Dear Colleen,

In Agriculture sales our product is commoditized and our prices are regulated by the markets. Of course we all have specialty and “unique” premium products but clients often see us all the same. What can we do to differentiate ourselves and not compete only on price.

Dean

Hi Dean,

This is a great question for everyone – in Ag. sales or otherwise because in a marketplace where customers see similarities everywhere, we can all be reduced to commodities if we are not careful. What you need are a number of differentiators to use use singularly or in tandem on each deal to break past the sameness and win the business.

Here are seven ideas.

“Give them something to talk about” Smoother your prospects in testimonials and referrals from other companies. Its hard to ignore, or resist the word of respected peers in the marketplace.

Meet their expectations.  Ask them point blank what should be in your proposal, what it should cover and what it should cost. You might be surprised at how direct the answers are. Give the customer exactly what they want, in their words, and you will be surprised at how many more deals you close, more quickly (but I won’t be )

Acknowledge and Appreciate. Thank your customers for doing business with you. Acknowledge that they are important to you. reward them for staying with you. This will lead to repeat order and referrals.

Communicate with clients using their preferred technology.It could be face to face, phone, email SKYPE, IM or FaceBook. It’s not for you to decide. Meet your client where they are at and accommodate their requirements. That will set you apart from everyone else who refuses to participate in new modes of communication(and 80% of your competition will refuse to participate)

Be nice. Remember his birthday, his wife’s birthday or his dog’s birthday. Remembering the personal in a business relationships impresses the heck out of people! .

Be easy. Be the easiest to do business with. Let you customer be the diva for a change and help them buy from you in the ways that make sense to them

Be first. Return calls and emails so fast that it becomes part of what you’re known for. Being there first is a dramatic demonstration of how much you care and how you work for the customer.

Be last. Make your presentations and proposals last on their list for review so you can gage their comparison of yours to the others and make your memorable.

Sell more this week!

Colleen

Whether you’re a business owner or part of a company’s sales team, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of the number-one activity that keeps your organization thriving, and that’s client prospecting.

New business and repeat sales both put money in the till but this won’t happen if you don’t have anyone to sell to. However, prospecting is more than just broadening your social network. It’s about finding who can and will buy what you’re selling. And that’s a skill that you can refine and learn to use as an integral part of your work.

Let’s look a bit closer those daily prospecting habits. There are five simple things you can do every day to refine those skills.

1. Pick up the phone.

One of your most powerful selling tools is sitting right there on your desk. Pick up the phone and make a new call to a new potential lead. Successful people who are in the top-ten percent of any organization will tell you that this habit is vital for finding new leads and turn them into customers. Not every call is going to result in a new sale. And sales are not the only reason why you need to pick up that phone every day. Talking to people builds your confidence and teaches you to fine-tune your listening skills. Both of those will help you go a long way to meeting your sales goals.

2. Go to a networking event.

Whether it’s a sales seminar or a charity golf tournament, a networking event is your opportunity to show your face in the community and to meet new people. To be clear, no one is there to buy anything, so NO PITCHING! People at networking events are most definitely keen on making new connections…and new connections can lead to some great relationships. Make time for events in your business calendar, and always be on the lookout for new ones by subscribing to email distribution lists for social events in your area or by joining business- or trade-related groups on social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn.

3. Send an email.

The third thing you can do to hone your prospecting skills is to send an email to a prospective customer to follow-up on an earlier discussion. It costs you nothing but a few minutes of your time and the mere act of reaching out to someone helps to cement the relationship you have with that person. Don’t fall victim to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle. Stay on your prospect’s radar. Remember that for every 30 days your prospects goes without hearing from you, they lose 10% of their potential value to you.

4. Rekindle.

It’s easy for people to fall out of touch. Talk to a client you haven’t heard from in a while. Maybe there’s a reason why that’s happened. A quick note or phone call is often all it takes to rekindle that business relationship you once had with a client and that can result in some pretty exciting leads. Reviving lost customers can be a profitable way to generate business now.

5. Call a satisfied customer.

Call a customer that you know who is really happy with your services. You can call just to say hello, you can share with them a business-related tip, a link to a great news article you just finished reading, or you can even take the opportunity to ask for a referral or a testimonial. Satisfied customers—especially those that you have recently started to work with—have already seen the benefits of the product you sell or the service you provide. Staying in touch and remaining familiar face is how you reinforce that positive experience.

The key to successful prospecting is to make it a daily habit. Never let a day go by without doing at least one thing to generate new business. Recognize that each time you do this, you’re putting new potential leads into your funnel. With time, your commitment to that one simple act will bring great results, including a boost to your bottom line.

Isn’t it true that we often get caught up in rushing through our day. Completing multiple tasks at one time. Putting out fires, firing off emails to “talk” to potential clients, co-workers and family. Taking conference calls when driving to pick up our kids, checking emails while in our office sales meetings. I believe that doing so causes us to lose sight of the real purpose of sales; to create engaging and memorable relationships with everyone in our network.

There is a difference between connecting with someone and engaging with them. That difference is trust. And creating trust requires being nice, staying focused on their needs and treating them with respect.

What is respectful behavior in your relationships?

1. If you receive and email that you feel is challenging or upsetting, pick up the phone and call. Speak with them with genuine curiosity and respect.
2. If you must deliver bad news to a client or a colleague. Use the phone or meet with them face to have a real conversation with them.
3. Listen, do not interrupt. A simple rule to follow is wait three seconds after someone has finished talking before you start. This will ensure you don’t jump in, interrupt or overrun their conversation.
4. If email is the only option, write it once, save as a draft. Sleep on it and review your text the next day. Better yet – send an email that only says, “please can we talk”.
5. Keep your private communications private – no need to tell the whole office or your networking group about an incident you had with a client, prospect or manager
6. Show acknowledgement and appreciation. In Honesty Sells Steven and I teach a technique called “getting into Gear™”. This technique works for client and internal relationships and it goes like this:

G:        Genuine. Say it only if you mean it.  People know when you are being insincere. 

E:        Exact. Explain what you are you acknowledging exactly. Don’t just say, “Thanks for doing a good job.” Say: “I appreciate the work you did on the Jones project. Your attention to detail on the contract negotiation was outstanding!” 

A:        At once. Catch people doing something good and acknowledge it right away. Don’t wait a week. Do it now. Even if you have to make a phone call or send an e-mail rather than acknowledging someone in person. An immediate acknowledgment is always better than a delayed one. 

R:        Regular. You cannot harm people by overappreciating them. 

Your success will  be directly determined by your willingness to communicate with your network in a trust building way.  In good times or bad, the type of salesperson you choose to be is entirely up to you. Choose to be kind, honest, open, and supportive of your clients. You’ll see consistent sales growth; you’ll build an excellent reputation; and you’ll become a leader in your field—regardless of your market or the state of the economy.

Success—real lasting success—hinges on how you look at your work and on the choices you make in getting things done.

It’s especially important to take action towards our own success because frankly most of your less-successful competitors out there today are too busy repeating old mistakes, blaming the recession or even their customers (hard to believe, but true) for their disappointing results. 

Unthink the box

In today’s new economy, no one can afford to keep adhering to that well-used euphemism of “thinking inside the box.” Instead we need to follow the advice of my good friend and motivational speaker, Nido Qubein: now is the time to “throw the box out the window!” Begin with a clear slate and challenge assumptions you might have been making about why customers buy from you—and just as importantly, why they might not be buying right now. 

Don’t succumb to temptation of using tough economic times as a crutch. I’m sure you’ve heard this kind of talk from friends and colleagues: “my industry is suffering… my competition is going out of business… everyone is cutting back…” and so on. Each of these observations about the economy might be supported by facts, but complaining about them isn’t going to help you one bit to become a better sales person. At best, mulling about it will be dead weight that will hold you down. 

The challenge is to take these opinions and ask yourself “how can I capitalize on this to help me reach my personal goals and my sales goals?” Indeed there are many ways to answer the door when opportunity knocks. 

You are your own brand 

The outcome of having a personal philosophy for success is that it helps others with whom your do business to form a positive opinion about you. In turn, this influences the kinds of decisions that your customers make every day. As Seth Godin wisely observed “Consumers don’t make choices as much as they react and respond to the inputs and assumptions they have about the marketplace, their life and your brand.” 

Always remember: no matter what you are selling, you are your own brand. Your personal approach, your habits and the people you choose to surround yourself—all the elements that comprise your personal philosophy—are what can make you stand out in your work and be memorable among your customers

I am always happy when I read feedback from clients who share with me their stories of how they’ve turned their own sales records around after participating at one of our events. And the best feeling of all is when a client come up to me and says: “you really inspired me.” There’s a lot of reward in those words and an insight as well.

You know that I spend a lot of time with clients, and our coaching groups sharing a range of well researched, field-tested approaches to emulating the winning ways of the top 10 percent of achievers. And, I’m also quite frank about my own experiences—the positive ones as well as the ones where things just didn’t turn out so well. It is that mix that, I believe, inspires you best because you identify with my key messages: success in sales doesn’t happen naturally for most of us – It’s something we can learn how to achieve if we find the right teachers.

The right teacher

Fifteen ago, when I formally began my sales career, I was really, really lucky. I found (well actually, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, I was given) a great teacher, named Fred Carr. He didn’t just help light a fire under my career—he also was instrumental in helping me dig myself out of a rather deep financial hole I had created for myself. I’ll explain right now what happened.

In 1992, I was six months into my sales career selling life insurance, and I was failing miserably. The company had provided me with all kinds of sales techniques—including many that had been given cute names, like the Puppy Dog Close or the Hot Potato or Good Cop-Bad Cop. Because I was new and eager, I followed those selling instructions diligently. And after having invested half a year of my life memorizing the techniques, as well as learning my product and following my leads, I hadn’t sold a thing. Nothing. My sales performance chart was a big empty graph with a zero in the corner.

But wait…this story gets worse!

Since I was paid a draw against commission, I also was $12,000 in debt to that employer. They had been paying me $2,000 a month whether I sold anything or not—the plan being that I would pay them back when I enjoyed some good months of sales. But six months had passed and those good months—even just one—remained out of my reach.

And what’s even worse, I discovered that when you’re financially strapped you develop into an emotional wreck, and an unhappy person. Relationships are squandered as you blame others for your failure. I know because I did just that. I Blamed everyone else, for my failure, including my (now ex) husband. Truth be told, failing at sales, also caused the failure of my first marriage.

Despite this dismal situation, my sales manager refused to give up on me. Granted, he was in a tight spot because he knew that if he fired me, he’d be on the hook for that sizeable draw I had been pulling for so many fruitless months. Thank god, he also saw some potential in me.

That’s when Fred entered the picture. When my sales manager partnered me with Fred, I learned quickly that he was the top performer in the office. That $12,000 debt I had accumulated over six months? Fred was earning that…in a week. And I learned something even more important from him. He taught me how he had become so successful in his work.

Rethinking sales

Fred and I talked a lot about the approaches I was using to sell life insurance. I explained how I had been following all the sales techniques the company had taught me to use. And I also offered my own – and now obvious – opinion: “Fred, I have to admit that I really don’t think these techniques work.” He agreed.

Fred taught me to rethink my sales approach—to trust my instincts and to be weary of sales techniques (especially the ones with the cute names). The trouble with most of the techniques that are out there is that they belong to someone else—there’s no room for your personal stamp (although I’ve often wondered if there really is somebody out there who has been wildly successful for all these years, thanks to all these techniques they’ve authored).

Techniques also tend to impose a tightly systematized way of doing things—telling you what to say and when to say it, sometimes in such excruciating detail you’d swear that the author was programming a robot rather than teaching a human being how to sell to others. There’s a real danger in sticking to that approach. If you devote all your energies to following one of these techniques, you can become more preoccupied with adhering to its processes and its steps than with listening to the needs of your prospects and clients. That’s what happened to me when I was striking out month after month before Fred put me on the right track.

Fred’s lesson to me, and it’s one I’ve never forgotten, is that all these old-school sales techniques are a nuisance that keep you from your real job as a sales professional—to build great relationships with prospects and turn them into repeat customers.

Once I started looking at sales in this new light, I was able to rethink what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. What was missing from my approach were the very things that had the potential of turning me into a great sales person—being a good listener, being a problem solver, being sincerely interested in others. Let me be clear. Those aren’t just qualities that I alone posses—we all have these traits. Rethinking the sales process is all about finding a common-sense approach, building on those strengths, so you can work with, listen to and tend to the needs of your customers.

Whether it’s adapting your approach to suit a buyer’s behavior, working to build reciprocal relationships with prospects and clients, or changing the way you tackle cold calling so that it becomes the start of a conversation that you want to initiate—there’s a lot you can do to develop a winning sales approach that is custom fitted to your needs and your sales targets.

I was lucky to have Fred as a teacher (and to have had a boss whose faith in me was unwavering). I learned a lot (and probably just in the nick of time, too). That’s why I’m always pleased to share these personal experiences with you. Being successful in sales doesn’t hinge on following a process or a technique. It’s all about having the right mindset and persevering.

Success leaves clues. That’s a favorite saying of mind. In 1992 I was dumb enough to make a lot of mistakes that hurt me and others, and at the same time was at least smart enough to recognize that if Fred could do it I could do it too. Always be on the lookout for smart successful people to learn from in your life. They are the best teachers of your own success.