a change has occurred, either in your products and services, or their client’s needs, clients may be forced to look elsewhere. So if you can change five out of this list of seven reasons – then yes salespeople, you can absolutely breathe life back into cold clients! Even with the two reasons that you can’t change – you could still be communicating internally to see how your company could change a little, to continue to meet their client’s needs.
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As change occurs, keep communication open with your client, giving your company an opportunity to become their chosen supplier again.
You might not know it, but your clients could be:
The common thread running through the seven reasons is bad communication. Perhaps even no communication.
• Having coffee with your competitor’s
Good salespeople can find something to help them connect with every client they deal with, not just clients who are exactly like them. We need to keep talking with our clients, keeping them in the loop about product and service changes. We need to let them know that they matter to us, that we have their best interests at heart. When our clients have problems with our company, we need to advocate for them and get the problem solved, so that our clients win – not just our company. Remember that if you’re not talking with your clients, then someone else will be.
• Looking at your competitor’s websites • Seeing your competitor’s content and advertising • Meeting your competitor’s at industry events • Discussing their pain points about your company • Receiving proposals from your competitor’s • You can bet that someone else out there is talking to your clients. The secret is: you need to keep close to your clients. You need to be so close to them, that when the competition approaches them, trying to win them over – the client comes to you, giving you an opportunity to demonstrate how your company can meet their client needs. Happy clients don’t want to change providers. Even if they become unhappy with your company, if they trust and like you as a salesperson, they will want to stay with your company. So, to win them back a key factor is good communication, probably over a sustained period, to regain their trust in you and your company.
As change occurs, keep communication open with your client, giving your company an opportunity to become their chosen supplier again. www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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Stay calm and be prepared for some hard truths. There could be a very good reason why some of these clients went cold
Show them that you’ve understood their needs. Try doing some of the things your competition did; that got them Submit a proposal so that they away from your company in the first place: can evaluate the other options • Improve the content on your website, keeping it topical and out there. No one wants to up to date remain ignorant, especially if it • Ensure your social media and any advertising is working for makes good business sense to consider other options. you, helping to expand your client reach • Attend industry events, actually listening to each person you Stay calm and be prepared for some hard truths. There could speak with be a very good reason why some of these clients went Set yourself a goal: have a coffee with at least one cold client cold. If there’s anything that each week. Enjoy the person you’re meeting, ask them how you, or your company did that it’s going. All they are committing to is a cup of coffee. They lost their business, apologise, might just relax and open up. They may not be as happy as they then do your best to create a initially appeared.. winning solution for them. Listen when they discuss their pain points about their current supplier. Now is not the time to trash the competition. You need to show them how professional you can be and you also need to relax. If you’re going to win this client back, they don’t want to feel embarrassed that they left. Show them that you’re interested in them, and in their needs. 010 |
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When relating to cold clients your job is to position yourself and your company as their Plan B. So that even if they truly are happy right now, your company comes back on their radar.
Right now is a great time to start breathing life back into cold clients. It’s Spring, so you are: • Still a couple of months out from the Christmas season • Contacting them five months before a 31 March year-end • Contacting them eight months before a 30 June year-end Make a goal to go through your client database: • Sort your data, so that you isolate clients whose last purchase was 12-24 months ago. • Next, sort your data in order of ‘highest spend’ to ‘lowest spend’. • Make it a priority to contact those 20 highest spending cold clients, perhaps two per week. Catch up with them, grow in your understanding of their needs. Breathe new life into them, and win them back. Just like new business development, winning back cold clients sometimes take a bit of time. So keep in touch because a lot can change in the months ahead. You want to be their first choice when they start looking at suppliers again. Connect with them on LinkedIn, get them back on your company newsletter list, diary to call them each quarter. Build that relationship so well, that when the start of their new financial year rolls around (find out this date too!), your company will get the opportunity to pitch for business in the year ahead. They could even become your new client!•
www.magnifyconsulting.co.nz
Mary Crampton is a Sales Advisor and Consultant specialising in helping her clients to boost their sales of big tickets products and services. She provides business development solutions from Magnify Consulting www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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Engagement comes from the company’s belief that better sales begin with better relationships, so it prides itself on fostering deep connections between people and brands.
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s management of your sales processes and customer service a pain point for your brand? Creating strong customer advocacy for your brand requires an investment of both time and resources, and this can take away from core business functions. However, with Leading Edge behind the scenes and its years of sales expertise at your disposal, your brand can shine. Leading Edge takes away the pain of the complexity of managing sales and services and in return creates strong customer advocates for your brand, to give it an ‘edge’. It’s New Zealand’s leading sales organisation with sales channels including telemarketing, call/contact centres, B2B, B2C, stores, face to face, online and outbound/inbound. Through these, it delivers end-to-end customer experiences in the form of after-sales services, retention, lifecycle management, loyalty and referral programmes through its engaged team of sales and support people who pride themselves on delivering a fantastic experience. That engagement comes from the company’s belief that better sales begin with better relationships, so it prides itself on fostering deep connections between people and brands. “People are helping with the experience of that brand; people are engaging with those end-customers and people are the centre of our service,” group marketing manager Chloé Lomas says. “So if you have better people and better relationships, you will get better sales performance.” www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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With this in mind, Leading Edge has created a culture within its team that encourages them to do the best to be the best. Its this emphasis on culture and putting people at the heart of the business that has seen Leading Edge be a finalist in the last three years of IBM’s Kenexa Best Workplaces. Further engaging the team is strong and competent leadership, which Leading Edge sees as a business’s key competitive advantage.
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Building competitive advantage today is all about leadership – having the right people driving the bus is key, and ensuring these people are tightly aligned on values, ethics, and goals is paramount to success.
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Group CEO, Struan Abernethy says, “Building competitive advantage today is all about leadership – having the right people driving the bus is key, and ensuring these people are tightly aligned on values, ethics, and goals is paramount to success.”
Facilitating its leadership is Leading Edge’s unique leadership framework, created by the enablement team to measure and develop the leaders. It also hosts quarterly leaders’ days, which all the leaders attend to ensure they return to their teams with a consistent approach to the role.
With Leading Edge taking care of sales and service, Spark can focus on its other core business functions, including product innovation.
Developing strong leadership within its team has been a focus of Leading Edge over the years and during that time it has developed expert knowledge. “We’ve got this rhythm that works,” Abernethy says. “And we know when something doesn’t work because we’ve learnt and we’ve gone through those years to figure out what we want to run with in the future.” The benefits of that knowledge are something already experienced by Spark, for which Leading Edge is the largest sales channel partner.
It’s other partners, Foodzone and n3 – Business Buying Power, are also experiencing brand growth and loyalty from Leading Edge’s methods and values because as Lomas says, “We sell and you succeed”.
Leading Edge services hundreds of thousands of Spark customers across 19 retail stores, 10 Business Hub locations as well as being Spark Digital’s nationwide sales channel partner.
See how Leading Edge help New Zealand businesses, as told by their sales channel partners. ■
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To get in touch with Leading Edge to find out how your sales channel can work better and smarter, visit LeadingEdgeGroup.co.nz www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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Reprogram Yourself to Overcome Your Fear of Selling Words by Yelena Kostyugova
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hether you're a sales professional or business owner, starting a career in sales is an exciting moment filled with hopes, opportunities and, inevitably, fears.
Being a salesperson means putting yourself out there and promoting your product or service. To some people, this seems to come naturally, but to a lot of new salespeople, selling yourself can feel a little daunting. It’s obvious that to grow your sales you need to grow your exposure, and that means facing your fears and possible rejection. Fear of rejection is the number one fear among salespeople. And fair enough, rejection is emotionally painful. We are social beings, and we have a need to be liked and accepted by our peers. Rejection is tough to deal with, but it simply is part of sales. Many salespeople fail because the fear cripples them from moving forward in their career. Your fear of rejection can be the biggest obstacle to your success in sales. Being an introvert by nature, I dreaded the thought of having to promote myself and my business. Deep down somewhere I had an automatic program that was installed ‘god knows when’ and was triggered every time I thought about having to put myself out there and sell. A simple act of picking up a phone to call a prospect, meeting new people and talking about my business felt as dreadful as going to the dentist. I had no idea where my paralysing fear was coming from, but I knew my business was suffering, and I felt frustrated and stuck. Luckily, being an NLP1 Master Practitioner, I had all the tools to deal with my fear, and it was time for me to ‘eat my own cooking’. I identified the thoughts that were triggering the old program of fear, and I changed them.
I’ve seen a lot of clients since, and I’ve never met a person who didn’t have a fear of rejection on some level in some area of their life. Most people do not know where it comes from. Usually, when I help my clients overcome the fear of rejection, we find that the root of the problem goes way back into the past when they were very young. The most common scenario is something painful happened to them way back in the past, and their clever subconscious mind installed a ‘fight or flight’ program in response to this event as a protection mechanism. Now, every time a similar situation happens it triggers that response and they have no idea where it is coming from. This program might’ve been useful in the past, but now that they are much older, it's a nuisance. If you want to deal with your fear once and for all, I would recommend finding an NLP coach who can take you through an emotional healing process, and help you clear the root cause of that emotion from your past. www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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If you want to have a DIY strategy available to help you deal with the fear as it comes up, here are two simple steps you can take.
1 Identify the thoughts that trigger your fear, and challenge them. When the fear comes up observe yourself, notice what you say to yourself and what pictures you make in your head just before it comes up. You will notice that certain thoughts and certain images cause your tummy to sink. For example, you are about to make a phone call, and you are noticing that you say to yourself one of these: “They are not going to like me.” “He is so busy – he might not want to talk to me." “They will probably never buy my service." “What if they say NO?”
2 These statements are neither right nor wrong, they are just some of the ideas you came up with, and they are probably the least useful ones in terms of helping you feel good and confident. Don’t accept these ideas as true. Challenge them! Talk back to them and find ideas that feel better. For example: “They might like me or they might not, but if I don’t call them, then I’m not giving them any chance to like me.” “If he is busy and cannot talk to me, I can ask him when would be a good time to call him back.” “I don’t really know whether they will or won’t buy my service. If I do not ask, then they definitely won’t. If I ask, I might get a yes. I guess it’s worth checking.” “I don’t like to hear ‘no’. But ‘no’ is the second best answer because not knowing where I stand is the worst position to be in.” Have fun playing with these. Remember the only limits to your sales success are the ones you impose on yourself.•
www.yelenakostyugova.com
Yelena Kostyugova is a life coach and NLP master practitioner, specialising in helping people from all walks of life overcome limiting beliefs and fears that hold them back.
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QUICKFIX
Quick Fix: Its Not What You Sell, It's How You Sell
What Do You Want Your Customer to do Next?
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f you are expecting a reply from a customer or prospect, and it doesn’t come through, do they know what you are expecting them to do next?
It might be clear cut – for example, ‘to meet your required delivery date we need your instruction to proceed by this Friday.’
Before you send your emails and sales letters, you must answer this If it is a bit more complex and question for yourself: for a softer approach, you might ‘What do I want my customer to do next?’ simply say ‘I suggest the next Then make sure this is clear in your communication. step is to…' • www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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TWOMINUTETOPUP
Accentuate the Positive
How to beat negative thinking with a Success Journal Words by Janice Davies
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ome salespeople get stuck in a rut of negative thinking, becoming fearful and depressed when they cannot turn their usual sales processes into a deal. Ultimately sometimes there are things outside of your personal control, but you still need to think about and seek your personal solutions. Changing your negative thinking to ‘positive’ is the key. Some solutions are already available from family, friends and colleagues. Everyone should be focused on thanking those who can and are helping you.
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Tapping into other people’s positive rather than negative thoughts and getting motivated together, is another answer. Families, employees and employers need to be orientated towards solutions and working towards overcoming the challenges together as some strive to survive.
Getting into the habit of focusing on your successes every day, will help change your emotions from negative to positive and immediately lifts your energy level.
Rather than getting down and dispirited, another solution is to focus on your daily successes by keeping a simple Answer the following questions in your Success Journal Success Journal. everyday: At the end of each day, take ten minutes to record any actions and achievements, no matter how big or small, that have helped make you ‘feel good’ and identify your goals for the next day. Getting into the habit of focusing on your successes every day, will help change your emotions from negative to positive and immediately lifts your energy level.
I am great because… Today I achieved… I felt good because… Next time I will try… I desire… My goal for tomorrow is… It is also important to use additional methods of mental injection like affirmations and visualisation like top sports people and other successful business people do. Being able to create positive thinking during times of adversity means you are already one more step up your ladder of success.•
www.attitudespecialist.co.nz
Janice Davies is an Auckland based motivational speaker, trainer, coach and author known as The Attitude Specialist. For more ideas you can visit her website. www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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RESOURCECORNER
How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling
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business classic endorsed by Dale Carnegie – How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling is for anyone whose job it is to sell. Whether you are selling houses or mutual funds, advertisements or ideas – or anything else – this book is for you.
By Frank Bettger
When Frank Bettger was 29 he was a failed insurance salesman. By the time he was 40 he owned a country estate and could have retired. What are the selling secrets that turned Bettger’s life around from defeat to unparalleled success and fame as one of the highest paid salesmen in America? The answer is inside How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. Bettger reveals his personal experiences and explains the foolproof principles that he developed and perfected. He shares instructive anecdotes and step-by-step guidelines on how to develop the style, spirit, and presence of a winning salesperson. 022 |
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No matter what you sell, you will be more efficient and profitable – and more valuable to your company – when you apply Bettger’s keen insights on: • The power of enthusiasm • How to conquer fear • The key word for turning a sceptical client into an enthusiastic buyer • The quickest way to win confidence • Seven golden rules for closing a sale.•
Find out more Here
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DIDYOUKNOW Consumer Guarantees Act: The Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 dictates the rights of consumers and the responsibilities of those who serve them. It covers everything that might ordinarily be purchased for personal, domestic or household use. Sellers cannot exempt themselves from their obligations under the Act, even if they put it in a contract. So, if a retailer puts up a sign saying ‘We do not provide refunds or exchanges’ it is meaningless. You still have full rights under the Act and the Commerce Commission can prosecute traders who attempt to contract out of the Act, under the Fair Trading Act. However, sellers can contract out of the Act when such goods are used for business.
When a product is ordinarily purchased for domestic use but is also used for business purposes – like a mobile phone, for example – the Act will allow a seller to contract out of the Act. This contracting out has to be in writing at the time and point of sale and it has to be fair and reasonable for the seller to contract out. In general, this means that the contracting out has to be subject to negotiation, and simply including it on the fine print on the sales docket is not sufficient.•
For more information visit Consumer.org.nz or CAB.org.nz.
THECLOSE
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”- Thomas Jefferson Subscribe at www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz
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