This is a guest post by Jill Konrath

I was recently asked, “If you were mentoring a new salesperson, what would be your top five sales tips and how did you learn those?”

Good question! It really got me thinking. There are so many things I’d like to tell a new seller. But what are the most important? What things could I recommend that would have the highest impact on success?

After serious deliberation, here are my thoughts …

1. Focus on making a difference.

Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. That’s the hardest thing for sellers to realize. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.

For example, today I sell sales training. If I’d call a VP of Sales and mention that, they’ll tell me their not interested. However, once I changed my focus to the tangible outcomes they’d get from using my sales training, the door opened wide. After all, they were extremely interested in shortening their sales cycle, reducing the ramp up time for new hire sales reps and driving revenue growth.

2. Slow down to speed up your sales.

This was one of the hardest things for me to learn. When I first started selling, I was so eager to be successful. I tried to wow my prospects with my great product knowledge. I closed often and early. But the more I tried to rush things, the more resistant to moving forward my prospects became. They’d throw out obstacles and objections that I couldn’t overcome. When I learned to slow down, parcel information out over multiple meetings, and simply advance the sales process one step at a time, suddenly my sales increased.

When you’re scared about not getting the business, your prospects can intuitively sense your fear. One of the major symptoms is rushing the sales process.

3. Pay the price of admission. Do precall research!

To get into big companies, you can’t make a 100 cold calls saying the same thing to everyone. Several years ago corporate decision makers stopped answering their phones and rolled all calls to voicemail. They delete most message within seconds because they sound like salespeople making their pitch.

I discovered that the only way to capture the attention of these corporate decision makers was to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research in their firm. Once I started doing this, I started setting up meetings.

4. Create an account entry campaign.

It takes 7-10 contacts to crack into a corporate accounts these days. Most sellers give up after 3-5 attempts. If you want to set up a meeting with a corporate decision maker, plan multiple touches from the onset. It takes a while to break through their busy-ness and register on their Richter Scale, but it can be done.

You can use multiple formats in your campaign too: voicemail, email, direct mail, invitations to teleseminars, and more.

5. Analyze your sales approach from your customer’s shoes.

It’s not important what you say. The only thing that matters is what your customer’s hear. For example, when I was trying to reach a decision maker a while back, I decided to leave the message on my own voicemail first to see how I sounded. When I listened to my message, I was appalled. I sounded pathetic! So I worked on scripting my message and kept calling myself over and over till I finally created something I would respond to if I were the prospect.

Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, helps sellers crack into corporate accounts, shorten sales cycles and win big contracts. She’s a frequent speaker at annual sales meetings, kick-off events and professional conferences. For timely and provocative sales advice, visit www.SellingtoBigCompanies.com

This is a guest post by Paul Archer

Everyone knows that in selling or coaching, it’s extremely dangerous to make assumptions about your customer or the person you’re coaching. It’s one of those principles that.s drummed into sales people on day one of their induction sales training. But we’re all guilty of making assumptions from time to time – I know I am. Read on to see how dangerous these can be.

Over Christmas I was talking to my three children about a fearful incident when I was about their age. The story shocked them at the time and they still don’t believe it was true. But I assure you it was.

My first pet was a cute golden hamster that I named Hammy – original I know. Now we didn’t live in a big house so I shared a room with Hammy and my two brothers who I hated passionately. We were constantly caught bashing the life out of each other, as brothers do.

It came to a head one evening when Hammy, being a nocturnal creature, kept us all up with his squealing exercise wheel. It was incessant. It was excruciatingly painful. Nothing we could do would stop him or fix the squeak. And the fighting with my brothers got even worse.

He had to go. The next day Hammy found his way into the garden shed. What a relief, at last we could get some sleep. We had solved the problem but only until that fateful morning.

It was freezing and pitch black at 6am. On my way to my paper-round, I popped my head around the shed door to look up on Hammy. I stared into his cage with a torch, he was motionless. I was devastated – my only true friend was dead and it was my entire fault evicting him to the bitter, murky shed.

Ignoring my paper round, I picked him up and took him indoors. This 12 year old boy was distraught and overwhelmed by it all. So I laid him on the kitchen table and went upstairs to cry my little heart out. Gradually the house woke up and I heard a banshee like shriek from the kitchen. My Mum had found a stone cold hamster on the kitchen table. Not that I could see at the time what the problem was, after all it was dead but maybe that was the point.

“Take it out immediately” screamed mum, so I grabbed Hammy and ran outside to bury him. As I took my old friend outside I laid him down on the earth next to the shovel ready to dig his grave, but then I saw his foot twitch. I thought I was seeing things so I dried my eyes and looked again. There it went again. It had moved and it wasn’t a muscle spasm. He was alive.

I rushed indoors and plopped him on the storage heater. With careful nursing and stroking, slowly and bit by bit he came back to life and I was the happiest little boy on the planet.

Hammy went on to live a normal life. I found out years later that he had merely hibernated that cold night. I still think it was a miracle. And he was within 5 feet of a living grave. So you see that making assumptions can critically damage your health – well maybe your pet hamster. Not assuming can literally save lives.

Seriously though, the next time you find yourself about to make an assumption about the needs of a customer, because you’ve heard it all before dozens of times or you think everyone wants the price to be lower or you assume the recession will gobble you up….just remember that devoted 12 year old boy bringing back to life his pet hamster, Hammy.

Paul Archer is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK. He specializes in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small. For more information on Paul and his training courses, visit www.archertraining.co.uk or his sales  blog at www.paularcher.com

This is a guest post by Paul Archer.

Here’s a sublimely simple way your company can take a small step to ride out the economic downturn. It hit me on Saturday whilst clothes shopping for my daughter.

The shop was empty. Just a few sales assistants wandering around looking trendy and checking the racks of fashion clothes. I guess it was the snow, the fact that it was 10am on Saturday and a retail slowdown that caused the shop to be empty.

I was shopping with Claire and my 8 year old daughter Bethan, for clothes and girls seem to take that job so very seriously, I can never understand why. At the checkout the girl behind the counter took the items. She was very pleasant, smiled fully and got on with the job, which I was keen to finish now having spent 19 minutes in the shop. Believe me; a man’s legs go wobbly after 20 minutes in a clothes shop, so I was keen to see the door.

“Do you want to enter a free competition?” she asked, and pointed to the brochure. As my wife paid for Bethan’s top, I read the brochure. Strewth I thought, now this is one fab competition. Totally free, as she said. But the first prize was £50,000 cash and the second prize a totally luscious Mercedes.

Wow I thought. This is a seriously good competition surely it would be easy to sell to customers. For a start she shouldn’t have said “Do you want to enter a free competition”. No, that’s a closed question asked so unenthusiastically too. She should have used a “yes tag” here. “You’d like to win £50,000 cash wouldn’t you?” and if she’d checked my name on the Maestro Card she would have been able to call me Mr Archer.

I was just about to give her a sales one to one training session to my wife’s horror…but then stopped myself.

The polite girl on the counter hadn’t ever been trained in sales and how many other customer facing staff have never had any basic sales training. Those fashionable types wandering around the retail floor, the people taking calls from customers that morning, the people at the checkouts, the staff that take orders from their online division, the people who take payments over the phone… the list goes on. They’ve never had even the basics of sales training.

As I left the store looking forward to watching England take on Italy in the rugby, a little bit of me thought…isn’t that a shame. Any company that gives every customer facing team member some basic sales tips, will certainly have a competitive advantage in this challenging economy.

So come on everyone who can change this. Give your guys just a few sales tips to help them sell us all through this temporary downturn.

Paul Archer is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK. He specializes in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small. For more information on Paul and his training courses, visit www.archertraining.co.uk or his sales  blog at www.paularcher.com

This is a guest post by Jill Konrath

Of course, you don’t mean to do that! But the truth is that it often happens without you even thinking out it.

Case in point: You’ve just learned all about your new product or service offering. Tons of details. All its selling points. You’re so excited & can’t wait to share what you’ve learned with your prospects.

And when you finally get into a meeting, what comes out?

“We’ve just introduced a new complete system (methodology/process) that’s guaranteed to provide fully integrated communications for all your technology and non-technology needs as well as provide significant return on your investment with an ROI of only 9 months.”

Blather! I know you’re thinking you sound impressive, but from a prospect’s perspective it’s downright intimidating. Their eyes slowly glaze over and before long, you’ve lost them.

To be a successful communicator, you need to talk like a normal human being.

Here’s an interesting tidbit that supports this premise: A language monitoring serviced analyzed the recent VP debate. Palin spoke at a 9.5 grade level, while Biden spoke at an 7.8 grade level. (Full article here.)

Both candidates are focused on connecting with voters, not impressing them. I have no doubt that they could have easily spoken at a much higher grade level – which would have meant bigger words, longer sentences and more complex sentence construction.

However, they chose not to do that. They wanted to relate to us.

If we’re focused on impressing prospects with our vast knowledge, we’ll lose them. They’ll feel stupid. They won’t open up. They won’t ask questions.

And we won’t get the business!

Question for you: Have you ever caught yourself trying to impress customers? What happened? Were you able to recover?

Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, helps sellers crack into corporate accounts, shorten sales cycles and win big contracts. She’s a frequent speaker at annual sales meetings, kick-off events and professional conferences. For timely and provocative sales advice, visit www.SellingtoBigCompanies.com

This is a guest post by Paul Archer.

Do you ever have to deliver presentations and include a question and answer session? Read on to discover the golden rules to make this

part of your talk shine.

I was at a conference recently and the speaker, who had done a pretty good job with his presentation, was about to take questions from the 50 plus audience. It was time for the dreaded Q&A Session. And you could tell this speaker wasn’t looking forward to it as his body language closed down and his voice demonstrated fear and trepidation.

As always, audiences want speakers to do well. It’s a human DNA thing. No one wants a speaker to bomb. And I was hoping this speaker would follow the golden rules of Q&As and do a good job.

Let me remind you the golden rules.

Question and answer sessions are excellent audience participation techniques which work really well with larger groups where spontaneous questions just don’t work. I mean for groups of 20 plus. They allow the speaker to demonstrate their knowledge orwisdom, they encourage audience involvement and they help the presentation to be linked to the needs and problems of the audience.

So you should run Q&As.

But you simply mustn’t leave them to the last moment. That’s a recipe for a damp squid close. Ending on a Q&A can be risky because you don’t know how many questions you’re going to get and it could all end rather meekly. No, you should plan to run a Q&A session about two thirds into the presentation, when content has been delivered and the audienceinspired and educated.

If you must leave the Q&A to the end, plan a finish to your talk – your call to action or summary or “bang” as I call it – but have your Q&A before this planned close. That way if you get few questions, then you just launch into your planned finish, to end on a high. If you’re worried about getting few questions, prime some audience members beforehand.

Alternatively display your mobile number on the big screen and get people to text you questions as the presentation is delivered. This works very well for younger audiences where mobile phones are their third limb. If you really want to be really clever, use an audience polling system using mobile phones. When this works it’s very smart and ignites audiences who love to hear what others think.

If you want the latest technology for meetings you will want to visit Corbin Ball’s site who is an expert in this area.

http://www.corbinball.com

When taking questions, follow this template:

• Repeat

• Respond

• Review

Hopefully you have a roving microphone, so everyone can hear the question. But it’s always good practice to repeat the question to make sure everyone can hear it. There’s nothing more frustrating than a question from the audience that others can’t hear. You lose interest.

Repeating also gives you valuable thinking time whilst you formulate the answer in your head. Respond, of course, although if the question is totally irrelevant, it’s quite OK to park it and suggest you have a one to one later. You might upset the questioner but you’ll please everyone else in the audience.

Respond quickly and succinctly. Don’t ramble on and on. This is a game of tennis with a both players involved in an exciting rally. Question, answer, next question, answer, next question and so on. Give the audience value by getting through a lot of questions if you can.

Finally review the answer. Ask the questioner, “was that useful” or “has that helped you”. And then move on to the next question. A little tip here if the questioner is hostile in any way – trying to catch you out or demonstrate their own expertise which some do, then don’t do the review. When you’ve answered the question say something like “I think we have another question over here” and move on.

A final Q&A tip for you is to focus your eye contact on the whole audience with about 30% of your attention on the questioner. This helps to keep the audience engaged. It also prevents you getting tied in with continuous questions from one person which is equally wearisome for the whole audience.

Keep to your timing that you allocated to the Q&A, thank the audience for their questions and move onto the grand finale that you prepared. And you’ve made the dreaded Q&A an integral part of your presentation.

Paul Archer is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK. He specializes in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small. For more information on Paul and his training courses, visit www.archertraining.co.uk or his sales  blog at www.paularcher.com

Mind you, they would never answer it if they thought a seller was on the other end of the line. They’re likely right in the middle of a meeting and expecting a call from someone else.

Suddenly, instead of leaving your well-prepared voicemail message, you’re on the spot to say something intelligent and compelling. If you’re like most people, those kind of words don’t flow naturally from your mouth – especially when you’re under pressure.

When I was writing my book, one of my clients was actually working through it in real time, giving me immediate feedback on the strategies, processes and tips in it.

She had a great laugh at my expense when she read about my own major blooper when the vice president of sales actually answered the phone. I totally lost my cool.

My value proposition evaporated into thin air. I stumbled over my words, talked a mile a minute and blurted out this rambling, non-focused spiel about what my company did. It was horrible – totally unbecoming of someone in my position. In fact, I was embarrassed to be me.

I got off the phone as soon as I could before I dug myself into an even deeper hole. My only saving grace was that he probably wouldn’t remember who I was.

Alyssa thought that was really, really funny – that is, until the day it happened to her. She’d prepared this great voicemail script for a prospect with whom she was trying to get an appointment.

She was all set to leave her message at the beep, but it never came. Instead, Mr. Big answered the phone. Immediately Alyssa felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Her brain locked and she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

On the other end of the line, Mr. Big was saying, “Hello, hello. Is somebody there?”

“Yes,” she finally said. “This is Alyssa. I’m with Anonymous Software Firm.”

“What do you want?” he said curtly.

“We specialize in (self-serving words to describe her offering). I’d like to talk with you about your sales automation system and how our software can help you improve it.”

He cut her short. “We already have that covered. I’m in the middle of a meeting and have to go.”

End of call. He hung up.

So what will you say after your prospect says, “Hello?”  Have you thought of it? Does it flow out of your mouth as easily as your voicemail? Or, are you getting ready to dig your own grave?

Here are several tips that will help you avoid sounding like a blooming idiot.

1. Keep it simple.  After you say your name, it helps if the next sentence you say is the same for both your voicemail and an actual conversation. That way your brain won’t freeze.

2. Focus on business. Corporate decision makers hate peppy, enthusiastic people who can’t wait to share things about their product or service.

3. Develop a provocative question. You want to engage the decision maker in conversation as quickly as you can.

4. Check to see if they’re busy right then and there. If they’re distracted, you’re wasting your breath.

5. Don’t focus on being nice. Instead, focus on being a business professional that has something valuable to say.

Most of all, plan ahead. You know how seldom someone actually picks up their phone. This is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Make sure you put your best foot forward.

Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies, helps sellers crack into corporate accounts, shorten sales cycles and win big contracts. She’s a frequent speaker at annual sales meetings, kick-off events and professional conferences. For timely and provocative sales advice, visit www.SellingtoBigCompanies.com

This is a guest post by Mike Brooks.

Clients use all sorts of objections, but sometimes I think this is their favorite. I mean, how can you argue with someone who tells you they don’t need what you have to give them because they already have enough of it?

Well, let’s face it, nobody has TOO much of anything, especially business, and while 80% of your competition get blown off when they get this objection, the top 20% know what to say.

After you read and adapt the three closes below, YOU’LL know what to say, too!

Response #1:

“I know that feeling; I do too! But for some reason, my boss wants to keep it that way so he thinks it’s a good idea to continue to market and introduce others to our products and services. And it’s the same way for you as well. Momentum is great, but if you don’t keep it going, it will first slow down, then it will stop.

Here’s what I recommend: Let’s get you started with the (package/solution) as it is, since we both agree it will keep your business coming. And then after the 6 month trial period, we can reassess. All we need to do to get your started is…”

Response #2:

“And ________ I know that the reason you have so much business is because you have the foresight to invest in (your kind of solution). It’s actually a pleasure to work with clients like you because I know you already understand the need for this kind of (product or solution).

And because you already know the value of this, I’m going to recommend you start with us on the professional level that allows you to leverage your way into our top position. That’s only (X amount). How do you want to handle payment of that today?”

Response #3:

“That’s a nice position to be in. And to make sure you stay that way, I’d recommend starting with our mid-level position. That way you’ll get X amount of (leads/results) and so won’t overwhelm yourself. If you find your other (companies offering some similar solution) starting to slip, then you can simply transfer that part of your business into your account here.

What I recommend is that you start with (X amount/position) and then increase it over time as you need to. What is the best way for you to handle this start up account?”

If you found this article helpful, then you will love my, “The Complete Book of Phone Scripts” which is packed with word for word scripts just like this one that you can begin using today to make more appointments and more sales. You can read about it here:

http://www.mrinsidesales.com/scripts.htm