Selling Isn't Debate: Confessions of an Engineer in Sales

The following was written by my good friend Chip Doyle with the Sandler Sales Institute. I think you will enjoy it!

I'm guessing you've heard jokes about engineers in sales. Accountants, contractors, PhD's, and lawyers don't have stellar reputations in sales either. Yet these professions generally are an intelligent lot. They are quite skilled at what they do since our daily lives may depend on their specific calculations and recommendations. I transferred from engineering into sales in 1988...

Here's how I used to sell: 1) Research the prospect and prepare a powerful presentation that applied specifically to them. 2) Provide the prospect with detailed features about the product. 3) Explain how these features worked and the significant benefits they would create. 4) Show the prospect an applicable analysis of return-on-investment and estimate how much money would be saved over time. 5) Ask the prospect how many of my products they would like to purchase.

If the prospect suggested a problem with the analysis or why the features weren't so beneficial, I would use my debate and technical skills to refute their argument and reaffirm my claim. My product knowledge was impeccable and I let no prospect get away until I had supported my argument and convinced them I was correct.

In the spirit of successful engineering, I had created a repeatable and systematic approach to selling. There was only one problem: My prospects rarely bought anything. It was a great way to prove my product knowledge but it wasn't an effective method for closing new business.

Product Knowledge Used at the Wrong Time Can Be Intimidating

In a sales discussion, there is only one person who can "convince" the prospect and it isn't the engineer or salesperson... Prospects base their buying decisions on their own personal and intellectual reasons. Studies show that salespeople who suggest benefits that aren't perceived as valuable or applicable to the prospect are actually undermining the sale...

Debates are useful to convince a third party such as a judge or observer that welcomes all viewpoints. There, the relationship between the two opposing parties is usually adversarial. However, adversarial relationships don't support buying in two party interactions. Words and phrases containing "I disagree," "That's not true" and the infamous "But" can destroy the delicate relationship between buyer and seller in a matter of seconds. While this may be intuitively obvious to most readers, they may be surprised to hear themselves saying something similar on their next challenging sales call.

Successful salespeople spend more time on the "why" questions than a traditional salesperson. They bend over backwards to find ways to agree with their prospects and probe for deeper understanding instead of taking an opposing view. Start using insightful questions to help your prospects "discover" why they should buy and watch your closing ratio improve.

Let us know your thoughts on this!

The Value of Email Marketing In A Social Media World

Today's post is an article written by Go-to-Market Strategies. Trying to determine the right marketing mix is on most business owners minds today and the information below on email marketing and social media will help give you some guidance.

Despite the surging popularity of social media, experts agree that email marketing is here to stay. What remains mysterious for many marketers, however, is how to make room for both email and social media in their marketing strategy.

Many companies have a clear preference for social media; they believe email is too competitive and easy to overdo. Other companies are sticking with their email strategy, maintaining that social media doesn’t give them enough control over their message...and can't be easily measured.

They’re both right.

We have a few tips that are easy to implement to get you started on the important task of combining the strengths of these tactics to maximize your reach.

• Create relevant and compelling (or “shareworthy”) content. The best way to ensure your email will be read and shared within the social media channel is to include valuable content in virtually every email promotion. Giving your email recipients information they can use will build credibility and interest. Nothing improves your email campaign results more than your trustworthiness. So make sure you earn it every time with great content.

• Make it easy for your audience to share your content with their network. Your email subscriber wants their clients to read your latest enewsletter. You’ve won them over—your content is shareworthy! What now? Include SWYN (Share With Your Network) links on all the web pages your outbound emails link to (see our Share with Facebook and Tweet This links at the bottom of this article). Also, post a link to your newsletter content on your Facebook and Twitter pages. This is the best way to reach a subscriber too overwhelmed by the contents of their own inbox. Or, in case a prospect finds you on Facebook first, make sure you have an link on your Facebook page to your enewsletter sign-up form so they can subscribe from there.

• Let your customers convince your prospects to buy. Social media conversation can inform your email content in a revolutionary way. By inviting customer participation in polls, surveys, and ratings within your social media channels, you can get immediate access to customer feedback. Then leverage what you have learned from this process in your email campaigns by including customer ratings and testimonials for the products or services you are promoting. There is nothing more powerful to a prospect than your customer’s own voice! (Tip: Consider testing this technique with subscribers who have opened your emails, but not yet purchased from you.)

The above ideas will help lay the foundation for your successful integration of email and social media marketing. As you get started, remember that content is king. Content that is relevant, timely, and valuable to your audience. The first step in any marketing strategy is to build quality content. Once you have quality content, do not restrict its use between your email and social media campaigns.

Savvy marketers must leverage the strengths of each approach to compensate for their weaknesses. Email and social media complement each other quite well, and if used effectively, will transform your marketing strategy.

Let us know what you are doing with email marketing and social media.

It Does Not Have to be Lonely at the Top (in fact it shouldn't be!)

Today's post is written by Bob Dodge, Sr. Partner at The Alternative Board - Denver West.

As a business owner, you have no doubt experienced how lonely it can be at the Top. It doesn’t have to be lonely, though. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto to talk with. You don’t have to go it alone; in fact, there are several reasons you should involve (listen to) others.

Talk with your employees to find out:

1. if they understand why you expect them to complete critical tasks. If they are not motivated, no amount of training will help! The must have the desire to do so.
   
   
2. if they have the capabilities (time, tools, skills and resources) to accomplish what is needed for the organization. Telling your team to “just do it” if they lack these capabilities will only frustrate them, and eventually you. You and your entire team will benefit from discussing your vision and priorities; providing opportunities for employees to learn. Demonstrate to your employees through your actions that you are committed to these critical success factors.
   
   
3. if they know the consequences of their actions or lack thereof. If employees don’t understand what is in it “for them”, they’ll never perform. Be prepared to provide those (positive as well as negative) consequences to avoid problems down the road. In short, walk the talk.
   
   As a result, you might hear some great ideas to improve the business! After all, they are the ones actually doing the work!
   
   

Talk with your customer to jointly consider how they experience your product or service:

1. Maybe there are additional services you might provide that customers would value (and pay for). These are opportunities to capture additional revenue.
   
   
2. You might discover that your company is currently spending time, money or other resources on activities and features that your customers don’t value.
   
   At least they’ll appreciate the gesture to at least look at the business relationship from their perspective.
   

Talk with your peers:

You might be surprised that other leaders face similar challenges as you. Regular conversations with these executives provide a safe way to explore ideas and learn from one another.


Talk with your coach:

Consider getting a coach to help you explore and accomplish taking your business to a new level. A good coach will help you listen to yourself!

These examples of communicating are all actually acts of listening. Most business leaders can and do inform, motivate, sell, and convince. Effective leaders have also mastered listening! How could listening to your employees, customers, peers or coach affect your business? Would you feel like less of a Lone Ranger?

If Your are a Victim; You are Guilty

This was written by my good friend and colleague John Dini, in San Antonio.

Let's say you own a small Italian Restaurant. Fifteen tables. Pasta, Pizza, beer and wine. Not really a white tablecloth place. More like plastic red and white check tablecloths with Chianti bottles and drippy candles. On a good Saturday night you might take in $2,500. You average about $400,000 a year in sales. You are closed Mondays, because everyone in the family needs a day off.

One Tuesday morning you come in early to start food prep for the week. The mail is piled on the floor where the mailman pushed it through the slot yesterday. You sit at one of the tables drinking a cup of coffee as you open the mail. Routine stuff. There is the produce vendor's statement.A postcard from a regular customer on vacation. An offer or two for new credit cards. There is a letter from a credit card processor; Visa or MasterCard. It informs you that a number of customer cards have been used fraudulently. They have traced the origin of the security breach to your restaurant, and you owe them $170,000 under your merchant agreement, plus penalties. Your issuing bank will be contacting you regarding the collection terms, and to inform you of the additional costs.

You are out of business.

This isn't a joke. It's not an Urban Legend. It is happening every day to scores of small businesses nationally, and the number is increasing rapidly. PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance is a term that should strike terror into the heart of every small business person who accepts credit cards. If you've been ignoring the warning information from your bank or merchant processor, or if you think you have it taken care of, think again.

A restaurant here in San Antonio recently went to the newspaper to ask for a story warning every customer of theirs to get new credit cards. This restaurant was hit for over $500,000 in charges, plus penalties (more on those later.) The most bitter pill to swallow is that this restaurant did it right. They have the latest version of a POS (Point of Sale) register system. Their network was behind an up-to-date firewall. Their credit card data was encrypted. Nothing saved them from a sophisticated international fraud industry that remains one step ahead of security techniques.

Some fraud is low-tech. A waiter takes cell-phone photos of cards as he runs them, and mails them to an online fence who pays him a couple of dollars per number. A hotel is missing boxes of old credit card slips. (That happened last week in San Antonio- 17,000 customers affected.) The most pernicious, however, is the Internet hack. The threat encompasses every business; retail, service or B2B that accepts credit cards.
Organized thieves, many of them in Eastern Europe, spend all day "pinging" IP addresses in the US. When one hits a firewall, or more commonly, hits an electronic cash register, processing terminal, PC or a server that isn't behind a firewall, they blast a dictionary of keywords at it to identify whether there is any credit card information on the other end. If one of these words gets a hit, they begin the hack, inserting a program that duplicates any card number run through the system and transmitting it to their servers. It takes seconds for the whole process.

Typically they will collect for some time, months or in some cases years, before they put the cards into use. It gives them economies of scale. With faster fraud identification systems, many have started "real time" usage, duplicating cards in Europe or Asia and selling them the same day.

Illegal web sites post buyer requirements; how many cards, issuer type, credit limits sought and prices to be paid. ("Need 200 AMEX Gold or Platinum- pay $50 each") Other sites will tell you the current available limit on any card number. Still other sites sell stolen numbers in a daily auction, batched by type and credit limit availability.

Your data is encrypted? Law enforcement sources tell me that decryption programs to defeat the current levels of credit card security can be bought for $125 on the web and installed in 15 minutes.

When I tell small business owners this story, they usually say "But my credit card company says I'm not liable for fraudulent charges." That is true if you are a consumer. If you are a merchant, you have already accepted the liability. You agreed to comply with all PCI security protocols. Those protocols, however, are so loosely defined, and so complex, that if you are defrauded it essentially means you weren't in compliance. In other words, if you are a victim; you are guilty.

When cards are used fraudulently, here is what happens. The card processor begins an algorithm to cross reference the fraudulent cards with the places they were used. In minutes, twenty cards cross at one point- Anthony's Italian Trattoria in Peoria Illinois. (If there is really an Anthony's in Peoria, I apologize. I checked to see that there wasn't. It's supposed to be fictional.) You are proven guilty.

What happens next is a nightmare. First, every customer who charged something at your business (in a time frame of potential risk determined by the processor) must be notified that their card may have been compromised, and they should get a new one. The charge for that is $30 per customer. It is billed to your bank issuer, who can either pass it on to you or eat it. Guess which one they will choose?

(A quick aside here. If you are like almost all small business people, your accounts are concentrated at one bank. Your loan agreements usually allow the bank to deduct amounts owed them from ANY account you have there, business or personal.)

Then they have to do the forensic investigation, to determine how the cards were stolen and the potential losses. The cost of a forensic examination is currently set by PCI at $10,000 minimum. All this is in addition to any fraudulent usage, which is directly billed to you. The bank may choose to let you continue operating, if you can afford to let them withhold everything charged to credit cards in your business until repayment is made.

If you think I am being alarmist, check out the PCI video at TAB member Don Douglas' Comply Guard Networks website. (This isn't a plug. Few small business owners could afford Don's services, which are geared to corporate and institutional customers.) The other examples I cite here are from my own experience locally in the last month, and they are not the only ones I know.

What can you do? Checking a driver's license, which many people consider security, doesn't help with this problem. That only protects you from being back charged for a fraudulent usage. That is one transaction, not hundreds or thousands.

You could stop accepting credit card, but for many of us that isn't feasible.

Here is what you CAN do, in simple terms:

First- Spend the money to upgrade your system. I've talked to POS vendors at length about this. They tell me that the usual openings, lack of a firewall, shared hubs with wireless hot spots, and out of date software, cost between $1,000 and $3,000 to change. It still isn't fool proof, but it is like the burglar who was asked why he didn't hit houses when he knew there were only timers on the lights. "Because the house next door doesn't even have timers." The cost is minimal in comparison to the deterrent factor.

Second- DO NOT STORE CREDIT CARD NUMBERS ON TRANSACTIONS ANYWHERE, EVER! Many businesses don't even know that their systems are keeping numbers. With cheap data storage, some have no erasure process at all. One restaurant locally, with hundreds of seats and a booming business, recently found out that they had every credit card number for every transaction in the last ten years residing in their hard drive. One hack, and they could have been hit for millions in notification fees alone.

If you have a customer dispute or question, you can get the information from the credit card company. Yes, it may take forever on the phone to wade through the process, but how bad is that compared to losing your business?

There are some major things that the industry could do, but for now they've chosen to just shift the liability to small business owners who are generally unaware of what has been done to them. In this case, such ignorance can ruin you.

If this is news to you, it is probably news to your business owner friends. I have been passing this information on to every business owner I know. Most have been surprised by it. Do a friend a favor, and give them a heads up. Ask them "Are your computers PCI complaint?" If they look at you blankly, send them here.

What is Motivation?

The art of motivating people starts with learning how to influence individuals' behavior. Once you understand this, you are more likely to gain the results that both the organization and its employees want.

Motivation is the will to act. It was once assumed that motivation had to be injected from outside, but it is now understood that everyone is motivated by several differing forces. Int he workplace, see to influence your staff to align their own motivation with the needs of the organization.

To release the full potential of employees, organization are rapidly moving away from "command and control" and towards "advise and consent" as ways of motivating. This change of attitude began when employers recognized that regarding good work is more effective than threatening punitive measures for bad work.

Self-motivation is long lasting. Inspire self-motivated staff further by trusting them to work on their own initiatives and encouraging them to take responsibility for entire tasks. For demotivated staff members, find out what would motivate them, and implement whatever help you can. Highly motivated individuals are vital to supply organizations with the new initiatives that are necessary in the competitive business world.

Who do you need to motivate? Yourself, managers, colleagues, and subordinates. Each are motivated in their own way. If you want a detailed assessment of what motivates your people click here or send an email to blair@tabdenverwest.com.

Your persuasion and influence can be used to motivate yourself and others. Just remember, true motivation has to come from within.

On Growth: Be a River

I read the following by Mark Sanborn and instantly wanted to share it with everyone. Enjoy!

I've been listening to a CD of a panel presentation from a conference I recently attended. The participants were all long-time friends and colleagues in the speaking business. They are all highly successful in their respective fields and I've seen great growth in them and their careers over the years.

The insights and perspectives they shared were very valuable and I have benefited from their collective wisdom.

In listening, I was reminded of something very important about highly successful people.

First, they invest regularly and significantly in their own growth.

I know each of these individuals and they have spent serious time and money in seeking out the best resources, whether professional associations, coaches or educational experiences.

Second, they become conduits of what they've learned.

Each freely shares what they've learned with colleagues and clients. Their exceptional expertise has created great demand for their services. Not only have they profited from their skills and abilities, but they have been willing to help others who desire to do the same.

They have become rivers.

Highly successful people are more concerned with their growth than their comfort; they are more committed to learning than leisure. That means they invest in learning and development.

But they don't stop there. Not only do they share; they increase their expertise and abilities in the sharing. A wonderful synergy takes place when they help others. People learn from the successful, but the successful learn not just from the people they teach but from the teaching process itself.

The lesson, if you aspire to become and stay successful: be a river.