At parties there are many types of people you will meet
- The Real Party people – no conversation possible.
- The Frat Boys - who will get drunk
- The Snarky Women - who complain about anything
- The Attention grabbers – loud and noisy
- The Snobs – boasting about their lifestyle and purchases
- The Not Interested – you can find them in the kitchen
- The Wallflowers – mentally absent
- The Aged Beauties – on their way back
- The Killjoy – too serious to be on a party
- The Heavy Drinker – looking for the next bottle in the scullery
- The Cocky Person – telling about his achievements
- The Person Who Forgets to Bring Something – accidentally always
- The Couple Who Make Out In front Of Everyone – but stay together
- The Guy Who Knows Everything – so boring
- The Sucker – will make you feel negative
- The Too Deep in Conversation for You – not the right moment
- The Living Memories – talking about the past as things and life used to be better then

You have the option avoiding and not speaking to certain people at the party. You are not obliged.

Sales meetings

During any sales process you will meet with all kinds of people and you need to talk to them as they are a part of the sales process.
At a party you can identify them by their appearance, clothes, attitude, body language, loudness and location, whereas during the sales meeting people sit on their chair, show less body language and their verbal expressions are limited. As there are rules and the environment is more stringent in a meeting, less information about the character of the person will show and less will you know about them.
 
At a party you can leave people behind in order to seek other more interesting parties. However during a sales meeting you are stuck with these people until the meeting is over.

How do you:
- Identify the character of the people in your meeting?
- Pose the right open questions in order to know about each of them?
- Handle all these types of people?
- Stay in good relation with them even if your opinions differ quite?
- Handle people that keep on bragging about their achievements?

The problem even becomes more difficult if different types of people are together in one meeting room and you as salesman needs to participate in or get dragged into a (social) conversation that the other might not interest at all.

Lunch meetings

The worst is of course if you have to invite people to lunch, that you would like to avoid at a party.
Or as you little know about their characters find out about them during lunch with no way out but to keep the conversation going even you or they have no interest.
During the lunch you will be stuck with these people you would prefer to avoid for at least 1 hour.
Equally the people who accepted your invitation can find out about you and get less motivated to buy from you as your characters don’t match.
Are such a lunch meetings beneficial for the Sales process? Or should you better not invite some of the people of the company?

What type of people would you like to avoid at your meetings or lunches?
What types of people are not happy when invited to a lunch with you?

Most people think Sales is just hard work and requires determination and persistence, which is true but you need more than these:

1. Be able to qualify your leads
Not all possible interested people are leads.
The better you take care and the more time you invest in the qualification of your leads, the less time you will be wasting during the sales processes. You want sales processes that become sales.

2. Be able to shut up
Listen before you pitch to their problems and the picture they paint of their company or business.
Then have your pitch, have your presentation and then shut up.
Anything that you tell more can be used against you in the sales process before signing the deal.

3. Have patience
Have patience. Take your time. let the potential customer speak.
Stay calm in whatever situation.

4. Be confident – look confident
If you aren’t confident, you will not win deals.
Don’t hesitate when you answer questions.
Don’t give complex explications: give clear answers that people understand.
Your confidence will give and build trust.

5. Be able to argue without getting into a fight
You can argue and you can bring good facts to the table, but in the end the customer is (almost) always right.
Discuss when and where needed, but don’t try to win the discussion. The winning is in the closing of the deal.

6. Be a networking genius
The more people who know you, the more likelihood to encounter or hearing about a deal or having a deal proposed to you as they know you.
If you are a nobody, nobody will know you or like you.

7. Be capable of change social class
If you want to sell to the CEO, then speak and think like a CEO else he won’t buy from you.
If you are selling to the divisional manager, then be and think like the divisional manager in order to make him buy from you.
The salesman needs to be capable of changing social class although he is only working as an employee at a company.

8. Be humble but don’t obey
You have to be humble, but never ever get on your knees for getting the deal. Never obey.
For a start you have given the impression to have the same status as your potential customer having the same level in the management hierarchy.
Then you cannot get on your knees.
Still you need to be humble about your achievements.

9. Don’t complain – be positive
If you think negatively and complain about the company, the society, the world you will leave a negative impression behind. Nobody is really interested in your problems.
Your customer can be negative, let them be. Still that will not help your sales.
Think positively – make them start thinking positively too: that will help your sales process.

10. Enthusiasm
It is important to be genuinely enthusiastic about your company and products.
And about the world and business in general.

11. Reach out to help
If you notice a problem you can help solving based on your experience or advice, then give it for free.
If it works out it is likely the decision maker will be grateful to you.
Just make sure you give the advice only to high ranked decision makers as they will not see you as a threat.

12. Have high expectations
Have high expectations about yourself, your company, your products, your customers and even your potential customers.
When you enter a sales meeting you need to have the high expectation of being successful and moving towards closing the deal soon.

13. Overcome rejections
In Sales you will have quite often rejections:
- Cold calls
- Canceled meetings for dubious reasons
- Not buying after a long sales process
Sales people need to overcome rejections quickly as the next opportunity knocks on the door or needs to get found.
If a salesman doesn’t overcome a rejection quickly, he will not succeed in convincing the next potential customer.

14. Be lucky
As always luck needs to be on your side.

What do you have a virtue helping you sell?

Probably not as there is no Bachelor or Master Sales degree (as far as we know).
Many types of Bachelor and Master Degrees exists for all kinds of professions in most industries.
Students aim for a certain degree in order to get into a profession or industry.

However the most important function in any company is in Sales as:
- Salesmen
- Inside Sales
- Pre-Sales
All without specific studies. There is no Sales degree.
Still the Sales professional exists and has amongst the better salaries in any company.

Leftovers or gifted professionals?
It seems that people who get into Sales are somewhat the leftovers not getting the real job.
As if you are not good enough for a job related to your Bachelor or Master degree, then the only choice you have left is getting into sales: becoming a Sales rep. or Salesman.

It can also be approached differently:
If you are as well as good in your profession and you have the gift of selling then you can make it in Sales. This has as a result the higher pay Sales can achieve if they do well.

Probably there will be people that go and become successful in Sales because that’s the main thing they know. Whereas others combine their degree, experience in the industry and know how to sell.

No degree vs Sales trainings boot and camps
A significant part of the people who obtain their Bachelor or Master degree, will eventually end up in Sales.
Still there is no Sales degree in University or High-school, but once in business most companies will send their Sales people to sales trainings, motivation courses, boot camps and the like.

What did you study when you where young?
What profession did you aim at?

Although the title may sound like a squeeze page title trying to sell you a self-training course consisting of 15 DVD’s and 2 booklets – it is not. It is just a free blog post.

Ever wondered why people or companies are successful and others not?

Most inquiry calls are not answered properly.
Most inquiry emails are not answered.
Most online forms never ever get a reply.
Most meetings are held, some meetings are never held.

80% of success is Just Showing Up

“80% of success is Just Showing Up” is a quote from Woody Allen and this quote still holds the road.

Showing up is:
- Answering the call, listening and answering properly or the best suited solution within a minimal time.
- Replying to any incoming email with the best suited answer within 24 hours, not with an auto-reply system.
- Reading the emails from the online web forms and giving an answer within 24 hours.
- Making sure you get to that meeting on time.
- The findability of your business website – if they can’t find your solutions: no business.
- Opening on time the shop, customer service or after sales service.

90% of success is by additionally Following Up

If you achieve the first 80% by “showing up”, that leaves 20% to achieve!
Half of it (or 10%) can be achieved by just following up on your first action or reply.
You call or email them or ask on a later occasion:
- If they liked your quotation, suggestion or advice.
- If your answer was any helpful.
- If your solution has resolved their problem
- Anything related to your intervention.

People will experience this that you remember them and care about them.
You give them a chance to give feedback without any hassle, solve a new problem that has arisen or even get a sales opportunity.

These 2 steps will make you achieve 90% of success.

Other advices in order to achieve the latter part are:
- Stay consistent in your exposés and explications: building trust by hearing the same thing.
- Remain calm and controlled: makes a good impression.
- Look successful: that helps a lot.
- Be confident and believe in yourself.
- Have some luck in business: you need that too!

How successful are you?
- Do you show up?
- Do you follow up?

Most of your customers or leads will have a voice mail system in place to be used in case when they are away from their desk.

Voice mails are hard to do

Typically when speaking into a voice mail system, people:
- Constructing the strangest sentences
- Telling the wrong things or things that not really matter
- Missing to tell the real point
- Being very brief missing essential parts of the reasons for your call
- Speaking too long (over 2 minutes)
- Using the wrong wordings
- Speaking with the wrong intonation
These problems are probably due to the fact that there is no human response from the receiving party at it is a recorder.
Of course you can always use the delete option and re-record until you get bored or more nervous.

The receiver will listen to a voice mail differently than during a normal telephone conversation. This adds on to the difficulty of a voice mail. Also the receiver can replay your (weird sounding) message several times allowing analyzing your strange behavior on the voice mail system. This will not add on to your credibility.

The end result is that the important message that needed to be communicated can:
- Leave the wrong impression
- Be misinterpreted
Both having with the result of creating the wrong response or action.
Still you can use an email as back-up referring to your voice mail just to be sure that the message is communicated.

A voice mail gone wrong in the British comedy TV show “Coupling“:

Voice mails in the sales process

During a sales process, if you need to bring an important message or information to your customer or lead, will you then leave a voicemail? Or try to call back later?

What harms the most?
- Using the voice mail in order to leave the message: that can be misinterpreted or not listened.
- Disconnecting and try to call back a little later?

Calling back later will require more time from you and you can fail to speak your prospect or customer again.

There is a trade off:
- Using the voice mail system: a wrong interpretation will be hard to repair.
- Not bringing the message on time has a certain cost too as a decision can depend on it.
But which one is the costliest?

There are the additional problems of:
- The many voice mails are never returned which stops your conversation.
- The facts changing or events happening after leaving the voice mail.
The best is of course if you could speak the person personally.
An alternative is to send an email, but maybe that’s not suitable for your all-important message.

How effective are you in leaving voice mails?
Did leaving a voice mail ever helped the sales process?

We all are content publishers

In this era of content marketing, we are all have become publishers according to Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 claiming during his presentation at the Online Marketing Summit in Cleveland, Ohio, USA:

Information to remember:
- Spending on traditional media is still 70% whereas content marketing is only 30%.
- All companies are content publishers.
Any will company produce and publish many different types of content in several channels: from white papers, product sheets, quarterly newsletter to the company and product websites.

The headline requirement

Any publication of content starts with generating interest by the headline.
The headline needs to:
- Sound interesting
- Appeal to the audience
- Reveal partly the content
- Promise something valuable or interesting in order to get them clicking

The main headline problems are:
- The limited number of words of a headline.
- Minimal wording but still understandable else it misses completely the goal.
- The promise should not reveal too much.
- The promise should not over sell the content.

The headline should intrigue people, but don’t give away everything at start.
The headline should like irresistible bait tempt the readers, listeners or viewers.

The headline sells the content by the promise

The promise is the most important part as the audience agrees to spend additional time after reading the headline on your information. As people have a limited amount of time during a day, the have a limited amount of attention to spend every day on different types of content: they “pay” you with their attention. The available offering of content is enormous and shifts from real entertainment, to serious news to useful information to advertising.
All these types of content compete for their attention. For some types of content people even want to pay.

Actually every headline needs to sell the content it precedes.
People pay with their attention. Their attention span is as long as you can keep their interest or keep the expectation generated by the headline.

The headline should not oversell the content, as when the content is not up to the promise of the headline, people will zap or click away instantly.

As all companies are in content publishing and their audience has a limited amount of attention and time to spend on various types of content, the headline needs to have a good promise to win the attention from the audience.

How well does your content get sold by the promise of the headlines?

As most businesses are slow due to the ongoing recession, sales people are under a lot of pressure to win new business. The pressure is on prospecting, getting leads, push the sales process and close the sales deal.

Imposing sales performance targets

As a reaction to the lower revenue and the fixed costs of operating the company, in many companies the CEO or VP Sales, in order to keep their sales force productive, they have defined new performance criteria like:
- Get 20 meetings a week
- Have 5 demos a week
- Make 240 cold calls a week
- Make 25 appointment calls a week
- Hold 3 web seminars a week with at least 5 people
- Call all of your customers every week
- Get 4 new sales processes started every week
- … (you fill in yours)

They will claim these are based on industry benchmarks – probably from another era (when they were still into sales: “When I was a Sales Rep. at Xerox, I made 20 visits a week”).

Solving the performance goal problem

Every performance goal could theoretically bring more new customers.
However these goals are hard to achieve and in many cases not realistic.
Moreover it is not the quantity that counts but the quality.
As sales people are humans, they will address this new imposed problem and find means to solve it.
They will achieve these quotas by:
- Setting up meetings with non qualified leads.
- Having meetings with existing customers.
- Giving demos to people in companies that have no decision power or influence.
- Setup web seminars and try to convince anyone in their contact list to sign-up
- Cold call just any name they can find.
- Call their customers without engaging in a conversation.
- Engage into sales processes that have no change to be won.

Performance target setting misses the goal

The sales men, instead of prospecting to get real leads, nurturing prospects and customers or generating interest with real potential customers, they will waste their time in order to comply with these rules imposed upon them.

Whenever a goal or target is being set or imposed upon people, they will do their utmost to find ways to achieve the target with the lowest effort possible. Any ways or method they can find that is good enough to reach the target. They don’t care if it helps the business or not.

As the solutions found and applied will miss the real goal of getting more revenue, the end result is worse than without those rules imposed.

Instead of imposing measurable performance criteria that are counter productive, management should help sales people to achieve the real sales goals by getting them appointments and getting them into contact with relations.

What are the new sales performance targets imposed to you?

In a village called San Gimignano in Tuscany Italy that is well known for its’ 14 towers, on the main city square there is an ice cream (gelato) parlor with a sign above the entrance:

“Team Italia Member – GELATO WORLD CHAMPION 2006-2007”.

As a first impression it seems this ice cream maker is the World Champion.
However it is not as they just have participated as a member of the Italian team in a contest.

Although there is no evidence of quality or craftsmanship what so ever, the statement gives certain trust worthiness, credibility.
It creates certain quality assurance and expectations although there are many unknown facts that people assume. They assume the quality must be great because of the participation in the championship.

Questions one could raise about the championship:
- The World Championship: Who is the organizer? What are requirements to participate?
- Team member: what are the requirements to become member of the Italian team? What kind of selection is applied?
- The Italian team organizers: Who has taken the initiative for this team? What is the relation with this parlor?
- The contest: What place did the Italian team obtain? How much did this gelati maker contribute?
- Judges: Who were the judges of this contest? How do they judge?
Apparently nobody poses these questions and buy an ice cream.

The Gelato World Championship appears to be an Italian organization and it is unclear how international this really is.

Still the membership of the Italian (national) team suggest the quality of the ice cream as you expect minimal requirements to become member.
In any case the tag line builds trust and credibility.

To be honest the ice cream was less good than we had in a small parlor in Orbetello, where only Italians go on holiday, whereas in San Gimignano most people are foreign tourists as it has been declared by UNESCO to be part of the World’s Architectural Heritage.

Using a championship to build credibility

If your business:
- Is a start-up in search of customers
- Misses customer references
- Needs to build trust
- Requires increasing brand name
- Wants more exposure
Then participating in a championship related to your industry can be used.
Of course you will need to weigh the all of the costs involved against the possible benefits.

The participation will already generate interest and draw in some potential customers as your company will be mentioned in several industry related publications due to the press release of the organizer. Additionally you can publish your own press release for drawing more attention if you have something specific to tell.

If you participate you better do your utmost in order to win or to achieve a honorable ranking.

In any case your participation will generate interest, give exposure, bring trust and achieve an increase of brand name recognition.

- What are your experiences with participating in a championship?
- How did you expose your participation?
- What were the reactions from your customers and potential customers?
- Did you generate more qualified leads?
- What are the tangible business benefits or the increase in sales registered?

Some or all of your competitors can be more popular, have a better known brand name, have a bigger PR budget or have a larger funding. As a result they are being mentioned or reviews being written more frequently than about your company or service:
- in blogs
- in micro-posts: tweets (Twitter)
- on Facebook
- in comments
- and on other social media.
You cannot just let this happen, but you need to fight for the attention.

In order to:
- Keep track of your competitors
- Stay up to date
- Act in order to get some of the attention
- Correct incorrect statements
- Raise a different voice and opinion
- Control the damage
You need to search on the social media on the Internet and act.

Instead of using a generic search engine like Google and Bing that retrieves all kinds on Internet information you need to use specific search engines, which provide you all social content preferably in real-time.

Social search engines

Several social search web services are available:
- SocialMention searching Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Youare, Rejaw, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Brightkite, Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Mixx.
- Whostalkin searching Facebook, Friendster, Last.FM, MySpace, Linkedin, Netblog, Ning, bebo, Xanga, hi5, Delicious, Blinklist, Reddit, Metafilter, MyWeb and more.
- Spy searching Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType
- SamePoint searching FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Diigo, Digg and more.
-VeryRecent searching Twitter, Ask.com Big News, Blog Pulse, Google News, Flickr, Wikio, YouTube, Digg,
Bloglines.
- Yauba This is a generic search engine that allows to specify the media: Real-Time, Blogs, Social Networks, …

We prefer and use SocialMention and Whostalkin.

Using social search for your own benefit

In order to use just enter the name of the company, the service or the product of your competitor or your product and press search.

Blog posts
If you notice a blog post mentioning your competitor, you can post a comment related to the post:
- Indicating an additional benefit or feature of your service.
- Mentioning your service as an alternative.
- Commenting positively or adding interesting information and having the link to your website in your name.

Micro-posts (Tweets on Twitter)
If you notice a Tweet you can reply to the writer in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Other media
If you cannot use the same medium to communicate with the author, then send an email to the author in order to draw interest for your service by sending useful information, a benefit or an advantage.

Rules for social reactions

- Don’t claim your service being far better than the service of your competitor.
- Don’t start a negative discussion – stay positive.
- Don’t make any bold claims you cannot realize.
- Don’t post more than once as a reply on the subject – except if someone asks you to reply.
- Stay social.

The main goal is to have your service or your company being mentioned on the same page as your competitor and leaves a positive impression behind.

Do you use social search for getting some of the generated attention?

Website essentials

The first impression of your website, which is formed within the few first seconds, is utmost important on the Internet.
Depending on the source of study, the type of website and the type of audience, these first few second is between 50msec and 7 seconds.
Additionally visitors of websites have certain expectations and find features evident. If you don’t fulfill these minimal expectations or provide the website essentials, your visitors will already decrease subjectively the value of your website and even your company.

One of these website essentials is the favicon (favorite icon) that you see preceding the domain name in your browser or in the bookmarks and history of the sites visited.
Having a favicon probably doesn’t bring any significant additional tangible value. However not having a favicon on your website will give the impression of a less professional website. A less professional website implies or suggests a less professional company.
Keeping up the appearances is utmost important on the Internet as for Miss Bucket to be called ‘Bouquet’.

Favicon benefits

Although no real tangible benefit can be attributed, still some benefit improvements can be expected:
- Helping your website standing out better.
- Adds a professional touch to your website.
- Improves branding.
- Create awareness.
- Adds credibility to your website.
- Easier retrieval of your website in a long list of bookmarks and history list.

The favicon design issues

The main problem is that in a tiny space with limited pixels (16×16 or 32×32) you need to make an impression, an indication of functionality or a statement and it has to be recognizable.

We started out with ‘LE’ in upper case as the name LEADSExplorer consists of 2 parts: ‘Leads’ and ‘Explorer’.
However nobody will know what ‘LE’ stands for as it has no meaning. Having still space available on the 16×16 square, we decided to add on ‘ADS’ so this would read ‘LEads’. This makes a very clear statement indicating the website is about ‘Leads’.

For the corporate Engago Technologies Ltd. website we wanted to express the ‘engage’ in the name. An indication of movement should be expressed by the favicon. In order to do so we used a few parallel lines that increase in distance and an arrow pointing upwards.

Keeping up the appearances is important on the Internet not immediately for increasing sales or improving business, but in order not to miss business.

How well do you keep up the appearances on the Internet ?

This blog posts counts as Prior Art proof for the LEADSExplorer favicon as it gets distributed over the Internet into several data bases.