No American can afford to treat salesmanship as a small matter. Why? Because the United States started out on a salesmanship basis for this reason: because only thirteen states were gained by war and all the others were gained by purchase and bargaining.
On five great historic occasions Uncle Sam went out with his money in his hand and bought more real estate. In 1803 he bought Louisiana from Napoleon for $15,000,000. Thomas Jefferson drove the bargain and actually picked up fourteen new States at a price of two and a half cents an acre. That was the greatest real estate transaction known to history. It doubled the size of the United States and gave us a huge territory.
In 1822 James Monroe bought Florida from Spain at a marked-down price of $5,000,000 less than the value of a handful of Google shares of today. Then, just after the Civil War and for no particular purpose, Uncle Sam bought Alaska. He paid $7,200,000 and got plenty of blame for throwing away good money for snow- drifts. For thirty years Alaska was generally regarded as a bad bargain, and then some half frozen trapper found the Klondike. In the best time of the gold-rush Alaska paid for itself, in gold, about once in every four months.
Our fourth real estate purchase was the buying of the Philippines. As to just why we did it no one has ventured to tell, for we first thrashed Spain and then to salve her injured feelings, we gave her $20,000,000 for an archipelago off the coast of China.
This archipelago had not been advertised. It was not up-to-date or serviceable. There was no demand for it. But, as almost all other nations own a few antiques, we thought that we could afford a private collection.
The Panama Canal site cost us $40,000,000; very nearly as much as all the others combined. We paid a million dollars a mile for a non-existent canal, which proves that Roosevelt was at least not as clever a bargainer as Thomas Jefferson. But we had to have it, and it is a source of national pride and marine shipping accomplishment.
So, it was buying and selling that gave us half our territory; and it is also a fact, not usually recognized, that salesmanship played an important part in preserving the Union. While it was Lincoln and Grant who put down the Rebellion, it was Jay Cooke, the famous banker, who sold the bonds and brought in the money.
Jay Cooke was unquestionably the first to launch a national sales campaign. In 1864 he was appointed by Lincoln as Sales Manager of bonds, at a time when the Federal Government was at its wits' end for money. At once Cooke sent out more than four thousand agents. He established a press bureau the first in the world, maybe. And he advertised the bonds in every worthwhile paper in the Northern States.
His fellow-bankers were shocked and astounded at his methods. They said he was no financier, nothing but a peddler of patent medicine. But Cooke only laughed at them and sent out another flood of hand-bills. He had a flaring advertisement hung in every Northern post-office. Such was his energy that in a few months the North went into a fit of bond-madness. After the noise and the shouting were over it was found that Cooke had sold bonds to the face value of $1,240,000,000.
TWELVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!
Such was the result of the first national sales campaign in the United States.
End of part I
This is an excerpt from my new book "How to Sell to Americans".
Click here to get the book today!
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
If you live by price - you will die by price
If your prospect does not see the value in your product or service, and if the only difference between you and the competitors is in pricing, you didn’t do a good job as a sales person. The main description of your position inside the company is to create the value, not just to show your price list.
Teaching and educating customers is no longer enough, giving them information about your products or services is no longer necessary. They can get them by themselves, without ever talking to you or your company, and know more about your product and positioning on the market then you.
If they know so much about you, how can you try to sell them the same product without knowing their business situation or their needs?
Remember that customers are sophisticated; they either have or believe they can get product information more reliably on their own. Information is readily available through many different sources, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Internet is full of different forums, blogs, and review or research websites where they can get information about your product easily.
Customers don’t just want a specific product; most of the times they want to solve their pain point or business issues. A customer in today's competitive sales environment does not expect to educate the sales professional about their business. Therefore, you must already possess a solid understanding of the customer's industry, competitors, and business direction.
Developing such a comprehensive view of the customer is a task that requires extensive researching and education to get an overall picture of the customer's business industry. The modern sales person needs to focus on understanding the customer's business initiatives, strategic plans, IT environment, and key customer preferences.
If you are still seeing yourself as someone who is there to educate customers, you are living in the past. The time of product-centric sales is gone. Welcome to customer-centric approach in sales.
You need to move away from the focus on presenting your products. Instead a customer-centric approach shows that you recognize and understand your customers’ needs, which is necessary if you want to survive in a 21st Century sales environment.
Your customers are tired of salespeople who come in and are unable to address real business needs, but talk about their company and the hottest feature, or unique one that nobody else has. There are many dimensions that you are selling, and price is only one of them.
How to win the deal and not even touch the topic of discounting of your product or service?
If you base your offer on your price only, there is a good chance that someone will have lower price than you, or you can end up in the bidding war that distracts from solutions. To avoid that, base your proposal in achieving more goals for your prospects, not just to save money, because every other salesperson will say exactly the same.
Customer wants to see the value not in your product; he wants to get the value from your solution to their business problem. They must perceive unique value from you. If they cannot differentiate you from the competition, there is no reason to buy from you.
Probably you can’t differentiate much with your product, I am sure you have some unique features, but your competition has them too. Customers today can easily substitute your product with the one from your competition and still be satisfied.
So how can you differentiate?
That’s where trigger events are coming to the game.
Trigger events can help you with recognizing needs and opening the door to have a meaningful conversation with customers who have events happening. Just to be different from the competition is not really important to your customers. What they would like to see is added value.
What creates customer value?
- Skilled sales force
- Sales process itself
- Understanding their business situation today and adapting to their particular wants and needs
If you recognize customers’ needs and create the value for them, customers will move from initial meeting to a decision much easier. Communicating the value is a traditional view of selling, but in today’s world you can’t survive if you are not creating the value for the customer. And make customer realize that they are on the market.
Sales person needs to play a leading role to create the value for his customers. In each step of sales process sales person can create the value, but the most value can be created early in the process by helping customers to define their needs.
This is true especially in consultative sales where sales person can create the value recognizing customer needs with trigger events and helping them to define them better and deeper. Sales professional needs to create the specialized situation and put them on the market even they didn’t felt like that before he entered the picture.
If you are just selling your product – you are missing the point and you will die by price, as you lived by price. Customers are looking beyond the product; they are looking for the solution to their needs and your understanding of their business situation. Many times that should include help and advice too.
Different customers must be treated differently, what works for one customer may not work at all for another. Knowing about trigger events happening to your targeted prospect (and more different events is always better) you will have a very powerful tool to adjust your sales presentation to their needs, recovered with trigger events.
Concentrate on understanding your customers' business issues, and show them how to solve more than one goal with your product, create a value for them and you will go home with the contract in your pocket, whatever the price is.
Let me repeat it here once more - if you don't show the value you will definitely not win whatever your price is. Even if you have a lowest price on the market, it does not mean much to the prospect, because they don't see the difference between your product and ones from the competition. And many buyers are buying from someone who had crafted a compelling solution to their needs, then comes understanding of their needs, and after that the financial part of the deal.
Your goal as sales professional is to create value through how you’re selling, not just through what you’re selling. To be a real sales professional ready for 21st century customers, here is no question you need to change your approach, but when and how?
Read more about Seliing in 21st Century and about trigger events (where to find them and how to use them) in my book "Trigger Events - How to Find Your Next Customer".
Sales 2.0 - how to sell in 21st Century
Everyone is talking about the Web 2.0 as a second generation of web-based communities and services, such as social networking sites that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.
I firmly believe that is time to start talking about Sales 2.0.
Certainly there are many areas that sales people are affected with the new technology, pushing them to be more pro-active and having more control over the tools they are using.
To give a few examples I would say that communications with the customer is affected with Sales 2.0 because many sales reps are having their own blogs; emails are taking over the communication to a different level, many sales reps are always available due to a technology and Blackberry phones of the world, and especially internet makes it possible to do something that even decade ago was impossible – research companies before you contact them with the help of RSS feeds, Hoovers, etc.
This is an excerpt from my book "Trigger Events - how to find your next customer" . To find more about the book and how to order it visit my website www.alenmajer.com
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