Corporate Developments: Not selling but beginning a relationship.

Corporate Developments: Not selling but beginning a relationship.: Major success in cold calling is to take an approach of not selling but beginning a relationship that adds value to that company or person...

Not selling but beginning a relationship.

Major success in cold calling is to take an approach of not selling but beginning a relationship that adds value to that company or person to whom you are targeting. Open with a statement that allows for them to begin sharing information with you. Do not over power the conversation with your own ideas or thoughts. Be natural and genuinely interested in their business. Selling is about relationships and the value to which you bring. Not how good you can close from a call script. And always know when to move on to the next prospect and not waste time trying to force something that is not worthwhile.
Advice for the day by Charlie Rudd.

Corporate Developments: Law of Attraction and Your Business.

Corporate Developments: Law of Attraction and Your Business.:     Law of Attraction and Your Business: Imagine the Picture of Your Success and Then Have it The secret law of attraction was for ...

Law of Attraction and Your Business.

 

 

Law of Attraction and Your Business: Imagine the Picture of Your Success and Then Have it

The secret law of attraction was for a long time the greatest secret kept in human history. Businessmen and Millionaires kept this little known treasure to themselves, and their success is phenomenal. If you've ever wondered what the difference was between you and them, this is it:

The Law of Attraction.

Some people will scoff at the thought that the law of attraction is what allowed these people to gain their riches and fully enjoy life, but it's true. You can use the secret law of attraction to benefit you, just as they have used the secret law of attraction to gain wealth, power, happiness, and more.

Many people have tried to use the law of attraction consciously, but it hasn't worked. If you're one of those people - if you feel that the secret, and therefore the entire universe, has failed you - read on, because it may be the universe that has failed.

If you're expecting the law of attraction to work overnight for you, think again. If you have never consciously used the secret law of attraction in your life before, it may take time for you to even realize that it's working.

Another mistake people make when attempting to benefit from the law is that they think the universe will deliver everything they need on a golden platter-IMMEDIATELY!. The law of attraction does not work like that - you cannot expect to get something from nothing.

The secret will open doors for you by attracting opportunities across your path and by allowing you to do things you wouldn't normally do, but it will not make a magic pile of gold bricks appear without any work- you also need to be ready to 'receive' what you are asking for. If your dream is to own your own business, the secret law of attraction will give you the opportunity to do so.

The law has been around for quite a long time - business pro's earning millions of dollars a year put the secret law of attraction to work for them time and time again, and you can easily put it to work, too.

The secret is as simple as thinking of what you want, seeing it in your possesion, and willing it to you. Your thoughts will manifest into reality - that's the basic principle of the law of attraction.

Close your eyes, and will what you want to come to you - extra money, extra work, love, hope, Try to connect with how you will feel when these things are yours, imagine they are yours with an 'attitude of gratitude', and it will all come to be. It really is that easy, and you can really achieve everything you've wanted in life - riches, fame, and more - if you use this law.

Know What Your Customers Believe

Beliefs drive behavior; this is has been proven true time and time again and I believe it is one of the great laws of the universe. So it makes sense if you are in sales it is probably pretty important to learn what your customer believes. Yet I will be willing to bet that learning your customer’s beliefs is not at the top of most sales rep’s priority lists. Maybe it should be.

Your goal in selling is to have a business conversation with another person and to hopefully change their mind and then their behavior so that they use your product (or perhaps use more of your product). I don’t know how you can attempt to do that unless you know what that person really believes. If you are not able to adequately explain what your customer believes and thinks about your product or service, then you need to learn what these beliefs are. The very best way I have ever discovered to do that is to ask — that’s the best way to find out the information you seek. It makes sense to construct a well crafted question that doesn’t sound threatening, creates a safe environment and sets the tone that you are truly interested in learning about your customer. You may say something like this: “It occurred to me that I am really not 100% certain how you currently view my product. I would love to ask you to share with me how you currently view my product and have it positioned in your mind, if at all? Could you take a moment to help me understand this so I can make certain what I share with you is most relevant?”

Being able to identify a belief is a great starting point, but you still want to learn more. You want to learn where that belief originated from, if at all possible. It could be based on experience, or what this customer was taught in training, or a recommendation from a colleague. Why is it significant to learn how that belief was shaped? The obvious reason is that your customer describing their beliefs either confirms that you truly understand them or that you need to ask some clarifying questions to learn more.

By asking this type of question, you gain extra insight: It enables you to get a glimpse of the thought processes that your customer employs to arrive at the decision as to the best option/product/solution for them. It will also help you identify different factors that will likely influence this customer. For example, you may learn that a colleague recommended a competitor’s product based on his experiences. Now you know not only that your competitor is already being used within that organization but that your customer values this colleague’s input. It makes sense to talk to that person of influence and gain an understanding of that individual. (And you may influence more potential customers by engaging this one influential person).

The quest for customer knowledge and insight for top performing sales people is never ending. By focusing your efforts to learn more about your customer, such as their beliefs, you’ll find it is easier not only to tailor your product discussion but to develop a business relationship with that person. You’ll notice that your customer responds differently to you once you gain this understanding — and you’ll very likely see the results in your sales numbers.

Whats going on with Lead Generation?

 

 

 

Lead Generation Has Grown Up

• The role has been elevated from being viewed as a low-skill phone resource to being viewed as an important element of a sales strategy.
• Today, quality is key and lead generation is becoming a proper part of the sales cycle. It is about identifying REAL opportunities which match with the model/strategy. For us, the group reports to Marketing and that is in question. At some point, it might have to be moved to sales.
• Lead generation used to be volume based; it was mostly about a pure appointment setting activity. Now it’s about quality and not quantity. It’s a more critical part of the pipeline generation/overall sales process than most people give it credit for.

Crazy Busy Buyers

• There’s less direct contact with key buyers. So there’s more emphasis on value messaging and specific insight from lead nurturing, trigger events or insight gleaned from speaking with lower level folks (day in the life pains).
• It’s increasingly more difficult as c-levels hide behind AAs, voicemail and even e-mail. It takes more dogged determination and creativity.

Why Social Media helps Business.

Social media marketing was not a well furnished method of marketing, but rather a best practice that evolved because of the numerous benefits of having a social media presence. It's a way of marketing in which you get in touch with potential customers through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and so on. The advantages of social media marketing are numerous. Social media marketing works by making use of internet places where customers approach on a day to day basis and thereby creating awareness of the business product or service.

Creating a brand value via awareness is one of the advantages of social media networking. Facebook is the social media website that has been rated as the site with most hits on the internet. Therefore via facebook marketing your business will be visible to a wide range of audience. It helps to identify potential customers both locally and globally whereby paves way to new sale spots. Not just it helps to identify potential customers; social network presence also helps in identifying competitors in your field of business. It helps you to have strategic business plots in place to manage your space in the market.

Live feedback from the customers is the most fruitful part of facebook commerce and marketing. The success of a product or service can be known instantly via the customer comments and likes on the facebook pages or communities. Feedback choices available in the social media sites like, following in twitter, like in Facebook and so on are very much effective than running a customer satisfaction survey. These social networking sites are visited by millions of users. Even if your business profile is not popular among all the millions, you would be able to gain attraction of a wider crowd. Popularity gained in such social media sites aid in expanding your business to new locations.

The customer relationship maintained via the facebook is more intimate. The updates have to be precise and up-to-date to ensure smooth handling of the customers. Facebook community pages also help keeping a personal relationship with your valuable customers by making sure they are notified precisely about the company activities. Customer support via facebook is more effective as the company would be answering customer queries and concerns directly in a timely fashion. This will further add to the customer satisfaction and achieves cost effectiveness by saving money from customer phone calls. The direct interaction made with customers results in increased trust on your company and the service offered. This will encourage the customer to choose you on top of your competitors and make recommendation to other fellow customers.

Featuring your business product is quite important in bringing attention to your products. Few sites even offer a promotional code to increase the sales. And it's stated to be an eco friendly method of advertising. No ink and paper is wasted for marketing or advertising campaign. Keep updating your site with new product releases, upcoming promotions, special seasonal offers, running contests and so on. This will help you in maintaining the existing group of loyal customer to be stringed to your business.

Facebook marketing is found to have the highest return on interest in terms of marketing. For any scales of business, facebook commercials are found to be the most cost effective solution when compared to the conventional methods of advertisement and marketing. It's easy to run a market research via social media sites rather than spending huge amount of money with such agencies running market research. 
Every business aspires to expand their business to new heights and new locations. Spreading your business is easier with social networking sites which has millions and millions of visitors. Harnessed properly, social networking would definitely create a boost in your business.

Do You Know Why Your Doing What You Do?

The powerful question in Sales is WHY? why do we care?why do we want to change? why will this benefit you and your company? why are you doing it? why should we trust you? to find a solution to Why, this must come from within yourself and the solution for me is to believe.

Do Business with people who believe what they believe,hire people who believe in what you believe.
As the great Simon Sinek states, Apple would not state "we make great computers with simple design do you want one" they would say "Everything we do challenges status quo and we just happen to make great computers want to buy one" the same thing different langage.
Apple believe in their products and know they make excellent computers, thats what they do and how can that help your business. People buy Why your doing it.

You must Believe in your services, products and skills, You may have Talent but this alone will not create long term success without developing your skills, "Talent will fail if you don't work to develop your skills"

If your inner diloge is telling you it's too hard, a wase of time, or the econnomy is shafted nobody is spending, you are creating negativity within yourself and this will most certainly effect your sales.

It's a nessesaty to make a difference in your attitude to potenial clients, it's vital you communicate and build good rapport, understand their believe as a business and know WHY their doing it.

How can 2mm change things?
If your playing Golf and you constantly swinging into the rough, the 2mm angle of the club head can change the hole game of golf, if you go for surgery on your face, 2mm can change your ugly face to beauty, so if your sat in a call center not getting the results on the phone, move your torso up 2mm and listen to the change in your voice, its more possative and confident in its self.

Successful people do what failures wont.

By Charlie Rudd Corporate Developments.

What to look for in a Telemarketing Company.

 

 

 

 

What to look for in a Telemarketing Company.

How can we separate the capable cold calling firm from the not-so-capable ones?

It’s just a matter of asking the right questions. It’s just like interviewing someone if he or she is perfect for a job position in your organization. You ask them some questions to gauge their professionalism on what will be their tasks. Here are some questions that you can use in searching for the right contact center.

• Can you give me a list of some companies that you have worked with in the past?
• Where the campaigns of said companies successful?
• Is your contact database updated and verified constantly?
• How long have you been in the lead generation industry?
• What happens if an appointment fails to show up?
• How much are the services of your sales representatives?
• What is your edge among other contact centers?
• 
  

If the call center is able to prove that their answers with hard-core evidence, then by all means opt for them and let the business leads and sales appointments fill your sales pipeline.

This is it for today’s tip. Tune in tomorrow for the next technique on how to bring success to your b2b lead generation campaign.

By Charlie Rudd Corporate Developments.

Are You Missing Sales Opportunities Because of Your Follow-up Skills?

 

 

Are You Missing Sales Opportunities Because of Your Follow-up Skills?

As sales people I think that a lot of us don’t follow-up enough because of a common fear we share...the fear of rejection. Sometimes we feel more comfortable with no feedback rather than hearing that dreaded word "NO". I teach my salespeople and customers all the time that hearing no isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a matter of fact it is the second best answer you can hear behind "YES". Truth be told, by hearing the word "NO" does three great things for you:

1. It lets you know where you stand. You don't have to guess what your prospect thinks of your approach/solution/pitch/etc. I will take 10 "NO's" over 10 "Maybe's" any day of the week. At least with "NO" you can move on to another prospect where a "MAYBE" might keep you hanging around and wasing valuable time.

2. It opens up a lot more options and opportunities for you than not hearing anything.

3. It allows you to learn from your mistakes, uncover missed customer needs or obstacles, answer any of their objections/hesitations (real or perceived), clear up any misunderstandings, or change your sales tactic.

Follow-up should be exctiting for both you and the client. This is an opportunitiy for you both to continue to build a meaningful relationship and establish yourself as someone of value. After all, you are selling service, not cemetery plots...have fun with it.

Remember, follow-up often with your clients or another salesperson will!

By Charlie Rudd Corporate Developments.

Stop Waiting & Take The Initiative

 

 

Stop Waiting & Take The Initiative

A common trait of some of the most successful sales people that I work with or teach, is that they take the initiative. They don’t wait to be told what to do and they don’t wait for someone to ask them to do something.

Taking the initiative is one way they show VALUE to their prospects/customers. Your customers DEPEND on you to be proactive and bring them ideas that make a difference. Your clients don't just want ideas, they NEED and EXPECT your ideas.

While they are focusing on their business, they NEED you to be thinking about how they can take their business to the next level. They appreciate the fact that you are thinking about:

- What isn’t working as well as it could?
- What ideas am I implementing for others that might benefit them?
- What could we develop together that would allow them to produce better results?

These questions aren’t easy to answer but the more difficult the question, the more important the answer. Take the initiative to ask and answer these questions because your clients are COUNTING ON YOU!

By Charlie Rudd Corporate Developments.

Lead Generation

Finding new leads, leads that haven’t yet found you, and preparing them for sales is tough work. Rewarding people to do it well is even trickier business. A good lead generation team keeps your sales team fed and focused on closing deals. It fills your pipeline, creating a steady revenue stream. The lead generation team members develop unique skills and learn how to carefully track leads to pass only the best to sales.
It’s a job with two objectives, right? Pass lots of leads to sales. Pass quality leads to sales. This is where the rewards get tricky.
Since the goal of lead generation is to bring in new leads, you want to reward prospectors who do that. But it doesn’t work to only reward for the number of leads. A prospector who isn’t focused on the final process (sale!) may bring in great volume of poor quality leads.
In the end that will waste sales executives’ time, force the company to pay out when it isn’t receiving revenue and drag down the sales process.
So how do you motivate prospectors to do two things at once?

Charlie Rudd Corporate Developments.

The Appropriate Appointment:

The Appropriate Appointment:
The appropriate appointment, how is this acquired for a client? Many companies outsource there B2BTelemarketing/appointment setting,and many receive incorrect information, appointments which are not saleable or indeed appointments with no reference to the business products of services.
To ensure all your appointments are saleable and importantly relative to your client, then a degree of home work, research, communication and organisation must be done before your team even pick the phone up.
I believe, any manager needs to be confidant that they know their clients Business inside out, in the respect of product knowledge, maintenance of services, always knowing of changes within the service or products that the company may be making, and to communicate with the field team and get a personal angle on the way they like to market  and sell the product and service.

The appropriate appointment, also requires research, on the buyers market your team will be contacting, to generate the appropriate appointment for your client, I believe an element of understanding of why your product or service is appropriate to the buyer.

For the appropriate appointment it is important your team are not only well trained with how your company operates and sells, but importantly they do their home work; and each of your clients have but one appointment Manager per client, so there is continuity and a business relationship can develop and you can represent your client to the best of your ability and provide the perfect appointment and see it through to the close.

Essentially, Knowledge and the correct management of communication between the three parties is the key to the appropriate appointment.

 By Charlie Rudd
Corporate Developments.

Why Accountability Matters in My Business.

Why Accountability Matters

Recently, I had a great discussion with one of my longtime friends about how often a manager should “stick their nose” in to their teams business…especially their top producers. His perspective on the matter was that by meeting w/ them often & regularly to discuss activity goals & metrics, it may be construed “micromanagement”. He believed that what any good manager should do is just “get out of their way”. While I agree that “micromanagement” is a poisonous activity for any profession, I can tell you from experience that “getting out their way” may make them happy but it isn’t in the their best interest. Giving your people what they need vs. what they want is the sign of a great leader/manager.

One of the most dangerous mistakes any person can make is to go without accountability. Even short periods of time w/out it can end up causing major problems in producing results later. As much as any person may want to resist activity goals & metrics or as much as a manager may not want to measure/enforce activity goals, it is necessary that you do so—even when that individual is making their numbers.

The best example I can relate this to, is imagine a professional athlete at the absolute top of his/her game. Now imagine that instead of maintaining their strict diet/fitness/practice/mental conditioning regime, they buy in to their own hype, stop listening to their coaches & start taking time off. They start to spend time at bars w/ friends & on the couch watching TV when they should be preparing. As an ex-athlete I know firsthand that people do not suffer from those decisions right away but, at some point, in the very near future, their results will diminish.

The business world isn’t very different than the sports world, is it? Without prospecting for even relatively short periods of time, your pipeline starts to look a little light. Without face to face interactions with your prospects & customers, your deals start to stammer & your pipeline starts to look even weaker. Before you know it…you miss your number for the quarter. This was never your intention; it just sort of slipped away.

Momentum in business requires that you keep some standard. Your activity goals & metrics are an indication of your future results. Like in our scenario, your activity metrics are a snapshot of your fitness level as a professional. W/out activity goals & metrics, it easy to underperform & miss your numbers…no matter if you are an entry level professional or a “top performer”.

I have known many managers to be unforgiving when it comes to activity metrics & goals. Activity isn’t everything, in-fact, a push for activity-at- all-costs turns many of their team members in to creative writers. They start to get reports turned in that are typically full of lies & activity with prospects that should have easily been disqualified. There is a balance required here & it is our job as leaders/managers to find it.

Help everyone on your team to map out a model week. Everyone’s week isn’t going to look exactly same, everyone’s isn’t always going to play out exactly like the model week, & in some instances their weeks are going to look very different based on the demands of the business. The model is simply something to aspire to, an ideal. A single week of poor activity isn’t likely to make or break your sales results. Some weeks are going to be more productive than others, it just works that way. A single week of poor activity ISN’T likely to break your future sales results but a single month of poor activity IS likely to do quite extensive damage and a quarter of poor activity is likely to spell doom.

To my friend & anyone else reading this…this is my case for activity goals & metrics. As the case for sports, or any profession for that matter, it is very difficult to make up for lost time. Activity goals & metrics, or accountability, are what keep you deliberately moving upward and onward

Entrepreneur?

Anybody can be a successful entrepreneur. Even someone who didn’t finish college or wasn’t born rich can attain financial success. How do you think these people manage to do it? Simple. They knew the secrets of successful entrepreneurs and applied them in their life.

I know that you must be a little sceptical. If anybody can be successful financially, then why are most people still in the same place they were five or ten years ago? The answer is fear.

They are holding themselves back. Are you one of them? Now is the time for you to turn your life around. Read these secrets of successful entrepreneurs and realize your dreams.

1) Passion is everything.

A lot of self-made millionaires are passionate about what they do. Whether it’s selling dogs or selling a food service, if the passion is there, the money will definitely follow.

So if you’re thinking of starting a successful business, better start with what you’re really passionate about. Sit down with yourself and list down the things you really like. Even if your passion sounds ridiculous, it wouldn’t be silly anymore after you earn millions of pounds from it!

2) Planning is a must.

One of the secrets of successful entrepreneurs is planning. These people eat, drink and breathe planning. Why? Because if you don’t know how to plan things accordingly, you’re going to end up wasting your potential and your time. Other people will be able to trick you into shelling out money, or into making unsound decisions.

If you’re not really a planning person, then you’re going to have to adjust. Buy yourself an organizer and commit to it. If it’s not written there, then it’s not happening.

3) Faith will lead the way.

Somewhere down the road, you might start having doubts about whether this whole thing is such a good idea or not. This is where faith comes in.

A lot of successful entrepreneurs have experienced losing direction and not knowing what they should do next. But they hang on with only their passion, their planning and their faith.

Soon, something happens that boosts their business. They regain clarity and direction. This is one of the reasons why faith is one of the most important secrets of successful entrepreneurs. Without it, everything else will be a failure. 

You already know how the financially successful live. Now, you also know the secrets of successful entrepreneurs. I say you’re well on your way towards attaining your goals in business and life.