The Selling Newsletter for Sales Professionals
SALES QUOTE
“For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.”
–-Ralph Waldo Emerson
For Salespeople…
At some point you’re going to lose a piece of business. That loss immobilizes some salespeople. They ruminate about the deal that went bad, what caused it and blame themselves. The reality is that all successful salespeople sometimes lose deals. They analyze what went wrong and resolve to avoid doing that again. They do this analysis once. Then they move on. If you find yourself stuck reliving what went wrong over and over again, you have to figure a way of stopping this destructive behavior. You are wasting your time. You can’t go back. You can commit to doing something different moving forward. Staying angry is costing you your happiness. It’s also costing you future sales.
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THE BLOG S AND OTHER COLUMNS
I’m now writing The Real Deal, a column on women in business for Allbusiness.com Hope you’ll read more ideas so you can achieve your success in business.
You can get RSS feed for the blog.
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THE SELLING IDEAS FOR THE MONTH TO SELL MORE NOW
Enquiring Minds Want to Know
Did you ever wonder why the National Enquirer sold so many papers? Their tagline gave it away. Enquiring minds want to know. It seems that people love gossip and want to know what other people are doing. I can’t tell you what Kim Kardashian is up to, but here’s what one sales force is doing to increase sales.
Are they coming or going? I recently spoke with the national sales manager of a company which sells through distributors. Their sales were up. Even though sales were good, things weren’t as rosy as they appeared. He undertook a project that took a strategic analysis of their selling. The team measured and benchmarked sales performance. They reviewed profit margins and sales. They even prioritized their distributor network. They found a problem when the team measured both sales and customer retention. They were increasing their new business, but at the same time they were having an exodus of existing customers. Their churn was unacceptably high.
As a result, they changed the way their sales force is compensated. Before, too much emphasis was being made on simply acquiring new business. The sales reports didn’t include any customer retention data. Now the reports include sales inactivity reports. That’s how salespeople can spot which customers aren’t buying. They can catch a customer likely to be lost before he’s gone.
You get what you measure. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to management that there was so much customer turnover. Salespeople do what gets measured and rewarded. The only data that was gathered was new business numbers. There was no emphasis on keeping business. As a result, the sales force focused only on getting new business. You can imagine the sales promises that were made (and not kept)to have the new business losses this company experienced. If you want to keep customers, first start by gathering the data on lost customers. What gets measured gets done in sales.
It’s not what you make. It’s what you keep. Further investigation looked at the portfolio of products that the salespeople were selling. Salespeople were selling more low margin products than high margin products. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the data indicated that their customers were not buying all the products they could have bought from each salesperson.
You certainly want to sell what your customers need. Just make sure you consider which of your customers are best suited for your high margin products. You’ll work just as hard selling a low margin product as a high margin product, so look for customers who can use the high margin ones. Then ask questions to sell all that you can of other products that your customer might need.
Who are you kidding? They also examined the time that was being spent on customers. They found that salespeople didn’t prioritize accounts. The smallest customer was getting the same amount of a salesman’s time as the most profitable customer. That makes no sense. There are always going to be 24 hours in a day. The most successful salespeople spend their selling hours with their most important and profitable customers. First, define your customer categories. Then define the criteria for each customer category. Allocate your time accordingly. Then stop kidding yourself that your C, or smaller account, gets the same amount of your time as an A, or large account.
Kim’s antics helps other people sell more newspapers. Knowing what other salespeople are doing just might help you sell more, too, and without all the late nights.
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ACTION ITEMS
1. Do you know your customer retention rate? How many customers do you lose each year?
2. Do you know who your most profitable customers are? What’s your strategy for making more of your customers more profitable?
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DID YOU KNOW?
Here’s a tip this week for your sales success.
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Programs
You can check for current programs.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Here are some selling tools to help you sell more now. Click on the photo to find out more!
Monday Morning Sales Tips : A book that has quick ideas for you to be more successful in sales. Real-World Selling: A book with selling skills and strategies that work in the real world of sales. Secrets of Persuasion: Audio CD for the clues to use to speed-read people and close more business.