Are You Adhesive?

Do people “stick” to you? Or do they quietly look for ways to keep conversations short and impersonal?

If you’re slumping in your career, you need to turn your focus inward. “Adhesiveness,” close cousin to cohesiveness (we’ll get to that next), is a step beyond likeability. And it’s a new trait you need to master. I like the simple words used here. Adhesiveness is your ability to cause people to not only like you, but to feel drawn to you. It’s charisma with value.

Tim Sanders wrote “The Likeability Factor : How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams.” It’s a great book that puts a spotlight on who you are as a person and whether you build “real” relationships with others. But adhesiveness is going beyond simply being friendly, relevant, empathetic, and “real.”

When you’re adhesive, people look forward to talking with you. Enough that they seek you out. Yes, they like you. But they’re not simply excited to hear from you…they contact you first.

When you’re adhesive, people develop a reliance upon you, because of the value you provide. They are dependent upon you. They may even say they need you.

When you’re adhesive, you stick to other people and they stick to you. You know and care about them. They remember you.

Increase your adhesiveness, you increase your success.

More Ways To Use Your Cell Phone As A Sales Tool

Using your cell phone to make phone calls is so 1999.

There are many different ways to use your phone as a real productivity tool. Previously, we talked about putting the camera to work in sales, we used IWantSandy to create our own mobile contact management software, we used our phone as a free GPS system and with Google SMS, we got flight status and much, much more.

Now there’s ChaCha, a free mobile answers service for people on the go. You text message a question in normal, conversational English and you get the answer back within minutes.

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2008 Sales Handbook Sales Survey

I generally like reading surveys that focus on the sales profession because it either teaches you something new or reconfirms a trend you already suspected. Either way - it gives you something to think about.

PROFIT magazine and the Canadian Professional Sales Organization completed their poll of 445 owners and sales staff of firms with less than 250 employees and $25 million in revenue.

A few topics:

• Effectiveness of sales software
• Effectiveness of lead generation methods
• Best compensation mix and most commonly used sales performance metrices
• What reps need to succeed
• How to best find great sales personnel
• Where reps fall short

We’ll point you to the full report in a minute - but here are a few interesting takeaways.

Amazingly enough, in the sales software effectiveness category, “in-house CRM” gets the highest score (6.6) but still only 47% of the surveyed people use this technology. Hosted CRM scores lower with a score of 5.4 and 39% usage in this poll.

Elsewhere in the report, referral programs and seminars are still considered the most effective demand generation methods but with a score of 5.6, reps indicate that the quality of sales leads still leaves something to be desired. Interestingly enough, their management scores the lead quality at 6.6 and obviously doesn’t think the problem is all that big.

72% of the respondents measure sales performance against revenue and 69% find “new clients” an important measurement. I don’t disagree - but the telling part here is that only 57% uses profitability for performance measurement and no more than 54% finds holding on to their current customer base important enough to tune a compensation plan towards it.

Another interesting insight - when being asked about the single biggest reason “why reps fall short”, an astonishing 47% of surveyed CEO’s and Sales Managers blames the rep’s motivation and work ethic.

Now, the taste of payback might be sweet though - because 49% percent of interviewed reps indicate they’d jump ship for higher compensation and better perks. I guess the silver lining in this number is that 46% would not consider going to a direct competitor.

Lots more to learn in PROFIT’s national sales survey

How Difficult Do You Make It To Buy From You?

Sending out newsletters is a lot of fun.

For the past week, I’ve been studying out of office and error messages that email systems generate when the newsletter cannot be delivered.

Here’s one that really jumped out.

“Thank you for your email. Please do not reply to this message. The person you are trying to reach no longer works for Company ABC but your business is important to us. Your email message will be deleted with no further action, sorry for the inconvenience. We look forward to continue doing business with you.

I’m not exaggerating here. It’s what the reply said

Ouch.

Now, I understand. This was a newsletter. And I wasn’t trying to buy anything from this particular company. The unfortunate thing is, however, that the email server doesn’t know that. For all they know, I could have been about to order my annual supply of widgets.

So, for those of you who work for companies with high turnover - please make sure you put an auto-forwarding rule in place for those mailboxes that are no longer monitored by a human being. It’s simple and every mail service supports them.

The point is this. I suspect that this company, like many others, spends good amounts of money to hire the right sales reps, paying them a salary, covering their expenses and sending them to sales training every now and then. On top of that, they’ll spend money on lead generation programs to fill the pipeline.

Well, you can hire reps and buy leads until you’re blue in the face.

It’s all not going to be very useful unless you actively follow up or, as in this case, create a turnover and error-proof system so customers or prospects can contact your company.

What Does Your LinkedIn Profile Tell Others About Your Sales Skills?

People judge. Whether we like it or not, everyone does it.

On a professional level, right or wrong, I judge people by how effectively they network.

Is it just me or if you find someone on Linkedin with only 5 contacts and no profile information, you wonder how effective they really are in their jobs?

A person lays claim to a world-class Rolodex yet they can not be found by Google or any of the social networking sites? Hmmmm?

A person brags about how they are on the leading edge because they own an iPhone, but don’t understand the power of specialty networks such as Inquisix or Naymz.
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The Anatomy of the Perfect Voice Mail

Okay, here’s a question for you. Let’s assume you cold call. And that you leave a voice mail message for a prospect who is unavailable. What are the elements of a voice mail message that gets a call back? What should be included? What should be left out? Share your thoughts!

Selling Without Being a Jerk

SMSOfficer lets you send text messages from…

SMSOfficer lets you send text messages from within Outlook 2007. I added it to our to-do list.