Epictetus (55 AD-135 AD) said, “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”  I believe the optimum state of mind to accomplish any achievement is gratitude.  It doesn’t matter what your status is, what you have or don’t have, there is always something to be grateful for. George Burns, in his mid-90s, said, “At my age, I’m grateful to be still breathing.”  For a salesperson, what’s significant about gratitude is that it’s impossible to feel discouraged or sorry for yourself if you’re feeling grateful.

Do you have a spouse you love and who loves you?  There are widows and widowers out there who ache for their lost love; I know a few, they’re friends of mine.  Do you have children?  Are they healthy?  Think of the millions of depressed women whose wombs are barren; or the grief-stricken parents of a critically ill child, who desperately go from the ICU to light a candle at church.  Are you healthy?  My grandmother, born in 1888. on a farm outside of Minsk, used to say, “If you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”  Smart woman, my grandmother.  Do you have adequate shelter?  The homeless do not.  Do you have enough to eat?  The hungry do not.  Were you educated?  The illiterate were not.

The things to be grateful for are endless, are they not?

Isn’t it simply a miracle that you and I are alive on this earth, with limitless opportunities to live life to its fullest?  Just to have known love was worth the price of admission.  It makes me want to get down on my knees and give thanks to the Powers That Be for every day I’ve been blessed with, for all the wonderful people I’ve been blessed with.  When I’m told to have a nice day, my standard response is “I woke up this morning; it’s already a nice day.”  How about you?  Do you appreciate all your blessings or just take them for granted?

Have you ever heard about the man who complained about not having shoes…until he saw someone in a wheelchair without feet?

Here’s an exercise for you: create a gratitude list; write down everything you’re grateful for. You may stop at a hundred, but go to a thousand if you like.  At the top of my own gratitude list are the health of my wife, three children, and three grandchildren.  I once made a promise to never take their health for granted.  I made that promise on a Saturday morning in February, 1997, in the CAT-scan waiting room at Lutheran General Hospital.

On a Sunday evening six days earlier, I had deplaned in Atlanta, gone to the bathroom and was shocked out of my wits to see blood in my urine.  It happened six more times before I headed home Thursday.  I have no excuse why I didn’t listen to my wife and immediately go home; not one of my more prudent decisions. Nicki had set up an appointment with the urologist for Friday, but I went directly from O’Hare Field after my plane landed.  The doctor examined me, said there were a number of possibilities, and then sent me to the hospital for an IVP x-ray.  When I was done with the x-ray and about to leave, the technician told me the urologist was on the telephone.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but I’m afraid I’ve got bad news—it’s kidney cancer, not much doubt about it.”  He suggested I return to his office so a surgery date could be set forthwith.

Kidney cancer—it sounded so ominous; I contemplated my mortality.

“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,” Hemingway wrote, “the bell tolls for thee.”

There was little doubt about the diagnosis, but the urologist wanted a CAT scan to be 100% sure.  So that’s how I wound up in the CAT-scan waiting room early Saturday morning.  Nicki and I were alone except for a young couple and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter—a real cutie.  They sat directly across from us.

Nicki nervously explained why we were there; the little girl’s mother explained why they were there: their daughter had developed a rare cancer when she was six months old, and periodic CAT scans had become part of their routine.

Six months old!  A baby, for God’s sake!  I fought back the tears—for both of us, but especially that beautiful child and her beleaguered parents.  I ached for them.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the mother and father to cope with such an Ordeal—hell, still were coping with it.  How did they manage it?  A baby whom you couldn’t communicate with, explain things to; how could they watch her suffer so without going stark-raving mad?  I couldn’t do it, I thought.  I couldn’t possibly deal with something so devastating.  Surely I’d collapse and die.

I felt a surge of gratitude that I had the kidney cancer, not one of my kids.  I took that CAT scan feeling like Lou Gehrig—“…the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

There is always something to be grateful for.

It’s impossible to feel discouraged or sorry for yourself if you’re feeling grateful.

There’s magic all around you; take notice of it, never take it for granted.

Smell the roses!

Emerson said it so well:
For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.

Be grateful and inevitably you’ll have a lot more to be grateful for.

The salesperson who has a heart full of gratitude sells a lot more than the one who doesn’t.

About the author: Robert Terson spent 40 years fearlessly selling advertising to small businesspeople; his passionate purpose as an author and speaker is to enlighten and inspire you to be a far better salesperson than you are now. Check his blog here: www.sellingfearlessly.com

Guest post: The Power of Gratitude by Bob Terson is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

I’m always amazed when I ask someone who their customers are and they say “everyone.” You can’t log on with that one. “Everyone” equals “no one.”

I make and sell envelopes. Everyone uses envelopes. So is everyone my potential customer? No way. The margins in the envelope business are paper thin, so my profitability depends on volume, huge volume. That eliminates 99.9 percent of the world’s envelope users.

Geography does it for another 99.9 percent. Delivery costs are a huge factor in bidding an envelope job. Almost any envelope company within 25 miles of a customer can offer a similar product at a better price than another outfit a couple of hundred miles away.

That’s why there are few national envelope companies. We all carve out our little territories and protect them like put bulls. Who are my customers? They are relatively few, but they are very, very precious to me. Everyone has his or her own special needs, requirements, and quirks. Knowing what those are and how to respond to them is not just a concern. It’s a career.

It’s the same for every salesperson. Your success does not depend on your product, no matter how universal or indispensable you think it is. It depends on how well you know your customers. It means meeting their needs before they even know they have them.

The same advice applies even when you’re not calling on customers, but are buried somewhere in the bowels of the corporate bureaucracy.

Years ago many computer companies grew by filling the niches IBM wasn’t serving. IBM couldn’t be bothered with niche markets. They were too big; the niches were too small. Their strategy was to wait until those markets developed sufficiently to become profitable. Then they would roll in and co-opt the customers with their own products.

It turned out that the little companies serving the little niches were on to something. Increasingly, end users wanted their own work stations, not the big mainframes IBM made. By the time IBM woke up, it was too late. The customers they had hoped they could co-opt had already found the products that met their needs.

A sadder and wiser IBM is now back in the game, but not before they got a new president, this time a marketing guy from R.J. Reynolds, and a new attitude about serving their customers.

The cautionary tale has not been lost on me. I’m aware that waiting around for a customer to meet my requirements is a lot riskier than me meeting their requirements, even when they are a little too small or a little too distant to be predictable. No, not everyone is my customer. We don’t need every customer, just the right customers.

Mackay’s Moral: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” –Dirty Harry

If you have enjoyed my writing so far, I encourage you to visit MackayMBA.com to download the first chapter from my upcoming book the Mackay MBA of Selling in the real World for FREE!  I am confident that it’s my best work yet.

The Wisdom Of Dirty Harry By Harvey Mackay is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

If you want to be a better salesperson personally, or you’re a manager who wants their staff to sell more effectively, then follow the following guide to the top ten sales training techniques to maximise your profits and reap the rewards.

• Keep it Simple

Too many people in sales overcook it big time when discussing the features of their products and services. The client only cares how they will benefit from what you are offering, so streamline your pitch and keep it simple.

• Ask Questions

A client may need some prodding to reveal exactly what they are looking for. Ask plenty of questions so when the time comes you can deliver a specific, tailor-made, and killer pitch. 

• Work Around the Clock 

Quite often the most important people in the world of business work outside the nine to five grind. An early morning or late evening call will often catch the exact person you need to sell to – the person with the power to make decisions.

• Network

Build an extensive portfolio of contacts who you can sell too. If one prospect dries up you should always have another one to hand. 

• Something for Nothing 

If you give a prospective client a little taster of the product and services your company offers for free, it might well pay dividends in the long run.

• Be Persistent

Do not take no for an answer. Don’t be pushy but be persistent. There is a difference. 

• Tone and Delivery

Study your voice, the words you use and the way you say them. Could they by improved? Do you sound friendly and warm enough? And do you sound, knowledgeable, confident, genuine and reassuring? 

• Set a Schedule

Selling can be an exhausting business, set yourself a timetable and a set of goals to help you organise your efficiency. 

• Put them at Ease

Cracking a joke is a great way to put the client at ease and get them to drop their guard. If you make a customer laugh they’re more likely to look upon you and your product in a more favourable light. 

• Customer Care

From the start of the selling process to the end, make sure you put the customer first. A happy client is a returning client. 

About the author:

Chris Goodwinis the Managing Director and founding member of Results Driven Training (RDT) 

Chris has a background in industry and 25 years’ experience in the skills arena in public and private sectors. One of his core skill sets is designing coaching, sales training and development packages that are bespoke to business need and linked directly to business growth (ROI).

Guest Post: Top 10 Sales Techniques is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Need more reasons to have a presence at trade shows? Here are 10:

10. Use your Booth Space to Demonstrate Products

Your sales people may expend a lot of time and energy trying to set up face-to-face meetings with prospects to demonstrate why your product is superior. At a trade show, the potential customers flow by all day. Attract their attention to your trade show booth with a demonstration and increase awareness of your product.

9. Distribute Samples from your Booth

Do you have the world’s best-tasting organic peanut butter? The most effective hand cream on the market? Let attendees and distributors know by passing out small samples from your trade show displays.

8. Showcase Technology with Interactive Displays

There’s no better way to position your high-tech organization as a thought leader than to demonstrate your technologies as an integrated part of a modern tradeshow display.

7. Attract New Talent

Show your authority in the industry with a sleek trade show display and the up-and-coming professionals of tomorrow may come to seek out employment.

6. Strengthen Your Distribution Chain

The other attendees won’t just be competitors. The trade show booth next door could be your new retailer or materials supplier.

5. Make Your Booth a Focus Group

Learn from your customers by using your trade show booth as an opportunity to hear customer complaints and compliments. Gain valuable feedback on your product from current and potential customers throughout the show.

4. Check out the Competitions’ Booths

Get a grasp of what your competitors are doing to promote their brand. Just taking a look at the competition’s trade show banners and displays may allow you to devise strategies to stand out from the crowd.

3. Make Connections

You might not need a marketing firm, lawyer or distributor who specializes in your industry today, but meeting these professionals and knowing what they can offer may come in handy down the road.

2. Raise Awareness of Your Organization

Whether it’s with customers, distributors, retailers or potential leads, raising awareness of your organization is a major reason to attend a trade show. Use a well-designed and professional trade show display to grab attention and increase recognition of your brand.

1. LEADS!

According to the CEIR, 40 percent of show attendees are there for the first time. Your sales force could spend huge amounts of time cold calling bad prospects, or attend an event where the leads are already there in person, with a self-identified need. There’s no two ways about it, trade shows bring fresh contacts to your company or organization.

About the author

Drue Townsend is senior vice president of marketing at FASTSIGNS®, a visual communications services provider with more than 550 locations around the world.

Ten Reasons for Having a Trade Show Display & Presence is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Don’t Wait until Retirement is on the Horizon
Many heads of business would rather imagine their organization going on after they have retired or gone, instead of being sold off. It is best to begin thinking of succession early on, before retirement becomes an immediate issue. Keeping your eyes open and evaluating each employee, no matter how low on the line, will increase your chances of finding a great successor for top positions in the organization. You never know where you might find the people with the highest potential.

Concentrate on More than the ‘Golden Child’
Too many leaders choose only a couple of contenders out of the crowd to train for prospective leadership. But what if something happens and those few who have been trained leave for some reason? It is necessary to cast a wide net when succession planning – it is likely that there are many employees with the organization who have the potential to be great leaders. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of many people when deciding who is most appropriate for succession training. Training more than one or two people for succession in the same area will not only give your organization important backup, it will show your confidence in more of your employees.

Think Long-Term
Avoid promising certain future leadership positions to certain employees, but train them in those jobs. Train them in ways that will be appropriate for action in higher positions, not simply advanced methods of the jobs that they are performing currently. Don’t forget to provide opportunities in which they can practice the skills that they are learning. Just as muscles are built when they are used, when new skills are used in real situations, they are stretched and developed, giving the skill-bearer confidence.

Employ Learning Tools
There are many good books out there on training leaders – while these should not be used in place of face-to-face training, they are a nice and informational supplement. Many organizations also have in-house workshops or courses on leadership development. If possible, anyone who is being trained for succession should be enrolled in one of these. When training is under way and seems to be going well, you might even consider assigning those whom you are training to special projects or giving them temporary assignment to another department. This will allow them to try their wings and get a feel for what they might one day be doing for the business.

Guest Blog: The Importance of Business Succession Planning is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

In keeping with Alen’s current theme about Trigger Events, I can confirm that in my business identifying trigger events has been a key aspect of the sales process.

Importance of Trigger Events

In my business, we offer financial education workshops and, if you think about it, it’s hard to get excited about being more responsible with money unless there is some sort of life event that’s requiring you to make decisions regarding your finances.

For example, we find that our clients are interested in taking our workshops when they’re about to start a new job, or they need to know how to complete their tax return or they want to take control of their investments.

Deliberate Approach

What I would recommend to salespeople is to make a list of the top five trigger events suitable for your (potential) client base, quantify the frequency of each event and identify where it would be suitable to connect with the client when this event is occurring.

For instance, one of our clients’ trigger events is starting a new business. New business owners need to make a number of decisions about money including how to take advantage of business expenses. Using the approach described above, first, I would determine how many new businesses are started in my target market each year (and when) so that I can quantify the potential pipeline. Next, I would conduct research to determine what percentage of this market has a need and would be interested in my product or service. Finally, I would research where I can find these new business owners, so that I can meet them.

Do they go to entrepreneurial networking events? Or, perhaps they attend local information seminars on starting a new venture? What online forums do they frequent?

Your trigger event list should be a working document, constantly refined based on what you learn from your clients and determining how best to reach them when they need your product or service.

Partnerships

One final tip: partnering with non-competing organizations that already service your prospective customers during a trigger event stage can be a potential shortcut to connecting with clients. The organization may already have an established distribution mechanism making it easy to connect with potential clients. Just remember to offer to reciprocate if appropriate!

Participate:

Do you use trigger events to determine when to approach your customers? Any tips that you can share?

Neil Jain is President and Lead Facilitator of Money Life Skills.

Money Life Skills aims to empower people to make confident financial decisions. We offer unbiased private, customized and affordable workshops to individuals, couples and families on how to save, spend and invest money. For more information, visit www.moneylifeskills.com.

Trigger Events are Key to the Sales Process by Neil Jain is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Sales Master Best Practices:

Has a systematic set of criteria for classifying customers and prospects into ABC categories

“You’ve got to show it in order to sell it.”

Today’s selling environment is jammed with an unbelievable array of “things to do.” Left without any mechanism to take control, salespeople can easily default to a way of going about their jobs that is characterized by being extremely busy at all the wrong things. We spend all day reacting to the pressures and demands on us. At the end of the day, we have been busy, but we’ve accomplished little of value.

The best salespeople understand that daily temptation to give into the urgent in place of the important. They understand the need to prioritize. And, when it comes to sales, the most important aspect of your job to prioritize is your list of customers and prospects.

The best salespeople spend the most time with the highest potential customers and prospects. In order to consistently do so, they need a system for classifying customers and prospects into categories based on potential – ABC. The “A” customers are the highest potential 20 percent of their account base. The “C” customers are the lowest potential 30 – 50 percent, and the “Bs” are everyone who is left in the middle.

Note that the discriminating characteristic is “potential.” So many salespeople categorize their accounts based on the quantity of their purchases. Thus, the A accounts are those who bought the most last year. But that view is historic – who bought the most last year. In our rapidly changing economy, that historic basis for investing your sales time is misleading. The issue is not who bought the most last year. It is far more effective to determine who could buy the most this year.
The best salespeople understand this, and develop a systematic way of determining the potential in each account. Having a defendable basis for their decisions, they are then free to invest their time where it will get the best results – one of the hallmarks of the high–achieving salesperson.

About the author:
Dave Kahle is one of the world’s premier sales training educators.  Since 1988, Dave has worked with over 400 companies, helping them to increase their sales and develop their sales people. Learn more at his website at http://www.davekahle.com

Sales Master Best Practices by Dave Kahle is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

What’s stopping us from closing the sales we should be closing? What’s causing us to lose prospects that need our solution? Why is the sales cycle so long? Why do we close less than 10% of our prospects?

Morgen contends it’s the sales model itself. In this disturbing, insightful book, Morgen introduces us to the behind-the-scenes world of the buyer: the culture, the system, the decisions, and the change management issues that need to be addressed before buyers can buy. The sales model has never taught us how to manage these off-line issues, and so we sit and wait until buyers do this on their own.

Now, in Dirty Little Secrets, we discover what’s going on and how we can help. Caution: if you are not ready to add some new skills or new thinking to what you’re already doing, this book is not for you. But if you are a serious student of sales, and want to find more prospects and close faster, this book is a wonderful guide through change management and decision making. After you’ve read the book, you’ll know exactly what is going on in your buyer’s environment and how to help them.

More about the book here: Dirty Little Secrets

Limited Time Bonuses

When you purchase the book between Oct. 15 – Oct. 29, you will be able to download free additional materials. Click here for the full list.

Presenting: Dirty Little Secrets by Sharon Drew Morgen is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer

Here is her article:

Why is a 90% failure rate ok?

As I’m doing the final rewrites on my new book out Oct 15, 2009, Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy andsellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, I realized how many times I’ve mentioned my frustration with the failure of the sales model: it actually builds in a 90% failure rate and we expect that! We hire 10x more sales people to get the results we seek, we get 50% longer sales cycles than we could be having, we face objections because people are responding to the sales model itself, we lose clients we shouldn’t lose.

What a waste – not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It works only at the product decision end of the equation (vs. Buying Facilitation, my model that manages the buying decision end of the equation), with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of stuff’ that needs to get figured out before they can make a buying decision. It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to make sure all of the people and policies that touch the Identified Problem are in agreement, that old vendor issues and relationships are handled, that historic problems are managed. Unfortunately for us, sales doesn’t help with this aspect of the seller-buyer equation and buyers need to do this on their own.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on. After all, their need and our solution seem to be a match – but it takes so long for them to decide! What is the problem!

So we sit and wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back. Not because our product isn’t good, or because our solution doesn’t match their need. It’s because their internal issues haven’t been resolved, and buyers won’t buy until they are. They can’t: they must maintain the integrity of their environment even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions: it’s certainly difficult for sellers to understand the buyer’s buy-in issues, management decisions, technology factors. But it’s quite possible to have an understanding of the decision making process – the route that buyers must make through their unique decision criteria – and recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators – Buying Facilitators if you will – much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy-in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.

To learn more about Buying Facilitation® or Sharon Drew feel free to visit her blog: www.SharonDrewMorgen.com

Read the first chapter of The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it.

Why is a 90% failure rate ok? by Sharon Drew Morgen is a post from: The Science and Art of Selling by Alen Mayer