Marketing Magnetism = Sales Negotiation Power

You are in the best negotiating position with customers when your marketing generates “deal flow” which exceeds your capacity.

Have you ever taken one of those negotiating classes? Who has the most power in a negotiation? It’s the person who has the most options.

If your customer has more options than you, then he’s in charge. He can dictate the price and the terms of the deal. I’ve spent a fair amount of time doing deals in Detroit, and it’s ugly. There are ten potential suppliers and only one General Motors. The pricing is cut throat and everyone gets squeezed real hard.

You don’t want to be in that situation, and you don’t have to be. If your marketing system delivers good leads to you every day, you’re far less concerned about each deal than if you have to dig them up by hand. And that’s good, because a customer who senses you don’t need him is more likely to buy from you than if you have to beg.

An effective marketing system solves a number of very difficult business problems:

· You have enough “deal flow” that you can choose customers who match your capabilities, rather than taking whoever you can get.

· You have more negotiating power because you can safely “walk away from a deal.”

· Clients have more respect for you because you didn’t “chase them down.”

· You can anticipate variations in your available capacity and revenue stream and open up or tighten your sales funnel as necessary, rather than scrambling at the last minute.

· You don’t have to alter your manufacturing process or systems to accommodate customers whose needs don’t match your capabilities.

· Your time with customers is spent productively, because when they call you, they already understand exactly what you do, what’s unique about you and how you can help them.

· You are able to focus on the nuances of solving your customers’ problems and building personal relationships with them, rather than worrying about whether or not you can close a deal.

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Marketing & Sales Message

Your marketing & sales message must effectively answer the following four questions:

1. Why should I read or listen to you?

2. Why should I believe what you have to say?

3. Why should I do anything about what you’re offering?

4. Why should I act now?

These are very basic questions, but few sales people can fire back fast answers to any of them. There are all kinds of companies who are the greatest in the world, but can’t give you a really solid explanation of what they do or why it matters.

Your precise answer to these four questions is your Unique Selling Proposition. You must have this message clearly defined and focused. It must be written down and you must be able to repeat it in the middle of the night when your spouse wakes you from a deep sleep. Everything you do should answer those questions in a consistent way, whether directly or indirectly.

Every time you communicate with your customer, you should reinforce the core ingredients of your sales message.

People forget. It’s never good enough to say something just once. Once your prospects have contacted you, they should regularly get things from you that reinforce what you told them the first time, and every time you talk to them, you must communicate your core sales message.

It’s easy to get tired of constantly saying the same thing all the time, and it’s easy to stop doing things that work just because you get bored with them. But you must resist this temptation and consistently, persistently reinforce that message.

Your message will never be consistent unless everyone in the company agrees on what it is. If you change your message every month, you’ll never get real traction in the marketplace because customers will have only a vague idea of what you do.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Sales Leads on Auto Pilot

A true marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month after month, year after year, so your salespeople only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem.

Our entire modern world is only possible because we can automate many things. If new cars were assembled by hand instead of machines, they would cost $100,000 instead of $20,000. If we used Pony Express to deliver mail, each letter you send would cost $100 instead of 37 cents.
Just as manufacturing in developed countries must be automated, similarly no sales person can effectively compete in the 21st century unless automated marketing tools are doing the most unpleasant and inefficient grunt work for him.
A finely-tuned marketing system is automated. It’s like a machine used in manufacturing: If you power it up and put raw material in one end, it produces qualified results – prospects – on the other end, predictably and reliably, around the clock.
Every day when you walk into the office you know it will produce new potential customer relationships for you to cultivate.

A Website Can Sell on Autopilot: 24/7/365
One of my most interesting successes was creating a web page that sold a product on the Internet. It was a four page sales letter that used those time-tested marketing formulas to move my customer from mere casual interest all the way to typing in their credit card information and ordering the product online. There was no phone number where they could call and ask for more information, and no email address. The website had to do all the work by itself.
That web page has hardly been changed in three years, and it is still successfully selling that product to one out of every twenty-five visitors. It literally runs like clockwork, a selling machine that works on autopilot. You can’t do much better than that, can you? The product and the website together are like an annuity that works for me 24/7/365 and puts money in my bank account month after month with 55% gross profit – all with no maintenance and no annoying phone calls.
Wouldn’t you like your business to run that way? Wouldn’t you like your sales process to be a machine that runs on autopilot, constantly generating leads or sales orders whether you’re awake or asleep, whether you’re in the office or on the golf course?

Sales Leads on Autopilot, 24/7/365
I’m here to tell you that your business CAN run that way. Now please understand, if you sell two million dollar printing presses, nobody’s going to order one from your website with their VISA card, as though it were a $12 book on Amazon.com. However, you CAN get lots of quality sales leads for that printing press, the exact same way, if you know how to do it. Make no mistake: Once you have a system like that in place, your life as a sales professional will change for the better – forever. You will NEVER go back to the old way of selling again!
When you have that kind of marketing machine working for you, you’ll make more money, have less stress, experience less month-to-month variation in your sales numbers; your sales people will be more motivated, you’ll attract reps and resellers and get more mind share from your sales people because they don’t have to work nearly as hard to get appointments.

Autopilot: Not a Fantasy, But A Necessity
“Marketing on autopilot” is not some fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is a the cornerstone of literally thousands of businesses and it quite literally is the difference between failure and success for many people. If you look around at all the really successful people you know, they all have systems that work for them when they’re playing or working on other projects. Maybe it’s their stock portfolio, growing their money year after year. Maybe it’s real estate income, maybe it’s their employees and the businesses they own. But in any case, they’re not using manual labor. If you can make the transition from manual-labor grunt work sales to marketing on autopilot, you’ve literally built a foundation for business success.
Do you or your sales people spend 50% of their time prospecting for new business? There are millions of sales professionals who spend most of their waking hours doing just that. It’s even worse for brand new salespeople, who often spend 80-90% of their time doing prospecting and cold call grunt work.
Believe me, I’ve done it. And it was tragically wasteful.
What would happen to your commission checks if you could end the never-ending battle with voice mail and eliminate the time wasted getting past gatekeepers and setting up appointments? What if you spent all that time in front of qualified prospects instead? Wouldn’t you double your sales and your income?
Convert that wasted prospecting and grunt work time to productive sales time. Generate a steady flow of interested prospects who call you and want you to help them, and make sure your sales people are spending 90% of their time in front of those prospects. You’ll make twice as much money and cut your stress level in half!

Eliminate the Stomach Churning Misery of Cold Calls and Rejection
There are several other huge benefits to this, by the way: first, the life of your sales people dramatically changes for the better. The stomach churning rejection and constant stream of no, not interested… not today… call me in three months… you’ll have to talk to the purchasing department about that… all that goes away. It’s far less tempting to procrastinate when you know that everyone you call on the phone is at least somewhat interested in having your help in solving a problem. It’s a lot easier to roll out of bed in the morning when you know that when you get to the office every day, you’re going to have a number of hot leads on your desk that have come in via the website, email, fax machine or voice mail, people who understand what you do and are waiting for you to help them solve their problem.
Second, it’s easier to attract and keep good sales people, whether they work directly for you or if they’re commissioned representatives or resellers.
Now if you sell a cutting edge, high tech product, then despite the fact that it’s cool and sexy, it’s probably very hard to sell. The world has an overabundance of neat products that nobody feels compelled to use. This forces small, innovative companies to do backbreaking missionary work to sell that neat new product. This is the #1 reason why hi tech companies go out of business – the cost of acquiring new customers is simply too high.

Getting Those “Lazy” Distributors to Go Sell Something
Have you ever tried to get your distributors to sell a bleeding edge “missionary work” type of product? It’s like nailing jello to the wall. You can’t get a distributor who’s making maybe 20% gross profit to stock and promote a product that nobody’s eager to buy. It just doesn’t make business sense for him to do so.
A lot of manufacturers think it’s just because those distributors are lazy. They think, “These guys are all bozos! They just don’t understand how great our product really is!” No, actually it’s because they’re too smart. They’ve fallen for that before, probably more than once, and they’re not going to do it again. They work on commission; they’ve got car payments and a mortgage. And they don’t like eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup.
So if you have a cool, sexy, cutting edge, high tech product, and if you use my lead generation system, then you won’t have any problem getting serious potential customers to raise their hands and express interest in that product.
The system will educate those prospects at very low cost before you make any significant investment in them, and you’ll be certain that they’re pre-disposed to buy before you get in your car and go see them.

Your Marketing System Can Protect You From Lousy Prospects
Please listen very carefully: You should not visit anybody, unless on a scale from 1 to 10, they’re at least a five in terms of “likely to give you their money.” Personally, I ain’t even calling a customer on the phone unless they’re a 5 and they’ve called me first. And I’m not going to actually, physically go see them unless they’re a 7 or 8.
You can actually have such a wide funnel that captures so many leads and interested prospects that you then devise second, third and fourth steps in your marketing system that further separates the diamonds from the dirt. You can even make prospects jump through hoops to talk to you, if necessary.
A built in feature of a true marketing system is that it qualifies leads for you so you can determine the quality of each lead with a high degree of accuracy. Then you can actually adjust the size of the bottom of your funnel as business conditions change, and literally regulate your sales volume from one quarter to the next.
If you’ve got plenty of sales leads that are 4’s, 5’s, 6’s 7’s and 8’s coming in every day – and the occasional 9 or 10 – then you’ll find that VARs, reps, and even your own sales people are much more eager to go see those customers, because they know those customers are genuinely interested.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

The Rules of Selling Have Changed!

The old fashioned sales routine of cold calls, telemarketing, pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, ignoring “No Solicitors” signs and trying to visit people who don’t want to see you is DEAD.

I spent nearly ten years of my life making unsolicited calls and visits, trying to beat down doors and windows, climbing over barbed wire fences, burning up shoe leather, and inventing excuses to go see people who didn’t want to see me. Can you relate to this?: You call the guy on the phone: “Hi, I’m going to be in the area next Tuesday and I was hoping I could drop by and see you…” as though you being in his neighborhood constituted any sort of reason for him to change his plans for that day.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. If the customers’ first impression of you is that you’re just another sales guy who wants to take away his precious time, then you’ve got one foot in the grave before you’ve even started.
Prospecting = Obsolete Sales Technology

If you don’t remember anything else from our time together, remember this: that type of selling is obsolete. Dead. Ancient technology. Irrelevant. It’s like vinyl records, 8 track tapes, carburetors and Disco.

Now Vinyl records still have their place in the world; some audio fanatics still think they sound better than CD’s. There are still swap meets where 8 track tape aficionados smoke weed and remember the ‘70’s. There’s probably still a carburetor shop in the town where you live, and as far as Disco is concerned… well, you never know.

But no sane person is going to build any kind of real business on those things. There are going to be times when you need to pick up the phone and find someone who will see you. But that should be the exception, never the rule. And if you’re building your business on old fashioned, outdated, manual labor grunt work, then you’re violating every trend. Which means you’re wasting huge amounts of time and money, antagonizing potential customers and missing out on very significant opportunities.

Ten years ago, a visionary woman named Faith Popcorn wrote a book called The Popcorn Report. She said the trend in the 1990's was ‘Cocooning’—which basically means people don't want to be bothered! There’s no question, if they were "cocooning" ten years ago, then today they're locking themselves in a fortress! Some people hide behind their computer, reading their e-mails all day long, but won't even answer the telephone.

You’ve probably got a lot of customers just like that, don’t you? If you’re going to effectively sell to them, you’re going to have to find a way to get invited – not as an unwelcome pest, but as a welcome guest.
Who Finds Who First is Very, Very Important!

Imagine these scenes. It could be any two situations where there's a buyer and a seller...

Scene 1: A buyer has a problem and needs to solve it. You get lucky and just happen to call the buyer that same day. The buyer was on your 'list' and you were able to show him a solution to that very problem.

Scene 2: Same buyer. Has the same problem and needs to solve it. He starts keeping an eye out for a solution. Talks to a friend, or notices an ad, or looks in the yellow pages, reads an article in a magazine – and hears about you. Calls you on the phone to see if you can help.

Which situation is most typical for you? Which one do you like more? Scene 1 or scene 2? Well, unless you enjoy making phone calls that are uncomfortable both for you and the guy on the other end of the line, you'd rather be living in scene #2, wouldn't you? Of course you would.

But there’s another factor that's very, very important: In scene 2, you ALSO have TWICE the chance of getting the buyer's business as you do in scene 1.

Why? Because the buyer found you first. In scene #1 you were prospecting. In scene #2 you were positioning yourself. The buyer naturally has more respect for you in scene #2 because everyone knows you must climb the mountain to find the guru. Gurus don't come down from the mountain hunting for disciples. Who calls who first is very, very important.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Positioning vs. Prospecting & Motivated Selling vs. Tactical Marketing

A prospect who "finds" you first is more likely to buy from you, than if you find him.

Has your medical doctor ever called you on the phone during dinnertime, asking if you might be looking for help fighting a flu bug?

He doesn't find you, you find him. And when you do see him, he tells you what medicine you need to take and you take it. If he says you need surgery, you might seek a second opinion, but you're willing to pay good money for that opinion. And most likely you end up taking the advice, no matter how painful or inconvenient it is.

Do your customers respect you as much as they respect their doctor? Why not? They don't know him any better than they know you. His diagnosis of problems are not correct more often than yours is. You went to school. You have expertise. You know how to solve difficult problems. So what's the difference?

Positioning vs. Prospecting

The difference is positioning. The doctor is perceived to be an expert, so you seek his counsel. You believe what he has to say while your premiums go up every year. The truth is, the medical industry knows things about marketing and positioning that most people in our industry are simply ignorant of. Most people just imitate their competitors, and everyone just gets dumber every year.

In the world of corporate sales, people are still doing things the exact same way as they did 20, 30 or even 50 years ago! And they consume enormous amounts of effort! But when you replace manual labor with automation, the difference is dramatic.

The Decoy of Sales Motivation

I endured a bitter struggle with this before I finally figured it out. I thought the problem was that I wasn't motivated enough. I listened to tapes constantly. I learned the Power of Positive Thinking. I smiled everywhere I went and shook people's hands. I remembered their names. I chatted with them about golf and fishing and their grandkids and the plaques in their office. I looked at myself in the mirror every morning and said "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me."

Isn't that pretty much what most salespeople learn how to do? Believe great things, be nice to people, work like a banshee and think positive, until success sweeps you off your feet and your bank account is filled with cash? Stop and think about it for a minute. Does it really work?

That's what I did, and I was working very hard at it. But it wasn't working, and every month I was falling further and further behind. You can only do that for so long before something finally gives. And I knew I was close to the breaking point.

"Motivation is NOT your real problem"

But I remember exactly when and where I found the answer I was looking for. It was May 7, 1997. I was at an-all day sales seminar in Peoria, Illinois, where I was, once again, trying to get more motivated. I had robbed Peter to pay Paul, just so I could be there that day. They had all kinds of speakers who were going to motivate me to achieve great things in my career.

But the last speaker of the day did not talk about motivation at all. He talked about how to bolt a marketing turbocharger on the front end of your sales organization, so that your customers would call you instead of you having to call them. He said if you had a steady stream of qualified prospects to talk to, you wouldn't have a motivation problem in the first place.

Now I'd be lying to you if I told you that this speech instantly solved all of my problems. But it WAS the tip of the real iceberg. It radically, permanently changed my perspective on the entire problem and finally pointed me in the right direction.

I eventually realized that this whole motivation thing was a huge decoy. Why? Because I was already motivated to begin with. The problem was, I was trying to dig a basement with a shovel when I really needed a bulldozer. I didn't need to be more motivated! Why?

Because no matter how motivated you are, the laziest guy in the world can still move more dirt with a borrowed bulldozer than you can with a shovel!

I went on a mission to study the most brilliant minds in marketing today, across dozens of industries and professions. And what I discovered was that with a good marketing system, you can have people lined up to have you help them solve their problems. You can be a welcome guest instead of an unwelcome pest.

Why My Sales Career Was So Miserable

I began to understand why the old way was not working. In hindsight, these were the problems:

The companies I was selling for did have marketing and advertising budgets. And they certainly did attempt to generate sales leads. But here's the problem: Most technical, industrial and business-to-business marketing and publicity is simply terrible. Abysmal. Everyone just copies everyone else, and the whole industry gets dumber and dumber every year. The sales leads were low quality and there wasn't nearly enough of them. If you're going to get better results than everyone else, you're going to have to do something different.

You shouldn't spend your time prospecting any more than absolutely necessary. Your time is too valuable and expensive. You should only spend time with qualified, interested potential clients, discussing your solutions to their problems. A good marketing system, which helps customers find the salesman, can do this for far less money than paying the salesman to find the customers. My problem was that I was spending so much time prospecting, I didn't have time to sell.

· Once an effective marketing system is in place, you can spend twice as much time in front of interested customers and double your income.

There's a hidden benefit to this: When the customer finds you, instead of you finding the customer, his perception of you is different. He perceives you as a consultant, not a peddler. Customers don't respect peddlers as reliable information sources. I was improperly positioned as a 'peddler' and could never accomplish what I was trying to achieve.

Over time I discovered an arsenal of powerful tools that cause people to see you as a "valuable resource" instead of "unwanted pest." Each customer has a unique category for you in his mind, and you're no longer "just another salesman."

Original Source: Perry Marshall