The Powertool Shed

Telemarketers: You can’t live with them, and you can’t kill them!

Seriously, starting and running an effective telemarketing unit is costly, more time and effort consuming than you ever imagined, and a grind, even when you’re getting positive results.

And when you’re failing, and it feels you’re pouring resources down a widening sinkhole, it is like a near-death experience, each and every shift.

To put a stop to the madness, management often thinks outsourcing is the answer, and on paper, it looks pretty good. First, these workers are never on your books, so you don’t run afoul of a lot of labor laws if they’re hired and fired in record time, which happens frequently in this field.

You don’t have to put up with the cultural clash that tele-people bring to an otherwise staid and starched environment. (See my article: “Having Telemarketers Aboard Will Create CULTURE SHOCK!”)

And usually, you’re quoted an all-in-one fee for their services, ranging from about $25 per hour, and up, providing you sign a minimal pilot program contract. Compared to your own costs of hiring, training, supervising, compensating, and housing these folks, the dollars seem to match up very well.

So, what’s the downside?

That’s easy: In my experience, most telemarketing outsource companies are barely capable of making “dumb calls.” And they’re almost all incompetent to make smart ones.

A dumb call is one aimed at preliminary lead development, in which the caller asks for some basic intelligence, such as “Who is the person who buys your office supplies?” or “What kind of sales software are you currently using?”

It could also be a call to residences that asks: “Are you thinking of selling your home, refinancing, or buying a new home in the next 6 months?”

These calls are then harvested for more experienced people to re-contact.

A smart call, typically, is business-to-business, that would sell consulting services via appointment. So, the phone rep has to (1) Get through screening or voice mail; (2) Determine and arouse needs in the decision maker; and (3) Get that person to agree to a meeting at a definite time; one that will not cancel.

Smart calls take linguistic, thinking, and persuasive capabilities, and most people who work for these outsource firms just don’t have these things going for them.

One of my former trainees at Xerox, who has developed outsource tele-units in the United States, India, and elsewhere, agrees with me. “They’re fine for some basic calls, but they just can’t do others,” he says.

So, take a hard look at what you need, and be realistic. Who do you really need to have working for you, to get the job done, and done right?

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone®, You Can Sell Anything By Telephone! and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.

Prior to making the first IT sales call to your client, you need to prepare for it. In this article you’ll learn how to get ready for meeting with a client for the first time.

IT Sales: Do Your Homework

Before you even arrive at your first IT sales call with a client, make sure you’ve done your homework. If the prospective client is worth you going out of your way to drive there and spend a half hour or hour or more and then meeting with them for another hour or two, then it’s certainly worth your time to spend 10 or 15 minutes researching their business.

Even more importantly, before you get to that level, properly qualify your prospect. This way you’ll know whether you’re spending your time wisely. Make sure you ask the right questions about size, platform and industry.

IT Sales: Sell Services, Not Products

Do some background research on this prospect ahead of time and start managing their expectations immediately. Make sure that they know that you sell your expertise and solutions and you’re not there to sell them a computer. It’s really, really hard to build a highly successful, profitable business if you’re not focusing on selling the services first and foremost.

If you want to sell white boxes, notebooks, web licenses or peripherals, that’s fine, but certainly don’t lead with that. Make sure that they know that you’re primarily in the services business. Otherwise that prospect may not understand where you’re coming from and might decide to look around and price-shop.

Choose Your Clients

Make sure that they know that you’re a service provider from the beginning of that relationship. You should be looking to interview them as much as they’re interviewing you. Be choosy and find a client you’ll enjoy partnering with for the long term.

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Joshua Feinberg helps computer consultant business owners get steady, high-paying clients. Sign-up now for Joshua’s free audio training that shows you how to use field-tested, proven Small Biz Tech Talk tools at www.SmallBizTechTalk.com/blog

I’ve been training in countries outside the U.S. recently, and have finally accepted a universal truth about sales people: you love to pitch.

For some reason, sellers continue to believe that knowing about a product solution - and all of the features, functions, and benefits it affords - would lead a prospective buyer to change what they are doing, shift their status quo, place their usual habits in limbo, recognize that something they are doing is less than perfect, stretch their pocket books, and live on a sales person’s time schedule.

SALES IS SALES IS SALES IS…..

No matter who is doing the selling, the patterns seem to be the same: whether it’s a telemarketer earning $7.00 per hour, or a senior partner in a multinational consulting firm earning seven figures. Oh, there is a style difference, with consultants believing they are truly serving the customer, or only selling according to needs, and telemarketers trained to spout a script. But - before you all get annoyed and defensive - let’s look at the hard facts here. Here is what a ’sales call’ looks like at the systems level:

* contact based on uncovering a need that the seller’s product can alleviate;

* contact made with some form of demographic baseline that assumes the prospect would have a propensity to purchase;

* contact made for the purpose of introducing, or garnering interest in, the seller’s product;

* contact leads up to a pitch (during this contact or subsequent contacts)that explains features, functions, and benefits;

* the baseline assumption that if the seller does a good job, the buyer will know they need the product;

* a close that rounds up the buyer’s admitted needs or holes in their thinking, and proves why the seller’s product would benefit the buyer;

* the belief that a good product, pitched or presented professionally to an appropriate buyer, should lead to a sale.

Note that all sales approaches - from telemarketers to relationship managers to senior consultants - contain the above characteristics. And if it were all true, you’d be closing a heckuva lot more sales than you are now.

So why aren’t you closing all those people who seem to need your product? Why isn’t your great pitch getting you the business you deserve? Why isn’t your care/brains/Prada shoes/marketing/branding and knowledge of the prospect’s business (not to mention that your brother-in-law knows the assistant to the CEO) getting buyers to recognize they need you? Or, to take it a step further, to choose you easily over the competition?

Because people don’t decide based on information. Because having a need or an obvious problem doesn’t lead to a purchase. Because an obvious problem is only a tip of the iceberg. Because the buyer’s solution must contain all of the elements that created the problem. Because buyers must design their own solution. Because change and product purchase doesn’t happen merely because there is a problem even if that problem is causing stress or costing money.

Buyers will buy only when they recognize, align, and manage all of the internal elements that need to be addressed that live with, created, and maintain the presenting problem. Not when they notice the identified problem - which is only a part of the range of underlying issues that created the situation in the first place - and not in the time frame you think they should solve it in. They will make a decision to fix or shift the problem in some way only when they make sure that a solution will not involve unmanageable disruption.

WHAT DO WE GET FROM SLOGGING PRODUCT INFORMATION?

When you pitch product, you have no idea how the buyer will perceive your pitch - even if they think they need the product and even when the problem and solution are obvious. Just about the only buyer who approaches a seller to seek specific information and is ready to buy at the point of pitch is a retail buyer who has studied his options, knows the brand, price, and store, and is ready to buy. And that person doesn’t even need a pitch by that time.

In fact, a prospect with a problem - even a recognized one - is not necessarily a candidate for your product even if you understand their needs, even if they understand their needs and they need your product, and even if you have a good relationship with them. And, knowing the buyer’s pain and the decision makers still doesn’t mitigate the basic problem: the buying environment is a complex system that can only be managed from within.

People do NOT change, or decide, based on information unless they have already figured out how to manage their internal criteria. Buying something new represents change. And the larger the item, the more complex the buying environment, the more internal change it will create when purchased.

Indeed, you’ve used ‘pitch’ as a way to sell only because you’ve not known how to manage the environment the buyer lives within - that place they go after you’ve first approached them and believe they need your product. So you remain on the outside looking in - even when you’re convinced that you know what’s going on within the buyer’s environment, and have done all your homework: it’s impossible to know all of the elements and politics and relationships involved - and attempt to effect change externally by thinking you understand their needs and offering your considered opinion along with data about a potential solution.

But what do you get when you pitch? The following responses are typical for a buyer: agreement, confusion, doubt, reaction, or mistrust. When you pitch information - even relevant information about an appropriate solution - buyers don’t know what to do with it.

You’ve even seen it all yourself hundreds of times: a great pitch gets ignored or given short shrift, and you never find out why they didn’t buy.

I can’t say this enough: information does not teach buyers how to make a purchasing decision. Your wonderful product is not the reason buyers buy. They buy merely to solve a business problem, and only then, when their entire internal system is aligned behind any change that results from solving the presenting problem.

THE BUYER IS IN CONTROL

For those of you who have read this from me a dozen times before, I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with me one more time: buyers have several layers they must manage before knowing what to do with your product data. Are prospects really missing something that they can’t solve themselves? Are you offering information that would make them think about simpler solutions they already have on hand? Can their business partners fix it? Do they have to fix it now? Who must they bring in to the equation in order to ensure the appropriate people and elements get included in the solution? What are the politics they need to play internally - the people, the rules, the relationships? What were the forces at play that helped create the problem that need to be managed before a solution sits comfortably within the system?

Indeed, you don’t know where your information is going or how it’s being heard when you give a pitch. Actually, sin! ce the listener of a communication is the one in control, the more you offer product data, the more out of control you are. Note how many centuries sellers have had to manage objections. [I believe an objection is nothing more than a prospect deflecting a seller’s need to push data with the expectation that the prospect is supposed to do something with it.] And how many centuries sellers have closed only a fraction of the situations in which buyers actually really need the product. Or how long it takes for prospects to decide when it’s costing them money every moment they don’t.

The most interesting part of this is that the model of sales is not built to support the buyer’s environment, since all of sales (sorry folks - even those of you who think you’re really doing consultative sales) is based on an outside force (seller, product, solution) trying to get into an existing, closed, system.

Why not base your sales skills on supporting buyers in recognizing their complex buying criteria? Why not offer buyers the skills to leverage the full range of their internal elements that created and maintain the problem? And, it’s not you who needs to comprehend the fact pattern - it’s the buyer.

Instead of using a pitch or your product as a sales tool, why not use your experience as a seller and your understanding of your product environment to lead buyers through and around the variables they need to manage? Buying Facilitation can give you the skills to do that for your clients. That way you can do your real job: supporting the decision-making process that will teach your buyers how to design a comprehensive solution. And then you can pitch.

Sharon Drew Morgen is the author of New York Times bestseller Selling with Integrity. She is the visionary and thought leader behind a wholly original sales model based on the systems of how people change and decide. She has taught this system to 13,000 people in the fields of sales, customer service, negotiating, coaching, and change management. Sharon Drew is a keynote speaker and decision strategist, helping companies change their internal practices to embrace collaborative decision making, ethics, values, and integrity. She can be reached at 512-457-0246 and http://www.sharondrewmorgen.com and http://www.newsalesparadigm.com

Business cards and greeting cards almost go hand in hand when
being used for marketing and business purposes. With a few
exceptions. One is bigger than the other, and needs a postage
stamp in order to get to it’s desired location, as opposed to
the business card which is handed directly to a person or
dropped into a fish bowl in the hopes of winning an office party.

Here are a few tips on how to use the business card and greeting
card as a sales and marketing tool.

The Business Card

This tip is not just about what you can do with your business
cards, it’s about what you can do with other peoples business
cards once you receive them.

A business card is normally exchanged before, during, or after a
conversation you have with a person. The next time someone hands
you a business card, try to remember something positive about
the conversation you had, perhaps something personal the person
might have said.

Than write it down on the business card so the next time you
call them or see them, you can bring it up again.

I once had a business relationship with a person who is now a
friend of mine. We met at a business card exchange, as we stood
talking over our coffee and donuts, I mentioned how I loved
boston creme donuts. Without my knowing, he wrote that down on
the business card I gave him, and every time he and I got
together, he made sure to bring along boston creme donuts. It
wasn’t until later that he told me his secret.

People are impressed with things you remember about them, it
makes them feel that the conversation the two of you had was
important to you, and it will give you credibility.

This is a great way to strengthen your business relationships in
order to obtain referrals.

The Greeting Card

In this day and age of the internet, we seem to have lost the
personal touch we once had with one another.

Most of this personal touch has been replaced with e-mails,
e-cards, fax machines, and cell phones.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for progress.

That being said, don’t ever underestimate the power of a hand
written note or card, it speaks volumes and means a lot to
people.

Have you ever heard of someone deleting a Hallmark?

Keep a Rolodex or tickler file handy of all your customers
upcoming birthdays, anniversary’s, and special occasions. Send
them a card with a hand-written message on the inside, they will
love the fact that you remembered them at a time that is
important to them.

The same goes for holidays, and don’t forget Arbor day.

When you send the card leave the business card out, don’t give
the impression that this is a sales call, at times like these it
is important for your customer to understand that they are not
just a statistic in your data base.

Also, keep your eye’s and ear’s open just incase your customer
looses a loved one or a pet. Send them a sympathy card. They
will appreciate the fact that you have compassion.

The business card and greeting card are two effective ways to
build and strengthen the relationships you have with your
customers, which will ultimately result in more business for
you.