Create Easy Paths For Risk Averse Sales Reps

Top tier sales reps continually stretch their comfort zones.  They gain confidence by enhancing their professional and technical skills.  They focus on expanding their horizontal and vertical contacts within their accounts.  They smartly approach new prospects in unfamiliar industries and territories. They represent their entire product line and are always searching for new applications. They create and tell Success Stories that prove how customers enjoy significant results by overcoming challenges through the solutions they provide. 

Mid-tier reps risk daily disappointment from their status quo strategy.  Instead, they should expand their comfort zones to smoothly navigate an uncontrollable sea of customers, competition, economy and their own companies.

An integrated sales and marketing leadership team can make it emotionally easier for these safety seekers by cuing them into areas where top performers have blazed a path for them.  They can tailor these ideas to their own style, which enables originality and authenticity.

At a minimum, mid-tier reps should retell success stories of top performers as they develop confidence and skills to develop their own.  This content will expand their horizons and they will find it less risky to look for similar opportunities and apply similar solutions because others have blazed the path for them.

Build a portfolio of online press releases and success stories fit for the moment.  Make this part of ongoing sales training and an agenda item during all sales meetings.  Online Press Releases reveal why a customer or partner has selected your company.  Success Stories prove that you delivered on your promise. Video Testimonials make the story real.  

Teach New Customers How To Benefit From Your Relationship

 Manage Expectations With A New Customer Welcome Package

An excellent way to begin each new business relationship

• Welcome letter from a company officer reinforces the sales proposal's promise
• Contact information - customer, company, channel partners
• Date for kick-off meeting to review timelines, responsibilities, potential pitfalls and status meeting schedule
• Warranties and how to request maintenance services
• Invoice and A/R process
• How to request a proposal for future services
• How to place a purchase order

An Important Synergy - Your Employees Will Benefit

If you teach new customers how to do business with your company, your people will be more efficient and better able to leverage their competencies for serving customers and finding new ones. They will be more effective in creating logical next step opportunities with each customer. They will help your company to learn from customer feedback. They will introduce referrals early in the relationship.

A totally satisfied customer will strengthen the company’s portfolio of success stories. So, start the relationship on a positive note.

Another Reason Why Business Schools Should Teach History

Self Fulfilling Prophesies Work Both Ways

If you expect a positive outcome, you are on the right track. If you expect a negative outcome, you'll be subconsciously influencing that result as well.

Today's high school and college students have yet to experience a healthy economy.  They're used to hearing about fiscal cliffs, high unemployment, a tough job market, belt tightening, outsourcing, etc.  Has this become their self-fulfilling prophecy because that's what they've come to expect?  Let's hope it's not engrained in their muscle memory.

I believe that a holistic business curriculum can foster their positive self fulfilling prophecy? If we teach business students about the history of the cycles our economy has traversed, they'll be better equipped to believe that they can influence future good times.

If we can create positive self-fulfilling prophecies in these future leaders, they will be wanting to innovate, undertake risk, invest, etc.  They will have a positive, enthusiastic attitude and will enjoy their careers.  And they'll get our economy back on track for the long term.

Here's an intersting article on Self-fulfilling prophecy by Carolyn Kaufman, Psy.D. in Psychology for Writers

Successful Marketers Are Great Performers

Captivate Buyers With Your Personal Performance

Memorable Experiences Differentiate Sellers Of Commodity Products And Services

Here's what I mean by personal performance

You present an aura of passion for what you do and a confidence that the customer is better off buying from you.  Your communication style establishes trust, honesty and dependability.  Your high emotional intelligence balances impulse control and assertiveness.  You blend style and class with minimal visible effort, while not trying to appear that way.  This is called sprezzatura.

Customers perceive you as both different and valuable.

Prior research reveals their needs for minimizing risk, avoiding aggravation, eliminating pain, obtaining pleasure, acquiring power or earning a profit.  You can weave this perspective into provocative questions that capture their attention.  Then you narrate a success story that resonates with their situation so that they can visualize the benefits. Being natural enables you to share insight about your products, your business and your industry and to easily address objections.

Invest in yourself and become the differentiator.  Give them a reason to want to interact with you.

After reading this blog post, do you agree that this is the profile that smart sales managers should be hiring?

“If a man is a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will say, Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."                                                                               Martin Luther King Jr.

Success Stories Create Emotional Attachment to Your Brand

Don't Let Selling Interfere With The Sale - Instead, Tell Me A Story

A portfolio of compelling success stories proves that your company is in the customer results business and that you're not just a vendor of products and services.

With each one narrowcasted for a target audience, and without sounding like an infomercial, a Success Story inspires people to act. Each story demonstrates how you've tackled challenges similar to theirs with solutions that produced desired results.  As a retention tool, success stories remind customers of what you did for them.

Brand your company as an array of customer stories that can be narrated by your employees and by external people who draw their own conclusions, insert themselves into your story, and retell it in their own words.

Top tier BizD professionals are natural "Story Sellers".  The middle tier, who fear the risk of tackling new customer challenges, will learn what your company has done for its customers and feel less threatened when looking for new customer problems to solve.

If you don't tell your stories, you are wasting an opportunity to differentiate your company.

If you don't have compelling stories to tell, you probably compete on features, price and delivery, which shouldn't give you a high degree of confidence in your business.

Stories should be available in hard copy and online to provide more details that support the narrative. Online versions should include keywords that enable self-service discovery by those looking for solutions.

Email marketing campaigns can direct a story to the appropriate audience if your CRM system or mail list includes the right account and profile information.