The Selling Newsletter
The Selling Newsletter
from Best@Selling
A free monthly newsletter of ideas to help make your selling easier.
Selling is the easiest job in the world…Just ask anyone who is NOT in sales! Best wishes for YOUR successful selling—Maura
This issue contains:
The Selling Quote for the Month
Upcoming Programs
The Selling Ideas for the Month
Action Items
Selling Tips
What do you think?
To Subscribe to the Selling Newsletter
Need an article for your newsletter?
About Maura Schreier-Fleming
Contact Information
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The Selling Quote for the Month
“At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.” Emo Phillips, American Comedian
While I’m not suggesting that you poison your customers, I am suggesting you think about what happens after your sale. There is more to think about in selling than just making the first sale. It’s thinking about how you can get your customer to continue to buy. What are you doing to get your customers to come back and buy more? Are you giving them a reason? Are you clear about the promises you made to your customer so you can keep them? Do your customers know all they need to know about your products and services to realize the value of what you sold them?
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Upcoming Programs
Program: Learn To Be Lucky
When: October 10, 11.45-1 PM
Cost: $39 includes lunch
Where: The Gates Restaurant, Meadows Museum
Dallas, TX
For more Information: 214 SMU THINK (214 768 8446)
Description: How lucky can you be? Research shows that people can actually make their own good and bad fortune, enhancing the amount of luck they have in life. Lucky people think and do things differently than unlucky people. Come learn from an expert in selling how to apply “lucky” principles to your life and experience additional luck and prosperity.
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The Selling Ideas for this Month
False Sense of Security
The best salespeople are concerned about their customers’ interests. They also remember to look out for their own interests. A customer focus without a seller’s focus will get you one thing—no business. I forgot this and here’s how you can avoid what happened to me.
The beginning. I had worked on a small project with a customer. I was looking for a bigger project with him. Instead of a purely sales project, his company, a $700 million real estate company, was looking to do customer survey work. One of my business partners does data mining work and customer survey work. I asked my customer some questions about the project. How did they arrive at it? What were they considering? My contact said they wanted to learn what their customers thought about their service offerings since they really didn’t know. He didn’t know how they would do the project. He also indicated no work had been done on this project. The data mining consultant said using the web to collect survey data is efficient and less costly to customers. I shared this with my contact. He thought it was a great idea and set up a meeting with all of us, including the president of his company.
The meeting. My business partner and I prepared our discussion questions, our meeting objective and brought sample management reports to the meeting. We wanted to show the customer what they could expect from the survey results. We began the meeting by discussing data collection using the web. The president said, “Stop right there. We are not going to use the web. Our customers won’t use the web.” He wanted a hard copy system all along. Our contact never told us that. Since our expertise was in a web based solution, we had to move on to the end of the project, which was the data analysis piece. The data mining consultant talked about the reports and showed how they helped management run the business better.
The end. My heart stopped when I realized my contact had given me bad information. The president was very clear that our solution would never work for him. Since we couldn’t make our contact look bad in front of his boss, we had to move on to another topic. (And the first thought did cross my mind!) I knew this was a tough situation to turn around. Then, when the customer produced a survey they had been working on, I realized there was much more information that my contact had not shared with me.
What would I do differently next time? I would be more careful about assuming information from someone I didn’t know well enough. When I looked back, I realized I really didn’t know how my contact thinks. When you know how someone thinks, you can gauge the accuracy and completeness of the responses they give. Some customers give you thoughtful responses to your questions. Others give answers just to respond to a question. They don’t even care how accurate they are. Perhaps they’re accurate at the time, but they don’t feel the need to update you when the information changes. My question about the project required more complete information. The information evidently changed over time. My contact didn’t feel the need to give me that information. Next time I would ask far more questions and assume far less.
I’m not a salesperson who suffers from “happy ears.” Happy eared salespeople hear everything their customers say in a positive light. If you do suffer from “happy ears” you’re going to be more vulnerable in your selling because you have a false sense of security. Even if you don’t suffer from “happy ears,” beware of assuming too much in selling. When you assume less and check more, you’ll experience a real sense of selling security.
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Action Items
1. Ask yourself how well you know your customer. Can you trust what you are being told?
2. Can you triangulate information? (Ask several people to see if the answer is the same.)
3. Do you always discuss what the worst case could be before the sales call? Do you have a plan for it?
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Selling Tip
From Maura’s ebook: 97 Ways to Sell More Now E-Book
https://www.bestatselling.com/selling_tools.htm#5
Tip 9. Write an article about how your business helps others in business and submit it for publication to a local newspaper, trade journal or magazine. Free publicity never hurt sales.
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What do you think?
Here are the results of the selling survey:
1. What part of selling do you find most challenging?
Reaching prospects on the telephone 46.9%
Maura’s comments: Are you leaving a message that sounds confident? Does it include a compelling reason to call you back? (A good reason is what you can do FOR your customer.) Are you persistent?
2. Where do you get sales support and guidance from?
Other sales professionals 43.3%
Reading books 33.3%
Manager 13.3%
Maura’s comment: Isn’t it interesting that managers are the last source of guidance?
3. What would be most helpful to make selling easier?
More customer feedback 29.4%
Maura’s Comment: Then why don’t you ask? Why is a powerful question and salespeople need to ask it more.
Let me know what you think about selling.
Click here to take the selling survey
You can email: info@bestatselling.com for the responses.
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I’m always looking for success stories and other tips from sales professionals. Please feel free to email me at info@bestatselling.com with ideas that have worked for you.
If you want to build customer relationships for long-term business, you can easily do it using Exacttarget (www.exacttarget.com) and their CANSPAM compliant broadcast services.
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To Subscribe to the Selling Newsletter
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Need an Article for Your Newsletter?
Articles from this newsletter may be used in your free publications or posted on your web when given the following credit:
Written by Maura Schreier-Fleming, Best@Selling (www.BestatSelling.com). Maura works with business and sales professionals who want to sell more and be more productive at work. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results.
For free articles, selling ideas and morale boosters
visit https://www.BestatSelling.com
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About Maura Schreier-Fleming
Invite Maura to speak at your next conference or sales meeting! Contact: info@bestatselling.com
Maura Schreier-Fleming works with business and sales professionals to make it easier to sell more and be more productive at work. Her Best@Selling clients want to create long-term client relationships. They include Fujitsu, Fannie Mae and Dr Pepper/7UP. She has an M.S. in Textile Engineering from Georgia Tech and was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. With over 20 years of sales experience, she teaches the art and science of selling with a unique hands-on perspective and a great deal of real-life insight. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results (a book filled with ideas to make selling easier and more productive. Her business column ‘Selling Strategies’ appears in the Insurance Record magazine and her column ‘Street Talk’ appears in Jobbers World. You can contact her for seminars at company or trade association meetings at 972 380 0200 or info@BestatSelling.com
Privacy: At Best@Selling we take privacy issues very seriously. Your information remains with us and will never be sold, shared, or distributed in any manner, for any reason.
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Contact Information
1. Our Web site: https://www.BestatSelling.com
2. E-mail: info@bestatselling.com
3. Call: In Dallas 972 380 0200
4. Write us:
6757 Arapaho Rd., Suite 711-183
Dallas, TX 752448
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(c) Copyright 2005 Maura Schreier-Fleming. All rights reserved
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