The Scrambled Egg - a blog every sales professional should wake up to.

On average, it usually takes a minimum of 6 attempts (voicemail or email) to get a response from a prospect. This means the leads you’ve already worked are closer to responding versus new leads. However after about 10 attempts, the chance they’ll reply is extremely low. It is no longer worth your time to purse, move on.

If you haven’t read the blog article on the 6 simple rules for increasing emails and voicemails, it's helpful as it’s a prelude to the below technique. 

I should also disclose I find it best to leave a voicemail first and immediately after an email matching (almost verbatim) to your voicemail. A voicemail would be 1st attempt and the email is the 2^nd attempt. The combination of the two is one round.

If any of you have taken the Basho training, you’ll recognize the format of the emails discussed. I researched the meaning of basho and it’s a tournament for sumo wrestling. One of the techniques in sumo is an opponent will shift their weight to gain control of their challenger. So how does this apply to increasing your response rates? By increasingly adding more and more value in each round. This is not a sumo wrestling tournament but it’s time to get fat!

Round 1: You’ll recall I discuss the give/get in the first article to increase response rates. This is where one will tease with an offer of strategic advice (without disclosing) to give then there is a call to action for the prospect to respond in order to get the advice. If you don’t get a response from the prospect, your next voicemail and email round will increase in the value. 

Round 2: Actually give the piece of advice. It can be somewhat generic or basic but should be helpful. The rep should then tease by stating they have several more ideas (more giving) for the prospect and finish with the call to action. The prospect will need to call the sales rep in order to get the additional ideas. 

Bob,

You recently downloaded the whitepaper “Using Facebook for Business”. I've been to your website and your business Facebook page and noticed you’re creating some interesting content through a blog. While a blog is the most natural way to gain more business via social media, it’s currently set up incorrectly to give your website search engine optimization credit. It’s an easy fix I’d be glad to explain.

I have several other ideas for you to gain more business through social media.

Would you be able to connect Monday at 1:00 EST or Tuesday at 11:00 EST?

Best,

Me

Round 3: Still don’t have a response yet? This time include something tangible. This could be a whitepaper or something educational and make sure the content helps the prospect solve an issue and is not about your product, service or company. It’s not about you! For example, we include a marketing grader report which gives a score of how well their website performs as a marketing tool and includes free suggestion on how they can improve it. Always remember the teaser and the call to action at the end.

Round 4: Offer some highly customized piece of advice. Look on their news page, blog, LinkedIn etc. and try to find something they are doing that you could offer help with. Complete it with the teaser and call to action.

What next if there is still nothing from the prospect?  After the 4^th round you are now at 8 attempts (4 voicemails and 4 emails), it’s time for the break up. “The Break Up” has a 33% response rate, it’s uncanny. Stay tuned. It’s the next blog article…..

I was shoveling my driveway this evening and I realized a strange coincidence. Then it occurred to me it might not be a coincidence after all. So now I’m worried my house might be cursed. So here are the facts….

In 2006 I looked at a house in Hingham which was an absolute dump, uninhabitable, a tear down, a complete junkyard. In fact, the words of some of the others at the open house were “this place is (expletive) disgusting”. There were jars filled with formaldehyde that were so old they’d fogged over and you couldn’t tell what was in them. Grease was dripping down the bedrooms walls where the headboards once were (Soul Glow anyone?). There was an old bank safe (a very large one) in the garage the previous owners had turned into a sauna. Yes, a sauna, steam bath, Turkish bath, whatever you want to call it. Complete with extension cord running from the house, across the back yard and into the garage. My personal favorite was the garden hose coming up through the 2^nd floor window, into the bathroom, hanging over the shower curtain rod as the shower head.

So what does one do with such a house? Run? No! I thought it was perfect and by 2007 it was the place I called home. It was not before a major rehab with a lot of blood sweat and tears. The house was completely updated from roof, electric, plumbing and the back of the house had to be torn down and rebuilt. It was 6 months of construction, a team of about 15 men from the general contractor, the fence guy, the roofing company, the company who did the driveway, etc. By no means was it a small undertaking.  So here’s where the story gets weird…..

As I’m shoveling my driveway, I finally reached the bottom of the snow and the shovel hit the cobblestones. It made me think of the man who put the cobblestones in and recently passed away. This is when the facts hit me like a ton of bricks.

The Driveway Guy – he’d owned his own company for years and done a lot of stone work in the area. He passed away of cancer in 2012.  Even more eerie, as I’m writing this, I googled to check on the date of his death and found it was almost a year ago to today. I have goose pumps.

The Fence Guy – a gentleman from Kingston, who'd put his life back together and had been sober for over a year. In 2009 he went out for a bachelor party and had offered to be the designated driver. After dropping off his friends safely, he was driving home at the wee hours of the night, fell asleep at the wheel, went straight when the road turned and was killed.

I can’t remember his last name as I wanted to google and find the date of his obituary. I looked in my phone to see if his last name might be there, however I have his name saved as “Kevin Fence”. I looked at his cell number it started with (617) 571 which is the same first 6 digits of my cell number. I no longer have goose bumps, now I’m feeling uneasy.

The General Contractor - Jason was a young contractor who practically had a monopoly on my street. He’d renovated 5 houses on the street within a year and a half. His business was thriving and he made the mistake of dabbling in prescription pills. He quickly went into a downward spiral and passed away 2008.

I went to find his obituary and his passing is almost exactly 5 years and 1 month from today. Goose bumps are gone, uneasy feeling is gone, I’m now - scared.

Is my house cursed??

Notice the Soul Glo? Bottom right hand corner of the below picture.

The garden hose is coming up from behind the shower curtain.....

The stairs.

The front of the house before construction and after (with cobblestones shown).

How can you be sure there is a 30% increase? I tested it and measured the results. I took 5 reps as the experimental group. They used the below technique with subsequent emails (which will be a blog post to follow). The control group was the rest of the sales team (about 45 other reps) who continued to use the same templates used in the past. I ran the experiment for 5 weeks and tracked the lead attempt to connect rates in Salesforce. The experimental group made 30% more connects than the control group. In data we trust, even in sales.  So here it goes....

In an early blog post I discuss the #1 rule to consultative selling. The below techniques follow the consultative approach by removing the focus from yourself, your product, company and/or service. 

1) The Subject Line should be about the prospect, not about you. The first step is to get the prospect to open the email. If it’s about them, it’ll be more interesting. If it’s an inbound lead, the subject line should be whatever they downloaded. If it’s an outbound or cold attempt, find something about the prospect. Look to see if they were recently in the news, updated or posted something on LinkedIn or Twitter. Make sure the recent news or status updated is related to business. Then make this the subject line.

2) The Length of the email should be short. Most of us are checking our emails via cell phones and mobile devices can make short emails look long. Send the email to yourself first and make sure it’s not overwhelm in length.

3) The 2 to 1 Ratio. In other words, you should reference their company and/or the word “you” at least twice as many times as you see the word “I” or your company name. Most importantly, start the email with the word “You”. This grabs their attention and it makes it about them. Starting an email with “I” is about you and quite frankly, who cares about you at this point.

4) The Give - you should also offer some type of tease alluding to strategic advice. It's best not criticize; add value by offering strategy and not about your product/service. Each subsequent attempt you’ll offer additional value by giving more strategies. I’ll talk about this more in my next coming blog article. Stay tuned.

5) The Get – the email should end with a call to action that stands alone. In other words, they’ll need to respond in order to get the strategic advice. This does not mean to end the email with “Let me know if you’d like to talk”. It's fine to use this with your friends and they get back to you because they like you. Prospects don’t like sales reps, they are not your friend and this is a waste of time. Instead, be very clear and end the email with a question “What time works best with you” or give suggested times (give a couple options as people are busy).

Here is an example of an email/voicemail template:

Bob,

You recently downloaded the whitepaper “Using Facebook for Business”. I've been to your website and your business Facebook page and noticed a few areas where you can increase the amount of business you’re generating from social media.

Would you be able to connect Monday at 1:00 EST or Tuesday at 11:00 EST?

Best,

Me

Your voicemail will match the same format, except you’d add at the end “This is (your name) calling from (company name) and my number is ____“. Yes, at the end not the beginning. As soon as you start a voicemail with “Hi this is so and so from…..” the voicemail is deleted before you can say the company name. If you have to introduce yourself, they know it’s a sales call and they won’t listen. Delete. Starting the voicemail without an introduction will seem very awkward at first. Practice until a it’s habit.

While many of these methods were derived from Jeff Hoffman's Basho Strategies, they've been augmented over time to stay relevant with the changing landscape of sales.   

You remember Fight Club starring Brad Pitt. What was the 1^st rule of Fight Club? You don't talk about Fight Club! This is also true in sales. The first rule to consultative selling and increasing sales is to stop selling.  Don't talk about your company or the products and/or services you offer.

You’ve probably heard the expression “it’s not about you, it’s about them”. For many in sales, this is easy to understand but it’s not clear how to execute. What the heck does one talk about if you can’t talk about the product/service you’re selling? Here’s the secret to not breaking the first rule of Fight Club.

1) What pain does your product/service solve?

If your answer is along the lines of streamlining this or that, more effectively does this or increases productivity, etc. Keep digging. Why would another company need that?  There are typically 3 areas in which a sale falls into: 

Makes money

Saves money

Reduces risk

Keep asking yourself why until you get down to one of the three listed above.

2) Become a subject matter expert in your industry. You’ll need to rely on this expertise so you can talk with your prospects about strategy. When you offer strategic advice and not about your product/service, you’ll gain trust and credibility. When they trust you they will tell you more about their problems and the REAL issues (which fall into one of the above 3 buckets). 

3) Stop selling. Put your product/service and quota to the side and genuinely try to help the prospect solve a problem through your expertise. Keep trying to solve their issues without breaking the 2^nd rule of Fight Club. While you offer a product/service that solves their problem, you will not need to bring it up. The prospect will ask on their ownif you’ve sincerely tried to help them.

This can be used in any example. Let's take an extreme example and say you're selling cake batter to a catering company. Why does a company need new cake batter? Perhaps wedding bookings have been down or their competition has a reputation for beautiful and tasty wedding cakes. Give advice on improving their current cakes and give ideas on how to increase bookings in other ways. You will gain trust with the prospect and they will be open with information about how one wedding cake collapsed an hour before a reception and several bookings were cancelled because of it. They might eventually disclose revenue is down 20%.

If you don't break the first 2 rules of Fight Club, the sale will naturally happen on its own. You may find the prospect doesn’t have a problem you can solve. While not the outcome you wanted, there was never a sale to be made in the first place. At least in this case the lost prospect is a great source of referrals. 

In subsequent posts I'll discuss how the rule of Fight Club is applicable in all stages of a sales process. 

It’s the age old problem; how does one diet and lose weight yet still be able to enjoy some beverages for those who are over 21?  The definition of “some beverages” may vary greatly for some people.  I digress. While the Skinny Girl Margarita have gained a lot of fans, I never really caught on. First, tequila turns some of us into the Exorcist. For those of you who need a reminder click here.....  As far as the Skinny Girl wine, it makes a bathroom with the door closed for days complete with a kitty litter box, in the summer, with no A/C seem more appealing. So here are some alternatives to keep you sane while dieting:

The Wannabe Creamsicle- 

Whipped cream vodka (Pinnacle vodka usually does the trick)

Diet Orange Canadian Dry (if you can’t find this you can go with diet orange soda or diet crush)

Add Ice and go.

*Caution these taste unreal, you’ll drink them fast!

Desperate for Chocolate Martini -

Chocolate flavored vodka (I've only tried UV chocolate vodka)

Skim Milk

Just a touch of Hershey's chocolate syrup 

Shake well and serve.

As an alternative you can drink the chocolate vodka on the rocks, add water to increase volume. It tastes like you're drinking Godiva liqueur.

*Caution these are also really taste and you’ll drink them as fast as you'd eat a piece of chocolate cake!

The "Ugh I Have to Get In a Bathing Suit" -

Malibu rum

Fresca

A splash of pineapple juice

Add an orange on the top of the glass and serve.  Don't forget the umbrella.

*Caution not only will these go down fast, but you might actually think you're on vacation from your diet.

The Lululemonade -

Cake vodka (ThreeOlives, Pinnacle or UV have all worked in the past)

Crystal Light pink lemonade mix

Add ice and serve at your favorate BBQ

*Caution limit yourself to 2.

These are the best I've heard of and discovered as of yet. I'm hopeful with all the new flavored vodkas there will be more recipes to share.

There have been countless times I’ve heard “I am the Decision Maker” in my sales career and I’ve fallen for the line more times than I can count. While we’re ultimately looking to get to the Decision Maker, it’s one of the worst things a sales rep can hear.  If you do hear this, seller beware, this is a prospect you should be VERY skeptical of.  

There’s an expression, “if someone tells you how rich they are, it’s because they’re not really that rich”. I’m sure you’ve heard or seen these people talk about how much money they make or how important they are.  As many of us know, they are making up for something they lack. The same is true in sales. If you hear this in a sales process the person can be hazardous to your sale.

Here’s what to look for:

1) The Self-Proclaimed DM – the prospect who unsolicited told you they were the DM. If they offer up the information without you asking, they are toxic. They are being deceptive and gating you from the rest of their internal purchasing process. The prospect is not bought-in and you need to discover their objections and handle them or move on to the next. Do your best to gain trust, otherwise do not waste time with prospects that won’t be authentic.

2) The Misunderstood DM/The Recommender – the prospect has a different definition. Many times in sales we have our own definition of the DM but it doesn’t necessarily match that of the prospect.  I find this many times when a sales person is proactively discovering a purchasing process. The prospect actually thinks they are the DM. Yes, they actually think they are.  Their definition is they will be evaluating all vendors and bringing their decision to the committee, board, etc. By the prospect’s definition they are the DM because they are deciding what to recommend. This person is actually, what I call, the recommender.  In this scenario, the prospect is not being deceptive. However the sales rep is looking for the person who signs the contract and checks.  Don’t dismiss the recommender as they are extremely valuable in a sale. Spend time with this prospect, ask more questions and determine if it’s just a difference in meaning.  

3) The Decision Maker – the big kahuna, the person in charge, the person who signs the check. You get the picture.  This is the person who can say yes without having to check with someone, they can re-allocate budget on their own, they can (but don't always) work alone. I find it most common this person needs at least a C-level job title if not the President or Owner. A rep should be asking questions in order to determine if they have the ultimate DM.  For example, “If you decide you want to go with this solution, who else do you confer with?”

Working with the Decision Maker is the fastest and easiest way to get a sale closed. It would not be true if we said we work exclusively with DMs, the reality is many times we find ourselves working with non-decision makers as well. A sales rep can still be very success when using a non-DM to get to the real DM. Be smart with which ones you spend your time with and know the signs of ones who are a toxic waste of time.  Don’t take things at face value, dig deeper and seller beware!

There is an old expression you can tell a sales rep is lying because their lips are moving. While I don't agree reps lying, I will agree moving lips are not a sign of effectiveness.  In fact, the less a rep can move their lips, the better position they'll be in. This brings me to two of my favorite skills in a sales tool belt. 

1) Silence is one of the most unnatural to master yet yields the most results. Many of us, regardless of making a sale, feel the need to fill in the awkward moments of silence. In sales the knee jerk reaction is amplified. Reps tend to fill in the space with useless information that could risk the deal or completely talk a prospect out of a sale.

Be comfortable with silence and learn to embrace it. Sometimes it can be gut-wrenching and the sound of silence can be deafening. Get over it and get comfortable with the mute button. Once a rep can embrace silence, it's a waiting game. The prospect also feels the knee jerk reaction to fill in the silence. If a rep can be patient, the prospect's need to fill in the silence will take over. What the prospect will divulge during the "filler" time is MUCH more interesting and valuable than anything a rep has to say. Silence is a huge advantage in a sale. While it takes practice and patience, the sound of silence will be welcomed technique.   

2) Ask questions. When a rep is telling a prospect something or making a pitch it gives the prospect time to think of objections, check their email, hit mute, talk to their colleagues, day dream, etc. 

Instead of making a statement, pose it as a question. This does 3 things. First, it minimizes the amount of talking from a rep. Second, it keeps the prospect engaged and they need to think of an answer to the question asked opposed to thinking of objections, checking email, miming comments, etc. Third, it forces them to come to the conclusion on their own. It might also uncover a piece of information that would have otherwise never been discovered.

Here is an example:

Statement "We have a tool that tells you the best time to post a blog article".

Question "When do you think is the best time to post a blog article?" Even if one elicits the answer "I don't know" it still engages the prospect and divulges the prospect might need help. 

What do silence and asking questions have in common?  They both minimize the amount of talking one does during a sale. The less one talks in a sale the more effective you are. In other words, less is more. Stop talking and start listening!

I've decided arugula is my favorite lettuce.  I eat a lot of salad and I mean A LOT.  After spending a lifetime of going for the crunchy lettuces like romaine, I'm totally bought into arugula.  If you haven't tried it, here's why you should:

6) Arugula is a time saver.  I've spent way too much time with romaine; cleaning lettuce, spinning the lettuce cleaner, chopping, chopping and then some more chopping. Whereas arugula usually comes bagged, already cleaned and doesn't require chopping.

5) Arugula saves money.  Every notice the other bagged lettuce doesn't last long? It quickly turns into that mushy, transparent, wet, starting to disintegrate type lettuce?  Arugula lasts longer, so I waste less and it saves me money.

4) Arugula is less in calories. I know I know, I'm splitting hairs here as all salad is low in calories, but stick with me on this one.  Arugula has a naturally zesty and bold taste (it even says it on the bag - I know cause I just checked).  You don't need to add as much dressing (if any at all) to get flavor. Just add lemon and some pepper and you have a salad that's tolerable (for those serious dieters). Try to do that with another lettuce and it's pretty darn bland!  Have you looked at the calorie content of some other dressings?  I love you ranch, but might as well get a Big Whopper!

3) Arugula is fun to say.  Remember the old school commercials for Ricola cough drops?  Click here to spark your memory.  Try saying arugula like you’re the guy in Switzerland yelling from the top of a hill with the alphorn (that's the long horn that sits on the ground). Now try doing that with Boston bib lettuce. It just isn't the same is it?

2) Everything cool has a nickname. Did you know arugula is also known as rocket lettuce? Rocket lettuce! Such a cool name. What other lettuce has a nickname and a cool one at that?

1) Size matters.  Yeap, I said it, size matters.  I'm always hungry, always.  So the fact that I can eat an unlimited amount of arugula without dressing helps to fill my bottomless pit.  Arugula is also jammed packed full of nutrition (unlike iceberg) so the more the better!

If you're not convinced about arugula yet, let's hear it!