Sales Problems and Solutions

Exceeding Sales and Revenues Expectations

• 1FIRST WAY You don't have the right prospects in your "sales pipeline."
  
  The key component of attracting the right kinds of prospects to your business is your message. This is a "blind spot" that trips even the savviest of businesses. The right message will attract the right kind of prospects. The wrong message will attract the wrong kinds of prospects, who will waste your time, energy and efforts. The most fundamental of all the messages is a 10-word slogan or a 10-second commercial. Is your 10-second commercial or a 10-word slogan targeting your ideal prospect? I have written tons of stuff on how to create your business' core message. You can read it here or move on for now and come back to it later.
• 2SECOND WAY You don't have enough number of opportunities in your sales pipeline.
  
  Two reasons why this happens: 1) your message does not grab your audience, 2) lack of sufficient and consistent activities from you that will enforce and re-enforce your message to your market. Having a strong message is important. Yet, once you have it, you must reinforce it to your target market often and in different ways. For most businesses, an ideal number of "channels" to send your message across to your target market is somewhere between 5 and 7. What are your channels? How consistently are your using them to reach your audience? Do you track their effectiveness?
• 3THIRD WAY Your deals are taking too long to close.
  
  Volumes have been written on this subject and businesses spend millions on fixing this issue. There is only one problem: all the stuff that gets taught on the subject fundamentally encourages behavior that makes sales people look, smell or sound "salesy." Since people have a very negative impression of "salespeople" and of "being sold," they have developed their own ways of dealing with salespeople. Perfected over thousands of years of history, their way of buying is superior to most forms of selling "systems" taught today, making most of them ineffective. Is your selling approach making you seem "salesy?" How can you change it?
• 4FOURTH WAY Too many good opportunities are slipping through your fingers.
  
  Fundamentally, this happens because most selling processes approch prospects intellectually, totally forgetting the fact that the prospect is a human being with emotions. Buying decisions are never made intellectually; they are made emotionally and then justified intellectually. If you are not engaging the emotions of your prospects, your relationship, and your ability to sell to your prospects is a fraction of what it could be. How can you uncover the emotional reasons for prospects to buy your products or services?
• 5FIFTH WAY You are not getting the price for your products or your services that you deserve.
  
  Pricing issue comes up at two points in your relationship with a prospect: 1) before they ever set foot in the door, and 2) when you are about to close a deal. A good marketing message sets you apart from your competition, and as a result, creates the perception of "monopoly" in the minds of your prospects. A good message preconditions your prospects to pay high price for your products or services. A good selling approach makes the price point AND the competition irrelevant by - emotionally - helping them see you as the only solution to their challenges, aspirations and dreams. What are your strategies for getting paid the amount that you deserve from your prospects?

Improving Your Closing Ratio

• 1FIRST WAY You are accepting Think-About-It as a valid answer for the fear of getting a NO.
  
  In traditional selling, a NO is avoided like plague. Yet, studies show that the majority of the time your prospects tell you that she is going to "Think It Over" at the end of a sales meeting, she is really trying to tell you that she is not going to do business with you. By giving your prospects the permission to tell you NO in advance, you establish yourself as a trusted advisor, as opposed to a pushy sales person. In the process, you stop wasting time with prospects who are not real prospects and spend more time with better prospects, with better chances of closing the sale.
• 2SECOND WAY You are giving away - for free - your knowledge and expertise in the form of proposals, presentations, quotes and demos, often helping your competition close the deal.
  
  Your expertise and your knowledge is one of the only leverages you have in selling situations, where the prospect is the judge and the jury. When you give away your expertise for free, you give up control of the selling situation and help your prospect shop you around with your competition. Make sure that you only provide your expertise to those who are qualified to do business with you: those who have an emotional reason to buy your products or services, have the money budgeted to pay for them and have fully shared their decision making process with you.
• 3THIRD WAY Your selling process is not designed to appeal to the emotional side of your prospects.
  
  People buy emotionally, only justify their buying decisions intellectually. If you have not uncovered their emotional reasons for buying, they won't have the urgency to do business with you. This will result in them putting off the buying decision until later which, in majority of the cases, will result in no-business.
• 4FOURTH WAY Your are not uncovering the prospect's money tolerance before presenting your features, benefits and solutions.
  
  Not uncovering your prospects' money tolerance in advance sets you up for "negotiating" later, when you have lost all your negotiating power by giving away your solutions. The best negotiation is when there is no negotiation.
• 5FIFTH WAY You don't uncover your prospect's Decision Making Process before presenting your features, benefits and solutions.
  
  How many times have you heard that your prospect needs to Think-It-Over because so-and-so was not there at that meeting? By uncovering your prospects' decision making process up-front, you will present your solutions to the true decision makers and increase your chances of closing the business.

Improving the Quality of a Sales Pipeline

• 1FIRST WAY You are not clear about what makes an ideal prospect.
  
  How do would you define an ideal prospect? Ask yourself the following questions: Whose problems am I solving? What kinds of businesses? What kinds of people? Business owners? Presidents? CFOs? CIO? VP's of Sales? How important is it for these people to solve the particular problems my business addresses? Would they have the authority to spend the money to buy my products or services? Are they the final decision makers? Who else would get involved in making the final decision?
• 2SECOND WAY Your message does not address your ideal prospect and his or her problems, goals and aspirations.
  
  This is the issue that trips the smartest of the business owners. The message ties everything in your business. This core message - you may call it a story if you like - communicates, in no uncertain terms, what's in it for your target market if they bought your products or services. I have written a series of articles on this subject. You can read it here or move on for now and come back to it later.
• 3THIRD WAY You or your sales people are calling unqualified prospects qualified.
  
  The question is, if we are clear about what makes an ideal prospect, why would we still call a non-ideal prospect ideal or qualified? Many explanations for this strange phenomenon. But perhaps it all boils down to one term: emotional strength. In other words, we get someone interested in our products and services and it gets us excited - emotionally involved. So we tell ourselves that a prospects is a good prospect even if, in reality, he is not. How would you make sure that your sales people don't fall for this? What kind of communication do you need to have with your salespeople to make sure that they are not painting a rosy picture to you and - more importantly - themselves?
• 4FOURTH WAY You are turning qualified prospects into unqualified ones by giving away your expertise, knowledge, energy and time.
  
  In the world of selling, where the prospects seemingly have all powers, there is only one power that a salesperson has: her expertise. When we give away this power prematurely at the beginning of a sales-cycle we lose the only leverage we have with a prospect. This results in those frustrating we-will-think-it-over's causing the salesperson to endlessly chase the prospect. In the meantime, the expertise you gave to your prospects may get used by him to get a better deal with you competitors. How can you make sure that you don't give away your expertise to your prospects prematurely?

Increasing the Number of Opportunities in Sales Pipeline

• 1FIRST WAY Your message to your market does not have a strong enough "What's In It For Me?" component.
  
  A crucial component of attracting a large quality of prospects to your business is your message. A very important part of this message is a blunt, no-nonsense solution statement to a problem that they are struggling with. Let me give you an example. A busy executive who is conscious of his dirty shoes and hurrying to catch a flight to an important business meeting reads these words at the airport: "Two- minute Shoeshine." Would the message get his attention? How many more executives like him would the shoe-shine shop attract? What's your blunt, no-nonsense WIIFM (What's In It For Me) message for your market? Is it attracting a sufficiently large quantity of prospects? What kinds of prospects does it attract?
• 2SECOND WAY You don't have an effective set of action steps - a Marketing and Prospecting Process - that you and others in your business follow consistently to bring in fresh prospects.
  
  Such a process is required to bring your message to your marketplace where it is reinforced and converted into a clear future engagement between you and your prospect, an appointment, perhaps. Having a strong message is important. Yet, once you have it, you must reinforce it to your target market often and in different ways. For most businesses, an ideal number of "channels" to send your message across to your target market is somewhere between 5 and 7. What are your channels? How consistently are your using them to reach your audience? Do you track their effectiveness? How effectively do you convert people who are browsing or looking to an appointment?
• 3THIRD WAY You and your people are not 100% behind your message and/or your Marketing and Prospecting Process.
  
  In other words, you are not engaged with your own message. This is probably because the message that you have created for your business was not created by you and others in your business. It was likely outsourced to other people outside of your company, such as an advertisement agency or a website development company. If it was created by you, it was not given the full attention from you and your people, your hearts and your souls, that it deserves. It also means that your Marketing and Prospecting Process was developed, perhaps, as a theoretical, academic exercise and is disconnected from the realities of the marketplace. Such a process, when it comes to execution, becomes ineffective as a tool to bring in new prospects. How can you directly get involved in developing the core message of you company? How can you get your people involved in the same manner? How can you develop a Marketing and Prospecting Process that is real-world, yet engaging, to you and your people, especially the sales and service people, in your organization?

Shortening the Sales Cycle

• 1FIRST WAY Your company's message is not attracting your ideal prospects.
  
  If you are attracting the wrong prospects in the first place, you are wasting your time, energy and money. How do you define an ideal prospect? Ask yourself the following questions: Whose problems am I solving? What kinds of businesses? What kinds of people? Business owners? Presidents? CFOs? CIO? VP's of Sales? How important is it for these people to solve the particular problems my business addresses? Would they have the authority to spend the money on my products or services? Are they the final decision makers? Who else would get involved in making the final decision? You can read it here or move on for now and come back to it later.
• 2SECOND WAY Your selling process or method is not designed to address the emotional aspect of your prospects.
  
  People buy emotionally. They only justify their decisions intellectually. How do you elicit an emotional response - a compelling reason to buy your products or services - in your sales process? What kinds of questions do you ask? How do you make sure that as you bring out the emotions of your prospects, they work for you and not against you?
• 3THIRD WAY You or your salespeople are not making it clear to their prospects that they are expected to make a decision at some point and that either NO or YES is okay.
  
  If you see yourself as a professional, your will make it a point to help your prospects come to a decision, whether in your favor or against it. If you approach selling this way, you will get the respect and trust you deserve from your prospects.
• 4FOURTH WAY You are waiting too long to uncover pricing objections and "negotiating" in the end when you have lost all your power to negotiate.
  
  In a nutshell, if you are waiting to discuss the pricing issues until after you have presented your solutions, you have waited too long. By uncovering the prospect's money tolerance before presenting, you will save yourself a lot of time. You will also be able to present more appropriate solutions within their price range. How do you make sure that you get necessary budget information from your prospects before presenting your solutions? What questions could you ask them?

Preventing Price Negotiations and Bidding Contests

• 1First is before they meet you face to face, while being exposed to your business and its message in some form.
  
  At this stage, pricing will become an issue if you are easily comparable to your competitors' products are services. If you want to make the pricing issue irrelevant, you must be Meaningfully Different from your competitor's offerings.
  
  Answer this simple question: what's ONE thing that your business does that no one in the world can as well as you do.
  
  The answers may not come quickly, but the question will get you thinking. The answers to this question is key to finding out your Meaningful Difference. Once you know your Meaningful Difference, all you have to do is build it into your marketing literature and in your conversations with prospects.
• 2The second stage is when they are about to do business with you, in the selling process.
  
  A typical problem at this stage is that the selling process is intellectually driven. People buy emotionally first, then they back up that decision with intellectual rationale. If you are not addressing the emotional needs of your prospects in your selling process, you will face pricing fights. To find your prospects' emotional reasons for doing business with you, ask gentle yet probing questions about their issues, challenges and problems while looking for signs that the prospect is emotionally involved with the problems or situations he is facing.

A Process for Marketing and Selling

Sales and Marketing Activities

• 1You can accurately forecast and predict your revenues, profits and cash-flow months in advance.
• 2You have control over the amount of revenues and sales you generate.
• 3Your month-to-month sales and revenues remain consistent so that you can avoid fluctuations in your sales volume.
• 4You save time and minimize wasted efforts.
• 5You can stay on track to the goals you have set for your business.
• 6You can focus your efforts and energies to the end result you expect.
• 7You can duplicate what works and eliminate what does not.
• 8You can teach the process to new employees, executives, partners and buyers of your business.