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Note: With profound apologies to my smokin’ hot wife, Kay, …the world’s #1 muffler sales person…the author of the really good book, Uncopyable Sales Secrets: How to Create an Unfair Advantage and Outsell Your Competition… I share here about my own sales experience.
\nWe can all look back on our lives and, depending on the circumstances, remember moments of epiphany or, at the very least, moments where our eyes were opened to a new realization. Maybe it was the moment you realized your heroes were human and had feet of clay, like all of us. I've had that. Maybe it was the moment you realized life wasn't always fair. I've had that one, too.
\nFortunately, most lessons aren't this harsh. And, interestingly, we sometimes get that blinding flash of the obvious few others will ever get.
\nSo stay with me here, because I'm going to share two big epiphanies regarding sales and marketing I had back in the 1970's that, ultimately, made a huge difference in my own personal success.
\nThe first lesson occurred while I was attending the University of Arizona. I'd decided to take the five-year plan towards graduation and was in my fifth year, hoping it wouldn't become the six-year plan.
\nI'd used up my NCAA eligibility, so I wasn't on the golf team and didn't have a scholarship. To pay my bills I became the mid-day 10:00 - 2:00 disc jockey for KIKX-AM in Tucson.
\nIt was a total blast. This was back in the day when every radio station's jocks were \"personalities.\" Unlike today's \"time and temperature\" DJs who have pre-programmed music and only a limited amount of actual airtime, we were free to play music in whatever order we wanted, talk about anything we wanted and even ramble on. I was sandwiched between two certifiable maniacs. Gary \"The Crazy Man\" Craig was the morning drive-time jock and Jefferson Stone did afternoon drive-time.
\nSide Note: My on-air name was “Randy Lane.” What a stupid name. For some reason, I thought every DJ had a pseudonym. When I met Steve Miller, the rock star, at a concert KIKX sponsored, I told him what my real name was. He looked at me like I was a total idiot, and asked, “You chose RANDY LANE over STEVE MILLER?” Since then I promised myself that if I ever went back into radio, I would have a really cool name. I’ve collected some as examples: Winston Fink, Basil Stetson, Nick Firestone. What do you think?
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\nKIKX never had big ratings on Arbitron, so we tried everything. Ultimately, we crossed the line and fake \"kidnapped\" Gary, getting the station in hot water with the FCC.
\nBut that’s another story...
\nMy happy and crazy little on-air world was short-lived. A few months after I started, the station manager called all the disc jockeys into his office to announce a change in business policy. To augment the clearly unsuccessful sales staff KIKX had, he instructed us to help sell commercial spots in our own time-slots. If we weren't successful, we would be replaced.
\nI knew nothing about sales, so the station's sales manager suggested I read books. With this helpful direction I picked a couple of books from the library. I don't remember the titles, but I clearly remember the basic premise of both...pitch hard, ask for the order multiple times, have seventeen methods ready to overcome objections, ask for the order some more, and ABC – always be closing. If you didn't close today, come back tomorrow, and keep coming back until you got the order.
\nMy \"leads\" came out of the Yellow Pages - again, a helpful tool proved by our sales manager. I was instructed to start at \"A,\" hit the pavement and start knocking on doors.
\nTo say I was nervous is an understatement. I was terrified. More often than not, I couldn't even get myself to open a business's front door. Yes, I could tell by looking at a closed door they were not a prospect.
\nOn the few instances where I somehow did open the front door, my sales pitches were abysmal. I stammered and stuttered my way through my \"presentation,\" clearly not having any idea what I was doing.
\nMore often than not, my presentation was cut short with a curt, \"I'm not interested.\" Tail between my legs, I'd leave. However, one particular businessman must have felt sorry for me, because despite my lack of sales knowledge and ability, he was nice to me. I must have taken his niceness as a buying signal, because I came back the next day. And the next.
\nI now realize he didn't want to buy anything, but I must have worn him down. After a few days he placed a small order. A really small order.
\nEmboldened by this major success, I remembered one of the tactics taught in my sales books--the best time to ask for a referral is immediately after they buy!
\nAs he signed the order, I blurted out, \"So, do you have any friends who might also be interested in advertising with us?\"
\nHe looked at me and laughed, \"But Steve, they're my friends!\"
\nAnd so my first epiphany.
\nThe sell-hard-always-be-closing-overcome-objections-take-no-prisoners approach to sales was WRONG. That style treats sales as confrontation...as a zero sum game where there is a winner and a loser. I didn't know what the answer was, but I somehow understood this way was not right.
\nFast forward about six years. I'd gone on to play professional golf and do a little work in Hollywood. But I needed a new career. A member of the country club in Albuquerque I'd played out of owned a small stock brokerage and offered me a job. He sent me to Denver where I attended a school to get my Registered Representative license. Somehow I passed.
\nSitting at my desk back in Albuquerque, I wondered what I was supposed to do next. My new boss walked up, dropped the local White Pages on my desk and said, \"Here are your leads. Start dialing!\"
\nIt was déja vu all over again. The only difference was the first time was a B2B situation where we were handed Yellow Pages, while the second time was B2C and the White Pages.
\nAs I'm sure you figured out, I didn't last long in that situation, either. In fact, I still vividly remember the last thing the KIKX sales manager said after I was fired: \"Steve, I wouldn't recommend a career in sales.\"
\nBut I did stay in sales and, ultimately, got into marketing. And, all humility aside, I became a pretty damn good salesperson and marketer.
\nMy last real job was as Vice-President of International Sales & Marketing for a Japanese company called Shinsei Corporation. We were the largest manufacturer of radio control toys in the world. I was the highest ranking non-Japanese.
\nWhat changed? What did I learn that made all the difference in the world?
\n1. I learned sales is not a contact sport. Unlike my sales manager at KIKX or my brokerage boss, I don’t have the attitude that you have my money in your pocket.
\nThis is not about Us vs. Them. Wikipedia defines sales as, “…the exchange of a product or service for money or other compensation. Signalling completion of the prospective stage, it is the beginning of an engagement between customer and vendor or the extension of that engagement.”
\nThe two key words in that definition to me are exchange and engagement. These are not harsh words. These are words that describe a mutually beneficial relationship. Just because you’re giving me money doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the more valuable role in this exchange. The value of what I deliver may be worth much more.
\n2. I learned my job as salesperson (and ultimately, marketer) was to join the conversation already going on in my prospect’s mind. At the radio station, for example, I needed to know: What business did they think they were in? How did they see their brand? How did they want prospects to see their brand? Who were their prospects? What problem/need/want/desire did they fill for their customers? How did they currently communicate with their customers? What marketing tools were they currently using successfully? Did their customers fit the demographic of our radio station?
\nOnce I learned there was another way of selling, everything changed for me. I wasn’t meeting people with the intention of selling them whether they needed my service or not. I was there to help them be more successful, and if I couldn’t help them be more successful, I’d leave. We had to BOTH win. That was the exchange. And if we both won, then we could establish a long-term engagement.
\n3. I learned the relationship begins long before the sale. I learned to start with the concept that I didn’t know how long it would take to turn a prospect into a customer. I wasn’t trying to close in every meeting.
\nHow many contacts does it take to close an average sale? Obviously, it varies somewhat from industry to industry and even from inside sales versus outside, but the numbers aren’t that far apart.
\nI am very reluctant to share the following information*, as I can’t confirm these statistics are true. However, I do believe they are close to the truth.
\n· 48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect
\n· 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop
\n· 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop
\n· Only 10% of sales people make more than three contacts.
\nHOWEVER…
\n· 2% of sales are made on the first contact
\n· 3% of sales are made on the second contact
\n· 5% of sales are made on the third contact
\n· 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
\n· 80% of sales are made after the fifth contact.
\nThese numbers not only drive home the importance of establishing an ongoing relationship as soon as possible, but they also give a big reason why I came to believe in the importance of marketing.
\n4. I learned marketing makes a salesperson’s job more efficient.
\nSales is a human-to-human (H2H) endeavor. Whether it’s face-to-face (F2F), on the telephone, or via the Internet, it’s still two people communicating in some type of personal manner. This H2H contact is the obvious strength of sales.
\nBut our strengths are also our weaknesses. And in this case, there are three weaknesses.
\nWe worked with a company that manufactures welding equipment. At a national sales meeting, we determined their salespeople made, on average, about fourteen sales calls a week. When you factor in other time-based activities like planning time, phone time, travel time, follow-up time, and customer service time, it’s easy to see why the cost of a sales call is so high.
\nMarketing, on the other hand, has the ability to connect with many times that. Which also leads to addressing the second weakness of sales...
\nHow many companies approach sales the same way my two bosses did? We find an directory, or maybe just the Yellow Pages, hand it to a salesperson and say, “Start dialing!”
\nIf we rely on salespeople to make the initial contact (i.e. cold calls), we’re asking salespeople to make a lot of F2F calls leading nowhere. Take my welding equipment client for example. Their average salesperson makes 14 calls a week. If these were all cold calls, what percentage of these contacts could we reasonably expect to become customers? 10%? 20%?
\nYet historically, that’s exactly what we ask salespeople to do. Good marketing, on the other hand, makes sales much more efficient by taking those preliminary steps out of their hands. Good marketing has the ability to contact a target market and narrow down the list by getting people to raise their hands, if they’re interested. After culling out people who really aren’t good prospects and capturing those who are, we can hand those names over to sales. Now, instead of cold-calling strangers, our salespeople have appointments with only those who have jumped onto our conveyor belt. The “engagement” with a qualified prospect has already begun and, as a result, the closing rate goes up. The simple fact is, good marketing eliminates F2F cold calls.
\nHow many companies have suffered because their star salesperson abruptly left? How many times has a salesperson moved to a competitor and taken all his/her clients along?
\nMarketing should always be the daily responsibility of a company’s top person. Marketing has the ability to establish and maintain a high quality relationship with customers and prospects. Yes, a salesperson plays a vital role in the connection with a customer, but it’s a mistake to let a salesperson control 100% of that relationship.
\nAfter I learned about about “exchange” and “engagement,” my fears disappeared. I no longer saw sales as confrontation. I was able to see my initial contacts as simply fact-finding missions. I stopped pitching and started listening. My prospects became friendlier, more comfortable, and more open.
\nAnd you know what? My sales went up. Way up. And then when I learned marketing, sales went up even more.
\nI wonder where my radio station sales manager is today?
\n* These statistics have been widely quoted by sales and marketers gurus for years. They are supposedly from a study done by the National Association of Sales Professionals (nasp.com). However, the only place I find it referenced is by the gurus. It is nowhere to be found on the NASP website.
\nUnfortunately, this is all too common. Much like the also famous 1979 Harvard Goal Study (or was it the famous 1953 Yale Goal Study?), which never existed, a good story gets spread around. It’s even better when that good story has great statistics from a “study” supporting a belief we want to have.
\nI share the NASP “study” for two reasons. First, I think we can all agree salespeople often give up too soon. I can also cite my own research regarding follow-up after trade shows. Over the last 20+ years I have asked tens of thousands of attendees how well exhibitors follow-up. The results are abysmal with over 40% never following up at all. My studies seem to at least correlate with the NASP “study.”
\nMy second reason for sharing is to give me a brief platform for exposing such falsehoods. Be careful when quoting studies and statistics without performing your own due diligence. Many, many top gurus are guilty of using such information simply because it’s convenient. And regardless of whether the information makes perfect sense or not, if we can’t prove a study exists with all our resources today, it probably doesn’t.
\nI also want to point out that I am not the original Mythbuster on this. Back in August 2014, a writer for Venture Beat named Stewart Rogers called this “study” out as completely false.
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\nIn return for encroaching on my wife's territory, I feel it's important I tell you about her NEW podcast!!
\nUncopyable Women in Sales is Kay interviewing exceptional women in sales, as they share their experiences, success strategies and tools you can use to crush your sales goals. Kay has a successful sales track record of her own, earning the nickname “Muffler Mama” when she sold more automotive mufflers than anyone in the world. Kay and her guests deliver actionable insights and real-world tools that will help you overcome obstacles, adopt a winning mindset, and maximize your sales results.
\nMy understanding is only women are allowed to listen, so if you're a man and still want to learn some GREAT sales tips, just know you have been warned.
\nThat's it for this week! Tell your friends about us.
\nThanks for joining us again! We appreciate you.
\nAlways remember...
\nBe Uncopyable!
\nSteve & Kay Miller
\nWhenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways we can help you:
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