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Some days it feels like we spend more energy focused on what we CAN’T do – especially in these times when many of our favourite places are closed and plans cancelled. We can’t meet with clients, we can’t go inside our favourite restaurant, we can’t attend our favourite conference. There is no clear direction for the future, and we may never return to our past normalcy.
Even though I’m very positive and optimistic about life and business, there are days when I feel down and prefer to just hit the snooze button – this must be a bad dream. Though as much as I wish I could wake up in a different world, we can’t change this reality – we CAN however change our thinking and focus on what we CAN do.
Recently when I caught myself focusing on the negatives, I decided I had to re-adjust. I grabbed a notepad and started to brainstorm a list of all the things I could do, that I could control and most importantly – that I can could excited about. As I started to draft this list, I began feeling much better, stronger, and excited. The ideas just kept coming – now I’m overwhelmed with all that I can do! I chose to rank these ideas on a scale of 1-10 to help me identify which ones I could put into action.
What is your list of #whatyoucando? You can expand this list to work, family, even summer activities:
Sales – #WhatYouCANDo
- You can sell to customers using virtual platforms
- You can identify customers who are increasing sales and not reducing costs
- You can focus on your key customers to grow business with other divisions/locations
Prospecting – #WhatYouCANDo
- You can research new verticals
- You can ask for referrals
- You can use LinkedIn Navigator to find new leads
Enjoy the Summer with limited travel – #WhatYouCANDo
- Porch Drinks with Neighbours
- Outdoor Office Space
- Ice Cream!
Start a new Hobby – #WhatYouCANDo
- Plant a garden
- Rollerblading
- Trail Hiking
Donate to a Charity – your time, funds or even your empties! #WhatYouCANDo
- Foodbank
- Black Lives Matter
- Your favourite charity
Family – #WhatYouCANDo
- Summer Picnic
- Road Trip
- Get a new Pet
This list is just to get your positive ideas flowing. Share, post, or make this a challenge in your next team huddle. Be creative and have fun to make the most of this summer – let us know your top 3 commitments for the month of June – we would love to see what your list looks like! #WhatYouCANDo.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
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Are you missing your road warrior days? You know what I mean: you’d start the day with your favourite coffee, head out early to avoid traffic, and get an early start on your first customer sales meeting. You’d continue your day with several other customer meetings, including a great customer lunch. Can you believe these road warrior days were your everyday normal just a short time ago?
Even though businesses are starting to open up and you’re getting itchy to get out on the road to meet face to face with your customers, the reality is that many of your customer sites are not allowing sales professionals on their premises. You want to get back to normalcy, to seeing your customers and hitting your sales numbers. You’re getting frustrated and feeling the pressure to increase sales.
There is a way to build rapport, establish trust through technology, and maximize your productivity while working your territory, from your home office. You can use your road warrior selling approach to become a tech Titan.
Here are ways to turn your territory into a tech-driven performance plan to get results:
It’s all about what you do BEFORE, DURING and AFTER your customer calls, and that means mapping out your series of Purposeful Conversations.
SELF-TALK Conversation
It begins with you and your mindset. You may not love technology, your CRM, or the volumes of virtual calls that fill your day. Yet, you like the idea of becoming a Titan – top of your game and ahead of your competitors. This is the opportunity to unlearn your traditional territory selling approach and embrace the Trusted Titan way.
STRATEGY Conversation
Map out how you work your ideal week, without even leaving your home. How will you re-gig your territory to meet with the right buyers on their terms? Identify technology that will save you time and hours of driving, and provide you with the time to enjoy breakfast AND dinner at home with your family. Maybe you convert your typical drive time into a new hobby, or finally put time towards optimizing your CRM.
REASON to MEET Conversation
Our recent conversations with buyers revealed that they are receiving hundreds of cookie-cutter emails each day that do not succeed in winning their attention. To secure a meeting with a buyer, it’s about quality over quantity and using exciting technology (eg. customized videos in emails) to win attention.
Our buyers said that a customized video email would get their attention, as they are getting very little of these types of emails as a means of securing a meeting. Buyers also told us that texting, or the old fashioned technology of a telephone call with an email, would give them the gentle nudge to differentiate you from the competition. At Teneo, we call that the double whammy to increase sales efforts. Again – it’s technology other than yet another email that will get a buyer’s attention.
PURPOSE Conversation
This is the opportunity for you to shine. It’s no longer about your products or even having the best price. It’s about having a Purposeful Business Conversation to ask even more questions about the challenges and impact on your client’s business. What new problems are they trying to solve? How are they trying to become more efficient and optimize costs? What are they doing to pivot and grow revenue? Using different virtual platforms will allow you to be the Titan! Have a discovery call to develop trust in a video call. Demonstrate your new product line, or host an interactive lunch-n-learn using polls to impress and get their attention. Customers will have to validate every decision and cost expenditure – turn your products and promos into a purposeful proposal with ROI that will help them grow their business.
FINAL YES! Conversation
There will be more objections or budgets on pause than ever before. As a Tech Titan, you are armed to anticipate those objections and address these even earlier in the buying process to influence and collaborate on new solutions that will make your buyers heroes! It’s all about making your customers look good – that is what Tech Titans do and it is what you can do to turn things around- both for your sales and for the economy.
Harness your Road Warrior Approach to become a Tech Titan Hero and enjoy your summer, even more!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
Why is “intel” – aka gathering client and competitor intelligence – so important right now? There is no crystal ball to forecast the future. What insights do you want your team to gather to help you make future sales decisions?
When we asked sales leaders to identify their biggest challenge with COVID, 83% stated it was the unknown and how challenging it is to plan for the future.
Even though several businesses are starting to re-open, there are still many travel restrictions, especially into customer facilities. Business owners, senior organizational leaders and customers are seeking business intelligence to help them make future decisions on how COVID will continue to impact their business.
Even though your sales team is not currently on their “feet on the street”, they can put on their detective hats. They can still be creative, be curious, and be confident in order to gather this important intel.
Turn your Check In Conversations into more PURPOSEful Business Conversations to gather business intel for your senior leadership team and help them understand what is going on in the marketplace.
Your sales team needs to understand that business will never be the same. Your sales team needs to understand why this information is critical to the future decision making, sustainability and success of your business. This information can be as critical and precious as new leads.
Here are different ways for you to gather business intelligence for your organization. Talk to your customers to ask and learn:
- What projects are they working on now and in the future?
- What will the new norm look like?
- Will there be pent up demand for their services to their customers?
- Will there be a pent up demand for your services?
- How will they adapt their facilities to allow employees & customers back?
- Will current deals be lost during COVID and into the fall?
- Is there different services they are looking for?
- How will their staffing situation change?
- What is the impact of their sales?
- Are they employing cost cutting, cost optimization or spending for growth?
- Is their senior leadership team being pro-active, reactive or cocooning?
Here’s one of the best questions to ask, “What do you think January 1, 2021 will look like for both business and your personal life?
Talk to your fellow sales colleagues and ask them the same questions above to get their insights.
Research your Competitors:
- Check out their Website and COVID update
- Order their product online to experience their e-commerce experience
- Check out their Social media channels
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
Last week, we interviewed two buyers to uncover their expectations of how to effectively sell to them virtually.
The buyers we interviewed were:
Susan Ryan – LBM Millwork Buyer – Home Hardware. Susan has more than 20+ years of buying experience and currently works with more than 80 strategic vendors across Canada.
Scott Prygiel – Senior Buyer – Petsmart. Scott holds more than 15 years of buying experience in both the pet food and grocery sectors.
While both Buyers had their own preferences, they did share some common expectations for having productive virtual meetings with Sales Professionals:
- Be technically savvy to manage different virtual platforms
- Some Buyers have a preferred virtual platform – get familiar with the most common ones to avoid fumbling while on the call
- Be more prepared than ever!
- Test your technology in advance and prepare a PowerPoint presentation with an agenda & structured outline for great dialogue. Both buyers prefer you to share your PowerPoint with the Buyer 24 hours in advance.
- Allow time for most relevant content, especially hot topics like e-commerce.
- Buyers expect your meeting to be compelling, professional and feel like a natural conversation.
- Dress as you normally would for a face-to-face meeting. This conveys that you’re still serious about the business.
- Build rapport at the beginning of the meeting to loosen up and make the conversation flow naturally. Do some digging to find out what their personal interests are, customize your virtual background, or comment on something in their background.
- Buyers are receiving more emails than ever – use the Double Whammy approach (a call followed up with an email) to get noticed.
- Both Buyers agreed that in your initial email, you should quickly introduce how your product fills a gap in their product line.
- Consider sending a customized video with your product or a strong compelling message – Scott said this would get his attention…and not many Sales Professionals are doing it!
- Have a plan to grow product sales now & for the future (after COVID-19) for retail stores and e-commerce!
Their Final Advice:
- Collaborate on a customized solution & demonstrate- how it is the right fit for your buyers and WHY! Show you really care about helping them and their customers with the perfect solution.
Yes, COVID19 is producing obstacles and curveballs that affect selling, but don’t let it bring your sales to a full halt! Download our [Download not found] to overcome your obstacles, including virtual selling.
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
Blog
Restrictions are starting to be lifted and there is a pent-up demand to get back to normalcy at work. Government officials in all provinces, states and countries are gearing businesses to start planning the phase-in steps. Everyone is experiencing spring fever to get out, especially with the temperature rising.
But what if you still can’t go see your customers face-to-face? How can you provide value to them during their phase-in stage? This is the perfect time for you to be turning your check-in conversations into PURPOSE-ful business conversations.
You can pivot your Check-In Conversations by starting with a few simple questions:
How is COVID Impacting your business? Are you getting ready for businesses to re-open?
For more business questions, before you sell too soon…
Ask these Top Business Questions before suggesting your products & solutions:
- How is COVID19 impacting your business?
- Have sales increased or decreased during lockdown?
- How has your plant/operations/team adapted?
- How are you preparing your team/business as we plan to re-open?
- What are the biggest challenges your team/business is facing during COVID19?
- What challenges are you anticipating throughout the rest of 2020?
- How will you ensure on-going safe distancing measures as work returns?
- How is your leadership/management team pivoting to adjust (or even thriving) during this situation?
- How do you plan to stimulate sales?
- What can we do to help you…?
Remember – COVID19 may have affected some of your customers more than others. You have to tailor your approach and solutions to each customer’s unique situation. Express empathy,and be sure to really listen to what your customer is saying – don’t sell too soon!
Using virtual platforms to conduct PURPOSE-ful conversations is a great way to develop rapport, trust, ask more and better business questions, and differentiate yourself as a Consultative Business Advisor. Sales don’t end when face-to-face meetings move virtual!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.
