Sales Strategies: Translating Concepts into Actions

When you begin to learn how to sell you’re learning at a conceptual level. Everything you read and hear sounds pretty good. After all it has worked for other people it should work for you, right?

Well, yes and no. Yes, it has worked for other people. But you aren’t other people you’re you and what worked like gang busters for someone else may be a total flop for you.

That doesn’t mean you are a failure, or that you can’t sell. It does mean that you haven’t taken a concept and learned how to adapt that concept to fit your particular situation and your particular attitudes and skills. And it means that you’re having trouble translating a concept into actions.

It’s easier for you to translate sales concepts when you’re very clear about who you want to attract and what you do. You may think that sounds like a duh, but I’ll bet if you’re currently having problems that your problems start here. You see you need to be very clear about specifically who you want to sell to so you can learn enough about those people to know exactly what they want and why. Then you need to be able to communicate to them in terms of the big thing they want to get when talking about what you do.

Without this underlying understanding within you it’s impossible to convey it to prospects. Plus prospects don’t care a whit about products, so you should never talk to them in terms of products you should talk to them in terms of desired outcomes. When you’re using a prepared presentation provided to you by the source of your products the focus is on the product not the prospect, and that puts you in a bad position with your prospect.

Instead of focusing on your agenda and what you want focus on the prospect. As you learn about a new selling concept ask yourself how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of this idea. If you don’t think you’d feel comfortable you won’t feel comfortable when you try to translate that concept into action.

When you try it you’ll see your prospect’s negative or uncomfortable reaction, and then you’ll know for sure it just isn’t right for you and your situation the way you’ve implemented it. So what do you do, trash the idea? No, recognize you don’t have it right yet because when you do it will feel like you and the prospect are in step moving together to the closed transaction like an army marching in cadence.

Identify how you could adapt this sales concept to better fit you and your prospect. There may be parts of your prepared sales presentation that have value and that you will want to work into your sales conversation at the appropriate time, but unless you’re holding a group sales conversation with four or more people tank the presentation and learn how to translate selling concepts into real selling conversations. You don’t hold selling conversations when you’re doing all the talking and following a script. You do hold selling conversations when the prospect is doing all the talking and your guiding them along the path to the end they want.

You have few, if any, results from the marketing dollars you’ve spent yet you keep doing the same things. You think your marketing materials must be very expensive and look professional. You think if you just do something long enough that eventually it will work.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. If your marketing dollars aren’t resulting in real qualified leads stop whatever you’re doing and fix it. It doesn’t make any sense to continue to throw good money after bad hoping that it will eventually work.

It isn’t how expensive your marketing materials are or how professional they look that matters. The only thing that matters is that those materials produce results. And if those materials aren’t producing results it’s time to fix the problem.

If something doesn’t work in the first marketing run it isn’t going to work the next thousand times either. When you don’t get the result you want you have to fix it and fix it now. Otherwise you can only expect to get the same bad results.

So why aren’t the things you are doing now working? Without ever having seen any of your materials or having met you I know exactly why your marketing materials don’t work. The first problem is that your marketing materials are you centered when they need to be prospect centered.

Prospects don’t give one whit about you until you give them a reason to. And telling them how great you are isn’t a reason. They want to know that you understand something that’s really bugging them, and that you have a way to help them to get what they want. The prospect wants your marketing communications to be all about them.

When you hit the prospect immediately with a powerful message that directly relates to what they’re thinking they’ll pay attention to every word no matter what format you use. So, you’ve got their attention and they’re hanging on every word. The next thing you do wrong is that you don’t have a call to action that get’s that prospect to reach out to you.

And that call to action should never be to ask them to appoint you. At this point they don’t know you, they know you may have something they want, but they don’t trust you enough to want to meet with you. When you ask for the appointment too soon you can lose a prospect forever, but when you provide a way for them to connect with you by providing value you can market to them until they’re calling you wanting to know more about doing business with you.

If you’re an insurance agent or a financial advisor what do you ask your clients to do all day long? Don’t you ask them to make investments to protect and provide the future they want? Yet surprisingly enough you guys are like the doctor who won’t follow his own orders.

In this case, I’m not referring to buying the products you sell yourself, although you should. If you don’t believe in the value of the products your selling enough to make the financial investment yourself you shouldn’t ask a single other person to do so. But there isn’t a simple product you can buy to do what you need to do.

This is probably a busy time of year for you as you wrap up business in this last quarter. But if you don’t assume a leadership role for yourself and do what you need to do the upcoming year may not meet your expectations. Self-leadership demands that you set your on course of action.

Good self-leadership demands you set the right course for action. You can focus on efficiency, you can focus of effectiveness, or you can focus on both. But you have to know what you’re trying to accomplish in specific details to improve either efficiency or effectiveness.

Efficiency is doing things in the right way in the least amount of time using the least amount of resources. You can be very efficient and very unproductive. Because while you can do things really fast you aren’t doing the right things.

Effectiveness is doing the right things. The right things are the things that produce the results you want. You can be inefficient but highly effective and produce results far greater than your competition.

But you have to know the right things to do before you can figure out how to increase your efficiency. And that’s where your self-leadership comes in to play. You have to develop a clear quantifiable plan of action to produce the results you want.

That clear quantifiable plan of action is your strategic action plan. Your strategic action plan helps you to make decisions quickly and use resources wisely. It helps you to increase your business results because it keeps you focused on doing the right things in the right way with the right people at the right time for the right reasons. So, how about scheduling time to develop your strategic action plan before this year wraps up?

Strategic Planning: Only 61 Days, but Who's Counting?

As of today there are only 61 days remaining in 2007. That means you have only 61 days to plan for 2008, so when the first day of the new year arrives you can be ready to implement the actions that will make it a better year than this year. Yet, in my experience very few small business owners actually develop a strategic plan for their business.

If you don’t have a plan that means you aren’t committed to achieving more than you have up to this point. And that’s fine for most people. You see there are three kinds of service professionals.

In the bottom 10% you’ll find the service professionals who are barely hanging on, and destined to fail in the near future. Even though this 10% is desperate and they don’t know what to do or how to do it they won’t get the help they need so they can succeed. These guys have a scarcity mentality. They’re afraid to make the investment in themselves and their business that would save them because they’ve already committed to failing they just haven’t told themselves yet.

The middle 80% is what I call the squishy middle. These folks don’t have a plan, but they’re satisfied with how their business is working. They don’t think they need to plan or investment in themselves or their business because they range from those who are getting by ok to those who are accidentally doing fairly well. By accidentally doing fairly well I mean they’ve had some things go their way so they’re generating the revenue that makes them happy now, but when things get tough these are the folks who will fall the hardest because they have no idea how to be intentionally successful.

Then there is the top 10% made up of the super star top producers. These people are never satisfied with where they are because they know they have even more potential for success. They are the ones who do have a strategic plan for their business and they put that plan into action on a daily basis. They’re never accidentally successful and always intentionally successful. They never stop investing in themselves and their businesses and their success clearly shows the value of doing so.

So with 61 days left before you start the new year you may want to develop your strategic plan so you can be a top producer in 2008. There are three parts to the strategic planning process: your core business statements, your critical goal categories, and your dashboard. Your strategic plan must be quantifiable and actionable or it’s a complete waste of your time and energy.

Your core business statements define you and your business. These include your purpose for being in business, the vision for the potential you see for your business, your mission for the upcoming year, and your unique market position. As you gain clarity you develop focus and focus helps you to make better decisions and better resource allocations.

The dashboard is where the rubber meets the road on this business map for where you’re headed. The dashboard is your tool for tracking and measuring your progress on a weekly if not daily basis. It provides the measurements you need to make adaptations and corrections along the way so you don’t get to the end of 2008 no better off than you are here at the end of 2007. So, if you’ve never done it before do it now and if you have let this be a reminder that it’s that time again.