Others Talking About How to Win Friends…
Written by Brandon Hull on September 8, 2006
Like the love being given to How to Win Friends and Influence People. The team at online application-builder 37Signals talks about one idea pulled from the Dale Carnegie classic (click the link to check it out).
We’ll have a couple more takes on this great work over the weekend. Keep reading…
A Must-Read This Friday Afternoon
Written by Brandon Hull on September 7, 2006
If you can holdout, bookmark this link and read it tomorrow afternoon, before you leave for the weekend.
It’s a reminder that the best rewards in life are found on the other side of adversity. A sneak peak quote:
…those who are both mature and happy are the ones who have tapped into the highest kind of human potential…”
True success never comes cheap.
How to Win Friends: Salesteamtools Book Review
Written by Brandon Hull on September 7, 2006
The Big Idea(s): Be genuinely interested in other people; show that interest in them by making them feel important; appeal to their higher nature; go about your business with a focus on helping other people get what they want and you’ll have a better shot at earning what you want.
This book is increasingly an important book for sales professionals to read. You’ve heard it said, “the message is as relevant today as it was when the book was written.” That’s not true here. It’s more relevant.
The reality is, we all know our customers and prospects are far better educated about their options today than ever before. They can go with you, or the other “local guy”, or one of the big, nationwide providers of whatever you sell, or the one that advertises all the time…or they can roll the dice with the guy in Montana who built a great website, has killer pricing, and is having all of his product drop-shipped from the manufacturer the next day. Who is it going to be?
It should be you, with your people-skills-first attitude. It should be you, who makes that individual buyer feel important every time you talk with her. It should be you, because you know how to leave people better off than you found them. It should be you, who knows the biggest differentiator a salesperson can offer is himself.
The Father of Professional Selling…
Written by Brandon Hull on September 6, 2006
…is John H. Patterson.
Jeffrey Gitomer loves him. You should, too.
And while I may not recommend you follow all of his teachings today, the reality is the profession as a profession took a quantum leap forward with Patterson’s principles and methodologies.
I mention this because I stumbled across a rock-solid article by Walter Friedman examining Patterson’s contribution. Check it out and pay your respects.
The man (Patterson) did more to jumpstart and lend credibility to the profession than anyone since. And there has been some tremendous thinking since his time. Read the article…
10 Things to Know Before the First Contact
Written by Brandon Hull on September 6, 2006
Mike Sigers of Simplenomics.com guest-blogs this next post. Some great advice that simplifies the pre-call planning process for sales professionals.
(If you haven’t checked out the Simplenomics.com site, you are missing out. Get over there after reading this…)
10 Things You Absolutely Must Know About an Account…Before You Make That First Sales Call
1. How big, or small, are they? And where do they rank within their industry? This will be a good indicator of how you’ll have to handle them. Really big companies have lots of “firewalls” between you and the decision-maker. Smaller companies will often have people with multiple duties.
2. How often they buy and in what quantities. If you can’t find this out before you go, don’t go. You aren’t ready.
3. Total sales last year. This gives you something to work off if pricing comes up too soon into the process.
What Sales Needs from Marketing
Written by Brandon Hull on September 4, 2006
Just pointing you to a great, free resource from Jill Konrath at Sellingtobigcompanies.com.
This is a nice and tidy, free PDF download that directly speaks to marketing departments as the voice of sales professionals.
Her list of needed sales tools on page 12 is a great one. Marketing departments should spend at least as much time developing tangible resources to help salespeople close more deals as they do brainstorming the look and feel of the brand.
QBQ Quote For the Ages
Written by Brandon Hull on September 2, 2006
Love this burst from John Miller in QBQ:
From the smallest group to the largest corporation, from the lowest rung on the ladder to the highest office in the land, there’s an epidemic of blame going on and no one seems immune. The CEO blames the vice president, who blames the manager, who blames the employee, who blames the customer, who blames the government, who blames the people, who blame the politicans, who blame the schools, who blame the parents, who blame the teen, who blames the dad, who blames the mom, who blames her manager, who blames the vice president, who blames the CEO, and on and on it goes. This is the ‘Circle of Blame,’ and it would be kind of funny it weren’t so true.
“Blame and ‘whodunit’ questions solve nothing. They create fear, destroy creativity, and build walls.”
How and Why to Validate
Written by Brandon Hull on September 2, 2006
Re-reading QBQ is affecting me. (That’s a good thing.) How about you?
I’m remembering what I learned in a workshop on marriage many years ago. It absolutely applies to our conversations with buyers.
Validate. Read the full post
Kill the Jargon, Free the People
Written by Brandon Hull on September 1, 2006
I pulled this wonderful tagline (service feature?) from a Comergent-via-Ziff Davis Media email the other day:
Optimizing Customer-Facing Operations Through Service-Oriented Applications.”
Who wrote this? I pray no one from a marketing department had a hand in it.
When you’re crafting your marketing message, you’ve got to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That means you simplify, in the easiest-to-understand terms, what it is you do to help people. You want to make it easy for them to say, “Hmm. I want that. We need that.”
Yes, “customer-facing” is a valid, behind-the-scenes term for hardware and software products. So, too, is “service-oriented application”. And yes, these terms mean something tangible to someone else other than me. But that’s not my point.
My point is: kill the jargon, keep it simple, particularly when persuading. You entice people — you first hook them — and only then should you hit them with whatever jargon you need to use to sell.
