B 2 B Direct Mail Marketing Followup

Once you’ve done a few mailings, go visit the prospects on your list. Before you go, though, think through what you want to say to them. A short (three-minute) description of what you do and how you can help the prospect’s company make money will get you started. Once you’ve delivered it, ask them what you need to do to get their business, then shut up and listen. Nine times out of ten, they’ll tell you what you need to know as long as you use a professional approach and demonstrate a willingness to pay attention. Don’t be offended if you get a brush-off or two and don’t give up if they say they already have a preferred source for what you’re trying to sell. If that happens, thank them for their time and move on. Keep them on your mailing list, though, and visit them again next month—things change!

You should also have a leave-behind of some sort for every sales call. This can be a version of your latest direct mail piece, a fancier brochure, or even a coffee mug with your logo. And don’t forget to give them your business card. In fact, one of the best tactics you can adopt is to always hand out two cards at a time and ask the recipient to pass one along to anyone else they know who might be interested in your services.

Once you’ve established a relationship, build on it. There are all kinds of creative things you can do to keep your company at the top of the prospect’s list of preferred subs and vendors. Offer to sponsor a sales contest for the prospect for example, awarding a prize to the dealer’s salesperson who sells the most pieces in your line during a given period of time. Watch for the prospect’s own sales event, then have a pile of pizzas or a few boxes of donuts delivered with your compliments on their busiest day.  If the prospect belongs to a civic group or supports a local charity, become involved with it yourself. The goal is to keep your name in front of the prospect all the time.

Your own vendors may help you with business-to-business marketing, too. Many manufacturers and distributors have co-operative advertising programs that pay part of the cost of your printing and mailing if you feature their products. Even if they don’t have a formal program, it doesn’t hurt to ask the next time you place an order. Others may have regional sales reps who would be available to go with you to make face-to-face calls. You should also ask if your suppliers do any lead generating of their own—trade shows, magazine advertising, etc.—that they can share with you.

Even with help from your vendors, marketing isn’t free, of course. A hundred first-class letters will cost you at least $100 for postage, envelopes, and computer printer ink. Imprinted coffee mugs aren’t cheap and even a supply of business cards will set you back a few bucks.

The biggest expense, though, is your time. Someone has to compile the prospect list, write the sales letters, and make the sales calls. In most small businesses, that someone is you. To control that particular expense (and to make sure the marketing gets done), dedicate a set number of hours every week to it, budgeting your time the same way you do your money.

Marketing is an investment from which you should expect a return. Fortunately, results from business-to-business marketing are usually easy to track. There is a finite prospect list, you know exactly how you’re marketing to each one, and you can easily identify the orders that you get from them. Make the investment in business-to-business marketing for a few months, then review the response. You might be surprised how much your company’s business has grown.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

How To Succeed At B 2 B Direct Marketing

Advertising to other companies doesn’t mean running TV spots in the Super Bowl. It’s much more targeted than that, which means it’s much more economical. Direct mail is probably the single most effective medium to use; it’s intrusive and there’s very little waste circulation. There are three keys to successful direct mail: a good prospect list, a compelling message, and repetition. You can make up a short prospect list yourself if you spend a little time with the Yellow Pages. Just look up the dealers and other prospects in your market area, call them to get the names of the general managers, service writers, sales managers and buyers, and you’ll have a solid prospect list to work with. Keep it handy, by the way, because you’ll use it later when you start making sales calls.

The direct mail piece itself doesn’t have to be a four-color glossy catalogue. In fact, a one-page personal letter introducing you and describing how you can make money for the other company (in one form or another, that should always be your pitch) will be a good place to start. Every three or four weeks, send another one saying the same thing in different ways. You can announce new equipment or product lines you’ve added, quote a recently satisfied customer, or brag about any awards you’ve received. Address it to each individual on your list, keep it to one page, include a picture or two, and make sure you send something at least once a month.

A web site is a useful business-to-business marketing tool, too. If it has plenty of pictures of your work or products, testimonials from satisfied customers, and some information about your background and your company’s capabilities, it will give the prospect even more reasons to send business your way. Also make sure there is a working email link, phone and fax numbers, and keep it all up to date. You don’t need to hire a high-priced web designer, by the way; most hosting services offer perfectly good bare-bones templates. The site itself can cost less than $10 a month.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Social Media Marketing Tips From The Pros

“You have to create a plan. I see many professionals and smaller businesses who haven’t looked at their objectives. Who is their target audience? What key messages are they trying to get out?”
--Stacy Cohen, Co-communications

“A great way to gain followers on Twitter is to Retweet what someone else has to say or to jump into their conversation and add your own perspective. Also ask people to retweet your links by adding the words ‘Pls RT’”
--Stacy Solomon, Internet Marketing Consultant

“If you are spending five hundred to a thousand dollars each month on marketing and take even one or two months of this and invest in setting up your social media, you can see a significant long-term gain for your business.”
--Gerald Stern, WOW Production Services

“One hundred high-quality followers easily equals one thousand so-so followers, because in the social media world you want people to constantly pass on the things you write, as well as send you material to post. Business people must avoid an overt ‘sales’ method—you’ll just turn people off and you’ll lose your following.”
--Chris Cornell, Westchester Social Media

“You should never expect social media to be completely cost-free. Someone must spend time staying on top of all those tweets, messages, Facebook updates and blog posts. Likewise, quick (if not instant) replies are necessary to maintain a reputation for responsiveness.”
--Kristen Ruby, Ruby Media Group

Whether they pay-it-forward or pay-as-they-go, more and more business owners and managers are turning to social media networks for very good reasons. “In the current economic downturn business owners must go above and beyond to promote themselves,” says Rye NY Chamber of Commerce Secretary Sally Wright. The organization received dozens of requests for a repeat of its recent social media seminar. She adds, “Social media is one great way to accomplish that.”

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Pricing For Profit - Step Two

Once you know how much the merchandise or job costs, you mark it up to provide a profit. One way is to use what’s known as “keystone” pricing, which simply means doubling the cost to arrive at the selling price. This provides a 50% gross profit margin. That’s why retailers can put goods on sale for 40% off and still make a profit. It works fine, but it isn’t always the best choice.

You can also use manufacturers’ suggested retail pricing, which even further simplifies the calculations. Nationally uniform prices, of course don’t reflect local market conditions, much less the individual business owner’s costs of doing business. Remember, too, that they’re designed to help the manufacturer move more merchandise, not necessarily help you make more money.

Using a standard markup sounds simple, but that’s really only the beginning of sound pricing strategy. You also have to be sure that the gross profit is large enough to cover your overhead, or the indirect costs of operating your business, and still leave a net profit. Whether you’re marking up merchandise or deciding on a labor rate, you’ve got to build in something to cover the rent—and all those other bills you pay every month.
Every business has indirect expenses (not related to the cost of a piece of merchandise or a particular employee’s labor on a job) that have to be paid. The obvious ones include your building and what it costs to operate it (utilities, maintenance, taxes, insurance), your fixtures, tools, office equipment, vehicles and other fixed assets (their cost on an annual basis is your depreciation expense), your salary and benefits (especially health insurance), not to mention the office manager and other general employees. Don’t forget to add in your property and casualty and liability insurance premiums, accountant’s fees, advertising and marketing expenses, office supplies, telephone, and so on and so on. While you’re at it, make sure you include an annual contribution to your own retirement plan, be it a 401-K, SEP-IRA, or whatever.

Finally, add something for net profit. That’s the whole point of running the business, right? The net profit, by the way, is not the same as your salary as the manager or owner. Your salary is payment for your labor managing the business. If you’re the owner, the net profit is the return on your investment and the compensation your receive for the risks you take. There’s a big difference.

The total dollar amount of your shop’s gross profit, the figure that has to be larger than your overhead expense, is also dependant on how much merchandise you sell or how many jobs you complete. These are determined, at least in part, by the prices you charge. If your prices are too high, customers will run away, so it can be a vicious circle. Cost-based pricing is all well and good, but ultimately, the prices you charge are determined by what your customers are willing to pay. That’s where a whole raft of other factors comes into play.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Pricing For Profit - Step One

When it comes to prices in your business, how much is enough and how much is too much? How do you set your prices? Buy low and sell high is the obvious answer, but for many companies, especially those with a mixture of retail merchandise and services, bricks-and-mortar and online competition, and customers driven one day by a penny-pinching budget and the next by the lust called gotta-have-whatever-at-any-price, there aren’t any easy answers.

Setting prices requires that even the most experienced manager or owner take a few moments every once in a while to dust off the calculator, get the accountant on the phone, and do some serious figuring. It’s tempting to just mark all merchandise up by a fixed percentage and figure labor at a flat rate comparable to what your competitors charge, but that’s not managing for profit, it’s hoping for one. There are several factors that you should consider.

Start with the cost of goods sold. That’s the amount you pay the manufacturer, wholesaler, or whomever for the merchandise you sell, whether at retail or as part of a service job. But it also includes the cost of acquiring those goods (shipping and handling), carrying them in inventory (interest expense), and allowances for returns and defective merchandise. If you pay any salespeople a commission or spiff, that needs to be taken into account, too.

For service work, you have to cover your direct labor costs on each job. These include not only an appropriate portion of your technicians’ annual salaries, but also their benefits, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, etc

What about the cost of your time? Whether you are a one-person business or simply provide indirect supervision of your staff, your time is a cost that has to be covered. One way to approach this is to divide what you expect to personally earn on an annual basis (including those items above but not your profit from the business—I’ll talk about that later) by 2,000, which is roughly the number of working hours during the year. Let’s say your “salary” plus benefits is $100,000. Your hourly labor cost is $50. Multiply that number by the hours you estimate you’ll personally spend on the job, add in the other worker’s costs, and you have your direct labor costs.

These aren't the only factors, so check next week for more guidelines on pricing for profit.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

How To Turn A Newbie Into A Customer For Life

New customers are the lifeblood of any business, but only if they stick around long enough to become old customers. A one-time buyer is welcome, but the ones who put money in the bank are those who come back again and again.

One breed of new customer that’s tricky to develop is the neophyte, the guy or gal who is new to the world your business inhabits. Maybe they are a first-time home buyer or a young couple setting up a college fund for their newborn. The way you and your staff respond to that newbie can make or break your relationship with them. Treat them like an idiot the first time and you’ll never see them again. Treat them right, and you’ll create a customer for life.

It’s tough, though. A newbie doesn’t know what questions to ask. He doesn’t know what’s do-able and what violates the laws of physics and/or the local building code. She may have seen a TV show where some lucky stiff’s family room went from wreck to magazine-spread-worthy in thirty minutes and expect you to do the same. What’s worse, she’s going to take up way more of your valuable time than this measly little job is worth.

The next time a newbie walks through your door, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. Remember what it was like when you went onto the field for your very first Little League tryout? If you were like most of us, the experience was a little intimidating. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing, but you weren’t sure. You wanted to make the team, but the single most important goal was to avoid making a fool of yourself.

That’s what the newbie is feeling when he comes into your business for the first time. He or she may not admit it—and may try to bluff their way through—but they are nervous about sounding dumb when they talk to the experts in the field.

Your first job, then, is to make the customer comfortable. Don’t draw attention to his ignorance by telling him it’s all right to be stupid. Instead, listen to his ideas in a non-judgmental way and ask him questions about what he needs at a level he can understand. Try to avoid using terms the customer may not have heard before, or, if you have to, explain them without being condescending.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Highs And Lows Of Negotiation Strategy

I used to be a strong advocate of aiming high—making an outrageous offer so that I’d have plenty of room to come down when the buyer made a counter offer. Besides, I believed, low offers signal weakness.

I eventually learned that if the first offer was too high—outside the realm of what’s reasonable to the buyer—then the buyer just might not make any counter offer at all. Then where was I? If I lowered my offer to try to re-start the negotiation, I was really signaling my desperation and letting the buyer know that concessions could be won.

The first step in the Creative Selling System is gathering information about your prospect. And one of the key pieces of information is an estimate of the prospect’s spending potential. This not only gives you a goal to shoot for and an idea of how to structure your proposal, it gives you a good guideline for where to start your negotiations. As long as you begin with a proposal in the ballpark your prospect is used to playing in, you’re not likely to scare them off.

Take the time to do your homework and use one or more of the estimating methods I covered in The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques. Even if you didn’t use those figures to structure your proposal in the first place, they will give you a sense of what’s possible for your negotiation.

Judge the reasonableness of your opening offer carefully. My rule now is that my opening offer is one at the high end of what the prospect could accept with no further changes if they were so inclined—and one I could defend without stretching my credibility.

It’s also good to practice a little mental discipline. Right at the beginning of the negotiation, establish in your own mind the lowest acceptable offer you’ll take. That way, you have a sense of how far you can go before you start cutting into profit margins, production capacity or whatever benchmark your company uses. As the negotiations proceed, you know where you are at all times. That sense of security gives you greater confidence during the process.

Establishing the lowest acceptable alternative in advance does something else. It keeps you in a win/win frame of mind because you don’t have to worry about losing! As long as you know the point at which you will walk away (and stick to it) you can’t lose anything.

As you may have noticed, we’ve now set an upper and a lower limit to pricing. This range makes it much easier to build a few small concessions into your proposal, or plan some value items you can add as the negotiations proceed. This helps you avoid making that big concession all at once, leaving you with no place to go if the buyer rejects it.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Use The Time Factor In Negotiation

One of the factors never to be overlooked in any negotiation is time. Time pressure works for and against both parties, often in interesting ways. Anyone who has been involved in union negotiations, for example, knows that the largest concessions always come just before the strike deadline. In fact, sometimes that’s the first time any concessions occur! Knowledge of the deadlines faced by the other party can be a powerful tool.

The pressure to come to an agreement is generally greatest on the party with the nearest deadline. Magazines are much more inclined to negotiate liberal terms for ad space the day before the issue closes than they are the week before. The prospect whose insurance policy is about to lapse is more eager to renew the policy than one with a 90 day grace period remaining. Know your prospect and know their deadlines.

One way to use time to your advantage is by making small concessions one at a time, drawing out the negotiating process if that is to your advantage. On the other hand, you may need to bring the deal to a close, in which case you may want to make a BFO, or best and final offer.

As a seller, though, don’t be surprised if the buyer calls your bluff. They have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by telling you your BFO isn’t good enough. If you back down and make a further concession, all you’ve done is prove to the buyer that you’re a bluffer—and that your word isn’t any good.

The time to make a BFO is when you discover you’re negotiating with yourself. You can tell that’s the situation because the other party isn’t offering any concessions—you’re the only one making any movement. It’s one of the most frustrating situations you can face. You make all the moves, getting nothing more than a “that’s not good enough” response from the prospect. The time to take a chance and make your BFO is when you have nothing to lose.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Adverse To Negotiation? Get Over It!

Some people are leery of negotiating a sale. They feel that the process is somehow dishonest or demeans them, their product, or even their prospect in some way. In fact, I often encounter sales managers who proudly point out that their prices are firm. They insist that every customer pays the same price and that’s the one set by the sales manager. They would rather forego a sale than violate their holy pricing policies. These sales managers need a strong dose of reality—and they often get it in the form of declining market share.

There is nothing holy about a given price, nor is there any moral law that says that every customer is entitled to the same terms. In fact, certain religions make a pretty strong moral case for customizing prices and other terms according to each customer’s individual needs. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with having a firm pricing policy. But let’s not hide the reasons for it in some kind of moral cloud. Firm pricing is a matter of what management feels is best for the selling company. Ideally (from their standpoint), it controls demand to produce the maximum profit from the available supply. And having firm prices makes the administration of the revenue stream easier, which makes the sales manager’s job easier. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But there is nothing wrong with negotiating every sale, either. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years in one way or another. In fact, the most successful economic system yet invented, the free market economy, is predicated on the freedom of sellers to offer different value for various prices and for buyers to accept or reject them.

Isn’t that what happens when your favorite department store puts an item on sale? Apparently, the store’s customers made the choice to not buy that item at the previous price, and the store made the choice to offer it at a lower price as a result. Isn’t that a form of negotiation?

Western retail negotiation just doesn’t happen face-to-face (usually) like the haggling that occurs in a Middle Eastern souk. It’s the same process, but the department store is haggling through the medium of its displays and signs rather than having hawkers standing in the aisles soliciting offers for the merchandise on the tables.

In business-to-business sales, nearly every sale is openly negotiated. There may be published price lists and standard terms, but very few buyers would keep their jobs if they didn’t at least try to do better. And few sellers would keep the revenue flowing if they didn’t make pricing adjustments to stay competitive.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Visual Sales Aids For Group Presentations

Larger group presentations often call for visual aids, which can both embellish and complicate your presentation. Whether you’re using foam-board flip cards or a laptop with presentation software projected onto a big screen, be sure that you know how to use the presentation medium and have rehearsed with it.

Find out, if you can, just how large the room will be and how many participants you’ll be facing. This will help you determine what kind of visual aids, if any, that you want to use. You may not want 24 X 30-inch flip cards for a group of four—unless they’re going to be seated at the opposite end of a 20-ft. table.

Never count on the prospect to provide any equipment. There’s nothing worse than arriving to connect your laptop to the prospect’s projector only to discover that you need an adapter neither one of you has. Whether you’re going high-tech or low-tech, bring every single item you could possibly need with you. This includes everything from extension cords and grounded-outlet adapters to monitors and projectors. If you need an easel for your flip cards, bring one yourself. I can almost guarantee that if you don’t, the prospect’s won’t work or someone in another department will have borrowed it just before you arrived.

It’s mandatory that you set up your visual aids before the group gathers in the room. I would rather skip the visual aids completely than stumble through a pitch while I’m fumbling with a “General Protection Page Fault” on my laptop. In fact, if it’s not possible to get access to the meeting room and set up before the group gathers, play it safe and don’t bother with the visual aids. It’s better to make a neutral low-tech impression than a bad high-tech one.

If you’re using a laptop, set up your software so that you don’t have to click through several screens to get to your presentation. Create a shortcut to the presentation right on your opening screen. That way, all you have to do is click on it to start the show. Finally, check the view from the back of the room to be sure everyone can read your material.

No matter which format you use for your visual aids, design them as much like your written presentation as you can. Make each slide (or card) simple, clear, and to the point. Any bodies of text will need to be converted to bullet points, of course. This isn’t the place to go into great detail on constructing slide presentations, but get yourself a good tutorial if you plan on preparing your own.

Group presentations are actually great fun to give. You get to practice your craft in a slightly different way from the normal routine. And you have the opportunity to use all of your persuasive skills and stagecraft to their fullest effect. Most group presentations involve prospects with large potential, so there’s usually a lot riding on the effectiveness of your pitch. You’ll make good use of your stage fright management skills.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Control Your Sales Presentations To Groups

Selling is just like playing chess—the rules are the same every time but no two games are just exactly alike. And it’s a good thing, too, since we’d all get bored pretty quickly if the games ever started repeating themselves. One of the variations many salespeople encounter is the need to make a presentation to a group rather than to a single prospect.

It may be Mr. Big and his assistant, a committee of decision-makers and decision-influencers, or even the board of directors. When you make a group presentation, you’re generally working in a different physical setting that can range from chairs pulled around the prospect’s desk to a conference room with a table the size of an aircraft carrier. You might even have to make your pitch in an auditorium complete with podium and sound system.

Regardless of the setting, the basic differences between a group presentation and a one-on-one call deal with the distribution and control of your written materials and handling the very different dynamics of large group meetings. It’s important to remember, though, that all the other good sales techniques remain the same. Your goal is still to gather information about the prospect, for example, and you should still follow the five-page presentation format I introduced in The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques, including asking questions at the end of each page. Your stage presence and enthusiasm level are even more important when pitching a group, though, as is your ability to gain their attention and hold their interest.

Handling your written materials is actually easier in many ways when you are working with a group. The best tactic to control the pace of the presentation is to hand out one page of the presentation at a time. You never want to distribute the entire proposal at the beginning for the same reason you shouldn’t just hand it to a single prospect: they’ll turn immediately to the price and fixate on it. Instead, hand out each page in its turn. In a small room with a limited number of participants, you can handle this easily yourself—provided you can walk and talk at the same time. With a larger group you may need some assistance, which can be provided by the group members themselves. If you don’t have a helper with you, just ask the people nearest to you to “take one and pass them on” to the people behind them. Your goal is to see that everyone in the group gets a copy—but that none have any page in their hand until you’re ready to talk about it.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Finding The Sales Decision Maker

When someone walks into your store or calls to place an order, you’re sometimes dealing with the decision maker. Often, though, that person is simply carrying out the instructions of the real buyer. The sales manager’s secretary who orders “Top Producer” awards from a trophy store, for example, may decide what kind of plaque to buy, but the decision to make the purchase in the first place was made by the manager.  If you want to sell more, you have to persuade that person—the original decision maker—to buy them.

To sell completely new accounts, of course, you absolutely have to find the person who can say “yes.” When you approach a new potential customer on your own initiative, it’s very easy to get stuck dealing with an underling who may or may not be able to give you an order. You need to at least try to see the prime decision maker when you make your first contact. So how do you know who they are?

One way to find out, of course, is to ask. Before you knock on the door with a presentation, call the company and ask for the name of the president, the marketing director, the human resources manager, or whomever you think is most likely to be the person who controls the budget you want to tap. You can also find names on company websites or from services like Dun & Bradstreet. Their reports not only provide data like address and phone numbers, but also whether you are dealing with a headquarters location. Facts you can use include the number of employees nationwide and locally as well as annual sales, both of which can help you estimate how much potential the account has. You’ll also find the names of various executives, a.k.a. decision makers. One nifty feature allows you to store this company’s name online in a tracking folder and be notified of changes.

To carry your sleuthing a step further, type the executive’s name into Google. Do the same with the company name itself. If they’ve been in the news, you might learn that they’re just announced a new product that your product or service could help their sales force introduce. Or you might find that they’re active with a church, youth activities, or a local non-profit, which gives you a way to open the door by offering to support their favorite cause. Other places to check include your local newspaper’s website, which often contains a search feature that will pull up past stories about your prospect from their archives.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

B2B Sales Call For Doing Your Homework

If you’re in business-to-business sales, you know where you and your product generally rank on the list of priorities of most prospects. It’s usually way down there near the bottom of the list simply because a business operator or manager has so many situations clamoring for their attention every day.

Start with personnel (the biggest headache of all) and all the issues that go with it: hiring, firing, motivating, compensating, absenteeism, benefits, training, and on and on. Then there is the cost of goods if the business is a retail establishment or the cost of materials if it’s a manufacturer. These contribute directly to the profit margins, which are thin and getting thinner in most businesses today. There’s the “infrastructure” of the business—overhead items like rent, utilities, computer systems, debt service, and insurance. There are partners and shareholders to deal with, not to mention the most important of all, the customers. And then there’s that old bugaboo: taxes in all their myriad forms.

With all these matters weighing on the prospect’s mind, is it any wonder that it’s tough to get an appointment—especially one to ask a bunch of questions?

It’s even tougher when you factor in the competition—other salespeople. And I’m not just talking about your direct competitors. I’m referring to the army of salespeople peddling items and services that deal with all the above issues. Vendors, manufacturer’s reps, insurance agents; the list is endless. They all want a few minutes of the prospect’s time every day. If the prospect saw them all, they’d never get anything else done. If you want an appointment, you have to break through the clutter. You should pay the prospect for his time, not expect him to pay you.

These days most prospects expect the seller to have done their homework before they come in the door. They barely have time to do their own jobs, much less educate every salesperson who wants to sell them something. So, do the research first, then come up with a product or service that will meet the needs you think the prospect might have. Now, instead of calling the prospect and asking for some of their valuable time to educate you, you can offer to give them something of value—an idea to help their business in some way. Approached that way, the prospect is much more likely to give you a few minutes to make your pitch.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

The Sad Truth About Consultive Selling

Consultive selling, about which shelves full of books have been written and decades’ worth of seminars presented, is based on the principle that you need to understand the prospect’s needs before you can make a sale. Nothing wrong with that. But some practitioners of the approach believe the first step is to set up a meeting to ask the prospective customer a series of questions, the ever-popular “needs analysis” call. By answering those questions, the theory goes, the customer will tell you what they need or want to buy. Then you can come back with a proposal on the next call. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the intentions of that approach, but in my experience it seldom works out quite so neatly.

For one thing, few prospects will give you the time to answer your questions unless they’re already interested in your product, which sounds good until you realize that making presentations only to those people means you’ve eliminated a large group of prospects who won’t give you the first appointment. I’ll grant that pre-qualifying prospects this way may be a good time management method, but I can’t help but believe that the “not interested” prospects could be a very valuable source of new business.

And that number grows every day because the “needs analysis” approach is hugely over-worked as more and more prospects refuse to invest their time in it. Business operators are bombarded with offers to study their financial needs, manufacturing systems, advertising plans, and insurance programs. “It’s a valuable study without any obligation to buy” is an offer they’ve heard so many times that they’ve become immune to the pitch.

What can be even more discouraging is that, in many industries, the same prospect has undergone the consultive needs analysis multiple times with the same company because the vendor has such high turnover in its sales force. And they’ve gotten nothing in return except another proposal to buy which looks suspiciously like the last proposal they got from that company’s previous salesperson. In other words, fewer and fewer prospects are falling for the “needs analysis” gambit.

But what about those who do let you in the door to answer your questions? While generalizations can be dangerous, I don’t believe that they’re going to give you the best, most accurate information on which to base your proposal. They wouldn’t be seeing you unless they already had some pre-conceived notion of what they would like to buy from you. This, in turn, will tend to color the answers they give to your needs analysis questions. Not that the prospect would lie to you, it’s just that when someone already knows the answer, they tend to interpret the question to fit it. And their interpretation of your question may not be the same as yours, with some possible confusion over the answer as a result.

And that’s assuming they’re fully cooperative to start with. What are the things you want to learn when you conduct the needs analysis? Most of the questionnaires I’ve seen can be boiled down to two questions: 1) How can the prospect best use my product and 2) How much money can they spend on it? The variations on the first question will get some fairly accurate answers, but the second will often generate purposefully wrong answers because most people are pretty sensitive about giving out financial information to perfect strangers.

And that’s what you are, after all—a stranger. Since this is the first call on the prospect, by definition you don’t know them and, even more importantly, they don’t know you. All the prospect knows is that you’re there to get something from him (information and time) and he’ll get something in return (a proposal) sometime in the future. You should look on every sales call as a transaction in which items of value change hands. Even if a sale doesn’t occur, information changes hands—and that’s an item of value. In a solid transaction, items of equal perceived value are exchanged in a two-way process. On the consultive sell first call, though, the prospect gets nothing of value in return for his or her time and cooperation.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Golf Fans Celebrate US Open With Free Kindle Book - Grand Slam

Bobby Jones did it, Tiger Woods almost did it, but if the moon were full during the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA Championship, could a werewolf win the elusive Grand Slam of golf? Find out in Grand Slam, a special excerpt from Weird Golf available for the Kindle.

This week, in honor of the US Open at the Olympic Club, Grand Slam is absolutely free! Check it out and tell your friends. It's a howling good deal.

Among many other books, Dave Donelson is the author of Weird Golf: 18 tales of fantastic, horrific, scientifically impossible, and morally reprehensible golf

Making A Sale On The First Call

One of the great myths about selling is that you need to make a series of calls on a prospect to determine their needs before you can make a proposal to them. If you’re selling anything less complicated than enterprise computing systems, this is time-wasting nonsense based on a misunderstanding of consultive selling. Why wait? You’ll speed up the prospect’s decision-making process and save yourself hours and hours of selling time (which you can use to make more sales) if you present a specific proposal on your very first call.

This suggestion invariably sends traditional consultive sellers into convulsions and they say things like, “How can you make a proposal without ascertaining the need?” “Won’t the prospect think you’re arrogant to come in with a proposal the very first time you meet them?” “What if your proposal is wrong?”

This response comes from a lack of understanding of my method. You’ll notice that I want you to make a proposal on the first call—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that call will be the first time you’ve visited the prospect. Nor does it mean that you haven’t done a needs analysis. In fact, the time and effort you put into needs analysis (before the first call) will dwarf that of a typical consultive seller who goes into the first call with questionnaire in hand. And your needs analysis will be more accurate, which will mean a more accurately targeted proposal.

Selling on the first call isn’t as simple as it sounds, of course. It’s not a matter of taking the same product to as many prospects as possible in hopes that you’ll stumble across someone that needs to buy something today. Nor does it mean that you ignore the prospect’s individual needs and try to sell them a one-size-fits-all product. To make a sale on the first call, you need to research the prospect in advance, ask probing questions during your presentation, and be ready to change your design or other elements of your proposal—on the spot. It takes preparation and a set of ears finely tuned to what the customer is saying.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

The Dynamic Manager Goes To Yonkers

The Dynamic Manager series will be featured at Books Without Borders, a day-long festival of books, authors, music, and other attractions on the Yonkers, NY, waterfront Saturday, June 9.

Books Without Borders will encompass the entire waterfront beginning at the wonderful Yonkers Riverfront Library and continuing past the Yonkers Metro North Train Station through Ella Fitzgerald Park and culminating at the picturesque Pier and Amphitheater on the Hudson River.

Workshops, Seminars and Panel discussions will be held throughout the day. Literary agents will hold workshops, authors will read from their works, and books--including The Dynamic Manager's Guide To Creative Selling, The Dynamic Manager's Guide to Marketing and Advertising, and the Dynamic Manager's Guide to Practical Management--will be on sale. To add to the festive atmosphere, face painters and clowns will be in the Children’s Book area and music will be provided around the event area.

I'll be there from 10 AM to 4 PM, signing copies of all my books. Come on by and get acquainted!

Books Without Borders was organized by The City of Yonkers, The Yonkers BID, The Yonkers Library System, The Westchester Guardian and Yonkers Tribune Newspapers, WGRN Radio, and author Dennis Sheehan.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Make More Sales With On-The-Spot Thinking

Watch out for the impulse to “go back to the drawing board” when the prospect throws you a curve.

Inside, you’re dealing with your own desire to get out of a stressful situation when the prospect says that he or she has a need you haven’t anticipated or wants a different design element in the product you’re offering. You’ll want to retreat and regroup and come back another time with a different proposal, but resist the temptation. You are a professional, you know your product inside and out, so be ready to make changes!

Only after the prospect agrees that your product or service will meet his or her needs are you ready to bring up the subject of price and ask for the order. If you never get agreement on your product’s ability to satisfy the prospect’s needs, the price won’t make any difference, so don’t rush into it. Ask your questions, really listen to the answers, then ask the prospect to buy.

Creative sellers with open minds have an endless market for the things they sell. Some of us, though, actually have lots of ideas but are hesitant to use them because we’re afraid they won’t be good enough. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it puts the onus of judgment on the wrong person. The salesperson shouldn’t judge the merits of an idea—leave that to the prospect. If the customer thinks it’s good—it’s good! Put your idea in front of him or her using the best presentation skills you have, and let the prospect make the final judgment.

You’ll be surprised how often they decide they like your bright idea.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

How A Creative Sale Is Made

There are two kinds of salespeople, order processors and idea sellers. The first one serves a certain function in any business, but it’s the second one that will make the business boom.

Who are idea sellers? Salespeople who size up a prospect’s business and take them a proposal for a product or service to meet their needs. They plant the idea for the solution to a need in the prospect’s mind even though the prospect may never have acknowledged that need to start with. By doing so, the idea seller creates demand for his or her products.

Here’s an example:  Let’s say the prospect is an insurance agency and you, the idea seller, have a small business making gift baskets—those elaborate assortments of gourmet foods, trinkets, and colorful goodies that solve a lot of gift-giving problems. As a real idea seller, you will take a look at the insurance agency and think up ways they could use gift baskets to sell more insurance. They could buy a basket every week to award the agency’s top producer, for example, or send a basket to every new client as a way to say thanks. Maybe they could reward clients who go three years without a claim or send a gift basket to prospective customers as a door opener. In other words, there are lots and lots of ways the insurance agency could use gift baskets.

But if no one suggests it, the insurance agency probably would never think of it themselves. That’s where the idea seller steps in. You pitch one of these ways the agency could use the product and gives them a specific proposal (how many—of what—at what cost) on which to act. That’s idea selling in a nutshell. It’s very creative.

Gift basket makers are generally very creative people, so they should be very good at this. The key is to put some of the same wonderful creativity that goes into designing baskets into ways that your prospective customers can use them. I’m sure you noticed that the “ideas”  mentioned for the insurance agency aren’t different types of gift baskets—they’re different applications for the gift basket product. It’s conceivable, in fact, that the same gift basket design could be used in all four—or more—ways mentioned above. The creative part of the sales process is in finding new uses for the product.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Winning A Sales Argument Can Lose The Sale

Traditionally, sellers walk into the prospect with a presentation listing the many reasons their product should be bought. They present their case to the prospect, giving arguments and evidence much like a lawyer in a courtroom. They then listen to the opposing case (the objections from the prospect) and rebut them as best they can. The whole process becomes about winning a courtroom debate with the prospect. Sound familiar?

Now, in my limited experience in a courtroom, there are basically three parties involved in a typical case: the judge, who hands down a decision based on the merits of the arguments which are presented by the other two people, the plaintiff and the defendant. What’s different about selling is that the “judge,” or prospect, also happens to be the “opposing attorney!” He’s responsible not only for making a decision, but for arguing against it. Not that he can’t be objective, but the odds aren’t with you. That’s one reason closing ratios are typically so low for many salespeople.

But losing the case—or getting a “no” from the prospect—isn’t the toughest part. It’s the fact that once this “judge” hands down the decision, it’s pretty final. There’s not really any appeal in traditional sales and it’s pretty hard to come up with a new case and get back into the courtroom with it. You usually give all your best reasons to buy during the first presentation. To get a second chance to pitch your product, you have to first overcome the prospect’s attitude that he’s “heard it all before.” You have to offer something new to get back in the door.

When you sell ideas (solutions to the prospect's needs), though, you’ve always got a reason for the prospect to see you again—because you can always come up with a new idea. Remember that an idea isn’t a product—it’s a use, a solution to a discovered need. So, as long as you can come up with different ideas, you’ll be able to get back in to see the prospect with them. You’re not coming back to make the same old pitch; you’re offering something new.

Of course, part of your presentation includes the reasons your product will satisfy the prospect’s needs. You do need to make your arguments. But if you structure your presentation the way I suggest, the prospect will focus on the desirability of your idea instead of on the reasons for buying your product or service. Your “arguments” will go unanswered. And you’ll have the opportunity to present them again as you come back over and over again with new ideas. Same arguments every time, just new ideas to get you in the door.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

HR Pros Offer Advice At 914Inc Power Breakfast

I'll be moderating a panel of Human Resource professionals next week, addressing issues from how you should (and can) control your employee's social media usage to what will happen if the Supreme Court overturns the healthcare legislation--and what if it doesn't? The event is a 914Inc. Magazine's Power Breakfast to be held Tuesday, April 24, at 7:30 AM at the Doubletree Hotel in Tarrytown, NY.

Joining me on the panel are five experts who bring different viewpoints on these and other issues:

Susan Corcoran
Jackson Lewis (a labor and employment law firm)
White Plains

Greg Chartier
Principal, The Office of Gregory J Chartier
Chair of the Human Resources Council of the Westchester Business Council

Ann Henning
Human Resources Manager, Sprint

Edwin L. Bowman
Principal, BowmanBecker Consultancy, LLC
Past President, Westchester Human Resources Management Association

Joseph DiCarlo
Director of HR, WESTMED
Former VP of HR, Porter Novelli

Tickets are complementary, but seats are limited, so make your reservations today.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Retail Sales Negotiation

Helpful negotiation tactics for retail salespeople:

● Stay cool. If a customer asks for a lower price, remember that it’s just a business transaction, not a judgmental comment on your artwork, your gallery, or you.

● Know your limits, but don’t go there right away. If the customer can talk you into two small concessions rather than one big one, they’re more likely to be satisfied with the deal.

● Ask for something in return. A customer may be willing to use cash rather than a credit card, put their name on your mailing list, or give you something else of value in return for a lower price.

● Use negotiation to close the sale. “If I give you this price, will you buy it now?” is a great way to separate buyers from lookers.

In today’s economy, you can expect more and more retail customers to test the firmness of your prices. If you keep your wits about you and exclude emotions from the process, though, you can use that trend to build your sales.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Sell More Services With Better Communication

Above all, selling services requires strong communication between you and the customer. It’s essential that you explain exactly what you’re going to do, why it needs to be done, and how much it’s going to cost. It’s even more important that you listen carefully to the customer to make sure that you’re both on the same page. Does he understand what you’re proposing? Is it what he wants? Does he have any unasked questions?

Establishing and maintaining open communication is especially important for a service job because you often encounter unexpected problems as the work proceeds, which can undermine the trust you’ve built up with the customer unless the news is delivered properly. No one wants to leave their car in your shop for a dash panel upgrade only to come back and learn that a major instrumentation repair has been added to their bill as well. The time to talk to the customer about unanticipated repairs is before they’re done, not afterwards.

Another source of customer dissatisfaction that can be eliminated with better communication is pricing. Some routine, straightforward jobs can be sold at a published flat price. Most of the work you do is probably not simple and routine, however, and you don’t really know how much time it’s going to take until you do it. Pricing tools like automotive flat rate manuals can help, but they’re far from the total solution, especially for complicated work that comes with high expectations.

Again, the solution is openly communicating with the customer at the beginning of the transaction.
Emphasize that the amount of labor, parts, and material required for the job is an estimate. It’s based on your experience with similar jobs so it should be pretty accurate, but it’s still just an estimate, not a guarantee. Explain that you’ll do everything you can to keep the amount of hours under the estimate and assure them that you’ll let them know as soon as possible if it looks like there’s going to be an overrun or if there are additional parts required due to an unforeseen complication.

Then do it! Make sure you have telephone numbers where the customer can be reached during the day while the work is being done and call whenever there’s the least question about any item beyond the estimate. It’s a great temptation to skip the call in the interest of time, but it’s a false economy if the customer blows up when he finds out about the work later. Even if the work is absolutely necessary, it’s going to leave a bad taste in the customer’s mouth and make them hesitant about trusting you in the future. And those kinds of grudges not only last a long time in the customer’s mind, they linger on the word-of-mouth grapevine forever.

Service is the heart of every business. With the growth of online retailers who can sell merchandise below the brick and mortar shop’s costs, selling those services is more important than ever. Following these simple guidelines can make the experience less painful for the customer and more profitable for the shop owner.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Powerful Retail Selling Environments

Having shelves full of merchandise is fine, but it’s almost impossible to up-sell a customer if you just rely on the quantity of SKUs you offer. Even worse, impulse purchases might seem to be more likely, but they are just about non-existent in a cluttered, claustrophobic environment. The most successful retail operations have showrooms that make both of these profitable events happen more often. Here are some tips for making the most of your selling space:

● Your front window is the first impression many customers get, so make sure it’s an appealing one. It should be clean (including the glass), well-lit, and arranged in an uncluttered, entertaining way. Choose the merchandise you’re displaying carefully and remember that it will fade in the sun. Most pros suggest cleaning the space and re-doing the arrangement about once every six weeks.

● Keep the entrance area free of clutter. Customers—especially new ones—generally stop when they come through the door to look around and get their bearings, so give them a little room—and the sight lines—to do that. Avoid big displays just inside the door that might block their view of whatever it is they’re really shopping for.

● Keep your space brightly lit, not just because it makes the merchandise look more appealing, but because it gives a sense of energy and motion to the shopping experience.

● Silence is deadly, so crank up your CD player or radio. Almost any kind of music is good, just as long as it’s not so loud that the customers and your sales staff can’t hear each other.

● Take a tip from the supermarket industry and arrange your merchandise on shelves or racks in ways that encourage impulse buying. Put related items like winter hats and gloves near each other and remember that the items that sell the best tend to be displayed just below eye-level. Generally, goods located above the customer’s head might as well be hidden in the back room for all the attention they’re going to get.

Finally, keep in mind that every interaction with a customer is a transaction whether they buy something or not. Both you and the customer get something from every conversation; you get a chance to qualify them for future business by finding out what kind of lifestyle they have, the size of their family, and other important details that affect their purchasing intentions. They learn (hopefully) that your staff is knowledgeable and eager to assist and that you carry the kind of products that can help them achieve their goals—information that will bring them back again. So, even if they don’t make a purchase, be sure to thank them for coming in and invite them to come back soon.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Retail Customer Service

We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that people are so used to shopping unaided in the aisles of mass-market retailers that they don’t want to be bothered by pesky sales people, but nothing could be further from the truth. What customers don’t like is a clerk hanging around putting silent pressure on them to make a decision. While there may be a few independent souls who want to browse unaided through a plan-o-gram full of merchandise, most people appreciate the expert advice and guidance of a knowledgeable retail sales person, especially when they’re shopping for something more complicated than a bottle of shampoo.

A good retail salesperson does their best work when they help a customer figure out what they need in order to accomplish their goal or fix their problem. Which means, of course, that your staff has to know what they’re talking about. They need to know the lines you carry and what the products do—and don’t do. They need to be able to answer the prospect’s questions and even to suggest questions that the prospect should be asking. If they don’t know the answers, they should know where and how to get them—and make it clear to the customer that they’re willing to do the extra work cheerfully.

Helpful service like this means the sales person needs another set of tools, too: good communication skills. Sometimes, it’s not enough to just ask the customer what he wants. The sales person may need to do a little probing about the customer’s needs or desires before he or she can suggest a good solution. They need to know what kinds of questions to ask and—even more importantly—they need to listen to the answers. Some customers will be able to tell you exactly what they’re looking for, what size they want, and even where it’s located in your inventory. A far greater majority of them, though, are like patients in the doctor’s office; they need somebody to listen to their symptoms, to tell them why it hurts, and to prescribe something they can do about it.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Save 50% on Dynamic Manager Guides During Read An eBook Week

Celebrate Read An eBook Week with 50% off all my full-length books at Smashwords.com. Enjoy any (or all!) of my novels and Dynamic Manager books by using this coupon code when you check out: REW50. Hurry, the sale ends March 10!

Heart Of Diamonds: a novel of scandal, love, and death in the Congo

Hunting Elf, a doggone Christmas story

The Dynamic Manager's Guide To Advertising: How To Grow Your Business With Ads That Work
The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing: How To Create And Nurture Your Best Customers
The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing & Advertising: How To Grow Sales And Boost Your Profits (includes both advertising and marketing books)

The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Sales Techniques: How To Create New Prospects And Make More Sales
The Dynamic Manager's Guide To More Sales: How To Nurture Customers And Grow Your Business
The Dynamic Manager's Guide To Creative Selling: How To Make More Sales And Build A Super Sales Career (includes both sales books)

The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Practical Management: How To Manage Money, People, And Yourself To Increase Your Company’s Profits

As a special bonus, Blind Curve, my collection of short stories, is available this week for free! Just use coupon code REW100.

Check out the thousands of other titles available with big savings at Smashwords.com through March 10. You'll find eBooks for all reading devices--Kindle, Nook, iPad, and others.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Taking Stress Out Of Sales Negotiation

Negotiating has earned its reputation as an unpleasant process in large part because it is inherently stressful. Stress is produced when something or someone blocks a person from obtaining a desired goal, which just about defines the process of negotiation. Each party is blocking the other one in some way. “I won’t buy unless you give me this” is just another way of saying, “You can’t obtain your goal (to get the order) because my demand (to get the concession) is blocking your way.”

Two other stressful things happen in negotiation. The blocks generally get bigger and bigger as the easy concessions are made early and the tough ones—the big price cut or the large volume order—are left to the end. And, the closer you get to the end, the closer each person feels to achieving his or her goal. The carrot is dangled closer and closer to the donkey’s nose.

Stress, stress, stress. That’s the real reason many people feel uncomfortable when put into a negotiating role. The uncertainty of the outcome is stressful. The pressure to make multiple decisions is stressful. The fear of feeling outfoxed is very stressful. It’s certainly a lot less stressful to say, “Sorry, our prices are firm. Take it or leave it.” You get the pain over with.

Negotiation doesn’t have to be that way. I’m not saying that you’ll eliminate the uncertainty, the decision-making, or the possibility of leaving some money on the table, but you can make the process less stressful if you have the right attitude.

The better way, of course, is win/win negotiation, where both parties recognize that the value side of the equation is not finite. If you can focus on building the value of the deal, both the buyer and the seller generally win. Win/win negotiation is at the heart of the Creative Selling System because it focuses on need satisfaction.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Win / Lose Selling

How do you negotiate honorably and successfully? By negotiating both value and price with the goal of striking the most favorable deal for both the buyer and the seller. If there is a morality problem with a negotiated sale, it’s when one party’s aim is to “win” the game at the expense of the other. If both the buyer and the seller can believe in and practice win/win negotiations, everybody’s life is easier and they can sleep better at night.

Unfortunately, too many people engage in win/lose negotiation. They believe that the only way they can gain value is by taking it away from the other person. They view every transaction as a zero-sum game. This belief is anathema to the Creative Selling System. You can’t build long term customer relationships based on taking advantage of the customer every time you sell them something. Sooner or later they’ll figure it out.

When you engage in win/lose negotiation, you create an adversarial relationship with your prospect. That lifeblood of Creative Selling, information about the prospect’s needs, is cut off at the source because the prospect soon realizes that you’re using that information to gain the upper hand in the negotiations.

That’s one of the main reasons, by the way, that the traditional consultive selling approach is so ineffective—many prospects fear that giving information to the consultive seller will just give him ammunition to use in future negotiations. So they clam up or even give misleading information to confuse the seller.

You can’t create solutions to the prospect’s needs unless you learn what those needs are. Without that information, your selling effort degenerates into a guessing game where you have to keep offering different proposals without having the feedback necessary to come up with good ones. And because your ideas don’t very accurately meet the prospect’s needs, fewer sales occur. The win/lose negotiation attitude may produce a larger single order today, but it reduces the probability of getting better orders tomorrow.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Negotiating Sales Like A Pro

Do customers in your industry pay the asking price? Or do they routinely ask for a lower price, better terms, extra merchandise, rebates, slotting fees, or extended service? If you sell business-to-business, you’ve probably never had a customer agree to pay your asking price on the first pass. It’s becoming more common in retail sales, too. What your customers are doing, of course, is practicing an art as old as commerce itself. They’re negotiating.

Negotiation is that stage of the selling process that occurs after the commitment to buy is made but before the sale is actually closed. It’s when the buyer and seller come to terms on the conditions under which the product or service is provided.

Sounds imposing, doesn’t it? And it can be a complicated undertaking, which is why I suggest you approach negotiations as carefully as James Cameron approached the production of Avatar. You need to coordinate all the various components of the negotiation if you are going to produce a successfully orchestrated sale.

Negotiation is a matter of choices by both parties. One party chooses whether or not to offer something and the other one chooses whether or not to accept it. As you’ll see, it’s not always the seller who does the offering, nor is it always the buyer who does the accepting or rejecting. Nor is price the only item subject to negotiation.

When do you negotiate? If you’re a creative seller, you only negotiate the terms of your proposal after the prospect has made the commitment to buy the idea you are selling. If the prospect doesn’t like the idea, no amount of negotiation of the price or any of the other terms will make the sale happen. But once that commitment is made, you can assume that you will negotiate the sale in one way or another.

The price to value ratio is at the heart of every negotiation. Both the buyer and the seller negotiate both sides of that equation, giving gains on one side in return for gains on the other. When the needs of both the buyer and seller are met, the sale occurs.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Making Team Sales Presentations

Each team, even if it consists of only two members, should have a leader. That’s usually the senior person on the team and will be the person the prospect will tend to address with questions. It doesn’t have to be, but it usually happens that way. The leader will also generally be the one to open the presentation and ask the closing question. If there is any question about who’s going to be the leader on your team, settle it before you go into the presentation.

But don’t let the leader look like the Grand Poobah attended by his retinue. If the leader delegates all the menial tasks like handing out materials to the lowly lackeys on the team, the prospect is liable to sense a power display in progress, and react negatively. Eliminate this problem before it arises and make sure the leader is perceived as a member of the team, not its monarch.

On the other end of the scale, also make sure that every member of the team actively participates in the presentation. Each person should have a speaking role of some sort, preferably related to their role in the seller’s plan to serve the prospect’s needs. You don’t want the prospect wondering why that guy in the corner isn’t saying anything while you’re trying to make the points in your presentation. The Metropolitan Opera may need spear-carriers, but your sales team doesn’t.

In order to keep your team call focused on results, make sure everyone on the team understands these points about the upcoming call:

What are we trying to do?
If this call is successful, what will happen?
Who are the key players?
What happened on the last call?
What are we going to ask them to do?
Why should they do it?

The choir always sounds better when they’re all singing the same song.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Preparing For The Team Sales Presentation

Pre-call preparation for the team presentation is essential. You should each know what your respective roles are going to be on the call before you begin the presentation. Even if the presentation is one you’ve done together many times, rehearse it before you go into the meeting. This means everyone on the team, including your company’s CEO. And the practice must be a full dress rehearsal complete with the actual props you’re going to be using.

One of my most embarrassing moments occurred during a team presentation. It happened because we had not rehearsed with the actual materials we were going to use. There were four of us making a pitch that we had done many times together. Our presentations usually involved the top decision makers and were quite lengthy and detailed. We typically used a lot of boilerplate material, but the key points were always customized for the prospect we were pitching.

The climax of the pitch came when I would present our revenue projections for the prospect. I typically jumped into that page like a preacher at a revival, giving it everything I had. On this occasion, though, when I turned the page I saw the headings of the columns of figures carried not this prospect’s name but the name of the company we had pitched the week before. The figures were correct, but they looked like they belonged to another company.

We all saw the simple little word processing mistake at the same time and everyone in the room was embarrassed, including the prospect. But the damage had been done. This little mistake completely undermined the “personal attention to each client” benefit that was our primary selling point. It cost us a $6 million client. The material had been proofread by three people, including me. But we hadn’t used the actual materials in our rehearsal the night before. I’ll always believe that we would have caught the mistake if we had followed that simple little rule.

In addition to the pitch itself, you should also rehearse the answers to particular questions and objections that you expect to crop up. It’s important to know which person on the team is going to answer which question so that there’s no fumbling when it arises. If the prospect asks you about delivery dates, for example, you don’t want a long awkward pause followed by three people giving three different answers all at once. You also don’t want your team leader to “hand off” a question to someone who’s not expecting it.

You also need to organize your visual aids under the management of one member of the team. We’ve all seen blooper video where three outfielders collide under the same fly ball in short center field. You don’t want that to happen to you in front of a room full of prospects, so make sure each piece of equipment and each piece of hand-out material is one person’s responsibility. Your hand-outs, by the way, should be managed the same way they are in a group presentation—the one team member responsible for them passes them out with the order and flow you want.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.