Sales Effectiveness

What people say about High Impact Presenting

In Cannes each year judges select the best media agency presentation from fifty competing countries. These are the Young Lions and I trained the Australian team to represent us in the competition. Watch the video to see what the participants thought of the training, interesting that of all the things we covered in the day they rated confidence as the main outcome.     

Sales Strategy in four steps

To run an effective sales organisation you must know what to do, how to do it and why to do it - that is sales strategy, sales skills and sales motivation. The sales strategy step has four elements –

1. Territory plan. This comprises where you are selling in terms of geography or client set. It identifies who you’re A, B and C customers are, and identifies your value proposition at the territory level.

2. Account Plans. For each of the A accounts you will need an Account Plan which focuses you on how to maximize the sales potential for this A account. It should also identify the key opportunities arising from this client

3. Opportunity Plan. This is core work for sales people – how to identify and close opportunities. The plan asks questions like ‘is this an opportunity?’, ‘is it worth winning?’ and ‘can we win?’

4. Engagement Strategy. For every client identified by the Territory Plan you will need to know how you plan to cover them. The A clients are addressed by the Account Pan, for the Bs and Cs you will need to know how you plan to service them. You can then go ahead and plan your month and quarter based on your coverage plan.

The 'my dear old mother close'

Sometimes it’s easier to define influencing by defining what it’s not, and it’s definitely not those near extinct dinosaurs the traditional salespeople. Tom Hopkins is the master of traditional selling and all the reasons it’s becoming extinct. (http://www.tomhopkins.com/)  Tom Hopkins became a master in real estate selling when he became a millionaire at 27, then he achieved legend status in his last year in by selling 265 houses in a year – that’s selling one house every day for 365 days. When he retired from selling he became a world famous sales trainer and published a book ‘How to master the art of selling anything’ (subtitled ‘Secrets of the world’s leading super salesman’) he devotes a chapter to closing techniques. Here’s a taster from Tom’s tips he calls the ‘My dear old mother’ close:

This is a cute one. In the right situation, it’ll really shake the apples out of the tree. To use it, you have to talk to someone’s mother – your own if possible, someone else’s if not – in which case you say, ‘ A dear old mother who means a great deal to me…’

You first ask mother to repeat some advise she probably gave you years ago that you’ve forgotten. So ask her, ‘Mom, would you tell me, word for word, that silence means consent?’ After she’s told you that, mind your mother. (It’s absolutely essential to go through these steps by talking to you mother – or someone’s mother – before you use this technique. Unless you demand honesty of yourself, you can’t project a convincing image of integrity.) Here’s how you use mother’s advise: Let’s go back to J. Douglas Edwards’ statement: ‘Whenever you ask a closing question, shut up. The first person, who speaks, loses.’

That’s very sound advice. Between ninety and ninety-five percent of the time, if you go against it and speak first, you’ll lose. So don’t go against it until you’ve risen far above the average and can start going for that last five or ten percent, until you’ve learned when the tension hurts the close instead of making it, until you’ve learned a way to break the tension and still close. That’s where dear old mother comes in. If you’ve been wondering what she’s done for you lately, here’s your answer.

This technique can be your salvation when you find yourself involved in a series of silences as you roll from close to close with the same prospect.

If you have a clever way to break tension, pressure turns into humour. Explosive laughter sometimes. Lots of people can handle pressure, but laughter will pop them wide open.

So when the pressure has been on for several seconds after your last close and it’s getting heavy in the room, suddenly grin from ear to ear and say, ‘My dear old mother said, “Silence means consent.” Was she right?”

No Tom, your dear old mother, and you, are wrong. What’s right is genuine collaboration and exploration of mutual value, not tricky inappropriate closing techniques.

Be an influencer not a waiter

You must decide to be an influencer – to impact the world around you. It sounds like a lot of work and it is. But deciding to be an influencer is a lot easier that deciding to be passive, to allow the world to impact you on all levels, because the energy it takes to be passive is a lot harder than what it takes make change happen. Not just any change, but positive change on your terms.

Being an Influencer doesn’t just mean just building relationships, understanding needs and recommending ways for clients to meet them. This is the waiter approach – find out what the guest would like for dinner and bring it to them. This works in restaurants but not in business because the client doesn’t always know what they want. It may also not be enough because you could have a client who has a very firm view about what they want but it just won’t work. In both cases you will need to provoke the client by challenging their thinking or challenging them to take action that’s required. That provocation is what builds value and trust.

Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is the world's best at making impactful business presentations and this Business Week Article tells you ten reasons why. Download GoToMeeting_Presentation_Secrets_of_Steve_Jobs . The whole article is a great read but pay particular attention to 'why should I care?' (selling the benefits), stick to the rule of three and use dominant images in your visual aids.

Ten questions to ask when planning a business project

When you are looking at a business issue the quality of your response is the quality of your answer to ten questions. Here they are in PowerPoint format.

Download ProjectPlanning _2010

The influence process

Like most things in life a process is a useful place to start. The influence process has six main steps which are:

1. Be clear on your goal

2. Establish rapport

3. Take the lead

4. Understand their values

5. Make a recommendation

6. Reach an agreement

If you'd like the Metta Influence template then click here to download:

Download Relationship_Strategy_hires

Metta Presentation Format

All effective communication has a structure - from movies and TV commercials to books and stories. When it comes to presenting the best formats are based on the ideas of Bernice McCarthy. If you'd like a copy of the Metta Presentation Format based on the McCarthy model please click here:

Download PresentationFormat

How to keep customers in a recession

If you are thinking about how to keep your customers in a recession then read on. When customers leave you it’s more about your poor service level than the attractiveness of competitors. According to the American Society of Equality and Productivity Centre the top reasons why companies loose customers are rated as follows:

·         Service Dissatisfaction 68%

·         Product Dissatisfaction 14%

·         Lured by competitor 9%

·         Influenced by friends 5%

·         Customer moves 4%

The number one factor in service dissatisfaction is a lack of being understood by the service provider.  So go ahead and serve your customers better, or someone else will.

The gender power imbalance

For too long now we have experienced a gender imbalance in power.

We’ll look at:

1. Gender power gap

2. How it developed

3. What we can do about it and

4. Some reasons why things may be changing.

1. Gender power gap

As women progress in their careers they are less likely to reach senior positions.

According to the Australian Census of Women in leadership:

1.    Girls are getting best results at school and universities but this is not reflected in their careers. Half of our graduates are women but only:

· 33% in management positions

· 15% are in executive ranks.

· Only 4% in executive board positions

The Equal Opportunity in the Workplace Agency found that female senior executives identified as top earners by the ASX200 companies are paid 58% of their male counterparts in comparable roles.

2. Eight reasons why the gap developed

The first four of these come from the work of Linda Carli (see the Journal of Social Issues Spring 1999).

1.   Reward – Men have more control over resources.

2.   Coercive – Men have more senior positions and are more willing to use coercive power & bully.

3.   Expert – Men are presumed to have more expertise.

4.   Legitimate Power – Men assume power more easily than women.

5.   Glass Cliff

Women are more likely to be placed in precarious leadership roles than men. (Women in the Boardroom UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development).

6.  Sticky Floor.

For some women its choice – they choose not to compete for the senior roles.  Lisa Gordon joined the board of Chrystalis at age 28, being the youngest woman ever appointed as director of a FTSE 250 company. She worked fulltime them part time until 2002 when she resigned to spend more time with her family. The following is a link to her story: www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3300296/I-am-choosing-not-to-want-it-all.html

7.   Socialisation.

Women are often socialized into not taking power positions. See Deborah Cameron’s (1992) work on studying children in the playground and following the differences in developing leadership, collaboration and leadership styles:

“Boys tend to play in large groups organized hierarchically: thus they learn direct, confrontational speech. Girls play in small groups of “best friends” where they learn to maximize intimacy and mimimise conflict.”

8.  Corporate Culture

AIM Survey -63% of respondents said Australian companies are not supportive of women “who seek to achieve seniority equivalent to their male counterparts.”

3. What can we do about it?

The power of influence

When you are influencing others look to understand first and persuade second, and the best understanding is based on values. The three most common values in business are power, security or reward. One model of values is called Spiral Dynamics you can find out more at www.spiraldynamics.org

The power of authenticity

You will be most powerful when you are most yourself and operating from your signature strengths. Strengths are what you love and make you feel good. You can find out your strengths at www.authentichappiness.org and take the VIA signature strengths test.

You will be most powerful when you are happiest and genuine happiness comes from finding a way to contribute your strengths to something bigger than you. For me it’s the local Nippers program.

Authenticity also comes from alignment – aligning who you are with what you do and how you spend time. The best in this area is still Stephen Covey, check out his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or visit him at www.stephencovey.com

Power of resilience

People like Brian Walker from CSIRO are key to the recovery efforts after disasters like the Victorian bush fires earlier this year. He studies how plants, animals and people absorb shock and sustain. The key question is ‘how much can you change without losing your identity?’

Systems have a threshold or a tipping point which is the limit of what you can absorb. This threshold is not fixed.

Resilience is defined as the capacity to absorb disturbance and retain the same features and functions – to have the same identity. The magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed is the level of resilience present. The resilience of any system is developed by probing its boundaries

How do you perform at a consistently increasing level?

How much stress can you absorb?

The best work in this area is developed by Dr Herb Benson from the Harvard Medical School Institute of Mind Body Medicine. You can visit him at www.mbmi.org . Herb recommends relaxation and meditation as a way to reset the mind and body (look for the Relaxation Response on his website).

There are great examples of the power of meditation to create profound change for people. One example is Jenny Philips work teaching maximum security prisoners in Alabama how to use meditation to find peace. Have a look at her book East Meets West in The Deep South or the video at www.dhammabrothers.com

For how to eat for high performance look at the work of Professor Jennie Brand-Miller at Sydney University. Her book the New Glucose Revolution is excellent. Low GI eating is linked to high mental function and creates less stress in the body - have a look at  http://www.glycemicindex.com/  or find out more on Jennie at www.medfac.usyd.edu.au/people/academics/featured/brand_miller.php

4. Reasons to be hopeful about change

There are five good reasons why things may be about to change in the gender power gap.

1.   Economic crisis means reward greed & coercive power  are questioned

2.   Boards with female members do better than male only boards

· Companies with women as executive directors have delivered average returns of nearly 14% over the past two years, those run by men mustered 10% (UK Cranfield School of Management study 2004).

· Fortune 500 companies with the largest representation of women board directors and corporate officers achieve, on average, higher financial performance. (July 2008 Study by US Catalyst Group).

· At time of great financial downtown in the financial markets companies that appointed a woman executive director experienced a marked increase in share price after the appointment and a period of financial stability. (Women in the Boardroom UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development).

3.   Wisdom of crowds

A well formed diverse and informed group makes a better decision that its smartest member. See James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds.

 

4. Neuroplasticity – means we can all change our minds – brains are not fixed machines. Have a look at the work here of Norman Doidge.

 

   5. Rise of goodwill in the catastrophe. See the work here of Adam Philips and Barbara Taylor in their book ‘On Kindness’ where the authors document the value of kindness and its huge increase after a catastrophe.

Here are some additional resources which explore the gender power issue further:

Download Gender&Leadership

Download Gender&Management

Download Women&Power

Download WomenTakeCareMenTakeCharge