Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Let Your Product Do the Marketing



Most marketers know the 4 P’s of marketing — product, price, promotion, and place — but more often than not, there’s one of them that they isolate from the rest of the list. Joel York, author of the popular blog Chaotic Flow, understands the struggle. That’s why he’s providing five ways to build effective marketing into your product design. For a even more tips, be sure to download his new eBook, SaaS Growth Strategy: A Customer Lifecycle Approach.

5 Ways to Let Your Product Do the Marketing

1) Design for Discovery

Designing for discovery is the secret to driving upsell. Great SaaS products cater to their users over time: For novice users, they provide stepping-stones to new features and essential tasks. For expert users, they can be customized to fit each customer’s unique business need. Achieving satisfaction across user levels requires your product to be easily accessible, flexible, and well defined.
While it may seem like a daunting task, designing for discovery is sure to keep your users engaged, therefore, reducing your churn rate.

2) Unleash Upsells

Allowing your users to explore new capabilities, as seen above, is one part of fueling upsell. The other key is making the purchase run smoothly. Enable e-commerce throughout the buying process — in pricing, trial account conversion, payment, invoicing, and billing. You’re a SaaS company, after all. Why wouldn’t you enable e-commerce?

3) Tantalize With Teasers

You’re product allows customers to discover essential features, but what about those needs they haven’t even considered? That’s where cross-selling plays in.
Design your product to cross-sell by taking advantage of the customer login page. Incorporate teasers into your customer’s homepage urging them to trial a new feature relevant to their needs. After logout, send your customers alerts encouraging them to make a purchase decision.

4) Make Friends Through Feedback

The secret to viral growth is an engaged customer community. Encouraging feedback will help improve your product and keep your customers invested in your product.
Ensure the feedback process to be as convenient as possible. Don’t make your customers jump through loops when they encounter a problem. Allow them to easily request new features, report a bug, check their account billing status, and contact you directly.

5) Streamline Sharing

This goes hand-in-hand with making friends through feedback. If you’ve nurtured an engaged customer community, you can expect your customers to start selling to their friends. Streamline sharing by providing your customers something useful to share, like business documents or analyses. In addition, encourage your customers to share something valuable that will lead prospects into a trial.

(from: http://labs.openviewpartners.com/let-your-product-do-the-marketing/?utm_source=Feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+openviewlabs+%28OpenView+Labs%29)

Why Customers Who Ask Your Price Can’t Be Trusted

Oct 29, 2013
We’ve all had situations where out of nowhere a prospect emerges.
You’re salivating over how they’re perfect and how quickly you intend to turn them into a customer.
Reason for your excitement is based on the customer asking you right at the start of the conversation what your price is.
In fact, the prospect contacted you first.  All you can think of is how good of a salesperson you are because they reached out to you.
It’s time to quit breathing your own oxygen and realize how the customer who approaches you asking your price most likely is anything but  a customer in the making.
New salespeople fall for this all the time and, surprisingly, even veteran salespeople get sucked into this deadly game.
I refer to it as a deadly game because it winds up doing two things. One it distracts your attention and winds up sucking up a huge amount of time. Two, if you fall for it, you’ll most likely give away the farm trying to close the sale.
The prospect who calls you asking for your price is most likely doing it to help them rationalize why they should buy from whoever it is they’ve already met with.  Reason they’re calling and asking you is they are merely looking for another price point to satisfy a boss and their own rationale as to why they’re buying from somebody else.
Another reason is many times the prospect isn’t looking to make any buying decision. To satisfy their reasoning for not buying, they’re just looking for a high price.  A high price will help them feel good about not making a buying decision.
Third reason – and this is the most deadly — is they want your price to allow them to go back and negotiate a better deal with another company.
I say this is the most deadly because many times the person will come back to you a second time asking for an even lower price.  All the while, you’re thinking a sale is pending.  There might be a sale pending, but it’s not your sale!
Each one of these reasons has huge implications for you the salesperson.  Namely it will suck you in.
Next time you get a call asking for your price, the response you need to give is something along the lines of, “We have a number of different options, and if you can help me understand a little bit about what you need and want, then I can provide you with the correct price.”
The objective is to get a discussion going with the prospect to allow you to really determine if they are a prospect.

(from: http://thesaleshunter.com/why-customers-who-ask-your-price-cant-be-trusted/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SalesMotivationAndSalesTraining+%28Sales+Motivation+and+Sales+Training%29)

You Gotta Show Up to Win

I get lots of cold calls from sales people trying to sell me stuff for my business. In most cases, I quickly brush off the caller, usually because they are unprepared, unfocused or because they simply do a poor job during the call.
However, last week, a salesperson managed to keep me on the phone AND schedule an online demo. That doesn’t happen very often!
After our call, he sent me an Outlook invite to ensure he was on my calendar. I accepted and yesterday I ensured I was at my desk at the scheduled time.
Unfortunately, the sales person failed to show up for the demo. No email. No call. No contact.
It is unlikely I will buy his product unless he contacts me later this week with a genuinely good reason why he missed Monday’s call.
Getting the time and attention of a decision maker is one of the most difficult aspects of selling and we don’t often get second chances if we screw up that initial contact or a subsequent pre-scheduled meeting, call, or demonstration.
You can’t win the sales opportunity if you don’t show up.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Sales Alert: “Own The Sale”

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Every sales person has heard the expression, “Own the Sale” but few have a definition as to what that means. Here are some tips to help you become the owner of every sale you are about to start or close.
  1. Take responsibility, from the start, for everything that will happen. Know the deal inside an out, and make sure you understand the workings of the clients.
  2. Prepare the recommendations or proposal yourself. Too often this is passed off to someone else; the sales person doesn’t really know what the job looks like. If there is another person involved in putting the paperwork together make sure you are part of the process.
  3. Make yourself the immediate contact for the prospect. Give them your cell number, and reach out to them often.
  4. Create a sense of importance for this prospect. Make sure that they know that this sale, whether it is large or small is important to you and the company.
  5. Deliver what you say you are, on time, in person if possible, and with enthusiasm.
  6. Never doubt the sale results. Believe it will happen, and do everything that you can to insure it’s successfully outcome.
  7. Get to know all the players. Not only who they are, but their specific responsibility even if it doesn’t directly affect the outcome.
  8. Be humble.
  9. Be honest.
  10. Thank them all the time for their time and faith in you.

(From:
http://www.steveschiffman.com/blog/sales-training/sales-alert-own-the-sale/)

What You Need to Know to Outsell Your Competition

 

Having spent years as a competitive strategist, I have a deep understanding for what we need to know about our competitors in order to outsell them again and again.
There are three levels of competitive intelligence.  The first includes our competitor’s company—their size, locations, financial situation, reputation, etc. That’s all available on their website. The second level covers the competition’s products and services. Strengths are found on their website as well. The weaknesses are harder to come by. But with a network of customers, business partners, other sales reps, and a bit of ongoing research on the Internet, we can stay up with the challenges our competitors are having with what they sell.
For me, the real value is in understanding that third level—how the competitor’s sales people sell. Only a small percentage of sales reps think about this, even though the competitor’s selling capabilities directly and significantly impact those reps’ income and careers.
Can you imagine a professional athlete going into competition without having completely studied, under the direction of coaches and consultants, and employing video footage, every move, nuance, strength, and weakness of the opponent? Hard to imagine, right?
I know that in most companies those chartered to support the sales effort don’t provide much help regarding this third, and most important level of competitive information.  So sales people need to have their consciousness raised about the value of this information. And gathering it must become part of what they do every day.
Ideally, here is just some of the information we need to know about the sales reps who are competing against us in our most important opportunities:
  1. What degree of knowledge do they have about the industries into which they sell? Deep knowledge of the industry you are selling into can be a competitive advantage.
  2. Who are their happiest and most unhappy customers? Reps often overuse their largest and happiest customers as references. And they’ll hide their unhappy ones.
  3. What is their typical sales process? When do they suggest a demo? A conference room pilot? When do they submit a proposal? Go for the close?
  4. How high in accounts do they typically call? Some reps go right for the top with a strong, financially-driven value proposition. Others are afraid or incapable of calling high in customer organizations.
  5. What value do they provide during the customer’s buying cycle? Are they a knowledgeable, trusted resource for the customer?
  6. How are they measured and compensated? A salesrep on 50% fixed/50% variable compensation is typically more aggressive than one with less risk. 
  7. What is your win/loss ratio against them? Momentum is generated when a rep wins one or two deals against another rep. They gain confidence. The loser has an uphill battle that gets steeper for each deal they lose against you.
  8. What types of sales strategies do they typically use? Do they attack head on? Or are they more strategic, working on changing the customer buying criteria to what they uniquely deliver?
  9. When they win, why? When they lose, why?
  10. What do they say about your company? Do they negative sell? Where must you set traps or immunize against their assertions?
Here are some additional questions for sales leaders:
  1. Do you think this information is valuable for your salesreps to have?
  2. If so, how will you facilitate that information being gathered, analyzed, positioned, and distributed on an ongoing basis?
  3. When your reps have this information, what will they have to learn to do to outsell the competition in each and every opportunity?
  4. Is your sales training provider capable of providing content and learning in this area? 

The 3 Most Powerful Words in Sales


  • If the salesperson was on commission, 75% of the respondents expected the salesperson to blather on, trying to hide the fact that he or she did not know the answer.
  • If the salesperson had no financial incentive to sign up the employee, only 38% expected the salesperson to obfuscate.
"I Don't Know" Inspires Trust 
In the second survey, 225 respondents were provided with one of three possible responses on the part of the financial advisor: A straightforward "I don't know," an unrelated answer, and the correct answer.
  • If the salesperson was on commission, admitting ignorance convinced people to buy. The survey respondents were more likely to say they would buy if they get an "I don't know" answer than if the salesperson beats around the bush.
  • If the salesperson was not on commission, it didn't matter what he said. If the salesperson was not on commission, the respondents were equally likely to buy no matter which answer the salesperson gave.
Beating Around the Bush, Bluster: A Deal Killer
The scenario was the same in the third test. But the 134 survey respondents were asked to give their thoughts about the salesperson. Beating around the bush turned out to be a deal killer for salespeople working on commission. The survey respondents described the salesperson as untrustworthy and said they were less likely to buy as a result.

The take away?
  • It's better to admit ignorance than to try to bluster your way through, especially if the customer or client knows you're working on commission.
  • Admitting ignorance makes you seem more trustworthy and credible in the eyes of the customer, not less. The professors speculate that what a salesperson loses in credibility from not knowing an answer he or she makes up for in trustworthiness from admitting their ignorance. In other words, they write, "dumb but honest" beats "clever but devious."
How do you react when someone can't or won't answer a straightforward question? And how comfortable are you saying "I don't know"? And do you think saying "I don't know" will help you with clients--or your boss?
(from: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-44440833/the-3-most-powerful-words-in-sales/?tag=bnetdomain)

Thursday, October 24, 2013

How to Sell and Beat Your Competitors With The Instant-Reverse Close

Written By  | Sales Success | October 24th, 201

Victory becomes, to some degree, a state of mind. Know ourselves superior to the anxieties, troubles and worries which obsess us, we are superior to them.
-Basil King
Throughout your sales process, objections are like signposts. They lead you step-by-step toward closing the sale. The fact is, if there are no objections, there is no interest. If there is no interest, there will be no sale.
FREE FINANCIAL REPORT: The Way to Wealth
The more objections you get throughout your sales process, the more likely it is that you are moving toward actually making the sale. The key is to use problem solving techniques and know how to use those objections to your advantage. My instant-reverse close, is just the closing technique you need to guarantee a sale.

How to Sell Using the Instant-Reverse Close

You can use the instant-reverse close in a variety of situations. It is a fun close to use and very effective throughout your practiced sales process. You can use it on your children and with your spouse. You can use it on both clients and prospects. A friend of mine told me that he doubled his income in less than one year when he learned how to use this close after one of my many seminars.
When the prospect gives you any objection at all, especially a standard, well-used objection, such as “We can’t afford it,“ you answer, “Ms. Prospect, that’s exactly why you should take it.”
This always grabs the prospect’s attention and forcers her to say, “What? What do you mean?”

Use Problem Solving Techniques to Think of a Good Answer

This gives you a few seconds to use different problem solving techniques and think up a logical answer to this question.
The prospect says, “It’s too expensive.”
You reply, “ Ms. Prospect, that’s exactly why you should take it.”
The prospect says, “What do you mean?”
You say, “Ms. Prospect, you want to get this for the lowest possible price, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“And you want to get the very best quality at the same time, don’t you?”
“Well, yes,” says the prospect.
“And you’re probably going to buy one of these someday anyway, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, probably someday.”
“Ms. Prospect, that’s exactly why you should take it today at this price, because you’ll never get a better combination of product, quality, and price as right now. Why don’t you take it?”

Use it Throughout Your Sales Process

On of my clients was with a cable TV company that was selling Pay TV from door to door. The team went out andtripled their sales when they learned how to sell using this single closing technique. The salesperson would knock on the door and ask, “Are you interested in getting Pay Television?” The prospect would immediately say, “No thanks, I can’t afford it.”
The salesperson would say, “That’s exactly why you should take it, Mr. Prospect, because you can’t afford it.”
The door, which was beginning to close, would open up again, and the prospect would say, “What do you mean?”
The reason he hadn’t purchased cable or a satellite dish was that, up to now, he had been convinced that he couldn’t afford it. The salesperson would say, “Mr. Prospect, may I ask you a question? Are you ever going to have Pay TV, with movies, sports, theater, arts, children’s programs, and so on, in your home for your family?”
The prospect would say, “Well, yes, someday I will.”
“Then that’s exactly why you should take it today. Because of this special promotion, you can get it cheaper today than at any other time. There is no hookup fee, and you won’t have to start paying until the first of the next month. The fact that you don’t feel that you can afford it is exactly why you should take it today.” Homeowners signed up by the hundreds.

The Best Sales Techniques in Seminar Selling

A multimillionaire friend of mine who started in sales began conducting free lectures to introduce people to his three-day, wealth-creation seminar. In his talk, he would point out that no one ever got rich working for someone else and that there were several routes to wealth that a person could follow if he learned and practiced them.
Almost consistently, someone in the audience would stand up and say, “Well, I would like to attend, but I can’t afford it.”
Before learning this instant-reverse close, he would be stumped by this response. But by using the instant-reverse close, he would say, “Sir, that is exactly why you should attend.”
By now, everyone in the audience was interested to hear what he was going to say.
He would then ask, “May I ask, how long have you been working since you left high school?”
The audience member would say, “Ten years” or “Twenty years.”
The speaker would then say, “This seminar costs $495 for two days, and it is unconditionally guaranteed. You’re telling me that you have been out of school and working for ten [or twenty] years, and you still can’t afford $495? That is exactly why you should beg, borrow, or steal to come to this seminar to learn how to improve your financial condition so you never have to stand up and sat this in a public audience again.”

Irresistible Logic

The answer was so logical that it was almost irresistible. Everyone in the audience who was sitting there thinking that they could not afford to attend the seminar suddenly realized that they had been working for years and they were still broke.
If they didn’t take this seminar, which was guaranteed anyway, they might still be broke ten years from now. At the end of his lecture, people lined up to enroll in his seminar.
Remember, in using the instant-reverse close, you don’t have to have a great follow-up answer. The whole purpose of saying, “That’s why you should take it” is to break the prospect’s preoccupation of the entire sales process. It is to get him to wake up suddenly and pay close attention to you.
Objections are a standard and predictable part of any sales process. Your job is to be patient, polite, and positive, asking good questions, listening intently to the answers and using effective problem solving techniques. If you are courteous and persistent, eventually the prospect will tell you why he might be hesitating and give you an opportunity to answer his question and close the sale!

(from: http://www.briantracy.com/blog/sales-success/how-to-sell-and-beat-your-competitors-with-the-instant-reverse-close-sales-techniques-problem-solving-sales-process/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrianTracysBlog+%28Brian+Tracy%27s+Blog%29)