The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Costumes, Ghosts and Goblins, Spooky Spiders, and Candy are fun Halloween traditions. Each year, children dress up and go door-to-door exclaiming “trick or treat” in hopes of getting a handful of candy to add to the stash they’ve already collected. To a child, there is no such thing as too much candy… in fact the one with the most candy by the end of the night wins. What’s interesting is while children give the choice… “trick or treat,” we all know that they don’t want to be tricked. All they really want is treats!  They want to be delighted with yummy, fun to eat candy.

Are You Tricking Your Clients?

Your customers are the same… they don’t want any tricks; they just want to be delighted with the treats you give them. Only treats are no longer sugary bites wrapped in bright, colorful paper. They are valuable solutions, tailored to meet their very specific needs.  And they provide a measurable benefit to the organization and often times the person and/or person(s) buying that solution. Developing customized solutions is not easy though; it requires the ability to first identify the problem. And uncovering the point of pain, or challenge that needs a solution is difficult!  

Following are 5 ways to help you uncover the point of pain so you can treat your customers with effective and valuable solutions:

Decades ago, I was involved in some emergency response training that—even though I did not pursue a career in the field—sticks with me today. They dropped a group of us off at a road-side ditch where a fake car accident had been staged, complete with actors and dummies representing the victims. The challenge was simple:

“What would you do right here, right now, with what you have to work with?”

What a great question, challenging each of us to improvise… and take action.  

We live in an age where there are all kinds of new technologies and tools that are supposed to make our lives easier, our work more productive, and our time more efficient. So it’s easy to want all of those awesome tools!  But just as your household budget does not expand with every wish and desire that crosses your mind, your company must invest according to priorities and available resources. 

So you can't always have every new computer, tablet, app, or piece of office equipment you’d like. You can’t go to every educational conference you’d like to attend, and you aren’t allowed to donate a bunch of “bonus inventory” to every client who’s asking for a better (no, cheaper) deal.

Here’s how the strongest professionals WON’T respond to those situations (insert whiny voice here):

The best inbound marketing programs and the ones that create the most leads are not necessarily the ones that develop the most content or have the prettiest infographics.  The most successful inbound marketing programs are the ones that embrace inbound marketing throughout the organization, and understand that in order to succeed it will take more than just the efforts of one person.  An inbound culture differs from an outbound culture in that the expectation within an inbound culture is that the company’s website and blog will be sought out and found by our prospects, because of the great content that’s created rather than having to utilize outbound methods to attract prospects to their website.  

In a very basic sense, an inbound culture understands that the very core of their existence is based upon trying to solve their prospect’s needs and explaining to them in a non-sales oriented way how they can do that for them.  

There are several characteristics that successful inbound marketing organizations share and we have listed our top 5 below.

The Greek Festival of Dallas, where 20,000 food and culture lovers gather every year, just concluded.

Every year I work with the Festival Team to make the purchasing decisions for marketing, food, and a plethora of other items that make the Festival run smoothly. This year we dealt with almost 100 vendors and all of them were thrilled to get our business.  Many of them, however, didn’t take the time to understand our business or have followed up on this year’s results. Next week the Festival Team will be meeting to review everything we purchased to determine what was a good investment and what could be eliminated. 

The fate of a vendor’s renewal for next year’s festival will primarily be determined at that time. Those who understood our business and had suggestions to get better results next year will not only be renewed but probably get more money from us.

Winston Churchill said “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.” There is a sweet spot you need to find as a leader.  You can’t spend too much time dreaming about a future you aren’t sure how to get to, but you also can’t fail to set goals and develop plans that will improve revenue performance.  Churchill is encouraging us not to look so far ahead that we set our eyes on a destination for which we have no clear route in which to get there. This is very important advice! 

As the calendar moves toward the end of the year and you look ahead to the start of another, it’s time to evaluate how your sales department is doing and determine changes you will make in the coming year.  We have a tool we use for this process that is called the Performance Prism.  The metaphor is this… “Just as a prism separates light into its component colors, our Performance Prism separates a sales organization into its components.” This approach will force you to break down each important area (like the prism separates light) and search for opportunities for improvement. It will also prevent you from looking too far ahead, but instead will help you focus on the next link in the chain that will move you along the desired path.

The key areas of the Performance Prism are:

• Goals & Values
• Structure & Process
• Metrics & Accountability
• Talent & Skill

For several years The Center for Sales Strategy has been saying that the combination of outbound marketing plus inbound marketing is the exact sweet spot where marketers can earn the greatest results. This is a reality because it's how the consumer wants it, and when it comes to achieving results that's what matters most. 

It happens all the time when you hear or see a commercial message; it sparks an interest or a thought or an idea and while you might not be ready to be a customer at that exact moment, you are interested enough to want a little more information. So what do you do?  Nowadays most people take out their phone and google it! Or if there is a memorable (vanity) URL they might even go directly there. And if the marketer has done their job correctly, when the consumer arrives to the site, it will be the perfect landing page optimized with responsive design and presenting the exact information the consumer is looking for. 

What happens next?

Tomorrow is going to have 24 hours, whether you like it or not. And just as this very hour is slipping by as you read this article, tomorrow’s hours are going to drift away, too.  There’s nothing you can do to “manage” time.

If you work for a traditional media company (TV, Radio, Newspaper, etc.) you likely have a wide range of tools to help clients reach consumers.  You have all your traditional assets and a growing set of digital capabilities.  When put together, you can create powerful tailored solutions—better than you could before digital came along, and better than a company that only has digital capabilities.  And if you are an advertiser, looking for a partner to help you reach the consumers you seek, give serious thought to how a local media company can help you achieve your goals. 

If you’re in sales, you spend a lot of your time asking other people to buy something. Think about the last time you purchased something. Was it coffee on the way to work, an app on your phone, or something bigger like a new home appliance? Do you remember why you bought it now, instead of later?

When I look back at the last few things I’ve purchased I find my tipping point is usually based on the experience during the purchase process. The salesperson (or their website) either asked the right questions or simply made the buying process enjoyable.

There is a moment in every buying decision when logic and emotion meet. 

Most of us have had the experience of staring at a blank sheet of paper or empty document on our computer… and struggled mightily to come up with those first few words.

The screen stares back at you… empty. Taunting you.  Laughing at you.  You know that if you could just come up with the first few words, the rest of your document would flow onto the keyboard almost magically. But those first few words are nothing less than a logjam keeping the rest of your thoughts backed up.

You may be in B2B sales, but did you know there are consumer trends that you can use to your advantage? As a Consumer Behavior Analyst, much of my focus is on identifying consumer trends among various industries. 

Why? So businesses can better understand how to serve their consumers and ultimately, profit. Let’s not forget, we are all consumers – and it’s not something we can just turn off. Therefore, these trends may apply to consumers of your products and services (your prospects and clients).

In August, my colleague, Emily Estey, wrote about how expensive meetings can be. I am in complete and total agreement with her. I have wasted decades of my life in sales meetings, department head meetings, and promotion meetings. OK, maybe not decades, but you get the point. 

But let’s focus on sales meetings today. Sales meetings can be a useful tool for managers, if you follow these simple do’s and don'ts:

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