The Sales Training Series: Gaining Commitment
Employers value salespeople based on their ability to Gain a Sales Commitment. Improving this sales skill has never been more important than it is today. So, what are you doing to get better?
Here are several ideas on how you can improve your sales effectiveness at gaining customer commitments.
Always Have a Commitment Objective!
Our recent research shows that nearly 80% of salespeople do not understand what their primary purpose is. Your principle mission in sales is to Gain Commitment. The confusion stems from the variety of tasks we as salespeople are asked to perform. The end result is that 62% of salespeople make calls where there is no attempt at Gaining Commitment. One of the most important reasons why this occurs is most salespeople do not establish what we call a Commitment Objective for every sales call. This is the number one mistake that all salespeople make. Well, it's time to change that!
Commitment Objective: A goal we set for ourselves to gain agreement from the customer that moves the sales process forward.
No sales call should ever be made without a Commitment Objective. If you do not have a Commitment Objective firmly planted in your mind, you
will wind up being one of those 62% that don't ask for Commitment.
In The Field:
Newly hired salespeople at Melody Inc., a Muzak Franchise, are required to make sales calls with veteran salespeople. Toward the end of one recent call, the prospect asked the veteran if he could keep the company brochure and share it with his partner. The veteran was happy to comply and began to pack up his briefcase.
The newly hired salesperson had recently gone through Action Selling Sales Training and learned about reaching a Commitment Objective. She decided that it would make sense to capitalize on the prospect's interest and schedule the next logical step - a proposal meeting. So she said, "As a next step I would recommend that we plan another meeting with yourself and your partner. We will prepare a proposal that documents what we have discussed and the solution we recommend. How does that sound?"
You guessed it. They scheduled a proposal meeting for a week later. During the next meeting they Gained Commitment for the business.
Author Bio:
Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based Sales Training Company that has trained and certified more than 200,000 salespeople in the system and skills of Action
Selling. He has personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions.
For more information on sales training programs, sales books or Action Selling, go to http://www.thesalesboard.com or call 800-232-3485.
Capture Clients with Words That 'Hook' and Graphics That 'Kick!'
Do the marketing pieces you send out lack pizzazz and personality? Are they capturing the clients you want to work with?
As your company's in-house graphics person--perhaps more by default than by intention--you're pressed to be a jack/jill-of-all-trades. You want to do a great job of producing promotional pieces, but you have little time to learn advanced design and marketing skills.
Your ongoing challenge is learning to do a little more to get a lot better results--quickly and painlessly.
How can you improve them? What Techniques Can You Apply NOW?
Take these 5 design/marketing tips to heart. Using them consistently will save you time in the long run and attract more customers.
#1 Develop a brand identity and stick with it
Branding is an all-encompassing concept that brings together your business's product mix, pricing, ambience, promotions, identity, and much more. From a graphics point of view, it's your logo, stationery, business card, website, and flyers that create a graphic personality. Your descriptive tag line bonds these pieces with added pizzazz.
Think about familiar brands like Nike's. You know what it offers instantly when you see the logo (the Nike swoosh) and tag line (Just Do It!). You want that kind of instant recognition for your company.
The results? Your messages get noticed because you've built credibility and recognition into your brand through consistent use of graphic identity techniques.
#2 "Hook" customers with persuasive writing and a "call to action"
Make a habit of doing these two things: Use persuasive words that "hook" their interest, and include a well-defined call to action in every piece. When writing marketing pieces, what can you do to make them more effective? Apply these basics:
- Know who you are writing for and keep their preferences in mind as you write each word.
- Put your message in terms of "you" rather than "I" or "we." People don't care about what "we" offer; they care about how your product or service can make their lives better.
- Make it clear what your readers should do, think, or believe as a result of reading the information you present.
- State your intention as a command--known as a "call to action." It can be as simple as "Call Today" or "Order It Now."
The results? The whole point is to encourage your prospects to take action! Whether it's to send an email or pick up the phone and call you, using precision wordsmithing persuades your prospects to take action...now!
#3 Use digital photography and illustrations to add "kick" to your marketing pieces
A ho-hum marketing piece generates few calls. What a waste! Learn the ins and outs of working with digital photography and illustrations -- so much easier with Internet resources galore to choose from.
A few quick tips:
- Place your strongest image in the top half of the page where it will get the best visibility.
- Using one large picture makes a stronger impression than several smaller ones.
- Group several small pictures so they collectively form a single element.
- Juxtapose a small picture with a larger one for contrast.
The results? Photos and illustrations help you add the "eye" appeal that translates into "buy" appeal.
#4 Jazz up your layouts so your most important points stand out
Break up monotonous lines of text with attractive "pull quotes" or "call-outs," which make critical information stand out on the page. To create a pull quote, just copy a provocative or challenging statement from your text and paste it into a different position on the page using large, contrasting type. Add decorative quotation marks, border it with lines, or place it inside a box to jazz it up.
The results? The points of interest you've added draw the reader's eye to the exact point you want them to remember.
#5 Ensure professional results by using the right file formats
You've just created a flyer that will be printed and mailed to your clients. To finish it off, you import a needed graphic from a website and send your file to the printers. Ouch! The resulting graphics looks blotchy and amateur in print. What went wrong? Graphic file formats for the Internet (72 dpi, low-resolution JPG and GIF) and file formats for offset printing (300 dpi, high-resolution TIF and EPS) are totally different animals. In this case, you've used the wrong file format and resolution for your purpose.
The results? Choosing the right file formats gives you a professional-looking document with clear images and the quality you want.
Start using these five easy techniques to add pizzazz and personality to your marketing pieces now, and you will "hook" new clients immediately.
© Karen Saunders 2005
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Saunders is the author of the ebook, "Turn Eye Appeal into Buy Appeal: How to easily transform your marketing pieces into dazzling, persuasive sales tools!," available at http://www.MacGraphics.net.
Since founding MacGraphics Services in 1990, Karen has produced thousands of successful marketing projects that have helped small businesses increase sales. Karen has also designed the covers of 18 books that have become best-sellers or won awards, including a Writer's Digest Grand Prize winner for the best self-published book in America.
Higher Prices Lead To Higher Profits - Part 1
I know at first glance this sounds obvious, but it may be worth it for you to think about your prices. At least just for a moment.
How did you decide on your current pricing? Did you conduct market research to understand what prospects would pay? Or did you compare yourself to your competitors and base your price on that? Or was it a crapshoot, and random shot in the dark?
These are the ways most people do it, and they are all wrong. Because the price you set for your products and services is more important than you think.
The following few paragraphs are a bit number heavy, but stay with me because this will be really valuable for you to understand.
Let's say you sell a high margin product - information products and software are two good examples. Your price is $60, and your costs are $10 - that means your gross margin (selling price - your costs) is $50 each time you sell one unit. Let's say further that your overhead is $5,000 per month. If you sell 100 units you'll break even, right?
Now you want to sell more, and decide you can take some business from a competitor by lowering your price - temporarily. You lower it to $40 - a 33% price cut, and not uncommon.
Your costs remain $10 and your overhead is still $5,000, only now your gross margin is $30 - 60% of what it was before. And how many units do you need to break even now? 166! That's 66% more unit sales required to make up for the 33% price cut!
But what if you're feeling very aggressive and you cut your price in half (also not unheard of) to $30. Now you have to sell 250 units - just to break even! That's 2-1/2 times as many as before. How easy do you think that's going to be?
Let's use a different example - something that has real manufacturing costs. This time, your product sells for $100, and your cost of goods are $50 per unit, for a gross profit of $50. Same $5000 overhead, same number of units to break even. Now imagine you cut your price 20%, to $80, leaving you with $30 of gross margin. You need to sell 66% more units. Ouch!
What if you cut the price to $70. This 30% price cut means you have to sell 2-1/2 times more units - just to stay even.
Let's go further...
Competition is really heating up and you think that matching them cut for cut is the way to go. The price for this amazing widget of yours is now a bargain basement $60.
(Shucks, that's only 40% off your original price. Salespeople and business owners do this every day.)
How many units do you need to break even? 500.
Five hundred? That's five times your original number.
Do you really think you can sell five times what you did before - at least without significantly raising your overhead and your variable cost of sale?
How many times have you done just this in response to competitive pressures?
How many times have you cut prices because you thought it would help you sell more?
:(:(:(
What we've just done is a simplified version of what's called margin analysis, and I hope it gives you a glimmer of what can happen when you mis-price.
For the most part, your price cuts don't automatically enable you to sell 66% more than you did before, and generally - at least not in this universe - you don't sell 250% more, and never, ever do you sell 500% more with this kind of price cutting.
But there is some good news - and it's very good.
Let's look at what happens when you raise your prices.
Remember your high-margin product. It sells for $60 and costs $10 to make.
Through good product positioning and excellent marketing you raise the price to $70. That's only a 15% increase. Now you only have to sell 83 units to break even, and if you sell the same 100 units, your profits go from $0 to $1000. Nice increase...
And that "hard" product - the one with $50 of costs? Raise the price tag 20% to $120, your margins increase to $70, and now your breakeven drops 71, and you make $2000 if you sell the same number of them.
See how this works?
:):):)
You can do this same analysis in a bit more sophisticated way, considering your marketing costs, sales or affiliate commissions, travel expenses if you have them, and so on. You can see the actual pricing effect varies quite a bit depending on these details.
If you have a high-leverage, pay-only-for-results affiliate model, a very high gross margin and almost no fixed overhead, you have a lot of price flexibility. You can cut the price 25% and only need to sell 15% more! That's not too bad at all.
But only in that type of model. If you have a office, some staff, and a physical product - in other words, fixed overhead - lower prices can kill you - and you won't even see it coming.
And higher prices?
They can make you rich.
By now you are starting to see the tragic effects of mis-pricing on the downside, and the marvelously enriching possibilities of raising your prices.
This only works, of course, when you can also increase your value proposition...
Stay tuned for part 2.
Follow this link at the bottom of the page to get a copy of an excel spreadsheet to play with. Get the spreadsheet, plug in your own numbers. It will really blow your mind. Also, feel free to pass this article or the spreadsheet on to your friends and associates. They will definitely appreciate it.(http://www.paullemberg.com/higher-part1.html)
About The Author:
Paul Lemberg is the President of Quantum Growth Coaching: More Profits and More Life for Entrepreneurs, Guaranteed. To get your copy of our free report with detailed steps to grow your business at least 40% faster, go to www.fastergrowthnow.com
Here are several ideas on how you can improve your sales effectiveness at gaining customer commitments.
Always Have a Commitment Objective!
Our recent research shows that nearly 80% of salespeople do not understand what their primary purpose is. Your principle mission in sales is to Gain Commitment. The confusion stems from the variety of tasks we as salespeople are asked to perform. The end result is that 62% of salespeople make calls where there is no attempt at Gaining Commitment. One of the most important reasons why this occurs is most salespeople do not establish what we call a Commitment Objective for every sales call. This is the number one mistake that all salespeople make. Well, it's time to change that!
Commitment Objective: A goal we set for ourselves to gain agreement from the customer that moves the sales process forward.
No sales call should ever be made without a Commitment Objective. If you do not have a Commitment Objective firmly planted in your mind, you
will wind up being one of those 62% that don't ask for Commitment.
In The Field:
Newly hired salespeople at Melody Inc., a Muzak Franchise, are required to make sales calls with veteran salespeople. Toward the end of one recent call, the prospect asked the veteran if he could keep the company brochure and share it with his partner. The veteran was happy to comply and began to pack up his briefcase.
The newly hired salesperson had recently gone through Action Selling Sales Training and learned about reaching a Commitment Objective. She decided that it would make sense to capitalize on the prospect's interest and schedule the next logical step - a proposal meeting. So she said, "As a next step I would recommend that we plan another meeting with yourself and your partner. We will prepare a proposal that documents what we have discussed and the solution we recommend. How does that sound?"
You guessed it. They scheduled a proposal meeting for a week later. During the next meeting they Gained Commitment for the business.
Author Bio:
Duane Sparks is chairman and founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based Sales Training Company that has trained and certified more than 200,000 salespeople in the system and skills of Action
Selling. He has personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions.
For more information on sales training programs, sales books or Action Selling, go to http://www.thesalesboard.com or call 800-232-3485.
Capture Clients with Words That 'Hook' and Graphics That 'Kick!'
Do the marketing pieces you send out lack pizzazz and personality? Are they capturing the clients you want to work with?
As your company's in-house graphics person--perhaps more by default than by intention--you're pressed to be a jack/jill-of-all-trades. You want to do a great job of producing promotional pieces, but you have little time to learn advanced design and marketing skills.
Your ongoing challenge is learning to do a little more to get a lot better results--quickly and painlessly.
How can you improve them? What Techniques Can You Apply NOW?
Take these 5 design/marketing tips to heart. Using them consistently will save you time in the long run and attract more customers.
#1 Develop a brand identity and stick with it
Branding is an all-encompassing concept that brings together your business's product mix, pricing, ambience, promotions, identity, and much more. From a graphics point of view, it's your logo, stationery, business card, website, and flyers that create a graphic personality. Your descriptive tag line bonds these pieces with added pizzazz.
Think about familiar brands like Nike's. You know what it offers instantly when you see the logo (the Nike swoosh) and tag line (Just Do It!). You want that kind of instant recognition for your company.
The results? Your messages get noticed because you've built credibility and recognition into your brand through consistent use of graphic identity techniques.
#2 "Hook" customers with persuasive writing and a "call to action"
Make a habit of doing these two things: Use persuasive words that "hook" their interest, and include a well-defined call to action in every piece. When writing marketing pieces, what can you do to make them more effective? Apply these basics:
- Know who you are writing for and keep their preferences in mind as you write each word.
- Put your message in terms of "you" rather than "I" or "we." People don't care about what "we" offer; they care about how your product or service can make their lives better.
- Make it clear what your readers should do, think, or believe as a result of reading the information you present.
- State your intention as a command--known as a "call to action." It can be as simple as "Call Today" or "Order It Now."
The results? The whole point is to encourage your prospects to take action! Whether it's to send an email or pick up the phone and call you, using precision wordsmithing persuades your prospects to take action...now!
#3 Use digital photography and illustrations to add "kick" to your marketing pieces
A ho-hum marketing piece generates few calls. What a waste! Learn the ins and outs of working with digital photography and illustrations -- so much easier with Internet resources galore to choose from.
A few quick tips:
- Place your strongest image in the top half of the page where it will get the best visibility.
- Using one large picture makes a stronger impression than several smaller ones.
- Group several small pictures so they collectively form a single element.
- Juxtapose a small picture with a larger one for contrast.
The results? Photos and illustrations help you add the "eye" appeal that translates into "buy" appeal.
#4 Jazz up your layouts so your most important points stand out
Break up monotonous lines of text with attractive "pull quotes" or "call-outs," which make critical information stand out on the page. To create a pull quote, just copy a provocative or challenging statement from your text and paste it into a different position on the page using large, contrasting type. Add decorative quotation marks, border it with lines, or place it inside a box to jazz it up.
The results? The points of interest you've added draw the reader's eye to the exact point you want them to remember.
#5 Ensure professional results by using the right file formats
You've just created a flyer that will be printed and mailed to your clients. To finish it off, you import a needed graphic from a website and send your file to the printers. Ouch! The resulting graphics looks blotchy and amateur in print. What went wrong? Graphic file formats for the Internet (72 dpi, low-resolution JPG and GIF) and file formats for offset printing (300 dpi, high-resolution TIF and EPS) are totally different animals. In this case, you've used the wrong file format and resolution for your purpose.
The results? Choosing the right file formats gives you a professional-looking document with clear images and the quality you want.
Start using these five easy techniques to add pizzazz and personality to your marketing pieces now, and you will "hook" new clients immediately.
© Karen Saunders 2005
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen Saunders is the author of the ebook, "Turn Eye Appeal into Buy Appeal: How to easily transform your marketing pieces into dazzling, persuasive sales tools!," available at http://www.MacGraphics.net.
Since founding MacGraphics Services in 1990, Karen has produced thousands of successful marketing projects that have helped small businesses increase sales. Karen has also designed the covers of 18 books that have become best-sellers or won awards, including a Writer's Digest Grand Prize winner for the best self-published book in America.
Higher Prices Lead To Higher Profits - Part 1
I know at first glance this sounds obvious, but it may be worth it for you to think about your prices. At least just for a moment.
How did you decide on your current pricing? Did you conduct market research to understand what prospects would pay? Or did you compare yourself to your competitors and base your price on that? Or was it a crapshoot, and random shot in the dark?
These are the ways most people do it, and they are all wrong. Because the price you set for your products and services is more important than you think.
The following few paragraphs are a bit number heavy, but stay with me because this will be really valuable for you to understand.
Let's say you sell a high margin product - information products and software are two good examples. Your price is $60, and your costs are $10 - that means your gross margin (selling price - your costs) is $50 each time you sell one unit. Let's say further that your overhead is $5,000 per month. If you sell 100 units you'll break even, right?
Now you want to sell more, and decide you can take some business from a competitor by lowering your price - temporarily. You lower it to $40 - a 33% price cut, and not uncommon.
Your costs remain $10 and your overhead is still $5,000, only now your gross margin is $30 - 60% of what it was before. And how many units do you need to break even now? 166! That's 66% more unit sales required to make up for the 33% price cut!
But what if you're feeling very aggressive and you cut your price in half (also not unheard of) to $30. Now you have to sell 250 units - just to break even! That's 2-1/2 times as many as before. How easy do you think that's going to be?
Let's use a different example - something that has real manufacturing costs. This time, your product sells for $100, and your cost of goods are $50 per unit, for a gross profit of $50. Same $5000 overhead, same number of units to break even. Now imagine you cut your price 20%, to $80, leaving you with $30 of gross margin. You need to sell 66% more units. Ouch!
What if you cut the price to $70. This 30% price cut means you have to sell 2-1/2 times more units - just to stay even.
Let's go further...
Competition is really heating up and you think that matching them cut for cut is the way to go. The price for this amazing widget of yours is now a bargain basement $60.
(Shucks, that's only 40% off your original price. Salespeople and business owners do this every day.)
How many units do you need to break even? 500.
Five hundred? That's five times your original number.
Do you really think you can sell five times what you did before - at least without significantly raising your overhead and your variable cost of sale?
How many times have you done just this in response to competitive pressures?
How many times have you cut prices because you thought it would help you sell more?
:(:(:(
What we've just done is a simplified version of what's called margin analysis, and I hope it gives you a glimmer of what can happen when you mis-price.
For the most part, your price cuts don't automatically enable you to sell 66% more than you did before, and generally - at least not in this universe - you don't sell 250% more, and never, ever do you sell 500% more with this kind of price cutting.
But there is some good news - and it's very good.
Let's look at what happens when you raise your prices.
Remember your high-margin product. It sells for $60 and costs $10 to make.
Through good product positioning and excellent marketing you raise the price to $70. That's only a 15% increase. Now you only have to sell 83 units to break even, and if you sell the same 100 units, your profits go from $0 to $1000. Nice increase...
And that "hard" product - the one with $50 of costs? Raise the price tag 20% to $120, your margins increase to $70, and now your breakeven drops 71, and you make $2000 if you sell the same number of them.
See how this works?
:):):)
You can do this same analysis in a bit more sophisticated way, considering your marketing costs, sales or affiliate commissions, travel expenses if you have them, and so on. You can see the actual pricing effect varies quite a bit depending on these details.
If you have a high-leverage, pay-only-for-results affiliate model, a very high gross margin and almost no fixed overhead, you have a lot of price flexibility. You can cut the price 25% and only need to sell 15% more! That's not too bad at all.
But only in that type of model. If you have a office, some staff, and a physical product - in other words, fixed overhead - lower prices can kill you - and you won't even see it coming.
And higher prices?
They can make you rich.
By now you are starting to see the tragic effects of mis-pricing on the downside, and the marvelously enriching possibilities of raising your prices.
This only works, of course, when you can also increase your value proposition...
Stay tuned for part 2.
Follow this link at the bottom of the page to get a copy of an excel spreadsheet to play with. Get the spreadsheet, plug in your own numbers. It will really blow your mind. Also, feel free to pass this article or the spreadsheet on to your friends and associates. They will definitely appreciate it.(http://www.paullemberg.com/higher-part1.html)
About The Author:
Paul Lemberg is the President of Quantum Growth Coaching: More Profits and More Life for Entrepreneurs, Guaranteed. To get your copy of our free report with detailed steps to grow your business at least 40% faster, go to www.fastergrowthnow.com