Good Guy Style Marketing Still Lives
I’ve been reading a fairly new blog for a while now and I’ve just got to link to it and the guy who writes it.
Terry Dean was around when I first started to get into Internet Marketing.
He’s a small town Indiana boy, much like I’m a small town Kentucky boy.
We actually don’t live that far apart even now.
He’s probably a little bit better spoken than I am. We do, however, share a love for Hawaiian shirts !
I’ve been watching him and his blog carefully after a period of marketing hiatus for him and I’m ready to proclaim him null and void of hypey, gimmickey, crappy marketing.
Terry’s just a good man, there’s no other way to put it.
Feel free to click thru to some of his posts that I spread a little link leak on and subscribe to his RSS feed. he won’t disappoint you and he won’t be going bad later. Count on it.
Here’s a little bait to get you to cruise over to his blog:
Marketing Is NOT a Dirty Word.
Copywriting…The Vital Business Skill.
How To Get A Copywriting Education For Under $100.
Customer Service or Customer Annoyance ?
Surely one of those will get you to click thru and read some good, clean marketing information.
Better Presentations Are Just A Click Away
After having sat thru several bad presentations lately, I went searching for some bloggers to help me learn how to not make the same mistakes I’d just suffered thru.
First off I found this great post from Ben Yoskovitz over on the Instigator Blog. Ben gives us 5 phrases never to be uttered.
As an aside, Ben’s using a WordPress theme I’d never seen before and he’s hacked it up to the point of making me envious !
I’ll be over at the theme’s homepage tonite trying to figure out which one of Michael D. Pollock’s great WordPress themes I want to try.
I need a facelift around here and those are absolutely great.
Then I found Michael Hyatt also talking about presentations here and here.
After those 3 posts, I figure I’m good to go on presentations and I’ve found some great WordPress themes.
I think this also qualifies as link leak and that’s enough for one day.
10 Things To Blog About If You Have A Sales-Related Blog
I’m sharing as hard and fast as I can, but I can’t always find a great deal of sales tips and advice on other blogs, so I thought I’d share some of the topics that I get asked to write about, in hopes that someone with more time than me can help the needy readers out there find what they’re looking for.
Here’s 10 topics to write about if you have a sales-related blog:
1. What makes a good salesman better.
2. How to develop sales imagination.
3. How to find prospects.
4. How to answer sales objections.
5. How to regain lost customers.
6. How to find a theme for a sales contest.
7. How to build repeat sales.
8. How to close a sale.
9. How to open a sales call.
10. How to beat low priced competition.
Can a blogger get a little help here ? Can somebody else do some posts about these topics ? Can you point us toward some posts already done about these topics ?
5 Simply Successful Things to Do Everyday
It kind of mirrors a conversation I had with a fairly new salesman the other day, so I thought I’d share some of the things I told him.
He asked me how I was able to have so much in common with so many different customers.
After a few minutes of thought, I came up with a few things that I do that help me be more successful.
1. Read several newspapers every day. I always read USA Today and 1-2 local newspapers very day to stay current. It keeps conversations going, which can lead to more time with a customer, which can lead to more sales.
2. Observe people at every opportunity. I take time every day to place myself in a position to watch and listen to people. the world is a living breathing textbook. Human behavior and the knowledge of it is a major key to making moew sales.
3. Test and track all sales attempts. If it’s worth trying, it’s worth tracking. I keep copious notes about how customers react to certain situations. I keep track of all the samples I leave with them and how they respond to using new products.
4. Make more calls than you take. If you don’t make phone calls, you’re an order taker. If you make calls, you have a shot a being a salesperson. It won’t make you one, but it’ll be a great start.
5. Start before and work later than your competitors. My customers start early and work late. Their salesman has to do the same thing. My cellphone’s always ready for a call from a customer. I can’t count the number of times a customer has called and said he didn’t think I’d be working yet or still working.
Opportunity Doesn’t Knock … It Waits.
Opportunity didn’t knock. It didn’t beg me to come and learn something new about selling. It waited for me to take action and then it presented itself.
I took an opportunity last Thursday and Friday to work a booth at a Professional Clubmakers Conference.
The opportunity to learn to sell custom golf wedges to guys who build golf clubs was too good to pass up, so I helped a friend of mine work his booth.
Over 2 days we sold around $10,000 worth of wedge heads that sell for $37.50 to $49 each. You can do the math to see just how many we sold to an attendance of 250 people.
We did twice as much as they did last year.
Did I have something to do with that ? Sure I did. I’m a master of the upsell.
Did I learn anything about selling ? Sure I did. You can’t talk to that many people and not learn something.
Was it worth being on my feet, in a basically unpaid position for several days ? Yes.
I learned that opportunity doesn’t knock, but it does answer when you take action and call it first.
Oh, and I got a new set of wedges to play when I’m travelling around playing golf !
Sweet !
If Shakespeare Was Your Sales Manager
Practice may make perfect, if you believe that old adage, but nor repetition.
In one of Shakespeare’s plays (of which I know nothing and am glad of it), there is a line about a certain woman protesting her virtue so much that everybody begins to believe she has none.
That’s what repetition will do for you.
As my old friend Dr. Phil would say, ” How’s that workin’ for ya. “
If she had kept quiet about that virtue of hers, she might have slipped thru and been safe. It was her oft repeated protestations that gave her away.
The same thing works in sales calls. The other day a salesman made a presentation to my company that included no less than 20-25 instances of him repeating the same phrase. It was about one of their features. Instead of thinking it was a great thing, it made me leery about the feature and I didn’t even consider buying the product.
There’s two dangers inherent with repetition:
- Too frequent or constant repetition can infer weakness.
- You keep repeating the same, tired, old, drivel and you make MEGO (my eyes glaze over)
If my eyes glaze over, you have no shot at selling me anything other than a white-chocolate mocha latte. No shot … unless it’s a double-shot.
There’s two ways to overcome those dangers:
- Get me to make the point you’re trying to get across and have me repeat it … once. I never grow tired of my own words.
- Work the point in as a transistion or bridge phrase … casually. Then if you need to, you can say we already went over that point and you may get away with repeating it.
Keep ol’ Willy Shakespeare in mind the next time you’re planning a sales call. He just might bear repeating.
If Leonardo da Vinci Was Your Sales Manager
” Leonardo da vinci was the inspiration that started us towards greater success. “
That’s what a sales manager told me when I asked him about the unusual way he handled his salesforce and their accounts.
I pointed out that da Vinci was an artist, sculptor, inventor and a genius, but not a salesman, nor was he ever in charge of a salesforce.
” Doesn’t matter, ” I was told. ” The biggest enemy of a sales team is complacency. sales people get into ruts, they get content and they tend to drift along, happy to do as little as it takes to get by. In Leonardo, we found a way around that sales-killing complacency. ”
Having been in sales for a couple of decades, I was more than interested. I get into those same ruts and funks at times and would absolutely love to hear a way around all of that.
” I read his notebooks. They’re wonderful pieces of inspiration. “ ( Note to self: Find a copy and rework it into something I can use on our sales people. ) ” da Vinci advised everybody to get away from their job, no matter how much they love it, because only then can you see the bigger picture and get the proper perspective. ”
Then I asked how in the name of all that’s geniusy did he apply that to his sales people.
” We send each one of our salesmen into an entirely new territory for 6 weeks out of every year. One that’s completely foreign to him. That opens their eyes and makes new salesmen out of them. ”
So if you’re looking for a method of injecting new life into an old sales team, here’s one to try.
Who’d have thought that Leonardo da Vinci was the father of sales managership ?
If Yoda Was Your Sales Manager
“Do or Don’t do … there is no try.”
If Yoda was your sales manager, you wouldn’t have all of those accounts that never buy from you.
You’d either sell them or he’d give them to another salesman to see if he could sell them or not.
If he couldn’t sell them, he’d try another and another and another, until he found a salesman who could crack the code and sell them.
I personally don’t want a bunch of accounts that don’t want to buy from me.
It’s not about me, it’s about the company. After I’ve had enough, give ‘em to someone else and let them try.
I’m much better off calling on people who enjoy buying from me, rather than making me call on someone who demotivates me, makes me want to put off the attempt and makes me an ineffective asset of the company.
If you’re a sales manager, please don’t let the company suffer in the name of my feelings. Find someone who wants to try selling those accounts.
If they buy from them, at least my profit sharing account will get some benefit from it. My feelings are the least of our worries.
Nobody can sell everybody … not even part of the time.
Do your salesforce and your company a favor and try another salesman on those accounts this week.
They’ll both thank you for it.
May the (sales)Force be with you.
Do You Read SalesTeamTools?
It’s been a while since I gave away some gratuitous link leak, so tonite I’m gonna suggest that you click thru and subscribe to the feed at the blog edited by my buddy Brandon Hull.
SalesTeamTools does what it’s supposed to do, it points you toward some great things to help your sales team. Sometimes more, never less.
For instance:
50 Ways and Places To Find New Business
The Best Sales Advice You’ve Ever Received
A Summary of Online Contact Managers
You gotta love a blog that brings you content like that on a daily basis.
Click thru and say hello to Brandon and tell him Mike sent you.
Finding A Reliable Contractor Just Got Easier
Some of you know that I’m also in the construction industry as a masonry consultant.
The toughest part of any construction job is the finding of contractors. Whether it’s a simple home improvement project or a total home building project, the task of finding a contractor is getting easier all the time due to the proliferation of websites designed to make that task easier.
One such website, findoha.com, asked me to look at their operation.
I found painters, electricians, plumbers, roofers, landscapers, heating and cooling and several other classifications of contractors listed on their site for my state.
Would I use this type of service ? Maybe. If I couldn’t find a friend to give me his recommendation, I consider using an online service.
Do I think that I’d get any educational info or tips from a local contractor ? Absolutely not. So the trade-off is that an online service can help you make an educated decision about the work you need performed.
At findoha.com, there’s a section devoted to education you the consumer, so you can make a good decision about what you need and just as importantly, what you don’t need.
There are so many home improvement articles on there that you’d need weeks to devour all the info in there. From Home Building articles, to the Top 10 Home Improvement Projects, to articles about Electricity and what to watch out for, to Painting tips and a lot more.
You can get an estimate for a particular project from local, licensed, insured and prescreened contractors.
There’s way too much info on finoha.com for me to tell you about in this sponsored review, so you’ll need to click thru to their website and see for yourself just how easy it is to find all the info you need on any construction related project you might get involved with.
