SALES TECHNIQUES
5 ways to Generate Sales
The Best Stuff vs The Right Stuff
GENERATING LEADS
Generating leads is a smart way to support your sales staff and make their efforts more efficient. A good lead generation program can lower your sales costs and raise your sales revenue.
Here are the basics of making lead generation work for your company:
1. Offer something free. This is the key to any successful lead generation program. Whether you use direct mail, print ads, radio, television, or other media, you must offer something free to get prospects to raise their hands and say, “I’m interested in this.” You can offer just about anything: free booklet, free gift, free survey, free sample, free catalog, free inspection, free consultation, or anything else that’s related to your product or service.
2. Help your prospect solve a problem. Forget positioning pieces and other pomp and circumstance. Give your offer value. For someone having tax problems, offering a “free tax reduction kit” is more appealing and relevant than “a free brochure about the XYZ Accounting Firm.” Try to solve particular problems.
3. Stay focused on getting the lead. Don’t get carried away with the creative aspects of designing a mail piece or ad. Keep your message as simple and lean as possible. The idea is to peak your prospect’s interest in the free thing you’re offering and get a request for it. Don’t talk about your company, then tack on an offer. Focus the whole message on the freebie.
4. Gather the information you need to make a sale. The only reason for offering something free is to get a name, address, phone number, and other information to build your database. So make sure your reply device asks for the necessary data. Be careful if you ask for an e-mail response, though, because the prospect may not give you everything you need. And if you want to direct a prospect to your Web site, create a special URL that will ask for contact information first, otherwise your prospect will wander around your site and leave without providing the data you want.
5. Follow up fast. Hot leads cool off quickly. When you get an inquiry, send the freebie immediately. Then get the lead into the hands of your sales force pronto.
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Quality: The Best Stuff vs. The Right Stuff |
If you want to earn a serious income as a salesperson there are two things you have to know.
First, you must compete on something other than low price.
Second, an aspect of nearly any product or service that is usually most important to a prospect – is quality.
How important and viable, as a competitive advantage, is the quality of your product or service? In some cases, it may be the most important reason your prospect buys.
Selling quality is easy.
But only if you have quality and you know what it is.
To be honest, virtually everybody does have quality. Unfortunately, not everyone knows what quality means—and consequently they have a tough time selling it.
Most salespeople will say that quality means “best.” Quality does not mean best. Quality means conformance to standards and expectations—to your prospect’s standards and expectations.
Quality means the right stuff; not the best stuff. Quality is the correct stuff for your prospect’s requirements and needs, not the best stuff made.
The word quality and the word best are not synonymous.
For example, what is a quality tire for your car? The only way to answer that question is to ask another question: What are you going to use the car for? Are you going to race it? Or drive to work in the snow? Go out and buy the bestracing slicks you can get, put them on your power-traction wheels, and see how fast you can accelerate in six inches of snow. Or put racing slicks on your front wheels and see how fast you can stop on wet pavement, going downhill. You might say that you bought the “best tires money could buy,” but you’ll be disappointed in their performance under those conditions.
Many salespeople can’t make their prices stick because they try to sell either too high a quality or too inferior a quality for the needs of the customers. If you want to sell quality, you better have “the right stuff.” If you don’t have the right stuff for your customer, you have a problem. A salesperson is never going to meet with success if he or she tries to insist the prospect wants and needs the wrong stuff. Selling certainly includes telling your prospects that your offering is the correct product (and why it’s the right stuff) for them. But if your offering is not the right stuff — if you’re selling high quality walnut wood and your customer only needs cheap plywood, for example — the only way you’ll get your customer to buy the wrong stuff is to cut your price. If they’re building fine furniture, they might buy your walnut. But if they’re putting in subflooring, they won’t: They don’t need it, don’t want it, and can’t afford it.
“But I Sell a Commodity — and You Have to Sell Any Commodity Solely on Price”
Many salespeople feel that they’re in a commodity business, and they believe because of that, they absolutely must sell on price. Nothing is further from the truth.
Selling a commodity doesn’t mean that you automatically must sell it on price. A commodity, by definition, is any item for which there is extreme competition; one that has no discernible distinguishing difference that separates it from the others.
For example, suppose we have two water glasses for sale that are identical. If we tell you one sells for two pennies and the other sells for one penny (and you’re
buying water glasses – not wine glasses), which one are you going to buy? You’re going to buy the one-penny glass.
Other things being equal,
people buy on price, right?
Many people believe that all other things being equal, customers buy on price.
That’s not true.
First off, other things are seldom, if ever, equal.
Second, and more important, it is thesalesperson’s job to make sure the customer knows
(1) that other things are notequal, and
(2)that he or she should buy the salesperson’s (higher priced) commodity item because it’s actually a better deal.
A salesperson must differentiate his or her company’s product and services from the competitor’s some how, some way.
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That is what selling is all about.Otherwise, a computer could answer the phone, direct the customer to a price quote on the web, and all orders could be filled digitally as well.
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that even when the product is equal to another—identical product—people don’t always buy on price. Think of your neighborhood convenience store.
Typically, just about every item you’ll find in a convenience store is more expensive than it is in a grocery store. The very fact that convenience stores exist proves that people will pay more for the exact same product (as long as there is some valuable differentiation – in this case,convenience). Milk is sometimes as much as $1.50 more a gallon at a convenience store. But if you get a craving for some cookies in the cupboard at 11:00 at night, but you don’t have any milk, chances are very good that instead of driving all the way to your grocery store, you’re just going to run up to the convenience store, pay more for the milk and get home so you can have cookies and milk while you watch Leno.
The facts are, other things are never equal—and even if the product is identical to another,prospects don’t necessarily buy on price.
Remember:
They say they do because they’re trying toget you to cut your price. But their behavior belies their words! The point is, even if one is selling a commodity—a genuine commodity—people still don’t buy on price. Household consumers don’t and businesses don’t, either.
The Last Word on Commodities
While we are on the subject of commodities, incidentally, you should understand that most “commodities” are not commodities. and cement isn’t cement.
If you believe cement is cement, why don’t you go to Skokie, Illinois, to the Portland Cement Association, and make a statement such as “cement is cement.” We guarantee it won’t be long before they’re going to ask you, “What kind of cement are you talking about?” There are different kinds of cement, even though most peoplewho buy cement will tell the cement salesperson that “cement is cement.” And even when you are talking about the same kind of cement, any given manufacturer of cement can differentiate its product from a competitor’s by simply putting its brand name on its product.
In essence, this tells the company’s customers that “this is cement like the other guy’s, but we made it, and by buying ours, you are getting our quality control, our service, our delivery, our company’s policies and procedures, our way of doing things, our billing procedures, our order turnaround, our friendly service, our care and attention, our ease of doing business, plus all the other differentiating factors we offer.”
Think about the last time a prospect told you they could get the same product or service at alower price. Was it really the exact same thing? What were / are the differences between your product and the other guys? The way you deliver it? The service you offer? Which one of you had the level of quality that best met the prospect’s standards and expectations?
Think About It !
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