The Sales Evangelist: Sales Training|Speaking|Business Marketing|Donald Kelly

Sellers are programmed to take advantage of outreach to generate opportunities, but it’s important that we don’t forget to ask for the referral.    We understand the importance of cold calling and cold outreach, but that’s doing things the hard way. We do it over and over again without ever considering whether it’s the best way.    This is a reboot of an earlier episode of The Sales Evangelist, but it's an evergreen topic. Asking for referrals always makes sense for motivated sales professionals.    Cold calling   I would never suggest you shouldn’t use cold outreach or cold calling to connect with your prospects. I do it myself and I’ve generated great opportunities that way. But it isn’t the only way to generate them.    Sometimes we forget to ask for referrals. So as a sales pro, how can you remember? What else can you do to remind yourself to take the easy route to generating business?    Put it on your calendar. Just as you block off time on your calendar for prospecting and cold outreach, set reminders

 We’ve all encountered price wars against the lowest bidder, but today we’re going to talk about how you can stand your ground, protect your margins, and earn the price that you’re worth and how that will help you grow your business.   Chris Perry works with Market Sense, a Sandler Training franchise, that helps business attrackt, assess, hire, and on-board world class sales people.   Great ideas   There are lots of great ideas in the world. Many businesses have built things that they are excited about and proud of, and eventually others notice that they are making a lot of money doing it. So they jump into the game.   Suddenly options exist where they didn’t before, and consumers, whether they are B2B or B2C, don’t know how to differentiate between them. Many of them fall back to the cheapest option.   If we fall into that trap, the buying process becomes all about price, and we’re forced to trade dollars for deals. We must cut our prices, and that’s a slippery slope. It’s also a great way to go out of busin

Every sales professional and entrepreneur needs a profitable brand, and the key is to build a brand online and leverage it for rapid sales growth.   Corey Blake is the CEO at MWI, an international digital marketing agency. His background is in sales and business development and he has managed great sales teams over the years. Validate your brand When it comes to building a brand and then leveraging it for growth, you must begin by validating your brand. You basically want to turn off any sirens that the potential customer has about you as a seller.   We all know that a stigma exists around sellers, and you likely even experience it when someone gets on the phone with you to sell you something, despite the fact that you're in sales yourself.   The biggest challenge often originates from the fact that we build great brands and we know we have value to offer, but we don't know how to convince people to pay for it. How you validate your brand is critical in that process.   It's simply legitimizing your brand, ser

We consume information from a variety of platforms, so we have to connect with prospects from different angles using **omnichannel outreach**. We have to find our audience where they happen to be listening. Mark Kasoglow is the VP of Sales at Outreach, a sales engagement channel, and he’s explaining today how sales reps can include omnichannel outreach in their efforts. His passion is developing people and creating a winning, fun, positive atmosphere where people are inspired to do their best. He said if you are going to have a hard worker, they have to enjoy work. That doesn’t mean you have to enjoy what you do. It means you enjoy working and you’re likely always tinkering around the house. His dad taught him that if you make people’s work easy, they’ll work hard for you. To that end, he tries to make people’s work easier so they’ll work harder. ##What is omnichannel? Consider the following questions as you’re considering what omnichannel is. Do you answer the phone when someone calls? Do you reply to e

In order to succeed in business long-term, choose a market with room to grow, and consider these 5 things to look for when choosing your market. Ryan Levesque recently landed on Inc.’s list of 500 fastest growing companies, and his company just passed the $10 million mark for annual revenue. He admits that he has made a lot of mistakes along the way and learned a lot as well.  Finding a niche Ryan said many business owners and entrepreneurs make the common mistake of following conventional wisdom in the early days of the venture. They focus on what they will sell or create rather than focusing on who they will serve. Who is your market? Who is your niche? He has engaged in more than 23 niche markets, from making jewelry out of Scrabble tiles to weight loss and satellite television. Through the process, he has learned the importance of focusing on people rather than things. He points to choosing the right market as the most important factor of all.  You can be the most charistmatic salesperson with the be

We’ve all encountered the guy who attends events just to see what he can get for himself, but there are ways to effectively use networking events in your sales outreach efforts. You know the type: his conversations are one-sided because he’s only focused on his next big opportunity, and he has no time to learn about your business. His pitch kicks in when he finds out you’re a business owner. But he could have fixed his approach. And you can make sure you’re not like him in your outreach. New clients No matter what type of sales you’re in, you need to get clients in the hopper. The way you get new leads varies based upon your industry. Some demand door-to-door while others require phone calls. Today, we at The Sales Evangelist use social media and other efforts as well as networking events. Typically, at networking events, I encounter potential clients or people who can connect me with other people who are potential clients. Outreach done well can be very rewarding. But as we mentioned in the teaser, you

Ethan Beute from BombBomb equates good marketing to selling by teaching, and he explains how you can generate a lift in cold email responses with video. Cold email response BombBomb recently conducted a study with a large international tech company that revealed the power that video has in improving cold email responses. The company offers a freemium service but they weren’t sure how to convert the freemium users into revenue opportunities. The company has teams in countries around the world and they were reaching out to create conversation and generate appointments. They contacted customers who had been using the free service for a while and asked for the opportunity to share some other ways they might be able to help. BombBomb conducted a pilot program with them that included an AB test of video emails vs. plain text emails. They increased replies from these people by 56 percent. Imagine, then, if you can turn a percentage of those responses into scheduled appointments and then a percentage of those app

Sellers often seek the path of least resistance, and if your programs aren’t designed to incentivize them to sell, your sellers may game the system and engage in activities that won’t help themselves or the company.  If you design your commission plans and your structures effectively, you’ll create more effective sellers who feel like they’ve actually earned something and who will achieve wins more often.  Happy sellers As a sales leader, you know that your sales reps will make outbound calls and try to close deals. Your goal is to incentivize them to do their jobs. You want them to be happy. You also know that if they are earning something, they will feel good.  In the natural order of things, if they are doing well, they’ll love working for you and the company will prosper as well.  Flawed incentives In her book, The Sales Development Playbook, Trish Bertuzzi lays out different concepts to help organizations develop the proper incentives. Sometimes companies design their incentives poorly so that reps

Asking questions and learning about the client is an accepted part of sales, but the key is assessing curiosity to optimize the performance of outbound sales reps. Alex Burg, who has a consultancy in curiosity quotient selling, focuses on leveraging mutual curiosity. He said isn’t so much the case that sellers aren’t thinking about curiosity, but rather that they are thinking about it too tactically.   Learning about clients Most sales methodologies are a bit too complicated and don’t really require that much detail. Sellers don’t need to write down 27 questions before they sit down with clients. They simply need to learn enough to ask intelligent, informed questions. By demonstrating your curiosity, you built rapport much more quickly. Stephen M.R. Covey wrote a book called Speed of Trust that reports a significant correlation between the development of trust and the pace of decision making. In other words, if you really want to accelerate your sales cycle, build trust. And the fastest way to build trust is

Sales is equal parts art and science and one of the keys to success is leveraging sales incentive data to increase performance and ROI.  Jason Atkins is the founder of 360 Insights, a software platform that enables large brands to execute all of their channel incentive strategies. Jason’s company works with tens of thousands of salespeople who work for major brands and helps them get smarter and make data-driven decisions.  Critical data Many people believe that sellers must be born with the skillset to succeed. We believe that anyone with a desire to sell can succeed and get the proper training. Understanding data will help tremendously.  The art of sales deals with the relationships, the conversation handling, and dealing with objections. The science of sales revolves around data and activities.  Jason recalled hearing that we’ve created more data in the last year than in all of mankind combined. That kind of growth is exponential. Think about how much data that represents.  So how do you mine through

You’ve likely heard the scenario before where an interviewer asks a seller to “Sell me this pen,” but how much value does this approach offer?? It’s bad enough that you’re already nervous about the interview, but if you’re thrown into a situation where the director of sales asks you to sell him a pen when you really have very little information to start from, you may find yourself fumbling for something to say.  Features and benefits Sellers who don’t know much about the product they are selling or the audience they are selling to usually revert to features and benefits. They sell the aspects of the product that they can see.  “It’s comfortable.” “It has a good grip.” “It has a clicky thing and even a laser pointer. That’s great for folks who do presentations.” “It writes smoothly and it isn’t too expensive. In fact, it’s cheaper than many of the pens on the market. And if you buy it today, I can throw in a notepad and a pocket protector.”  Why would people even do this test in the first place? Quick t

We're talking about key metrics this month, and today Shawn Finder talks about the key metrics to track in your outbound strategy that will help you be successful.  Shawn was a professional tennis player before he launched into entrepreneurship in the form of Autoklose, a company that automates the top of the sales funnels for sales representatives.     Cold calling Shawn divides outbound into three different categories: cold-calling, emailing, and database because your database is the engine that keeps that car moving. You must have at least two of those inside your outbound strategy.  Within those three categories, you'll have different metrics.  Cold calling will include dial-to-connection percentage, dials-to-appointment ratio, dials-to-opportunity, and dials-to-deal. When you're cold calling, if you're dialing 100 people but you're only reaching 5, that isn't very successful. Maybe you're dialing 100 and reaching 10 knowing that 3 of those will turn into prospects and one of those will close.  If you don

Many people get sales enablement wrong because they have different concepts and ideas about what it actually is. Roderick Jefferson began his sales career as a BDR, then an AEE, and finally moved into sales management. He discovered that he enjoyed sales more than he enjoyed closing deals. So he stepped into sales training. Now, through his company Roderick Jefferson and Associates, he breaks the complexity of sales into practical ideas through scalable and repeatable practices. SALES ENABLEMENT MISTAKES Sales enablement helps develop the right conversations the right way with the right tools. Ultimately, it seeks to decrease time to ramp or increase productivity and revenue. Many companies make mistakes implementing their sales enablement. They fail to establish consistency and parameters. Many wait too long to hire sales enablement consultants. They assume they need a consultant or a resource without realizing they need both. One can help you lay the groundwork that you can hand off to another. Many comp

It seems counterintuitive in sales, but leading with your flaws can shorten the sales cycle and disarm your customers, ultimately leading you to better metrics. Todd Caponi was the chief revenue officer for a company called Power Reviews which helps retailers and brands collect and display ratings and reviews on their website. His time there caused him to rethink the way he leads sales organizations because he discovered that consumers were more likely to buy a product that had a 4.2 to 4.5 rating than a 5-star rating. Statistics show that 95 percent of consumers in the B2C world are looking at reviews before they buy. Of those, 82 percent are looking for negative reviews before buying. Todd wondered what might happen if the same notion could be applied to the B2B world. Pros and cons Todd embraced the idea of embracing the pros and cons and leading with them. He discovered that his first deal, which previously had a sales cycle of 6 months, closed within 4 weeks. They discovered that when you lead with your

Humor takes away tension and sellers who use humor in the sales process can increase efficiency and improve effectiveness. Andrew Tarvin realized over the course of his career that you can't be efficient with humans. Instead, you must be effective. His experience in stand-up comedy revealed that improv demands the same skills necessary to be an effective leader. He explored the intersection of humor in the workplace and fell in love with the subject. He observed that it's strange to think that companies pay him to teach employees to have more fun. He notes, though, that it's missing from the workplace, and he addresses the issue in his book, Humor That Works. Strategic humor We know that humor relieves stress and that it's overall a good thing. We do not seem to know how to deploy humor strategically. Rather than simply using it for the sake of fun. we must use it to achieve a specific result. How do I use humor in the sales process to build rapport?Can I get people to pay attention to what I'm saying with hu

Sellers who want to succeed must ask themselves a vitally important question: Are you ready and prepared to have a value-rich conversation? I recently took a camping trip with my buddies to St. Louis, and though many of us were excited about the trip, we realized that being prepared was something completely different. Being ready for it suggests that you believe in your ability to get it done. Being prepared means having the proper equipment and gear to succeed.     Sales pitch    My friend Doug shared recently that many different sellers pitch his company, and though many of them are ready, most are not prepared. Sellers often feel excited about the sales pitch and the possibility that it could lead to great opportunities for their company.  If, however, they arrive unprepared, they'll be unable to identify the problem their prospects are facing. They won't have any idea about how to solve the problem for the client.  If our crew didn't prepare for our camping trip, we wouldn't have enough food and water to

Value is in the eye of the buyer, and because assessing value is not as simple as it sounds, companies often get this wrong. Ken Rutsky specializes in helping companies tell their story in a way that connects it to the customer. He says that value is all connected to the stories we tell. Defining value We're trying to sell something. Essentially what we're doing is making a trade of the two things they value the most in order of least to more. Money is the thing everybody values, but often buyers value their time even more. They value the time they spend understanding, evaluating, and implementing a solution or a product. We're asking our buyers for two rare commodities, so we have to deliver something that is equal to or hopefully greater in value. As a result, the simple definition of value is what will the customer open his wallet and pay for? Many sales reps perceive that they are creating value but that may not be the case because assessing value is not as simple as it seems. Perceived value Ken said tha

During our time at the Florida State Minority Supplier Development Council's expo, we've met a number of people who understand the secrets behind growing your business and creating value. Felix Bratslavsky works at Tampa General Hospital, a very large level-one trauma center that is number one in Florida for transplants. The organization has more than 8,000 employees but they still contract out much of their workload. Gilda Rosenberg started a vending machine company 35 years ago in Miami and she slowly grew it to include major clients like universities, schools, and hospitals. She calls her relationship with  the NMSDC a love affair that resulted in referrals, connections, and mentorship that helped her to grow her business. Partnerships Tampa General has a minority business program that breaks out the four procurement categories from construction and professional services to general goods and services, and medical services and supplies. The hospital has a lot of contracting opportunities and a lot of partne

The same secret scale up success strategies that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses to the next level will benefit individual sellers who recognize their territories as their own business. Lauren Cohen works with foreign investors to find the right business opportunities, make the right investments, and get and keep their visas. She discovered along the way that many of these people didn't pay a lot of attention to their business structures and that the same was true of American business people. 7 Steps Scale Up Success Strategy Lauren characterizes her role as creating a GPS for your business, but you have to have a destination. You can't tell your GPS that you don't know where you're going. These 7 areas of a business' foundation can result in disaster if they are overlooked. Funding in capitalization. Without the right capital, or if you're under-funded or under-capitalized, it doesn't matter how great your business idea is, you're going to fall apart.  Business planning. If you don't have a busines

Every seller should create good content as a tool to gain leads, grow their business, and increase overall success.  Kyle Burt first heard The Sales Evangelist podcast two years ago when we interviewed Alex Berman about using video in sales. Kyle, who once chose business school over film school, went home and started making videos.  Massive success Kyle quickly turned his video capability into massive success for himself. Before video, he was using cold calls, email, and "screaming from the tops of mountains," knocking on every door and delivering cookies. When you're starting out, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes.  He realized that video provided a good strategy to get leads. But he shifted his focus to making videos because he wanted to make videos. He realized he had a level of value and a perspective that wasn't being shared.  Kyle recognized, too, that only the people in his bubble would understand the content he was posting because it was niche content.  Coca-Cola He established a weekly s