There is a scene in the Tina Fey/Amy Pohler film “Sisters” that is hilarious. The scene takes place in the dressing room of a trendy shop where the eponymous sisters go shopping for dresses for a party they are hosting that night. They go to a boutique and try on a number of party dresses, but they are clearly clueless. Each dress the sisters put on is completely unflattering as they wear the dresses in all sorts of inappropriate ways.
The shop clerk watches them in deadpan horror and her face expresses what we are all thinking: each dress is worse than the next. The clerk, however, doesn’t help them put the dresses on correctly or offer them sizes that fit; rather, she says “that looks amaaaazing” in a completely flat tone. This character is the epitome of the lackluster clerk who clearly has been told to compliment the customers. No. Matter. What.
Service that is inauthentic, unhelpful or pushy is the stuff of horrible Yelp reviews and comedic movie scenes. But service doesn’t have to be like that. Businesses that take time to connect authentically to their customers will build a client for life. And businesses that ignore service in the sales moment are doing themselves great harm as sales are based on a human connection. Here are some easy ways to connect with your customers that will make the sisters of your business – service and sales – shine.
Establish Customer Quotas, Not Sales Quotas
Too many businesses focus on the number of sales rather than the number of customers. You must remember that customers make sales. Ask your salespeople to create relationships with every type of customer – not just the ones they already know.
Achieving your goals is all about taking tangible steps every day. If you change your time horizon and ask yourself six simple questions, you’ll find you’re achieving your goals more rapidly than you ever thought possible.
I met an eighty-eight-year-old man named Orville at my health club. I first noticed him one afternoon while checking in at the front desk. He was stumbling along behind me. There was no way this man, slowly shuffling along the path to the gym, was going to do any kind of meaningful workout! Orville patiently moved, inch by inch, into the weight-training area, picked up some dumbbells, and, with an audible grunt, started his routine.
One day I happened to see Orville out of the corner of my eye, stepping onto one of the treadmills. I was across the room, and he was already reaching for the start button. Too far away to help him, I just stood there and watched. As the treadmill came to life, Orville took one small step, and then another. The machine picked up speed, but miraculously, so did his legs. Within a minute, he hit full stride, running like a man half his age!
At this point the reality of the situation dawned on me. Orville’s problem was not with his legs, it was with his vision. He couldn’t see where he was going. Though Orville did nothing to cause his vision problem, it is a powerful example of how limited we are when we lack clarity and vision.
How often do leaders and employees lack clarity in their communication, and as a result, drive forward ambiguous goals?
I think 90 days is the best timeframe for most goals. A year is too long – see how few people keep New Year’s Resolutions? Twenty-one days is too short for most real change. However, in 90 days, I was able to lose 33 pounds! And I’ve seen people triple their sales in 90 days. That’s why I like the 90-Day Quick Plan. It is a strategy for clarifying how you are going to achieve your most vital goals.
Pick an area of your business or personal life that you’d like to address, and then ask six questions. Don’t wait to start because the plan should take less than thirty minutes to create. All you need to do is ask and answer these six questions:
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Stories are a great way to connect with your customer. They can make the ordinary product or service you’re selling extraordinary by adding richness and experience to the sale.
In May of 2015, my wife Lisa convinced me to attend a juried art fair with her at Coney Island in Cincinnati, Ohio. As an artist herself, she has a sophisticated appreciation for fine art that I don’t. She can spend hours on end lazily drifting from one booth to the next, studying each piece and talking to the artists about their inspiration, medium, and techniques. Me, I just like to look at the pictures.
As the day dragged on, we arrived at the booth of Chris Gug (pronounced “Goog”), a photographer known for his awe-inspiring images of marine life. His gallery is full of breathtaking underwater shots of anemones, corals, sea turtles, and whales. On a mission to find a piece for our boys’ bathroom at home, Lisa eyed a picture that, to me, looked about as out of place as a pig in the ocean.
It was a picture of a pig in the ocean.
She described it as inspired genius—a cute little baby piglet, up to its nostrils in salt water, snout covered with sand, dog-paddling its way straight into the camera lens.
I thought it was a picture of a pig in the ocean.
I asked the artist what on Earth that pig was doing in the ocean. And that’s when the magic started.
Gug explained that the picture was taken in the Caribbean, just off the beach of an uninhabited Bahamian island officially named Big Major Cay. He told us that years ago, a local entrepreneur brought a drove of pigs to the island to raise for bacon. Gug went on:
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Getting your buyers to tell stories can give you insight into how to sell to them more effectively. Here are five ways to get your buyers to tell you their stories.
Your first objective in a sales call shouldn’t be to tell any of your stories. It should be to get the buyer to tell you their stories. If you don’t hear their stories first, how will you know which of your stories to tell?
You wouldn’t trust a doctor who wrote you a prescription without listening to you explain your problem, would you? Of course not. Then why would a buyer accept the recommendation of a salesperson who did the same thing?
And if you’re unsure about what kind of stories you should want to hear from your prospects, here are the three most productive ones you should be asking for:
A personal story – so you can get to know them better
A story about their biggest problem – so you’ll know what kind of help they need
A story about how their favorite supplier became their favorite supplier – so you can become their favorite supplier
Now, getting your buyers to talk is easy. Getting them to tell you stories requires a little more work. And you should want them to actually tell you stories not just talk, and for many of the same reasons why you should be telling stories to them:
It’ll help you relax and listen better
It’ll help you build a better relationship with them
It’ll help you better remember what they say, plus
When the story they tell is about the problem they’re facing, it helps you understand the context so you’ll have a better idea of the opportunity you’re up against.
So, here are five tactics being used by successful salespeople to get their buyers to tell stories:
Shut Up and Listen
That’s probably the most obvious but underutilized tactic to get stories out of buyers. Human beings abhor silence in a conversation like nature abhors a vacuum. We’re desperate to fill the void with something. So, if you can resist the temptation for that something to be your voice, you have a near certain chance of that something being the buyer’s voice.
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When scaling your consulting firm up from an individual to a team, you’ll have to decide whether to hire contractors or employees. Learn the pros and cons of each.
When you want to grow your consulting firm, you’re probably going to have to bring on additional people. There’s only so much of you to go around. Make deliberate choices about whether the people you bring on will be contractors or employees. Ensure those individuals’ interests are aligned with yours.
If you’re going to bring on contractors, you don’t run into all the employment and tax issues and they’re going to be a more flexible workforce. The downside is they can leave suddenly and they don’t always share your personal interests.
If the people you bring on are employees, they’re dedicated to the work, but they come along with a lot of administrative issues you’re going to have to deal with. If you need someone who’s fully committed to building your firm but that person’s only interest is part-time work to supplement their income, you’re not going to be happy with that result.
Ensure interests are aligned between you and the people you bring on. A lot of times I get people who say they want to work with me, and we run a training firm. They’ll tell me, “Well Mike, when you can’t do the training session, just throw me that gig.” The problem is, I don’t need people for bandwidth to do the training. I need salespeople. That relationship won’t work out, so I have to hire different people.
I’ve chosen a structure where I have contractors. I don’t want to deal with the overhead. I don’t want to deal with the administrative issues. It’s great that I have contractors because I don’t deal with those issues. The downside is, sometimes I struggle to get my contractors’ attention and have them focus on building my business versus other interests they’re pursuing.
Know the different benefits and drawbacks of contractors and employees. Make sure you choose deliberately to drive the outcome you’re looking for.
Want more weekly consulting tips? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start improving your decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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As a consultant, your relationships with your clients are invaluable. Learn a few strategies for maintaining your client relationships.
Client relationships are the lifeblood of your business. Be deliberate about maintaining them. Regular contact will keep you top of mind. Beware of excessive contact; they’re going to ignore you or block you if you’re in their inbox too much. Find excuses to reach out to them like, “Hey I read an article and I thought of you,” or “I heard about a cool new technology and I thought you might be interested in it.” Send these notes and leave it at that. Don’t try and sell during these interactions. They know you eventually want to sell them something. Just focus on being helpful and good things are going to come.
Learn the importance of communicating what sets your consulting firm apart from your competition.
When you run a consulting firm, you have to answer one very important question. What makes you special? If you can’t articulate what sets you apart from all the other consulting firms out there, you’ll be hard pressed to win business away from them. You’re going to have trouble winning the bid when other firms are in the mix. Have a clear statement about why you’re differentiated. It’s that differentiation that will enable you to compete on quality instead of being in a race to the bottom on price. Read more
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A “Hunter” salesperson must have five non-teachable, non-negotiable traits to persevere in the face of rejection. Here’s how to identify them before you make an expensive hiring mistake.
You’re ready to hire a new salesperson and you know the stakes are high. While the economy seems to be moving in the right direction, surging COVID numbers are stirring up a lot of uncertainty. Whether more lockdowns happen or not—and whether the sales force returns to the office or not—you’re absolutely going to need a strong candidate who can bring in new clients in a tough business environment. Read more
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One of our clients had 5000 SKUs and we showed him analysis-wise that only 600 products made 80% of sales. We recommended the CEO to discontinue at least 500 very costly and unprofitable products. We showed him the data over and over again. But at the end of day, the CEO didn’t want to drop one single product because the products were like his “babies” and he did not want to “kill” them. Lesson learned: Products and services aren’t your children and you shouldn’t have an emotional over-attachment to them.
Common CEO Pitfalls
All failures in the business world have to do with not taking disruptions into account or failing to realize that your value proposition has become obsolete. When the big data shows you that certain products don’t make sense financially, you should consider removing those products from your portfolio. This is one example of a lack of CEO focus. Doing a results-oriented job is not as easy as it seems, especially in times of crisis. But there is one common mistake I have seen in numerous companies. Employees are very often “just not” doing what they are supposed to do. And even worse, their boss, the CEO, is very often not doing what he/she is supposed to be doing either.
CEOs can get trapped in the daily business and the incoming operative problems, mail, social media, and non-strategic tasks. They are busier with efficiency than with effectiveness. Doing the right things versus doing things right. The key challenge for a CEO is to make sure that he/she and his/her team are focusing and executing on the right things every day. And that doing the right things leads to profitable growth.
CEOs have to define where the company will be in the next two years and not take part in every single decision that his or her managers are responsible for. CEOs have to define the long-term vision and the fundamental business model elements facing the current crisis. They also have to have a clear plan that generates financial value and gives the company a competitive advantage.
5 Signs You’re the Bottleneck
Signs that you, as the CEO, are becoming the bottleneck of your company’s growth:
1. Almost every single decision, oftentimes operational issues, has to be double-checked with your office. 2. There is no accountability of the Sales, HR, and operational leaders. Weekly meetings lack solutions and best practice recommendations. 3. Lack of agility to resolve problems. 4. Distraction and procrastination due to too many tasks, unclear goals, fear of change, or fear of failure. 5. The company fails to achieve sales and profit goals.
Distraction Kills Your Business
“Distraction kills your business. You and your key employees have to be focused.”
CEOs are responsible for strategy. And strategy is a synonym for renunciation. To focus, CEOs have to make trade-offs. How much time do you spend on operational issues? How often are you in the 80/20 zone?
Through the years, I’ve seen that many CEOs, especially of SMEs, fail to see the BIG PICTURE; whereas the most successful CEOs have become 80/20 masters. The most successful CEOs lead their companies to achieve ambitious goals by energetically focusing on the most important actions. For example:
– They develop relationships with their key clients and prospects to understand market needs and requirements.
– They frequently talk to their key employees, especially their sales people, and retain them.
– They are aware of disruptive trends and key challenges. As a result, they are better prepared for unpredictable crises.
– They set clear goals and communicate the importance of strategy execution.
– They empower employees and show them the importance of the 80/20 rule.
You need to focus on the 20% that will deliver you 80% of the desired results. Every decision and action has to be made consciously if our time is to be used effectively. CEOs are responsible for hiring focused people who are better than him/her. CEOs should not be there to execute 80% of the whole work that only results in 20% of the important results.
Thomas Michael Hogg, author of Profitable Growth Strategy, is a consultant and mentor with more than 20 years of market and work experience in Germany, Switzerland, the US, and Mexico. Thomas has been an advisor to global companies such as PepsiCo, adidas, Campbell’s Soup, Johnson Controls, Bulkmatic, among other multinational companies, SMEs, and nonprofit organizations. He is the author of “Profitable Growth Strategy – 7 proven best practices from German companies” and a columnist at El Financiero. Thomas has been featured in Bloomberg TV, CNN, El Economista, SalesTech Stars, Milenio, Reforma, Mexico Industry, Cluster Industrial among others. He has also been a speaker at the Mercedes-Benz innovation week.
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When strategic planning, a SWOT helps you define your business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
A useful tool you can use to assess the environment you’re competing in is called the SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And typically, it’s drawn on a grid. For strengths and weaknesses, those are typically within your own organization, capabilities you have or don’t have. As far as opportunities and threats, they can either be internal or external market-facing opportunities and threats.
So let me walk through an example. As you build a SWOT analysis, you’ll want to have the team together and have people throw out their ideas. And it’s generally a brainstorming session. Read more
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Identify your organization’s major threats and opportunities by assessing these five aspects of your market.
As you begin your strategic planning process, it’s important to assess the market you’re competing in. A classic tool for doing so is Porter’s five forces. Dr. Michael Porter, who’s a professor of strategy, came up with this set of five forces to evaluate all the different dynamics that can affect your organization. Read more
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Learning how to build goals from the bottom up connects individuals to the broader mission.
In addition to building your goals from the top-down, a useful exercise is to build goals from the bottom-up. It helps get team buy-in and it can identify new opportunities for upside. For bottom-up goals, start with what the team thinks they can commit to. What they can deliver. Ask them what they can stretch to. Then work from those individual drivers, those individual goals, up to the bigger metrics that matter for the organization.
If you have an organization that’s trying to drive sales and you have a team full of sales reps, you may look at the individual bottom-up goals of number of calls that they’re going to make in an hour. Those then roll up to the number of calls that they’re able to connect on in an hour, which rolls up to a broader goal of the number of pitches that they’re making to customers, and a goal above that of how many pitches are being accepted by the customer. That can tie to a bigger goal of the number of contracts sent and pricing being achieved, a bigger goal of number of contracts being closed, and ultimately, end up in the big organizational goal of how much revenue is being generated.
Working from the bottom-up ties the individual to the broader mission. In terms of identifying new opportunities, I found this out firsthand. I had a team where I went to all my team members and I asked them for their profit goal for the year. One team came back to me with five times what I would have expected. I would have given them a goal of say, $5 million. And they came back and said, we’re going to get you 25. I was shocked and I asked them, where did you get this? They showed me they had found a huge new opportunity I wasn’t aware of. When I went to commit to my boss, I only committed 3x of that 5x they had found. I learned on the back end they had sandbagged me, and the number was 10x what I would have asked for them in the first place. They left upside for themselves and had hedged their goal to me. They were excited to exceed that hedge but they made sure they didn’t over promise to the organization.
Building from the bottom-up in that situation was great because it brought forth a new opportunity and we were able to roll it into the broader organizational goal. When you go through your goal setting exercise, go to your team and work from the bottom-up, from those low level metrics that tie to the higher level organizational goals. Look for buy-in from your team in terms of the goals that they’re going to set, and try and identify new opportunities for upside. That bottom-up goal setting process is going to give you tighter goals that are more closely tied to the broader organizational ones and hopefully help you find new opportunities to pursue.
Want to learn more about setting goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to set better goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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