Blog

LinkedIn as a Lead Generation Tool

Simply having a LinkedIn account is not enough - you must have a strategy and a plan!

Professional sales people frequently tell me they have a LinkedIn account, but haven’t yet figured out its capability or potential. Even those who use LinkedIn on a regular basis often run out of ideas and steam after a short while. Initially there is a frenzy of activity linking up with friends, college classmates, former work colleagues etc. But then what to do once you have started to gather all these new networking contacts? Many users become inactive very quickly and only dip in and out when prompted by an invitation from someone else.

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Make More Impact With Your Presentations

Speak to move people towards action - not to inform them!

Making business presentations is a regular part and parcel of being a modern business manager or executive. The impact your presentation makes can impact your sales figures, your business results and even your personal reputation. We find some presenters are engaging, inspiring, and motivational, whilst others prepare poorly, read from their slides, and just “show up and throw up” far too much information in the time allotted to them.

Fundamentally, every presentation is an opportunity to move your audience towards an action as opposed lecture them.

Many of you reading this newsletter will have attended presentation skills training in the past. The purpose of this newsletter is to build on your previous training and experience and challenge your thinking about the way you prepare for, script and deliver your presentations. We believe we have peppered this edition of ‘Executive Briefings’ with tips, thoughts, and practical take aways that will help you make more impact with your presentations, help you move your audience to action, and ultimately help you become a more inspiring and engaging speaker.

We hope you find the tips useful.

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How to Get More Appointments by Phone

No matter how you initially find a lead, whether from a referral, a networking event or simply a cold list, at some point you must pick up the telephone and speak with that prospect. If that initial telephone conversation does not go well, you will not move to the next step in your sales cycle. Step one is always the introductory call where you will introduce yourself, your company and your products or services. The objective of this call, (assuming it goes well), is to get a new appointment with a potential sales prospect.

However, in order to get that appoint you must have a compelling conversation with the potential buyer. This telephone conversation should be structured. It should be well thought out in advance and scripted where appropriate. It should have compelling potential reasons why it will be in the sales prospect’s interests to meet with you, and it should be a vehicle to gather information about the potential sales opportunity. It all sounds straight forward?
Yet many, professional sellers avoid using the telephone to set appointments. They cite lack of success, ability to generate leads a different way, and being too busy as reasons why they don’t do it. This avoidance leads to poor pre-call planning, poor technique and poor results

In this document, we will provide you with proven best practice techniques and planning guidelines that will take the fear and reluctance out of using the phone to get more sales appointments. We hope you find it useful.

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You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate

In today’s highly-competitive markets, prospects are more risk-averse than ever. While your prospects must focus on every aspect of every purchase to prove that they are getting the best possible deal. Many of your prospects have become “professional purchasers” who know how to play hardball with suppliers and they are fully responsible to get the best deal possible.

At the same time, your goal as the seller is to establish enough value to minimise the price discussion when it is time to close the business. Your company’s profits are directly affected by your ability to meet your customers’ needs while meeting your own goals. That said, sales is the business of relationships, and like any relationship it requires give and take. We typically expect the give and take, also known as negotiating, to happen during proposal and contract discussions; however, in reality, we continually negotiate throughout the sales process – on everything from picking a time to meet to determining who will participate in a demo to hashing out the terms and conditions of a contract. So you have your hand of cards to play, the trick know is to learn to play them well.

In this guide we hope to give you some tips and protocols that will help you negotiate better all round sales agreements. We hope you find it useful.

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Selling In Tough Times

How well networked are you? In 2010 business development is tougher that ever before. Buyers are more cautious, preferring to spend their budgets with trusted suppliers. For this reason cold callers are finding phones slamming down faster than ever before. On top of this, the decision making process in many organisations’ has moved up a level to more senior management, and this may mean your old contacts no longer have the power or autonomy to make purchasing decisions on their own any more. Clearly, to be successful in sales in 2010 it’s not who you know that counts, it’s who knows and trusts you that does.

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Financial Services Special Report: Is your brokerage built for success or failure?

Featured in Irish Broker Magazine - July 2009-09-03

By Dave Malone

“Good times shield us from the truth about the limitations of our sales organisation. However when the financial services marketplace gets tougher those limitations can threaten your brokerages very survival” so says David Malone, Executive Director of Evolve Consultants.

Many sales leaders believe that the answer lies in working harder, asking their team to make more calls or work longer hours however, Malone argues that this may just be akin to mimicking the mouse running on the round wheel, trying really hard but getting nowhere fast. Others turn to sales training in the hope that someone will deliver a silver bullet but that rarely happens. This may seem a strange thing for Malone to say considering his company Evolve provide, among other services, sales training, but he says the truth is that his company have consistently found that answers to poor sales performance are often more fundamental than a sales training can resolve. Furthermore Malone poses some questions which may provide food for thought to owners and directors of Irish financial services firms who want to improve sales performance.

Firstly, as a leader of a company how can you be sure that you have the correct Sales Strategy to maximise your marketplace potential? Do you have the right processes to support a total sales effort? Do you have the right people to drive your business forward – particularly in these tough times? Is your compensation and benefits package designed to deliver the performance you require in a changed Irish financial market?

According to the Evolve model, SALESAUDIT™, they audit organisations sales processes and benchmark their performance. “Often we find that companies recruit the wrong people with the wrong skills set because they have not built a profile of what a successful seller looks like”. Just because they have worked in a successful broker’s office over the last ten years doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be able to adjust to the selling realities of Ireland Inc. 2009” says Malone who asks some further pertinent questions. “Do you know what makes your best performers are different from the rest? What are the behaviours and skills that set them apart? Malone believes that if you know “what good looks like” then you can recruit specifically for those behaviours and skills instead of ending up managing poor performance. Through the use of profiling techniques and robust psychometrics he feels you can get the best people for your brokerage.

There are other questions to be considered too. “Is your remuneration system supporting the development of behaviours you want to see? “One financial services company that we worked with told us that they wanted to encourage lots of team work, yet their commission system remunerated individual performance and in reality encouraged conflict as opposed to sales collaboration. Other companies tell us that they want loyal life long customers and yet their behaviours and structures only reward newly acquired customers and treat existing customers with distain until they leave! Whether you have an acquisition strategy or a retention strategy or both, it must be backed up by processes that deliver...” Malone continues, “The collapse of the property market and the current banking crisis and subsequent drop in living standards, means brokers are finding it more challenging to sell and place lending, pension and credit products. This means they are having to try and cross sell other products to ‘old’ customers, some of which haven’t been contacted since they got ‘that mortgage’ for their ‘commuter belt house’ five years ago”! By designing and supporting the implementation of an account management process combined with an effective CRM system which captures useful information brokers can get closer to customers and bullet proof them from the competition

According to Malone forecasting is a key metric of performance. “Have you ever asked your sales team what sales will come in this month? Forecast accuracy is one of the top traits of top performing sales people. When forecasting some sales people will tell you what they hope to sell this month, but as we all know ‘hope is not a strategy’ others will use words like, think, assumes, feels, believes however the top performers know how the sales pipeline works and use weighted probability to define an accurate prediction. From my experience many organisations are simply measuring the wrong things? Many manage only by measuring results however logic tells us that sales results are a culmination of a number of sales activities, not just number crunching. For example, if your brokerage runs a telephone prospecting campaign, I believe it is vital not just to measure number of calls but to measure quality of those calls. Are your sales people really talking to real decision makers? Do they know who the real decision makers are? Do they know where the real power resides? Are they networking in the right places with the right people? The appropriate sales activities for one financial services company may differ from another depending on whether you have a high street presence or a telephone based approach, or whether you have lending agencies as opposed to general ones. But the bottom line is that you will be more effective if you define those activities and measure them, rather than measuring the end result because by that stage it is too difficult to implement an effective change.

Malone says that the old saying goes ‘if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ but that isn’t even true anymore. “The business world is in chaos, approaches that worked yesterday may not work today. We need to constantly reassess whether the approach we used yesterday is still the best approach for today. As a sales leader your ability to create a culture of creativity and innovation into your sales process will be essential to spotting, creating, managing and maximising opportunities moving forward. Is your sales organisation work in progress or set in stone?”

In conclusion, Malone says that while he would love to believe that it is possible to buck the current economic trend sometimes that is not the case. “If your customers are not buying property then you are not selling mortgages - but things will improve. However the key is not to wait for ideal trading circumstances to realign your sales function. Cutting the number of employees you have because sales are down is similar to changing the positions of the deck chairs on the Titanic before it hits the ice berg. It will just delay the inevitable. The only way to stop sinking is to get the fundamentals right – and now is the time to start the process of change. Today you could change the foundations to build a much more effective sales organisation that will out perform your competition and deliver extra ordinary results. My advice is to audit your current sales process and implement fundamental changes that will bring success in the future months and years ahead.”
 

I know what you did last summer!

I know what you did last summer. In fact, I know what the majority of sales professionals have been doing every summer for the last five or six years. What am I talking about? The great corporate Ireland summer wind down. Quarter three is an odd time for doing business in Ireland. Unless you are in a seasonal business quarter three will be your worst performing sales period. Why is this? Traditionally, corporate Ireland goes into “Mediterranean mode” during the summer months. The kids are on their summer holidays, the BBQ set is wheeled out, and corporate Ireland heads off golfing in Spain or rubbing shoulders with the great and the good at the Galway races. When there are fewer customers around sales professionals don’t have as many sales meetings and this means they have significant amounts of free time on their hands. But how should the sales professional use this time?

The problem is that in 2008, the Irish economy was only starting to show visible signs of contracting, so last summer many sellers were able to get away with winding down their sales activities. This summer is different. We are in the middle of the worst recession in the history of the Irish State.

This summer its time for sales professionals to turn up the heat on themselves!

Here are some ideas to upping your game this summer:

Get closer to your existing customers. The recession means your customers are not as busy as they used to be. They now have time to talk to you. Start running account reviews with your customers. Get closer to them. Find out what your competition have been offering them. Protect your existing customer base. At some point they have to start buying again, unless they intend to close their operation down. They may buy different, they may buy less, but they still need to buy to do business.

Stop blaming the economy. Yes, there is a recession. Yes, it’s tougher to make sales. However, companies still have to buy goods and services no matter what the economy is doing. If you keep focusing on the negative aspects of the recession, you will convince yourself that no-one is buying, that no-one has the money to buy, and that there is no point trying to sell.

It’s time to start focusing on the key sales activities that will give you the best chance of salvaging something from the rest of 2009. If you can’t convince prospects that what you’re offering is a solid investment with meaningful return, then maybe the problem lies closer to home. Maybe you need to adjust your offering for what the market wants and will afford.

• Can you reinvent your offering
• Do you need to revisit your pricing points
• Can you offer any value add
• Consider re-qualifying every prospect and work on cleaning out your sales funnel.

Remember, the prophetic words of business author Tom Peters during the recession of the 1980s’ – “The one sure way of going out of business during a recession is to try nothing different”.

Increase your networking activities. If corporate Ireland slows down and becomes more sociable during the summer months, then its time to use this to your advantage and up your networking activities.

Trawl your address book of existing contacts and reconnect with them.
Ask your contacts for new introductions.
Find out the type of events your customers and sales targets attend during the summer and attend them.
Summer events can be great ways of meeting existing and potential customers in less pressurized scenarios.

Increase your profile as sales professional. Contact trade associations, sector publications and professional bodies that are relevant for your target sales market. Now is the time that autumn schedules are put together.

• Put yourself forward for making speeches in their autumn season.
• Why not write a relevant article for their publication.

Revamp your sales “pitch”. When business is slow, then it’s an opportunity to revamp, reengineer and change your sales pitch.

• Record some of your prospecting telephone calls and analyze them for effectiveness.
• Roles play sales meetings with your colleagues.
• Mysteries shop your competition.
• Consider adjusting your key sales benefits so as they are more relevant to the market in the recession of 2009.

Consider advertising. I know what you are thinking - this man is insane! We are facing into the toughest recession in seventy years, budgets are being cut, customers are more nervous than ever about making purchasing decisions and he is suggesting advertising.

I suggest advertising because the advertising and media industry is facing this recession as well. They are facing a scenario when their client budgets are being cut, where customers are more nervous about spending money and where advertising campaigns are being cut by clients. So ask yourself, might there be an advantage to advertising at present? Are there potential sales prospects out there considering leaving their current supplier? Could I take advantage of the lack of advertising in my sector? Could I strike a good deal with a publisher by putting a six month advertising package into a magazine at the moment?

Conclusion: In short, “I know what you did last summer” was a movie with a scary ending. The sequel you star in may depend on how you make the summer of 09’ work for you and your business. 

Time to act in a counter intuitive manner

Going against your gut, and acting in a counter intuitive manner will see you through the recession argues John Ryan who believes that many companies are making disastrous short term decisions today that will undermine their future success and may in fact prove fatal.

It maybe cold comfort for those who have lost their job but our economy and the world economy is changing at a pace and a speed unprecedented. For many, just like the last ‘Big Snow’ which happened in Ireland, the last recession in the 1980’s is a dim and distant memory. For college graduates today, they were only born in 1987 so they have no experience of how to handle themselves in these tough times.

When the snow falls in Ireland many people give up trying to get to work, they look out the window and go back to bed to bury their heads like the ostrich with its head in the sand, waiting for all the snow to melt and everything to return to normal. Other people take a different approach and decide to brave the elements and get into their cars and start to drive, unfortunately they often drive in the same way as if the conditions had not changed and often with disastrous consequences.

However if you want to be successful in our changed economy you can’t ignore the news like many advise nor can you act in the same way that brought you success in the past, to succeed you need to change your approach to suit the changed economic environment.

Darwin’s theory of Evolution was not all about the strongest or fittest surviving. It showed us that the ones who survived were the ones who adapted to their changed environment.

When driving in the snow and you feel your wheels loose grip your first emotion is fear and this can affect your thinking, this is natural because you feel that you are now out of control. For many in the economy today they are anxious about the future because they are sliding and they are not sure where they are going or where it is all going to stop, and what direction they will be facing when that happens.

When our car is sliding out of control our instinct tells us to brake! The result can be disastrous. The experts tell us when driving in ice and snow we need to move to a different gear not the normal one that we use, and if we experience a slide, not to brake hard because we will loose complete control. Instead we should touch the brake gently to test the ground conditions and see the effect a more committed action may have.

And even though it feels wrong, if we feel our car sliding in one direction we should steer in that direction to regain control while our instincts tell us to steer the opposite way. Therefore to drive forward successfully in the frost and ice we need to act in a counter intuitive manner.

This is true too of the people who have succeeded in recessions.

Invest
Organisations who invested smartly during the recessions in the 1980’s stole a march on their competition. When the banks get recapitalised they will lend again. Top companies have identified acquisition targets at a price that is too good to miss. They are always on the look out for a bargain and think about collaboration with everybody including their competition in areas that may not overlap.

Recruit
While others stop recruiting top companies take the opportunity to recruit the best talent, because during a recession it is easier and less expensive.

Communicate and Build Trust
When the news isn’t great we often want to keep it to our top team, an information vacuum will be filled with rumours and erodes trust. In recessionary time top organisations communicate more regularly, sharing the latest information with their staff, suppliers and customers. Sometimes this maybe information they would prefer not to share but the risk is worth the reward, which comes in higher levels of trust and staff engagement. If everybody is rowing in the one direction you’ll be surprised just how fast and far you can go.

Don’t Screw Your Suppliers
While it is tempting to negotiate suppliers to the wall, top organisations resist that temptation, yes they may ask them ‘to share the pain’ but the best enter into a partnership relationship where they look after each others interests so that in the future they will want to work with each other to make both businesses succeed instead of trying to get their own back

Make the right Cuts
While cuts often are essential, top organisations make the right cuts, some poor performing organisations don’t really know who are their most valuable employees because they don’t have a robust performance management system and they end up making people redundant only to find they have to bring them back on contracts at high rates. Top organisations know and retain their brightest and their best and use that to decide rather than a last in first out policy.

Focus Externally
While recessions force us to analyse how we do what we do they tend to drive us to focus our efforts internally. It is important to cut out the fat and create lend machines that deliver however, top organisations have an external focus. They spend more time communicating with their customers, getting closer, building better relationship not for business today but understanding their needs and wants for their business next quarter or next year. Top organisations lay the ground work of tomorrow’s success, today.

Think Twice before Outsourcing
It is a very attractive option and in some cases justified, however don’t let you’re accountant drive this decision to balance the books, particularly if you are tempted to outsource customer interactions. Nobody cares more for your customers than you. Nobody will spot potential opportunities like you. Nobody can sell your unique business offering like you.

Train Selectively
They say that in a recession the two items to be cut first are the marketing and training budgets. In some cases this is justified. Why advertise if your customers are not buying. Top organisation tends to get more bang for their buck from their advertising budgets in a recession and find new channels to get to market, so now might be the perfect time to invest in an on line marketing campaign and renovate your web presence. In terms of training, it is a fact that a lot of money spent on training is wasted but that does not mean that all training is a waste of money. Top organisations analyse which training initiatives can make a real bottom line difference. Insurance companies who train claims agents to negotiate better can save money on payouts. Sales organisations who train their people to deal effectively with the request for discount can protect margin. Organisations who train employees to be more innovative can invent products and services that can give them a critical competitive advantage in the future.

Innovate
During a recession it is difficult to think with innovation in mind, our minds are less creative when we are living with fear and anxiety. Top organisations and leaders know their future is in the innovations of today. Facebook is five years old this year. If myspace was a country it would be the 5th largest populated on Earth, China will soon be the number one English speaking country in the world. The world is changing faster than we know. We need to look forward to a very changed world that lies ahead. Top Organisations build systems that give time and rewards to those that innovate. Google allows 30% of employee time for innovation. Would you give 10% of the profits of a new idea to a staff member who invented it? Top Organisations drive innovation in their workplaces.

Take your Summer Holidays Now
Finally, if your industry is waiting for the banks to recapitalise maybe you should take your Summer Holidays now and get away from the tough weather conditions and recharge your batteries in the sun and return with new energy and enthusiasm ready to drive your business out of the recession to a brighter future. Giving staff the option of a three month break to see Australia or travel the world can make sense, particularly for the staff member who has a once in a lifetime chance to do something at a time that it will cost them less in a way that can be extremely tax efficient.

It is time to think differently, act in a counter intuitive manner, when that little man or women in your head says you must do this, ask the question why? And is this really the best course of action to ensure success in the future for your organisation?

Top negotiators retain margin in tougher times