Category Archives: Sales Management

Kain and Stauning Release Comprehensive Study – Lots of Leadership Lessons Throughout

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After nearly a year of studying the inner workings of successful automotive dealerships’ Internet sales efforts, David Kain from Kain Automotive and Steve Stauning from pladoogle.com have released their groundbreaking study showing the activities and actions that truly drive Internet sales success for today’s automotive dealers. Their conclusions are expected to shape the structure and content of automotive dealership sales efforts for years to come.

Kain and Stauning, industry veterans in the automotive digital marketing space, spent countless hours evaluating successful Internet sales operations and reviewing the data from nearly 4.3 million sales leads to uncover the fifteen most impactful activities car dealers can undertake to ensure they are successful with their Internet sales efforts.

“With so much being written about the relative impacts of social media, David I felt like it was time to take a deep dive into what was truly driving sales for successful dealers,” shared Stauning. “In fact, the automotive blogs were so gaga over social that it seemed no traditional online marketing source had any value.”

To the contrary, reveals the study (which began with case studies involving third-party leads and evolved into a deeper study into what drives Internet sales success for today’s dealers). Both Kain and Stauning felt that their consulting clients were benefiting from a robust lead mix (including third-party leads), but they had no way to disprove the theories being bandied about by the most vocal on the industry blogs.  The boisterous few on most automotive marketing websites were shouting that dealers should abandon these tried and true leads in favor of focusing 100% on first-party leads and social media.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” piped Kain. “Our study results are clear: Dealers who want to be truly successful with their Internet sales efforts need to cast a wide net… and that net includes traditional third-party leads.”

Among the most impactful activities that separate successful Internet dealers from their middling competitors are the obvious factors like quality of lead response and the adherence to a written process; though the study revealed a higher level of importance for some not so obvious factors like middle management support and level of accountability.

“We were a bit surprised that sales, desk and F&I mangers had such an impact on a store’s Internet sales success,” added Kain, “we knew there were dealerships where these managers can be roadblocks to Internet growth, we just didn’t realize the extent to which their honest support and buy-in would catapult a store’s Internet sales.”

The study, available at KainAutomotive.com and on the Kain Automotive Idea Exchange, provides dealers and their managers a compelling and comprehensive overview of the model Internet dealership by providing real world examples of successful dealerships. Moreover, Kain and Stauning weave their own industry knowledge into the study where appropriate to help dealers learn how they can leverage all fifteen of the factors/activities identified.

 

Leaders Don’t Get Too Caught Up In The Details

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Low Hanging Fruit and the Cost of Perfection

Imagine a small airplane flying low over a crowd at a baseball game. The door of the plane opens and a smiling man appears with a large sack. He turns the sack over just as the plane flies over the bleachers and millions of dollars in various denominations begin to flutter down to the amazed crowd below. The plane makes a dozen more passes, and each time the man empties sacks of bills onto the crowd.

Now imagine you are in this crowd and you see hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives and ones all floating toward your waiting hands. As the bills come within reach, you feel compelled to collect only the fives and ones because you know they’ll be easy to spend and they’ll work in most vending machines. Additionally, you decide to straighten each bill as it reaches your hand and you arrange all bills in sequential order by serial number and denomination as you collect them.

Of course, these decisions hinder your ability to gather the maximum amount of money, but you really want to make sure these dollars are perfectly displayed in your wallet once the money shower subsides.


Crazy? Probably, but managers in businesses of all shapes and sizes make similar decisions every day. While rationale people would grab every bill just as fast as possible, managers locked into some strange quest for flawlessness worry too much about perfection and not enough about the goal – costing their companies millions in actual losses and even more in lost productivity.

 

Leaders Grab the Low Hanging Fruit

 

Often in sales we talk about Low Hanging Fruit (LHF). This overused phrase refers to the sales that are so easy to make you just have to walk up to the great sales tree, reach up and pick the customer of your choice. This phrase is so hackneyed and misunderstood that it nearly cracked the Top Ten in our list of the 25 Most Annoying Business Phrases of All Time.

 

The concept of LHF in sales came about because inexperienced salespeople would often pass up the sure thing only to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to close a sale that would eventually yield them less commission. In leadership, LHF refers to the opportunities that take little effort. These opportunities are often not glamorous, causing unfocused managers to chase shinier objects (leaving the LHF to rot on the vine).

 

Leaders, of course, maintain the goal in the forefront of their minds. This keeps them focused and allows them the wisdom to grab the Low Hanging Fruit; and to avoid the traps of shiny objects and the ill-advised pursuit of perfection. Leaders do what is best for the company and not just what feels best at the time or makes them appear to be in control.

 

Perfection is a Joke, and it Costs Too Much

 

I once worked with someone who was put in charge of overseeing the migration of the company’s website from provider X to provider Z. While X had done a fine job with the site, the company just felt it was time to change. No biggie, this happens. Unfortunately, my colleague got so caught up in how every page of the new website looked (she argued for weeks about shades of blue that were indistinguishable to the naked eye), that the designers at provider Z left out major functionality that would have converted twice as many visitors. Additionally, the new website performed poorly with search engines like Google because my colleague was too busy picking just the right images to notice that the content was incorrect.

 

A leader who was focused on the goal would have known that search visibility and conversion were the primary objectives of the website, and that there were no secondary objectives. This leader would have looked at the opportunity to build the site correctly as Low Hanging Fruit and would never have been caught up in unimportant details like Cornflower blue v. Dodger blue.

 

The Devil is in the Details

 

In today’s business world there is no room for perfection. Those lucky enough to still have a job are likely carrying the weight of several laid-off coworkers. True leaders understand this and do everything they can to maximize the ROI of their activities and decisions. They do not get caught up in colors or sequential bill stacking when the future of the company is at stake. As bad as it may sound to the dilettante managers, leaders understand that good enough is sometimes good enough.

 

Sales 101 – Stop “Venting” and Start Selling!

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Are You Venting or Just Making Excuses?

A colleague recently posted a rant about the quality of the leads she was handling on an automotive industry social network. As a part of her diatribe on her most recent batch of Internet sales leads, she gave some great examples of just how bad the leads really were. Her examples proved that some of the leads (certainly her examples) were indeed crap with a capital C.

In case you’re feeling like you should be the next one to go online and rant, read on…

Venting can be cathartic, and for those of us in your shoes, we know your vent will probably be warranted. After you’re finished venting, however, be sure you’re factoring in the percentages. Once you do this, you’ll likely find that things are much better than you imagined.

Like my colleague’s, yours will probably be a rhetorical venting, but I can’t help but provide a little advice. I’m hopeful you take this in the right light, as the following is the same advice I would give to any sales manager who expresses similar dissatisfaction in the quality of their leads:

“Failures” in the Sports World

  • You should know that the most successful hitter in Major League Baseball history was Ted Williams. In 1941, Williams maintained a .406 batting average. Since then, no MLB hitter has been able to break .400. This means that in the last 68 years, every batter in baseball has failed more than 60% of the time. Are they all failures? Of course not.

  • More recently, Derek Jeter of the Yankees won the Silver Slugger award in 2008 and was an All Star for the 9th time in his career. Should Jeter waste time venting about the 70% of the at-bats he had last year where he failed to get a hit? Of course not.

  • Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time, yet his NBA career shooting percentage is just .497. He missed more shots than he made! Is MJ a failure? Of course not.


A traditional team in my industry handling Internet customers closes about 10% of their leads, a very good Internet sales team can consistently close above 18%, while a great team generally closes above 25% of all leads. This means that even the great teams fail to close 7.5 out of every 10 leads they receive. Wow, those guys are either complete failures or those leads must really stink!

Do the Leads Stink or Does the Team?

Of course, neither statement is true. A team closing 25% of their leads consistently is on the top of their game… and the leads they’re working are of the same quality you’re working.

The truth is that with proper lead counts, a great process and a dedication to that process, any team can be successful closing sales leads.

I’ve always believed you can vent about the bad leads or you can sell the good ones.

Stop Whining and Start Selling

While I’m not sure how my colleague took the advice above, it could be worse. I could have simply recited Blake’s words from Glengarry Glen Ross: “The leads are weak. F***ing leads are weak? You’re weak.”

…

We can always find reasons we cannot succeed… they’re called excuses. It’s time to stop whining and start selling.

Email Etiquette for Message Importance – When “Importance: High” = “Don’t Waste Your Time”

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Quick, Read This Email… Now!

Today I received another in a long line of email messages from a certain vendor touting their newest and greatest product improvement. This email, like all of its predecessors, arrived in my Outlook inbox as a message of High Importance. Because I receive just one in five hundred messages marked “Importance: High,” I generally give these more than a quick glance when they arrive.

Imagine my surprise when I noticed a subject line this morning that read **Special Sneak Peek: (Vendor Name Omitted) New Guided Search**. I thought, “Wow, this is big news! You made an enhancement to your website that will have little to no effect on me or my business, and you sent me the details in a message marked High Importance. Congratulations! I now like you even less than I did five minutes ago.”

The Email Who Cried Wolf

No need to rehash this as a new millennium version of the famous fable attributed to Aesop, except to say that with each email of miniscule importance sent by this vendor that masquerades as a critical Top Secret UMBRA message, I lose more interest in reading anything they send… anything.

In fact, it’s become so bad that I now treat all of their messages akin to how one would treat the proclamations of a ten-year old who brags about what a big boy he is every time he makes “doody in the toy-toy.” We get it, congratulations; you pooped.


It’s not just egocentric vendors who misuse the High Importance selection in Outlook, though it does seem to be solely the province of the unintelligent and unsophisticated. Ever get the High Importance email on Tuesday afternoon sent to everyone at your company reminding you that the office refrigerator will be cleaned out promptly at 5:00 PM on Friday? Chances are your CEO didn’t send it.

You Don’t Sell Plasma

Out of every 500 High Importance emails I receive, about ten truly require my immediate attention – and none of these ten ever originates from a vendor. Here’s a quick email etiquette tip: if you’re a vendor who does not sell plasma, stop acting like you sell plasma. The more you try to make your customers care about your (fill in the blank), the less they care.

High Importance status should exist solely for those emails that require both immediate attention and for which there will be negative consequences if they do not receive immediate attention. If your email merely requires that the recipients read and respond, write “RESPONSE REQUIRED” in the subject line. Likewise, if your message requires that recipients take an action based on the email, try placing “ACTION REQUIRED” in the subject line.

What About Tagging Something “Low Importance?”

Here’s a bonus to those vendors who don’t understand basic email marketing rules, and who mark their outbound sales messages as “Importance: Low.” Likely you tagged these emails as having Low Importance out of some misguided consideration for your recipient. Congratulations, your emails are ending up in SPAM filters all across the Web. Quick tip: never mark any email as having Low Importance. If the email is truly of Low Importance, don’t send it.

For that matter, if the message only highlights some unimportant feature enhancement of your website, don’t send that email either.

Salespeople Need More Leadership, Not More Technology

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Too Much Technology…

When working to help an underperforming business unit (in my real job) grow their revenues, I always discover instances where the unit has purchased some widget, gadget or other magic bullet designed to help them sell more.

Although well-meaning, the manager who made this purchase generally believed against all his or her own better judgment and experience that this solution would enjoy high adoption and utilization, and would deliver the desired results with little or no work required. Given a warm welcome by the sales team, this manager was certain that the worm would soon turn, and that the good times were just around the corner.

… Not Enough Reality

Usually between six hours and six months of the initial purchase, the manager believes they were taken. The widget does not perform as demonstrated. Their team is not selling any more (and maybe selling less) as a result of adding this technology and expense. What gives?

The truth is that while there are certainly technologies that have made a salesman’s job easier; sales still requires people to do work. Products that still involve salesmanship – cars, real estate, personal services, home repair – also require that those gifted with salesmanship work to leverage technology to their advantage.

Generally, these overbought and underutilized tools are CRM-related. CRM, it seems, is the greatest underutilized business technology “in use” today. In fact, we once discovered that one of our business units was paying for eight different, yet overlapping, CRM tools… and none of them was helping drive any incremental business.

CRM Does Not Mean What You Think

Twenty years ago, great salesmen used 3X5 cards and small plastic boxes as their CRM tools. They organized their prospects and were tenacious at follow up. They used these boxes and their day-timers to remind them to send letters and birthday cards, and to remember the names of a customer’s wife and children. Today, we expect technology to take the place of this tenacity – we expect that technology can replace people and process.

While a great CRM tool might help an organized person stay organized, it offers nothing for the disorganized. Likewise, CRM falls well short of getting lazy salespeople to care, or the sales laggards to do something (anything!). More often than not, bad salespeople spend an inordinate amount of time trying to game the system. (If they just used this time for good, rather than evil, they’d be superstars.)

Because of this, CRM tools are the biggest rip-off in business today. Too many business owners and business leaders have spent too much to equip their teams with expensive tools to manage customer databases, only to have the great procrastinators (salespeople) destroy real progress by failing to complete even very simple steps. I am convinced that you could take away any underperforming business unit’s CRM tools and provide that same sales team with index cards and pens, with the end result being better sales numbers than are realized today.

While the acronym CRM (which stands for Customer Relationship Management) is meant to describe the means a company or salesperson uses to manage their customer relationships, the onslaught of underutilized tools led us to coin the memorable (if not a bit hokey) phrase “Crutches Require Muscle” so those purchasing new CRM software would understand that assembly is required and magic bullets are not included.


As sales leaders, our goal has to be to make certain that everyone and anyone on the sales side understands that you cannot successfully manage customer relationships without work – hard, sometimes tedious work.

Crutches Require Muscle: Two Real Life Examples

Next week, my family will have an invisible fence installed in our home. We own a couple of small dogs, and these little buggers have figured out how to burrow under our traditional fence. After coming home too many times to notes on our door that read “Your dogs got out again. We have them at our house,” we’ve decided to spend a few bucks on shock collars and electric barriers to keep our pets (and neighbors) safe.

Because this is the first time we’ve ever had to purchase something like this, we sent price quote requests (via email) to seven local invisible fence companies who operated websites. These seven are using technology (the Internet, email and CRM) to their advantage, we figured, so we expected quick and complete responses.

Long story short, we received three automatic responses (43%) to our inquiries and only one of the original seven (14%) bothered to personally follow up with a price. We heard nothing from four companies (57%). This is pathetic, of course, because these seven companies are spending thousands each year on technology designed to capture more business, yet only one of the seven bothered to add people and process to the mix in an attempt to gain our business. The other six likely believe that their websites and CRM tools are magic bullets designed to deliver millions into their bank accounts with little or no work.

Can you guess which of the seven companies is installing our invisible fence next week?

Sylvan Learning Centers Need to Learn Something Themselves

CRM real life example number two: On a recent Thursday afternoon, one of our sons (we have three) brought home a mid-term “D” in English. We were shocked, scared and mortified for two reasons: 1) none of our sons has ever delivered anything below a B+; and 2) the boy speaks English, doesn’t he?

In our momentary horror, we were convinced that the best thing for this likely slacker was for him to get professional help (clearly his teachers, and especially his parents, were doing a poor job). We immediately sought an afterschool tutoring program that could release this young man from the dark side and make him our son once again.

A quick Google search yielded a sponsored link to Sylvan Learning Centers – hey, I’ve heard of them – so I submitted an online request to have my local Sylvan office contact me with pricing and other information. I was clearly desperate in my initial plea. Not surprisingly, the CRM tool used by Sylvan immediately fired off an automatic response that gave me confidence: My boy will read again, I cried. Here is the reassuring auto-response I received:

Thank you for your spending time with Sylvan’s website today. Whether your child needs to improve a report card, get ahead in math, end homework struggles or prepare for college, Sylvan can help.

Please keep this e-mail for your records; below is the contact information for your local Sylvan Learning Center:

Your local Sylvan is located at: (followed by the local center’s various contact info)

Visit your local Sylvan’s website often; you’ll find information about news and events, hours of operation and if they offer live, online tutoring from the comfort of home. You may want to even bookmark it!

Thank you again for visiting Sylvan’s website. We look forward to serving your family in the near future.

Your friends at Sylvan Learning®.

Awkward first sentence aside, I was convinced that my son was not going to have to ride the short bus after all.

Sylvan is on the Case

I heard nothing from my local Sylvan center the next day (Friday), though I was not concerned. Surely, they are so busy turning around the lives of so many children that they’re just a little behind in checking their emails.

At exactly 1:29 AM Saturday morning I received the following email (names and locations changed to protect the guilty):

I’m John Doe, Center Director from your Anytown center. Thank you for contacting us regarding your child’s learning needs. Your recent inquiry has been marked for our immediate attention, and one of my staff members will be contacting you shortly. If you have a preferred method for contacting you, please reply to this email with your preferred contact information. We look forward to talking with you soon.

Wishing you and your student success,

John Doe

Center Director

I was starting to get concerned, because they certainly must think we are all a family of morons if they believe they can fool us into thinking someone is sitting at our local Sylvan center sending out emails just after the bars close.

Although I responded to this email with very specific needs, no one on Mr. Doe’s staff ever bothered to respond, though I did receive the following automatic email on the following Monday afternoon:

I hope one of my staff members from Anytown Sylvan center was able to resolve your questions or concerns. Please reply to this email if you still have outstanding items you would like to discuss, and we will contact you as soon as possible. Thank you for your interest in Sylvan.

Wishing you and your student success,

John Doe

Center Director

I responded to this email immediately, and have yet to hear anything from them. It’s now been over a month.

As frustrating as this process was, it forced me to help my son with his English, and he is now back to a solid B – not great, but also not summer school material.

How to Guarantee Utilization

How much revenue could Sylvan have realized from my family over the next 10 years? If they were successful in helping this son with his English grades, would we not use them to help our other sons improve something? In my estimation, this local Sylvan center lost a minimum of $10,000. If you multiply that by the hundreds of other potential customers with similar experiences you begin to get into some real money.

The issues in these two real life examples are not caused by bad CRM tools, rather these instances point to a sales leadership void within these organizations. Without leadership, these organizations have too much technology. Case in point: if none of these businesses attempted to employ CRM tools, I would have been forced to call them, and chances are they might have answered the phone.

What can a leader do to guarantee utilization of tools designed to help an organization close more sales and drive more revenue? Accountability.

It’s a cliché, but your team will truly respect what you inspect. (By the way, we generally hate sayings like this, because people assume they’re true simply because they rhyme. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” could have just as easily been “if you killed your ex-wife, you’re gonna do life.”) Inspecting the daily inputs and outputs of your salespeople, and then holding them accountable for employing the designated processes for prospecting and managing customer relationships, can change everything virtually overnight.

The truth is that most salespeople are lazy. They expend more energy avoiding work than they would have to use if they just completed tasks as designed.

Salespeople need more leadership, not more technology.

 

Sales Management Blogwatch – February 21, 2009

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Sales Management Blogwatch

If it feels like it’s been months since our last Blogwatch in the Sales Management series, that’s because it has. We’ve been scouring the Web for any semblance of great blog entries to help us create a decent Blogwatch and we continued to come up empty handed.

Sure, we saw some great entries from the top Sales Management Blogs like Brad Trnavsky’s Sales Management 2.0 Blog, Nesh Thompson’s stuff on SymVolli, Ian Brodie’s Sales Excellence Blog, Karl Goldfield’s Sales Evangelist nuggets, Skip Anderson’s Selling To Consumers, Tibor Shato’s The Pipeline, and Will Fultz’ Top Sales Blog, but we weren’t getting the nice, tight posts we normally see from the unwashed masses of the Sales Management Blogosphere. We expect great things from the Sales Gurus, we just want to see what the rest of the world is writing.

Where were the amateurish posts from those who just had something to say about Sales Management? They were, for the most part, missing. Other than the gold you can always find at the blogs we mentioned above, here are the best of the Sales Management Blogs from the past several weeks:

Managing expectations: Maturity at work – Revenue Journal®
Managing your client’s expectations is one of the most important aspects in any commercial relationship, and yet it is almost universally ignored in sales training – and sales management. If you were selling this type of complex product …

Tips for Sales Managers: 7 Sales Team Meeting Ideas for 2009
Books for Sales Managers. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig · ProActive Sales Management by William “Skip” Miller. Resources for Sales Managers. ES Research – Sales Training Intelligence · Sales Vault …

Total Sales Success: Raise Your Prospecting to a Whole New Level
With over 27-years of sales and sales management success, I bring a wealth of experience to the table. My goal is simple: To raise the standard for sales excellence in your company. View my complete profile …

8 Steps To Creative Sales Management : Managing Salespeople
8 Steps To Creative Sales Management was part of a recent sales management seminar we ran. The client was concerned that creativity was totally absent from his team so we ran a brief session.

Sales Training and Sales Programs for the Natural Born Seller
Sales training and sales programs can benefit even the natural born seller. Advanced sales training and sales programs get down and dirty into the specific skills that manifest excellence in sales management.

Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation? – Sales Management 2.0
It’s Friday evening, I’m cruising some of the blogs and other forums as I wind up the day. I saw a question posed on the Sales Best Practices board in LinkedIn. The question concerned the Reputation of Sales, asking about why do we see …

Identify and Overcome the Four Curses of Sales …
Peak performance author, columnist, trainer, speaker and radio show host for sales, management and leadership, Dave Anderson walks the talk as a leader. He has led some of the most successful retail automotive dealership in the …

How Do You Get Your Salespeople to Sell More?
The key to making the sale in this economy is to help your team stay focused on solving real customer problems and enabling them to add immediate …

20 Characteristics of a Superior Salesperson
Enthusiastically supports internal initiatives from his or her Sales Management team. 5. Focuses on the positive, staying away from gossip regarding other individuals or his or her company. 6. Is constantly in self-improvement mode …

Sales Training • Sales Scorecard for Success – Sales Techniques …
The job could be sales, management, finance or operations; it doesn’t matter. As Jim Collins states in his book Good to Great, it is about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats. The same thing applies to you and …

Silver Bullet Selling – A Practical Guide to Consultative Selling …
sales effectiveness sales experience sales management sales preparation sales resistance sales training scoreboarding self-esteem selling service performance silver bullet solution success system transition …

Tips for Sales Managers: Top Sales Experts 2.0
Books for Sales Managers. 100 Best Sales Books of All Time · Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig · ProActive Sales Management by William “Skip”

How to hit your sales target this Quarter | Managing the Salesforce
Filed under: Pipeline and Forecasting, Planning, Sales Management. How are your numbers looking one month into the quarter? We polled our network of VP Sales to see what is at the top of their dashboard for evaluating the health of the …

Incentive Compensation Survey—Take the Survey, Find Out Current …
Posted by Paul McCord under Sales Performance Management, Sales Technology Research, sales, sales management, selling | Tags: business, compensation, incentive compensation, management, sales, sales compensation, sales management, …

 

 

Sales – Why Do Some Salespeople Take It Personally When They Lose An Account?

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Sales: It’s Nothing Personal

A salesperson who works for one of my company’s primary vendors – someone who happens to be a former coworker and a person I considered to be a friend – just lost a bid with my company. The vendor had held this business for the past several years and we were nearing the end of the latest multi-year agreement.

While the successful bidder’s price was a 20% discount to what we were paying (and a 35% discount to the incumbent’s best and final offer for the proposed agreement), the primary reason we decided to make a change was the deteriorating level of support and innovation the incumbent has been providing over the course of this latest contract.

It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

By rejecting the incumbent’s bid, we were not rejecting the salesperson (we’ll call him Rich). Interestingly, Rich is taking it personally. In fact, he’s become an invisible man since the day we made our decision. Why is he taking it so personally? I ran into Rich a couple of days ago (we live in the same town) and even though it’s been a month since we chose his competitor, Rich was short and cold with me. What happened to the warm friendship we had as coworkers and as buyer/seller?

Why I Became a Sales Manager

When I was a commissioned salesperson, I rocked. Not to brag, but I routinely sold double what the second best salesperson at my company sold. I sold like crazy and I made a whole bunch of money… and I was miserable. I was miserable, because even if I had a 50% closing ratio, which I generally did not, half of all my prospects told me “no.”




I took it personally. I’ve always believed in my product so much that when someone rejected it, it must mean that I had done a lousy job of explaining it to them. “How could anyone not buy this?” I would wonder. I decided that if I was going to stay in sales, I would have to move to management.

It takes a special kind of person to be a happy and successful salesperson. You have to be smart, quick-witted (not the same as smart), ballsy, lack a certain amount of pride and be willing to taste defeat more often than victory. Most importantly, you cannot take it personally when someone tells you “no.”

I assume it will take a few months, but eventually this former friend will become a friend again. I’ll have to set a reminder in my calendar to be sure and tell Rich what an ass he was back when he lost our business, and how he shouldn’t take it personally – it’s just business.

 

Sales Training 101 – Reciprocity is Childsplay

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Reciprocity – Sales Training 101

From a very early age, we all learn about reciprocation. That is, when someone does something nice for us, we tend to do something nice for them. As humans, most of us don’t want to be indebted to someone else – especially someone we barely know.

In sales, we often forget the power of the lessons we learned when we were five; and we fail to use these simple techniques and other great manipulative gestures to get our way with a client.

As bad as that last sentence sounded, this really is what commissioned sales is all about. If you cannot manipulate someone to buy what you’re selling, then why do we need you to sell for us? We would be better off firing our sales team and putting everything we offer on a table and letting the customer choose what is best for them. Of course, companies whose products require salespeople would be out of business in a week if they chose this path.

If you can get past the whole “manipulative gestures” of sales, then you might just have a career as a sales manager – and you can begin teaching your sales team some basic lessons on gaining a “yes.”

Tit for Tat – How a Coke Will Make All the Difference

One way to use reciprocity to your advantage (if you’re an inside salesperson) is to offer (with no strings attached) every prospect who walks into your store a can of ice cold soda or bottle of water.

This little gesture is so manipulative that it should be outlawed. When you give someone a true freebie, they cannot help but be open to your pitch – they owe you.

Studies have shown that the simple act of unilaterally offering something for nothing can increase sales by 25-50%. Wow! We spend hours on sales training to gain a 5% incremental advantage; it’s hard to imagine that a bottle of Dasani or can of Coke can do so much more.

It can, and it does. The bottle of water accompanied by a sincere “it’s a hot day, thought you might enjoy this” or “you looked thirsty, hope this helps” will go a long way to improving your closing percentage.

If you’re an outside salesperson, it might be necessary for you to learn something about your prospect and then show up with something cheap that you’re sure they’ll value. If they have kids, bring a few pieces of company-logoed chachki that appeal to children, for example.




Think Small and be Careful to Keep the Strings Unattached

Earlier this year, one of my company’s vendors took a colleague and me to the Super Bowl in the Phoenix area. It was a great game; and it came with an all-expenses paid trip that probably cost the vendor $5,000-$7,000 per person.

I enjoyed the game, and I appreciated being asked. I did not, however, increase my company’s use of their product. In fact, less than seven months later, I was actually advocating to others that we needed to reduce our spending with this vendor.

Why did this once-in-a-lifetime trip not sway me to become this vendor’s advocate? Why do they now feel they wasted their money on me and my colleague? Is there anything they could have done to get more value from this gift?

Forget for a moment that one of their salespeople once used the line “yeah, but we took you to the Super Bowl” to gain more business from me – big mistake – primarily there were two reasons their gift failed to drive the desire results.

Allowing myself to enjoy such a huge gift was difficult. I felt guilty and was worried there would be strings attached to such a great trip. My conscience bothered me, and a trip this big caused me to reexamine the vendor relationship to be absolutely certain there was no indication of impropriety on my part.

In effect, I began to “over-police” myself. When in doubt, I selected the choice against this vendor for fear that a decision in their favor would seem tied to their gift. The exact opposite effect they sought with the Super Bowl trip.

Secondly, the trip was nice, but it wasn’t very personal. We received free airfare, a free hotel stay, and free tickets to the game and other events. A packaged deal that cost thousands, to be sure.

Personalize the Manipulation

Where this vendor went wrong with both my colleague and me was that they didn’t bother to personalize anything about the trip. Everything they provided us was part of some package they had purchased. It was money and it was things; it was devoid of thought and showed no personal sacrifice or commitment on their part (save for the money they spent).

Had they spent an additional $50 per person and given us a commemorative Super Bowl football, for example, they would probably have us more in their debt; and we would have something to remember the gesture.

Additionally, both my colleague and I have children. Providing us with something we could take home to our kids (we’re talking about less than $100 here) would have made the weekend away from our families more worthwhile. As it is, I have a great memory of a great game and little else.

What Should You Do as a Sales Manager?

If you plan to add a little “manipulation by giving” to your sales team’s routine, it’s important to remember a few simple rules.

  • Rule number one is to keep it simple. Never try to “over think” your prospect or the role your company plays.
  • Rule number two is to consider the recipient. What drives them, and what would make them think you really care?
  • Rule number three is to make sure the gestures are personal and come with no strings attached. That is, walk away after you give the prospect the bottle of water. Let them know you’re here for them if they need you, but that you intend to let them browse on their own – and mean it.

Making a Sale Today is Tough

No one can disagree that we live in scary times. Whether you sell cars, furniture or cell phones, your walk-in traffic and your sales are down. In this economy, it is imperative for sales managers to find that little “something” that can separate them from the competition.

Open your mind, and realize it may very well be a can of Pepsi.