NZ’S E-MAG FOR SALES LEADERS | WWW.NZSALESMANAGER.CO.NZ

DECEMBER | ISSUE 89

Page 6

USE THE SALE METHODOLOGY TO COUNTER ANY OBJECTION

Merry Christmas NZ Sales Managers!

12 Tips to Close

End of Year Sales Fast!

Page 18

02 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

From the Editor

This is our last issue for the year. We are off to refresh and recharge, reflect on 2014 and plan for

2015. Thanks for all your comments, encouragement and feedback during the year. Please continue to let us know what you want to see in the magazine.

ABOUTShort and sharp, New Zealand Sales Manager is a free e-magazine delivering thought provoking and enlightening articles, and industry news and information to forward-thinking sales managers, business owners and sales professionals.

We’ll be back in January, so from us all at NZSM, we wish you a safe and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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EDITOR Paul Newsom

ART DIRECTOR Jodi Olsson

GROUP EDITOR Richard Liew

ADDRESS NZ Sales Manager, C/- Espire Media, PO Box 99758, Newmarket, Auckland 1151, NZ

ISSN 2230-4762

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From Koru memberships worth over $700, to free valet parking and Airpoints Dollars™ - if your business spends more than $20,000 annually on air travel, get registered and start enjoying the benefi ts. It’s a no-brainer.

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DECEMBERcontents

THIS MONTH'S MUST READ...............................................................................................................6USE THE SALE METHODOLOGY TO COUNTER ANY OBJECTION

USING SALES HYPNOSIS TO OVERCOME LIMITING BELIEFS.........................................10

FIVE REASONS WHY SALES MANAGERS DON’T COACH................................................................14

TWO MINUTE TOP-UP.......................................................................................................................1812 TIPS TO CLOSE END OF YEAR SALES FAST!

QUICK FIX..........................................................................................................................................20It’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell

BOOK REVIEW...................................................................................................................................22 The Naked CEO by Alex Malley

THE CLOSE.........................................................................................................................................23

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MUSTREAD

Words by Colleen Francis

We all face questions and objections from buyers. The key to creating a nonstop sales boom is in reframing these objections as simple conversation

starters that lead towards a sale. In doing so, you will reduce your anxiety and will be able to work through them more effectively.

Use the SALE Methodology to Counter any Objection

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S = Stop and listen. That’s right. I am saying that the best first step in answering questions or objections is to stop. Do nothing. Say nothing. Just for three seconds. Three seconds is long enough to create some space, some thinking time between the question and your answer, but not long enough to be awkward.

A = Acknowledge the question. When you are selling you want your buyers to be talking and asking questions. That is a sign they are engaged. Silence or apathy is deadly. In order to keep the conversation going, thank them for making the statement. I am not advocating that you agree with them. Just that you acknowledge.

A SIMPLE STATEMENT SUCH AS THE ONES BELOW WILL DO THE TRICK:

• Thanks for sharing that.

• You raise an important point.

• I’ve never thought about it that way.

• You are smart to be concerned about that.

• I appreciate you being honest with me.

Showing appreciation will show the client that you care about the conversation. When you show that you care about the conversation, and value what the buyer has said, they will say more.

L = Ask a question and listen to the answer. Before you answer the question you must truly understand what the client is stating or asking. Use one of the following questions to clarify what the buyer is asking for and to help you better form an answer:

• What do you mean by that?

• How much of a discount are you looking for?

• Why is that important to you?

• Have you seen something else that includes that?

• What do you like about that approach?

• Is that a deal breaker for you?

• How much too high are we?

Continue asking questions until you truly understand the issue your buyer has raised. Only then will you be in a good position to answer it properly. Kevin Poppel from Ag-Power Enterprises always likes to advise his team: “Once the client has stopped talking wait at least three seconds before you say something. That’s the best way to ensure you not only don’t interrupt but you let the buyer completely finish his thought.”

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Lee Harbin at Dolphin Professional Services also stops, acknowledges, and listens effectively when addressing a question about the timing of delivery. He then states, “The implementation team at our largest client was originally concerned about our ability to deliver a project of this magnitude as well. What they discovered is that our structure allows us to ramp up quickly with the right resources, ensuring that we have never missed a deadline with them in over four years.”

Use the SALE methodology to keep the buyer engaged through the sales process. Remember, the more the buyers are talking the better chance you have to make the sale and create your Nonstop Sales Boom. The minute they shut up is the minute the sales start slipping away. •

E = Provide an example. The best way to answer questions from buyers is to use the words of your clients. Let’s face it − your buyers will believe your clients more than they will believe you. You are, after all, the 'salesperson', trying to earn a living.

While most sellers spend their time developing case studies and testimonials to provide outcomes data on their solutions for their website, the best sellers use this data to answer questions and deal with objections posed by clients.

Let this become your million-dollar strategy − your killer app, the secret weapon that allows you to exceed your revenue goal year after year. Here are two examples:

A professional services seller gives this response − after having stopped, acknowledged, and listened to a price objection: “At ABC Company they were also initially concerned about the price. What they found is that with the reduction in contractors required for data entry from three to one, they were able to save over $100,000 in labour costs in one year. This more than paid for the $24,000 project purchase and provided a four times return on investment in 12 months.”

Colleen Francis, Sales Expert, is Founder and President of Engage Selling Solutions. Armed with skills developed from years of experience, Colleen helps clients realise immediate results, achieve lasting success and permanently raise their bottom line.

www.EngageSelling.com

The more the buyers are talking the better chance you have to make the sale and create your Nonstop Sales Boom. The minute they shut up is the minute the sales start slipping away.

www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz | 09

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010 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

Using Sales Hypnosis to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

Words by Murray Carter

Back in the mid ‘80s I was working as an insurance agent and after two years

of some success I was asked if I’d like to move into management. I started with a team of three existing agents and was to build a new team around them. One of my recruits was an ex−priest; let’s call him Dan.

Dan sold group schemes to the government sector and it’s not an understatement to say that he was loved by his clients. He was what we called a consistent producer, but something wasn’t quite right. When I analysed his month-on-month results his commission was always around $5,000 a month. It didn’t matter whether he worked one week or four weeks a month, it was always the same give or take a few hundred dollars.

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Using Sales Hypnosis to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

On discussing this with Dan it became obvious that he had a huge sense of social justice and deep down he had a belief that if he earned more he would be depriving others in some way. My suggestion that if he earned more, he could help more people, fell on deaf ears.

As I progressed in my sales management career, I got to meet more salespeople like Dan who looked great on paper, in presentation and work ethic and yet, something was stopping them from achieving their true potential. I liken it to living life with ‘the handbrake on’.

In my experience, the top three limiting beliefs for people in sales are:

• Not believing that they can be successful (‘I’m not good enough’)

• Majoring in minors (procrastinating). Stress relieving activities instead of goal achieving.

• Fears i.e. rejection, failure, even success (Dan’s major limiting belief). This also shows up as reluctance to make the calls necessary for success in sales.

Sales people are often aware that something is holding them back but they can’t identify just what it is. It quite often goes right back to childhood. Perhaps you have people in your team like Dan?

By the end of the millennium I was National Sales Manager for a multi-national services company, managing a $45 million sales budget and I was still coming across people like Dan; people who could be so much more if they could only get rid of whatever was holding them back. It was at this point in my career that I started to look for answers.

My search led me to the mind, or more specifically the sub-conscious mind. Dr John Kappas in his ‘Theory of Mind’ calculated that the conscious mind is 12 percent of mind function and the sub-conscious is 88 percent. The conscious mind does three things. Firstly it analyses, secondly it thinks and plans, and thirdly it manages short term memory. Everything else is controlled by the sub-conscious mind.

The conscious

mind is 12 percent

of mind function and the

sub-conscious

is 88 percent.

012 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

Murray Carter helps people make their dream come true … from the inside out!www.murraycarterhypnotherapy.co.nz

But the BIG question is this … if long term memory, habits, relationship patterns, addictions, emotions & feelings, intuition, creativity and much more are in the sub-conscious mind how can you remove limiting beliefs and replace them with more empowering beliefs?

Remember that day dream state you were in when you woke up this morning - when you were not asleep but neither were you fully awake? It’s called the Alpha State. In the Alpha state your critical factor is bypassed and you have direct access to your Sub-Conscious which accepts everything you tell it as 100 percent fact. Another way to describe this state is being in trance or hypnosis.

And here’s how you can access your Sub-Conscious Mind:

You could record positive affirmations and play them back to yourself as you go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning. My favourite is the affirmation that the famous 19th century French Chemist Émile Coué gave to his clients – “Every day, In every way, I’m getting better and better.”

There are many pre-recorded hypnosis downloads available on the internet (iTunes. Google Play, Amazon) of varying quality. I’d recommend anything by Steve G Jones (US) or Glenn Harrold (UK) or if you want a Kiwi voice you will find a couple of mine there as well.

A word of WARNING, don’t listen to them while you are driving! See a qualified Hypnotherapist. He or she will be able to develop a program specifically tailored to your needs.

For example, in addition to removing limiting beliefs about selling, you might have a fear of flying, or want to stop smoking and this can be included as well. Hypnosis as a tool in business and sales to get the competitive edge and remove limiting beliefs is gaining recognition and popularity overseas, particularly in the United States and in the UK. ●

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014 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

Conventional wisdom says that, for performance and results to grow, people must continue to learn and master critical skills and knowledge. Master musicians continue to rehearse;

award-winning photographers discard more shots than they publish; surgeons practice on cadavers, and pilots spend hours in simulators. So why don’t sales managers engage their salespeople in continuous rehearsal?

How many of us would board a plane if we knew the pilot had missed or flunked her last three simulator sessions? In 2012, while completing an MBA, I conducted an international study of the critical factors in a sales professional’s performance and results.

Every sales manager knows the pressure to produce revenue for the company and looks for ways to boost the results of his or her salespeople. Which of the myriad of available strategies and tactics should the sales manager use for the greatest positive effect on sales growth?

Five Reasons Why Sales Managers Don’t Coach

Words by Ross Wilson

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WHAT DID I DISCOVER?

1. Most salespeople are aware of the various steps in the selling process, can differentiate between them, and know when they should be taken.

2. 48% of salespeople spend more than an hour per day thinking about and planning how they can be more successful in selling.

3. 87% of salespeople believe they are capable of producing more sales than they do at present.

4. 52% of salespeople said they could produce more sales if they applied the skills and knowledge they already have, and 44% said they would be more successful if they learned new skills.

5. 60% of salespeople rely mostly on their sales managers (as opposed to other sources) for guidance on how to improve sales performance.

6. When offering assistance in improving sales performance, four out of five sales managers rely upon their own perceptions of the salesperson’s performance (not on factual data).

What else do we know? Most sales managers would agree that skills training is important for performance, and the research supports this belief. But training can also be very expensive and even the leaders in the training industry confess that training on its own does little or nothing to improve performance in any role over time, including sales.

87% of salespeople believe they are capable of producing more sales than they do at present.

016 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

It is not surprising that many CFO’s think that training is a waste of money. There are many factors that influence sales results: the weather, economic conditions, and the turnover of decision-makers, to name a few. But none of these should stop a salesperson faithfully performing the proven selling behaviours that contribute to a sales result.

Even under the most challenging conditions, what will make the difference? Numerous studies going back decades have shown that securing the real gains from investments in training requires consistent performance of a critical management function: performance coaching. But the majority of sales managers do not coach for performance.

Five Reasons Why Sales Managers Don’t Coach for Performance:

1. Ok, let’s be honest. Reason number one is that some sales managers are just lazy. After all, it’s easy to beat the results drum in a weekly team meeting and hide behind a computer the rest of the week. It’s much harder to engage every day in observing and analysing a salesperson’s performance to find improvement opportunities and to coach each salesperson towards higher performance.

2. More likely, though, is that the company doesn’t recognise the value of coaching and creates job expectations that overlook coaching as the modus operandi of any manager. Instead of focusing on what she does to support and develop the salesperson, the sales manager is required to spend all her time serving her boss by attending meetings, writing reports, handling complaints, socialising with key accounts, and politicking around the office.

3. It might be that the sales manager doesn’t know how to coach for performance. Performance coaching is a learned set of skills. We’re not born with them and they don’t come with the 'Sales Manager' title and salary. It’s probable that the sales manager was never coached and so knows little about its value or what’s involved.

4. Or perhaps the sales manager can coach but doesn’t know what to coach. The company has never behaviourally defined the selling it expects of a salesperson. Perhaps the sales manager was never fully aware of what made him successful in selling, or was never a great salesperson, and so can’t replicate the right behaviours in others.

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5. Believe it or not, some sales managers still believe that high performing salespeople are born, not made. They hire a new person, test them on the job, and use the 90 day rule to keep turning them over in the hope that, one day, a star performer will just happen to show up. Apart from it being an urban myth, that false belief causes untold hidden and obvious cost to the company.

When Jason Wynyard, sixteen times Lumberjack World Champion and six times Timbersports World Champion (and a Kiwi!), recently took out top honours at the 2014 Sport Waitakere Excellence Awards he said, “Being successful at [wood chopping] is just like any other sport. It takes dedication and the desire every day to be better.” Sales managers could take a lesson from high-performance athletes and their coaches who know exactly how a champion thinks, and how winners move each muscle and joint. They know exactly which behaviours generate the right results. They use achievements (results) to inspire intrinsic motivation and focus their time and energy on coaching better process and skills (performance).

They rightly believe that, while many factors are not

within the control of the athlete, performance certainly is. Ask any athlete or sports person and they’ll tell you that 'personal best' is more important than the scoreboard, and a medal is a bonus. Champion sales teams have effective sales manager-coaches. Sales manager-coaches like that are not born; they’re made. ●

Numerous studies going back decades

have shown that securing the real

gains from investments

in training requires consistent

performance of a critical

management function:

performance coaching.

018 | www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz

TWOMINUTETOPUP

12 Tips to Close End of Year Sales Fast!

Words by Kendra Lee

It’s December! For most sales reps and sales managers that means it’s crunch time for achieving your sales goals. With just weeks left in the year, you need to close sales fast, but don’t want to appear desperate. Here are 12 strategies you can use to close sales without proposing discounts and special offers:

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2Review all the proposals you closed this year and make a list of things customers decided to 'wait to do'. Close them now.

Spend two days closing lingering proposals, even the ones from last January.

Upsell add-ons you thought would inflate the original solution you sold this year.

Sell one more. Look for opportunities to sell one more of something small or simple: one more PC, one more small project, one more staff administrative position. Sell a bunch.

Conduct a 2014 review meeting with your top eight customers. Look back on the year’s successes and forward to what still needs to be accomplished before year end.

Look for clients with remaining budget this year that they’d like to spend on next year’s priorities.

Call every client you haven’t talked to in 90 days to see how they’re positioned to start next year. Do they need your services in December to get off to a fast start?

Call all prospects that’ve been holding off on moving forward with a proposal. Check in to see how they’re positioned to achieve their first quarter initiatives.

Review your forecast and identify the steps required to close everything − then execute.

Enlist your managers and / or team’s support in overcoming roadblocks holding any of your customers or prospects back from buying.

Remind customers you welcome referrals. Who do they know that needs help to get through year end?

Set appointments for January to give yourself a fast start to next year. You may find last minute opportunities while you’re at it! ●

www.klagroup.comKendra Lee helps companies rapidly penetrate new territories, break into new accounts and shorten time to revenue with new products in the SMB market.

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QUICKFIX

Leading from the Front During the Holidays

Just because it is the holiday season, and you are away for a few weeks,

don’t assume that everyone is also away. You should know your customers’ needs and be able to keep your own sales team engaged if they are working through.

Here’s three things you can do to keep leading from the front during the holidays:

1. If you begin to check out early, then so will your team. Step up your support and coaching in the run up to the holidays. Your team will appreciate it.

2. Call your customers to ask about their needs during January then make sure that they are catered for before you go away. Your customers will appreciate it.

3. Little things can keep your team motivated while you are away. Use regular motivational quotes, or arrange for a small gift to be delivered to each of your team in January. It will probably get noticed more than the usual Christmas ‘expected’ gift. ●

Get world leading free whitepapers and research each month by email!

Contact Ross Wilson on 021 152 8400 or email info@growingorganisations.com to discuss how we can help you achieve your sales goals in 2014.

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RESOURCECORNER

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www.nzsalesmanager.co.nz | 023

By Alex Malley

THECLOSE

“Best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy”Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz

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