Your Look Counts

I find that in today's selling world more and more sales people think it's OK to get away with a casual look in front of their clients. And while some industries might support a well tailored "business casual" look, most will not support golf shirts, jeans and outdated and ill fitting clothes. Sadly...I see it a lot.

Truth is that I still sill more when I am wearing a suit. I believe its because a suit, suggests expertise, authority and success. People want to deal with people they think are successful. And, like it or not, they base their thoughts about you, on your appearance.

Over time, research continues to show that your outer look has an impact on how others view you. Dr. Robert Cialdini of "influence at work" shows us through his work that "when you look good, it is assumed that you are good at what you do.” I think it is always best when meeting new business associates that you look extraordinary, not ordinary.

Image and Branding expert Sandy Dumont who deals with high-powered entrepreneurs says “Looking powerful and upper class not only gets you noticed; it leads to higher credibility and respect.” As sales professionals you need to make your first impression the best impression, to gain respect which will foster the framework of future business relationships.

Success coach Lee Milteer reminds us that "if you don't make a positive impression by your appearance when first meeting people in any professional environment, you are likely to be dismissed as if they don't know your credentials or your success in your field. It has been proven that when you meet a person for the first time, your unconscious mind makes an instant evaluation that is almost always permanent and rarely given a conscious – or second – thought."

Give some thought to what you look like before you leave the house or office to make sales calls. Sales is about style AND substance, and without the style, you never get a chance to show youur substance off.

Dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen

More on Assumptions

Honest, effective communication hinges on being able to make a distinction between what we know and what we think we know, and to apply this to our professional and personal interactions with clients, friends, colleagues and associates. This is a concept that was articulated at length by Dr. Brad Blanton in his book, Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends. He describes this distinction along the lines of what is noticed and what is imagined.

To explain this important distinction, let’s look at some examples:

You notice a colleague arrives 30 minutes late for an internal sales review. You might think that this person simply forgot about the meeting, and your manager sitting across from you might notice the late arrival and assume that this person just doesn’t care about the meeting.

You notice that the man across from you at a sales meeting is wearing a red tie. What you think you see is a tie that is fashionable, and someone else might notice it and think it’s not fashionable.

You notice that a client did not return your phone call as promised. You might think it’s because they have chosen a competitor’s product instead. Someone else might assume there’s another reason for the unreturned call (e.g., because the client is on vacation).

The things we see—what we notice—are matters of fact, such as appearance, words or actions. The rest of our experiences are based on subjectivity—what we think we see or what we imagine.

Assumptions can cloud the path to honest communication. People can confuse what they think they see with what they know by verifiable fact to be true. In other words, they can think their opinions are facts. In sales this can lead to trouble.

Learning to distinguish between imagination and fact—between what we think we see and what we know—can pay important dividends in our professional lives. Let’s look at some case studies that explore how this simple distinction can affect the sales success of an organization.

1. Motivating a Sales Force
A reward can be a great motivator, but there are perils in giving rewards that you think people will want. Consider the following example:

Recently during a coaching session, Brian, the sales director of an international software company, shared an example of how he attempted to motivate a series of teams. The end of fiscal year was fast approaching and his teams were dangerously close to not hitting their revenue targets. To get things back on track, Brian promised each team that its members would be treated to a company-sponsored ski trip if the sales numbers were met. Sales started to grow everywhere except for one team on the West coast. Brian reminded this team about the ski trip, hoping to increase their productivity, but to no avail. Later, the leader of the West coast team gave him an insight into what went wrong: none of the team members were enticed by the skiing offer because none could ski very well…and no one owned the equipment required to participate in the trip. By attempting to use what he imagined would be a good motivator for everyone; Brian accomplished the opposite with his West coast team.

2. Initiative
In sales and in life, imagined assumptions can cripple us if we’re not careful. It not only affects how we interact with others, it can also significantly influence our careers.

Not long ago, I noticed that a client in the insurance business — let’s call him Kevin — had stopped taking the initiative for new marketing ideas and business development. Several months earlier, Kevin’s boss, Susan, had told him he was in line to be promoted as the new sales director for the region. But months passed without a follow-up discussion about the promotion. Kevin began to imagine that his boss had changed her mind. In retaliation, he stopped assuming a leadership role, ceased all initiatives and performed only the necessary tasks associated with his position.

After a lengthy period of feeling resentful, Kevin sought out and found a new job. In his exit interview with Susan, he confronted her about being overlooked for the position. He maintained that this demonstrated a lack of respect for his work and that was why he was leaving the company. Susan was genuinely surprised and said she would have promoted him a long time ago, but had assumed he didn’t want the promotion because of the extra hours it required. She explained that she had noticed how Kevin had earlier complained about working long hours and not having time enough for his family. Later, Kevin’s frustration appeared to Susan to be a lack of initiative.

A short conversation could have prevented this misunderstanding. Instead, valuable resources went untapped, hard feelings were harbored and everyone lost something.

3. Customer Feedback
When consulting with clients, we often observe salespeople avoiding or refusing to deal with a problem, because they imagine that addressing it could anger a customer and send them to the competition. In these situations, we’re inclined to ask whether this behavior creates customer-service issues or disloyal customers down the road.

A customer-service team at a software company was dealing with an error in their software that a client had complained about. The team sensed there was no satisfactory answer to the problem. The development team indicated that it would take more than nine months to fix it. The customer-service team assumed that the client wanted the problem fixed immediately and that they would be unhappy to hear this news. Weeks passed. The customer-service team delayed calling the client back. Not surprisingly, the client became angry and imagined that the company didn’t care about them. Finally, the client called and demanded to know what was going on.

In the end, this team was responsible for losing the client to the competition because of a perceived notion that the company was indifferent to their needs. Engage Selling Solutions later reviewed this case and concluded that if the customer-service team had chosen to double-check what they had imagined to be true and had provided up front, honest answers, they would have solved the matter to everyone’s satisfaction.

I often observe sales managers or sales teams wrongly concluding that a customer offering negative feedback is simply a troublemaker or a problem client. Worse still, sales teams will make a concerted effort to avoid communicating with that client. That’s when trouble ensues. When an organization ignores its customers, it has to rely on more — but has to make decisions with less — factual information. The client, in turn, must do the same. With both parties relying on their imaginations to guide them instead of the facts, a bad situation can easily become worse.

Keep this statistic in mind: sixty-seven percent of business is lost every year because of customers who imagine that their service provider is indifferent to their needs and wants. That’s a staggering amount of lost sales for any organization — and it’s especially difficult to accept when mistaken assumptions are at the root of the problem. Without honest communication, an organization cannot understand the true needs and wants of its clients.

4. Customer Service
Credible customer service must be rooted in good faith. Consider the following example in which a salesperson made promises that turned out to be too good to be true.
A project group with a hardware manufacturer lost millions of dollars on a contract simply because they wrongly assumed (imagined) they knew what the client expected. In this case, the client made requests for items and services that were not part of the existing contract. The group assumed that if they signaled that they were unable to fulfill such requests within the allotted resources, the client would become upset and possibly terminate the existing contract or refuse to grant work to the group in the future. The group fulfilled the client’s requests, figuring they would somehow find a way to satisfy everybody.

Instead, it was unable to satisfy anyone. As time passed, they fell behind in their work…very behind. Rather than say anything, they used excuses to protect themselves in the event the truth was discovered. But these excuses took up even more time and caused further delays to the project. Eventually the project had to be stopped. Not only did the company lose the client, the group was also dismantled. Many talented people lost their jobs. The client hired another company and paid even more money for services because that company was up front and managed expectations of what could and could not be accomplished.

The Trouble with Assumptions
Assumptions abound for each of us every day. It’s a valid and important part of human thought processes. The trouble with assumptions — arriving at conclusions based on what we think we know — arises when we don’t check them against verifiable facts. In business and sales, this can present a significant problem in the way we interact and communicate with clients and potentials.

Consider the missed opportunities when a prospect reaches a completely wrong conclusion about you, because of assumptions made by either party (or both). Have you ever hesitated to ask whether your prospect was the real decision-maker for a project, worried that you might offend him if he wasn’t?

We have covered many examples in which people hurt their credibility and undermined their own potential simply by not keeping their assumptions in check. Learning not to assume, and check in to find out the real reason an action was taken is an indispensable skill to have—one that will serve you well in your career whether you’re an ambitious junior sales associate or a seasoned vice-president of sales for a Fortune 500 company. Watch for an upcoming tip that will help ensure you never make another assumption again.

The Trouble with Assumptions

Hi Everyone,

My grade 8 chemistry teacher Mr. Yamamoto was the first to teach me that making assumptions risked making an "A**" out of "U" and "Me". Today I find myself reviving that saying in all of my training and coaching sessions as most sales are lost, or relationships strained, because sales people are making assumptions about their clients rather than taking the time to gather the facts. It's my opinion, as you know from previous postings, that the best sales people focus on the customer first and engage in a dialogue that promotes open and honest communication.

The top 10% do not create proposals, forecasts and presentations on assumptions about the clients, they base them on the facts. Step one in learning to gather more accurate information about your prospect is to get over the fear of asking questions. Despite what many sales people think, asking questions does not make you look silly or stupid or undermine your power. Instead, asking questions emotionally connects you to the prospect and encourages them to share more, giving you better and more accurate information to base your solutions. Asking questions is a critical step to selling more in less time and making more money, so... get over yourself and focus on the customer! Give them a good listening to, not a good talking to and you will see the true facts emerge.

Dedictaed to increasing your sales,

Colleen

Great Article from Mike Staver - Leadership Expert

I saw this article from my friend and leadership expert Mike Staver and loved it. I hope you do to!

*************************************************************************************
Do you need to lose weight?

The number one New Years resolution is about losing weight. I was on a cruise recently and made the mistake of having a toxicity evaluation. They measured my body fat, metabolic rate, lean body mass, etc. Why I would do that on a cruise is beyond me. But what I found interesting was the amount of time they spent explaining how the body stores toxins and how the cumulative effect of the stuff we put in our bodies AND minds affects us. So my question to you is: do YOU need to lose weight?

I am not pretending to be some nutritionist attempting to get on the multi billion dollar diet industry. In fact, I really don't care that much about your physical weight. I am most concerned about the metaphorical weight you need to lose.

What weight are you carrying around that you need to lose? Where is the personal or professional toxicity in your world? Perhaps this would be a good time to evaluate what you are carrying and cleanse yourself of it.

All of us carry our share of "toxins." There is no way to rid ourselves of all toxicity but we can eliminate a significant amount. The destructive effect of carrying weight that is non-productive is significant. If you are like most people there is something to let go of. Maybe it is a relationship that is dragging you down. Maybe you are holding on to emotions like guilt or anger that rob you of the light heartedness or energy that you need to be effective. Maybe you are in a job or career that you know is dead.

Here are some ways to cleanse yourself of the toxins and weight you carry.

1. Evaluate the professional and personal areas of your life for those things that create drag or sluggishness.
2.Spend time alone thinking about how you want your personal and professional life to look.
3. Choose one area and make a decision to shed that weight and toxicity.
4. Evaluate unintended consequences.
5. Replenish the gap with those activities and thoughts that produce energy.

**************************************************************************************

Dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen

Allies vs. others

Prospects tend to chose industry allies and build relationships in their professional associations with other companies and peers who are similar and like-minded. In doing so, they can often become defensive when an outsider suggests they’re wrong. This can be harmful to sales people who are considered "outsiders".

Often this defensiveness takes the form of third-party validation in which a prospect might say:


“Others in the market have told me they think the same way about your company, too.”


It’s an easy thing to say, and difficult to verify. Where are these opinions coming from? Who are these "others" in the market?

"Others" refer to those insiders that your prospects are aligned with in the market. They’re influential on our prospects, and because they tend to justify opinions—right or wrong—these are opinions that matter. Its in your best interest to become allied with insiders in your market so you can have a positive influence on all those people influencing your prospect.

This pattern of communication can also apply to the dialogues people have within a company. If you only associate with those people who always share the same opinions with you, be careful. Nobody is right as often as they think they are.


Make sure you verify opinions each step of the way so "others" don't get in the way of you making the sale. At the same time, make sure you stay open minded by listening to the opinion of "different-minded" people.


Dedicated to increasing your sales,


Colleen

Be Likeable

Good Morning!

In sales, we talk a lot about likability. Likability leads to rapport and rapport leads to Trust. trust of course leads to a sale.

What is likability based on?

A person’s likability is based upon a strict set of mostly unconscious processes. First impressions are critical. Your initial judgment of someone filters all future words and actions with him or her. To make your opening moment most effective, Smile, it is very easy to smile and smiling conveys confidence, happiness, enthusiasm and acceptance.

dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen

I finally did it!

OOPS!

I may be 2 weeks late...it is after all Jan .15 not Jan 1...better late than never I suppose. It's my New Year's resolutions! Last night before I went to sleep I documented the 3 key business goals and a personal goal that I want to accomplish this year. This morning I hit the treadmill to start my plan to accomplish 4 10k races this year (personal goal) and made some enquiries about cottage rentals to book my writing retreats (writing more and getting the book published is a business goal)

How are you doing this year so far? I maybe late in starting but I do have a plan in place to guarantee success. It's easy to accomplish your resolutions or goals if you have a plan and are disciplined to stick to the plan. I encourage you to take a look at your resolutions today and create a plan that will help you achieve them...starting with an action you can take now. After all...there is no better time than the present!

Cheers Colleen
PS: read the first post of this year and send me your goals. I am happy to hold you accountable for achieving them!

Salesopedia Media - Resources Worth Having

Hello Sales Bloggers,

As you can imagine, I receive a ton of sales newsletters and articles both by email and hard copy. Salesopedia Media is one that I particularly enjoy. They publish both articles and pod casts and the quality of their material is always relevant and up to date! This week's newsletter was all about questioning and I thought this one - Shut up and Sell - was worth reading.

Cheers Colleen

Start the year off right

As you start your planning for the New Year, below are a few questions you should be asking yourself to give you a clear focus of the areas and goals where you are committed to improving, and to help make sure that this year is your best year ever.

Be Nice

1.How passionate are you about what you do? Loving what you do will ensure that you maintain the positive attitude you need to get to the top. Ask yourself Brian Tracy’s question, “if I knew then what I know now about this job, would I have taken it?”

If the answer is yes, find a way to communicate that passion to your team mates and your clients. Passion and a positive attitude are the glue that hold all your sales skills together.

2. Are your company, colleagues, family and friends life givers who support you in your endeavors, or life suckers who impede your progress? Only life givers can create an environment that fosters success.

3. Do you want to become who you hang out with? Tony Robins says that our success is directly linked to the expectations of the people we associate with. Do you have the right associations? If not, you might have to go to different places, try something new or join new groups to meet new or different people.

4. Are you the “it” person in your industry? Do people see you as a person with valuable information, and come to you first? This year, develop a plan to become the “go to person” for your clients. Studies show it can be worth between $63,000 and $117,000 in extra income for you per year.

5. Do you take responsibility for your actions? You can complain all you want that it was shipping’s fault for getting the order out late, marketing’s fault for not giving you good leads or your manager’s fault for not funding or training you sufficiently. The fact is, in sales, the buck stops with you. Your clients don’t want people who make excuses or whine about being victims. They want agents of success. They don’t care whose “fault it was,” only that you take responsibility for it. What are you going to do this year to take more responsibility?

As a side note, when I interview sales people I always ask them to tell me about an opportunity they lost, and why they lost it. If they blame others for the loss, they do not get the job. I know that sales people who can’t take responsibility, are never going to be in the top 10%

Dedicated to increasing your sales

Colleen

Resources for Sales people

Happy Sunday evening!

I have been member of CPSA since 1992 and have always found the association to provide high quality content to sales professionals in Canada. This articles "Six Business Trends Every Salesperson Must Know" is part of their regular newsletter and I think its a great one to read for the beginning of the year. I saw Dan Burrus speak in July and was blown away at his depth of knowledge and insights on the future and trends.

Cheers Colleen

Look after yourself - worth reading

Hi Everyone,

Sales people are notorious for working themselves to the bone and then getting sick. Its difficult (and gross) to deliver an effective sales presentation to a customer if you are hacking and wheezing in front of them so this season do yourself a favour and take precautions against getting sick. My friend Kevin Dee had a great article on "Taking care of yourself" in his blog that I thought you should read.

Dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen

A Change will do you go!

Happy New Year, welcome back and best wishes for 2008. Well...to be honest it's not wishes I am after for 2008 - it's increased production! Specifically, how can we all sell more while working less and take home more money in 2008. Although its a complex question with many solutions, there is one thing that stands out as an absolute truth if you want to sell more in 2008: you must change something from 2007. Simply put, if you want a different result this year, you will need to do something different.

So many people are resistant to change; I find change exciting. So many people are scared of change; I find change a necessity. Everyday I meet people who want to be better and want to be succeeding like they are not succeeding now. Yet, when I ask them to try something different, they respond with "well that's not the way I do things!" Insane! Wasn't it Albert Einstein that said the definition of insanity was "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?"

This year, make a change. You are not a static being, you are a dynamic one and change is within your control. Here is your first 2008 sales challenge. Decide on one thing you will change this year and email it to me. I will keep your desired change on file and hold you accountable for it this year through periodic emails and maybe even a phone call. Consider it a personal accountability "kick in the butt" motivator to keep you on track with the discipline the you need to make this year a great one.

Dedicated to increasing your sales,
Colleen