The Executive Sales Coach: Keith Rosen’s Sales Blog and Business Blog On Selling, Leadership, Managing Your Team, Business and Life » sales tips

In an effort to combat market conditions, I’ve noticed an increase in cold calling activity within many organizations regardless of industry. Here are some solutions to be mindful of for you to use when you run into the barrier that may prevent you from connecting with your desired prospect. The elusive gatekeeper.

Strategy #4: Ask for Help

Now that you have the prospect’s name, you begin the initial steps of contacting the prospect. After several attempts, you still have not successfully connected with them.

Another avenue to revisit would be asking the concierge for help. Think about how you respond when someone asks you for help. Chances are, you do your best to help them. So, appeal to their humanity. Here’s a sample of the dialogue to use.

You: “Hi Jane, Keith Rosen here. We spoke a few weeks ago and you were kind enough to help me then. Well, here I am again in desperate need of your help. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Mary Johnson, but have not been successful in getting her to return my calls. I’m sure she is very busy and I certainly don’t want to keep filling up her voice mail with messages from me. Can you help? Any suggestions you can provide, whether it’s an alternative way to get Mary to return my call, a different way to contact her other than voice mail, or a better time that I should try to reach her would be deeply appreciated.”

You now have the opportunity to develop a relationship with the concierge and become the salesperson who gets preferential treatment that the other salespeople who are calling do not. Finally, you might find that once you ask for help, they will immediately connect you to the prospect!

Becoming friends with the concierge provides some immediate benefits that you can realize. As a matter of fact, you’ll be surprised how much insider information you can get. This includes the name of the decision-maker and their contact information, important information about the decision-maker and how to best approach and appeal to them, company politics and procedures, company status and timely news, internal changes, , initiatives, or challenges.

Connecting with them as a person rather than as an obstacle will make your cold calling efforts much less of an effort. So, acknowledge every concierge you speak with. It’s safe to say these types of calls are not the majority of calls they receive. Some are just downright hostile! After all, the concierge is often the first point of contact and in the hot seat when dealing with certain problems. With the barrage of calls that a concierge fields daily, a sincere and authentic complement goes a long way. You now have an internal advocate on your side.

Strategy #5: Work from the Top Down and the Bottom Up

Get your calls transferred over to customer service, technical support, accounting and attempt to get the intel you need from there.

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And here’s a quick update on what this team has planned in the very near future over at Top Sales Experts, because they fervently believe that collaboration is the way forward and intend to develop this team into the premier business collective, creating a global presence along the way.

From September, you can expect to find:

- Daily Blog
- Monthly Newsletter
- On-Site Resource Centre (Including articles/”How To” guides etc.)
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Forum
- Book Store
- “Ask The Expert” facility

Plus a weekly radio show and finally, before the end of the year, we will be adding a complete library of online training sessions, designed and delivered by the expert team.

TSE’s aim has always been to create a one-stop shop for harassed business owners, VP Sales, Sales Managers, frontline sales personnel - in fact anyone seeking business related services, solutions, coaching and consultancy – and they are achieving that! I very much hope you enjoy their latest collaborative offering.

Here’s the link to download.

I’d like to direct you to a new resource for sales professionals called SalesHQ.com.

SalesHQ connects members of the professional sales community across the globe. SalesHQ helps anyone excited by the art of deal making and the science of driving revenue. Members can discover jobs, research career choices, and learn to sell more effectively, manage sales people, hire the right sales people, and much more, all the while expanding their professional and personal networks.

I encourage you to sample some of their resources here at their new site at www.SalesHQ.com.

With all the talk about the economy heading towards a recession, I’m busier than ever. And so are my clients. So, what gives? How much of this is fact and how much hype? Either way, I’m certainly not disputing that it’s affecting how some business owners and companies are spending lately.

So, what tips do I offer to companies, salespeople and, more specifically retailers on how to weather the recession? The same coaching I deliver to my clients, which is keeping their recession blues at pay, enabling them to drive and close new sales, and most important keeping their mental edge.

‘Weathering a recession’ sounds like surviving a storm and waiting until it passes. The “wait and see” or “lets hope things get better soon” is putting retailers out of business every day. I see it in my community. Stores that were opened one week are closed the next. Sure, you can ‘batten down the hatches’ when the eye of the storm lands but keep in mind when you open them up, there won’t be any customers sitting there waiting around for you. Instead, here’s what you need to do.

1. First, get out of your own head.
Businesses are closing their doors not due to a lack of effort but because they are still attempting to sell, manage or run their business the way it was, not the way it is today. If your marketplace has changed, then you need to change with it. Friendly reminder, don’t get sucked up into what you’re hearing on the news every day. Turn it off if you have to! What is real for you in your business in your local economy? Get out of the type of mindset that keeps you stuck in obsessing on what you need to do to survive and focus on how you can thrive. Remember all those great business ideas you were going to implement; the training your wanted to take, the marketing you wanted to do, the team building you felt would surely to make a measurable impact on your growth and success but daily business responsibilities always seemed to take precedent? Now is the time to blow the dust of those ideas and start executing on them. This begins with a change of thinking, accompanied by a change of strategy and topped off with a strong dose of reality.

2. Get back to basics.
Do you remember when you first opened your doors and achieved some measurable success? Why were you successful in the first place? What did you do then that you may not be doing now or unwilling to do now? Get on the floor of your store, cold call, prospect, do some grunt work? You need to turn around your business, fast, so time is not a luxury. Therefore, if you think there are any activities which are beneath you, then you already have one leg of your business in the grave.

3. Actually learn how to sell.
No, selling for 30 years is not what I’m suggesting as a training platform. Experience is important but experiences doesn’t equate to engaging in the healthiest of sales techniques. I’d be willing to bet (and I’m not a gambling man) the majority of retailers out there have not been coached and trained to be a sales champion, do not have a defined sales process they consistently engage in and as such, don’t know how to truly sell. And by no means consider this an attack on the retail sector. However, given that the majority of daily purchases we make are at a retail level, this is what I’m experiencing both as an executive coach and as a consumer. The “I’ve been successful in spite of myself” theory would apply here.

4. Work your leads and earn a sale.
Just a short time ago, in many sales driven companies, your salesperson can have a pulse and still get a sale simply by your customers showing up and having the money to spend. We were fooled into thinking that, “Hey, since I’m bringing in the business, I must be a great salesperson.” In today’s business climate, the same people are now struggling to generate the results they were, realizing that the marketplace has duped them into thinking they were better then the really are when it comes to professional selling. It has been the economic climate that made many salespeople seemingly productive, rather than their skill set or the core competencies needed to truly become a high performance sales professional, regardless of economic or market conditions. With today’s ever evolving market, if you are selling, managing or running your business the same way you’ve been running it for the last several years, you’re overdue to reevaluate your philosophy.

If you sell consumer products or services that is a more substantial purchase than going to the supermarket (home electronics, furniture, bridal/wedding venders, travel, boutique stores, computers, home appliances, home furnishings, clothing/shoe stores, etc.) don’t let a potential customer walk out the door without collecting some data points and permission to check in. Learn to position yourself as your customer’s trusted adviser throughout their decision making process. Abandon toxic thinking and get beyond the fact that you can afford to let any potential customer walk away from a conversation, thinking they will actually call you back on their own accord. Earn the right to call each person who buys from you - a customer. It’s during times like these where you literally have to earn their business rather than simply be an order taker.

5. Get into action. Work with a coach.
Hire a coach. With a coach, it’s not about weathering the storm. You can do that on your own. A great business coach can assist you in developing the strategy and skills you need to not only sail through the storm but actually even profit during it.

Can something new possibly be written on this subject? It looks like Paul McCord Author of has made claim to a new and powerfully effective model for selling success.

He asks, “Do you have what it takes to become a superstar in sales? I’m talking about, do you have the real foundation that is mandatory for becoming a top producer.”

Do you know which markets that you will really dominate?
What marketing and prospecting methods are best suited to your strengths and skills?
What sales process will make you the most successful?
What your real strengths and weaknesses are and how to take full advantage of them to sell more than you thought possible?
Everyone knows that top salespeople are made, not born.

But what do they REALLY do that is different than everyone else? What do they know that so few others know?
Paul McCord has just released SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar, the most detailed guidebook to creating a top producing sales career I’ve seen I a very long time.

This isn’t the typical book with some tips and strategies to close a few more sales or to find a few more prospects.
SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar is a guide to finding your personal keys to success–your keys to controlling your career and insuring you are one of the top salespeople in your industry. No longer do you have to allow chance to determine whether or not you reach the top of your field.

SuperStar Selling doesn’t have any canned answers. No quick miracle fixes. No fluffy promises of easy success.
Instead, SuperStar Selling challenges you to examine everything about your sales business and then to make RADICAL changes. It forces you understand how you’ve gotten to where you are in your sales career and why you aren’t where you want to be.

Then it not only demands you make radical changes to what you do, why you do it, and how you do it, it guides step-by-step through the process of finding exactly what markets and marketing methods, and what sales process will take you from where you are today to where you want to be.

This is absolutely a career changing book. McCord walks you through every major area of your career, not only demanding you examine each area in detail, but works with you to create real plans, real goals and real solutions to your problems that will make you a top producer.

Get your copy at Amazon.

In a recent interview, I was asked what companies can do to ‘boost their close ratios’ within the specialty retail market. Here were the questions as well as my responses.

Question: What techniques have you seen work in terms of boosting close ratios within the retail market? Are there any action steps that retail owners need to take to boost their close ratios?

Response: After tracking your sales numbers and closing ratio, you’ll find that you may fit into one of the following scenarios in terms of how much prospecting, marketing and selling you will have to do in order to reach your income goal.

1. You are right on track to reach your sales and income goal.
2. You’re slightly off but can easily adjust your daily routine to compensate.
3. You’ll need to put aside a considerable amount of more time to devote to prospecting. This may require some delegation of responsibilities or taking some other activities, tasks, or projects off your plate that may not serve you best or support your goals.
4. You feel like you just got hit with a two by four because the amount of marketing and selling you need to do in order to reach your income goal is off the charts and unrealistic; even to high to count.

If you fall within the fourth category, do not despair! If you find that you need to spend more hours selling than there are in a day in order to reach your income goal, consider some other alternatives that will decrease your required prospecting time, marketing dollars and time on the floor selling.

1. Improve your selling skills to boost closing percentages. You may want to consider revamping your marketing and selling approach as well as doing an analysis of your own sales acumen and selling skills. After all, if you’re fishing in a lake and everyone else at the lake is catching fish but you aren’t, do you go to a different lake or do you change the bait you’re using! If you are still selling or marketing the way you’ve been doing it or have never been shown the right way to market and sell effortlessly, then you are making it easy for your competition to take your business. Consider it’s time to reach out and get an overhaul or tune up.
2. Increase your profitability/commissions or income per sale.
3. Increase the size of your average sale.
4. Decrease the amount of prospecting or marketing needed to identify one new prospect.
5. Decrease the average time it takes for you to identify a qualified prospect. (Remove all distractions.)
6. Change your income/sales goal.
7. Find a new career path. This alternative is only for those people who have thoroughly explored all options (including working with a sales coach) and, most important, have taken the time to develop their selling skills and implement a comprehensive selling system they have followed for a considerable length of time.

Fine-tuning the first six of the seven measurables I just mentioned will ensure that you are maximizing your time, your talents and your potential as well as each prospecting and selling opportunity.

In a recent interview, I was asked what companies can do to ‘boost their close ratios’ within the specialty retail market. Here were the questions as well as my responses.

Question: What are some common mistakes you see retailers make with regard to close ratios?

Response: Quite often a common mistake is simply not managing their sales numbers on an individual basis or not managing them accurately enough to provide a realistic picture of where they are and what they need to change or adjust regarding their selling efforts and approach. But the problem goes even deeper.

At the core, the real mistake is not accurately accounting for the activities they need to engage in throughout their day. All roads lead back to time management. So if you find that you’re not getting through all the tasks you need to in the time you’ve allocated for it, then there’s a strong chance you are suffering from unrealistic planning or you’re doing something else that you didn’t plan for nor account for in your daily schedule. As such, designate separate blocks of time for all your daily activities and responsibilities so that it doesn’t interfere with your selling efforts.

Finally, lack of follow up or follow through in their sales process. Many simply lack the sales acumen and selling skills they need to boost their sales such as effective follow up, asking the right questions that would create more selling opportunities as well as qualify the opportunities that make the most sense to invest your time in.

Objections are a part of selling. Every salesperson can readily admit they’ve come face to face with objections throughout their sales career. Interestingly, salespeople define the word, ‘objection’ a variety of different ways.

In a seminar I delivered last week, I asked the audience what the word, ‘objection’ meant to them. Here’s what I heard in response:

1. It means “No.”
2. It’s an excuse.
3. It’s a smokescreen.
4. It’s a concern.
5. It’s a sign of interest.
6. It means “Get out. I’m not interested.”

While I’m a firm believer of the fourth and fifth definition above, salespeople still continually fall into the trap of creating objections themselves; the very obstacles they are looking to avoid in the first place. After all, if the prospect is not saying flat out “No” (and they’re being honest and upfront), then there’s a concern that you have not addressed and defused in a way that provides them with the confidence and peace of mind to move ahead and buy from you.

Salesopedia just published one or my articles on this very subject entitled, “Stop Creating The Objections that Kill Your Sales.”

You can read the article here.

So, in the end, developing a greater sensitivity around the obstacles and objections that you create during your selling process will assist you in eliminating certain roadblocks that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

However, what about the valid concerns that you hear from your customers and prospects? You know, the objections that sound like, “Your price is too high,” “I need to shop around,” “Let me think about it,” “Now’s not the right time,” “It’s not in the budget,” “We’re happy with our current vender, service provider, etc.” and so on. How adept are you in responding and actually defusing these common obstacles to the sale?

Here’s an exercise I would encourage you to do. List all of the objections you typically hear. Then, write down how you respond to each of them. If you find that your rebuttals are not effective enough to defuse these objections and create new possibilities for a sale, then it’s time to give them an overhaul. Take the time to create a more effective response for each objection you hear.

Remember, salespeople don’t overcome objections, your customers and prospects do. (After all, when was the last time you actually ‘convinced’ someone to do something that they really didn’t want to do?) So, your response to each objection will contain questions to better understand exactly where the prospect stands, rather than a defensive statement that simply creates an adversarial posture between you and the prospect.

Once you’ve developed the appropriate language to handle each objection, take them out for a test drive and gauge your results. Remember, if you don’t define it, you can’t refine it. How else can you determine what works and what doesn’t? Put your shotgun away. Shooting from the hip is a dead strategy. Developing a conscious process for handling each objection gives you the power to continually reinforce best practices that have been proven to work which will ultimately lead to more sales.

I was recently asked what the top five things businesses and salespeople can do to attract more business and find more qualified prospects. Certanily something top of mind for every company. “Where do we mine for new business?”

One option is to outsource your lead generation or new business development efforts to an outbound marketing company. I have some clients who rely on this option with great success. They have found companies located both in the states as well as overseas, particularly in the Philippines where the hourly wage is certanily more competitive. Of course, outsourcing overseas comes with its on inherent risks and trade offs.

Another common option for salespeople is to mine through company websites and develop their own custom targeted call list of prospects. As you can imagine, while highly effective, it’s also very time consuming.

As such, many companies and sales professionals turn to third party solutions that provide lists of companies you can call on. These companies vary in both how they charge as well as the type of targeted data and information they provide. Some of these list providers offer very targeted and relevant data on the companies you’re looking to call on where the lists they provide can be broken down by industry, profession, size, years in business, position (i.e. CEO, sales manager, VP, HR, as well as their contact information) location even by number of employees. Here’s a short list of companies who provide this type of service.

www.idexec.com
www.goleads.com
www.salesgenie.com
www.netprospex.com
www.jigsaw.com
www.hoovers.com
www.dnb.com
http://www.listengage.com/emarketing.asp
www.maxprodata.com

Please note, I am not endorsing any of these sites in particular, just offering you several options that are available for business owners and salespeople who are looking to mine for specific prospects. I share these sites with my clients, as each site has their own advantages and disadvantages, and provide different levels and depth of data. It’s a pretty comprehensive effort to research the solution that works for each individual, as everyone needs different data points on each prospect.

Yet, at the end of the day, I’m always shocked and amazed as to why companies don’t leverage the selling opportunities that are right in front of them, without having to spend time and money on leads, call lists or outbound telemarketers.

Here are seven additional and highly effective ways to generate new prospects without having to spend a penny.

1. Become an expert voice.
2. Prospect your prospects.
3. Mine within existing accounts for upselling opportunities.
4. Mine within existing accounts for opportunities to be introduced to other people within the organization, possibly in a different division of the company.
5. Set up referral agreements with existing clients.
6. Networking
7. Partnering and collaborating with other companies to cross-sell products and services.

So, before you hire some outbound calling company or purchase your next prospect list to use for your cold calling efforts, I most certainly suggest that business owners leverage the first seven strategies I suggest above. If you find that your efforts are not resulting in enough new business nor brings in the volume of prospects you need to hit your goals, or if you simply find that time constraints and additional responsibilities are preventing you from generating new prospects on your own, then it would make sense to explore these additional lead/list providers as an additional complementary vehicle that will assist you in developing a targeted list where you can generate new prospects (or have someone do the calling for you).

Keep in mind, the positioning of each of these seven strategies is different and each requires a mapped out process and approach to achieve success and the results you want. Most salespeople unfortunately don’t spend the time creating their step by step approach nor do they fully leverage these seven strategies that are immediately available to them consistently, thus leaving new business on the table for their competition to take. (I cover this in my prior book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cold Calling, just fyi.

The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes in Selling:

Do you wish that your selling strategy and efforts to earn more customers were more rewarding for you? It will be if you avoid falling into these top 10 common pitfalls in the New Year.

Mistake #10. What is Your Most Valuable Proposition (M.V.P.)?

Having great products, service, and prices is no longer enough in today’s competitive marketplace. Although important, this information often falls upon deaf ears, since most salespeople are saying the same thing. The trend of companies today is to become more specialized by creating their own unique “niche.” A unique selling proposition is what you offer your clients that not only clearly separates you from your competitors, but allows for long term partnership that keeps your clients coming back. What is unique about your company, product or service that either no one else or only very few other companies can claim or offer?