May 14, 2014

Some salespeople close new business continuously while others, albeit personable and seemingly good at what they do, have fallen into a rut of less & less closed sales — one reason may be because they’ve fallen into bad habits without even realizing it.   (Note:  If you are a business owner, you too are a salesperson. When you talk to someone about your business, you need to be direct, authentic, and unattached to the outcome.)

Are you a victim of any of these bad habits?  See if you recognize any of these in your daily sales activities..

1 Sticking to People You Know: It’s far easier to communicate regularly with those whom we’ve already met & have rapport.  However, if we stay within our “comfort zone” it limits our potential for growth.  Oftentimes, at networking events, we gravitate toward someone we have met before.  While it’s always nice to see familiar faces, don’t fall into the trap of spending half your time chatting with people you know.

When meeting people for the first time, it’s also easy to fall into this routine – – You meet three or four people and chat for a minute each, and then meet someone and the chat becomes a 20-minute conversation.   Some people who stay with one person will justify this by saying that they want to find out more or they want to have a real conversation. I can appreciate that.  I also believe sometimes all it takes is that one important connection to have a successful event.

However, no one ever says they stayed with one person because finding a new contact is an uncomfortable experience. But that is a factor as well. It’s a change in your environment. Once you get comfortable with a situation, any change will cause a certain amount of anxiety.  It’s far easier to continue talking with a familiar person rather than going through the exercise of finding and introducing yourself to an unfamiliar person.

Listening to the experts, you’ll hear pretty much the same piece of advice: People buy from people they know.   But if you are sticking to people that you know because they are familiar to you and you are in a comfortable place, then it’s time to rethink your prospecting strategy.

2 Taking the Path of Least Resistance: Given a choice, people prefer getting more of something over less, getting it sooner rather than later, and working less to get it as opposed to working a lot.

There’s nothing unusual about this. It’s called being efficient.

I know a lot of salespeople and none of them have been afraid of working long days and overcoming impossible obstacles to achieve a goal. They are, however, creatures of habit. A successful salesperson will often resort to habituating certain behaviors to streamline their process.

Sometimes, these habits have outlived their usefulness, but a salesperson will continue to use them because it’s easier than changing to something that is different, unfamiliar, or will produce an unknown result.

When I was starting out in sales, I always found it easier to call on previous customers over researching and calling on new prospects. This makes sense when you consider that we already have a relationship in place with these customers, and people buy from people they know and like. And as noted before, change is a painful process.

However, not everyone will buy what you have when you need them to buy it. They will buy when they need it.

If you are starting to panic because none of your past customers are calling you back, then it’s time to find some new ones. You do not want to risk your current relationship to make a fast sale. You are better off dealing with change rather risking your current client relationship.

3 Looking for that “Special Verbiage” or “Scripted Materials”: Are you only concentrating on WHAT you say and not HOW you say it?  Even good salespeople find themselves repeating the same script over & over and finding it unsuccessful… Why?  Because you tend to repeat things that you know have previously worked.

Here we are talking about interacting with people, and everyone is different. You won’t find one special thing that will work on everyone, everywhere, in the same way.  You have to stay aware of your prospect and communicate with them the way they want to communicate. If not, then you will find yourself missing important information in the sales process.

4) Selling the Product not the Solution: It’s easy to fall into a habit of becoming enamored with your product, service or company. You call or email a prospect or you finally meet with them face-to-face – – You think about the best way to open and you come to the conclusion that you need to tell the person about your wonderful products & services and you think “Wow, they have to be impressed with this.”.

The best way to approach a prospect is remembering “what can I do for you?” – not “look how great we are!”

Remember, you need to address their needs.

5) Using Only One Method to Touch Your Prospect: There’s a tendency for salespeople to focus all their efforts on one or two media or to rely heavily on one strategy. In a previous article, I wrote on combining Direct Mail Marketing with Email Marketing.

In today’s environment, the more variety you can incorporate into your prospecting, the better chance you will have of connecting with your contacts. In addition to email, phone and the personal visit, you still have social media, networking, and business organizations.

If you find that you are falling into any of these habits, then it’s time to take a fresh look at your activities and generate some new additions to your results.

* Maria L. Novak Dugan is president of Marketing Solutions & Business Development, a firm in West Chester, PA, offering creative marketing services and goal implementation for small & medium sized businesses. For more information, contact Maria at 610-405-0633 or MariaNovak001@yahoo.com or visit www.Maria-L-Novak.com

“The Cloud.” It seems everyone’s talking about it, but what is it? In its simplest form, the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud Computing is accessing data, programs, or services via the Internet.

Think of a company’s infrastructure: computers on people’s desks accessing shared data on a server, located in a server room. Data is backed up from that server, emails are stored on the server, many people working on the same document from that server. Now move the server to a remote location (the cloud) and access the same data over a secure connection over the Internet. That is cloud-computing.

The cloud opens up doors to unlimited scenarios and product offerings: backup your hard drive to the cloud and you will be able to show your vacation pictures from Aunt Sally’s computer in Tulsa during Thanksgiving dinner. Purchase books on Amazon and read them from anywhere by logging into your account from any computer or device with Internet access.

Many of these cloud options include a monthly or annual fee, usually based on number of users and/or amount of data.

Benefits of the Cloud:

Accessibility / Availability – you get it anytime, anywhere.

Scalability – you pay for what you use.

Compliance – offered for various businesses and for your many industry needs. For example, health care organization have access to HIPAA compliant solutions, financial companies have SOX (Sarbanes Oxley).

Security – your provider is responsible for maintaining the servers and storage in a secure location, with redundant Internet Providers, high capacity generators, and a team of security experts to safeguard your data.

Cost – server and storage hardware is “rented” from your provider instead of you having to purchase, deploy, and maintain the expensive equipment onsite at your facility.

Disadvantages:

When the Internet is down, you need to wait for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to correct the issue – which can put your business at a standstill, unless you have a backup business continuity plan in place.

Physical access to your data – if there’s a dispute with the vendor or the vendor goes out of business, in general you no longer have access to your data.

Security – While most service providers have large teams of security experts to protect your data, ultimately you are entrusting them to do their job, with little control. Also, large providers are more likely to be targets of hacking attempts just for the large amount of data they hold. Amazon is probably more likely to see hacking attacks than Jeff’s Burgers and Hotdogs joint down the street. It does not mean Jeff should not be vigilant about network security, but the odds are highly slighted towards Amazon… unless Jeff just fired a disgruntled employee who knows a thing or two about computers.

Cost – Usually you pay a monthly per person and/or data amount fee. This can start to add up very quickly.

 Basic Examples of Cloud Computing:

DropBox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, documents, and videos anywhere and share them easily. You never have to email yourself a file again. The downloadable Dropbox desktop application runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems and gives you access to your Dropbox directly through a folder on your hard drive.

Microsoft Office 365 / Hosted Exchange is a powerful business email platform for anywhere, anytime email access. Businesses and organizations get access to the Outlook suite – email, contacts, and calendar – with real-time sync across multiple devices. Benefits include security, stability, functionality, scalability, and elasticity – in addition to a cost effective bottom line.

Google Apps is a suite of Google applications that brings together essential services to help your business. Professional email, online storage, shared calendars, video meetings and more.

One Drive (formerly SkyDrive ) is installed on all of your devices and provides access to your photos, videos, documents and more from almost anywhere.

Carbonite (online backup solution) is a very affordable solution to backup your data automatically from your computer to the cloud. It sits in the background and every time you click “Save” on that document, a copy is made to the cloud. Clients tell us, “But I already have an USB drive that I connect to and backup everything once a week.” Our response – “When was the last time you really performed the backup? And what happens if this building gets flooded, or someone breaks in and steals your laptop and USB drive?” Carbonite takes care of all of that and, once your subscription is setup, you don’t have to think about it.

Voice Over IP (VOIP) allows businesses to have fully functional phone systems, with menus, music on hold, ability to transfer calls to different extensions (even if they are not in the same physical location) all without having to purchase a Phone System. If you are “working” from home due to snow or from your beach house while on vacation, have your calls ring on your phone at the remote location and make outbound calls which display your main company number as the caller ID.

“The ‘cloud’ is a great solution for many reasons – often it’s free and offers easy access to your data,” stated Bernie Orglmeister, President & Senior Project Engineer of eBernie, Inc. “Some people might be uncomfortable about having their personal or business data out there on the cloud but, the fact is, you’re probably already doing it. If you use online banking or purchasing online or at the store (example, Target stores breach of customer data), your information is already on the cloud. It also allows for smaller businesses to operate and benefit from large scale infrastructures without having to invest and maintain servers that can cost several thousands of dollars.”