How To Get Sales Success through Agile Selling
It’s rare when a new word is interjected into the conversation. Today I’m talking about the conversation that is constantly revolving around the topic of “sales” and the new word that has entered the conversation—thanks to Jill Konrath—is “agile.” In Jill’s new book, “Agile Selling,” she makes the case that keeping up with our crazy-fast pace of change isn’t really an issue of “time management,” but an issue of developing one’s agility. Anyone in business today—especially small business owners and entrepreneurs—feels the unrelenting pressure of time. The marketplace, products, and people are changing at what seems to be an accelerating pace. When phrases such as, “That’s sooo 2013,” enter the lexicon, you know you’re in for a high-speed thrill ride. Learn better Rather than just get up earlier, work later or find ways to cram more into the work day, Jill devotes much of “Agile Selling” to teaching us better ways to learn the information and skills that are important for success. Jill developed her “agile learning” skills through “trial and error” during her days as a consultant. Today, she says, “there’s a growing body of research on how our brain works.” She offers “practical, hands-on tips and techniques for jump-starting your knowledge acquisition” that are based on neuroscience. As Publisher’s Weekly put it, “(the) chapters on how to absorb new information at a fast pace are worth the price of the book.” She also offers some sage observations and insights about buyers, which anyone involved in sales ignores at his or her own peril. Generally, a salesperson enters the picture very late in the game today, Jill explains. While a previous generation of buyers would turn to a knowledgeable salesperson for advice early in the buying cycle, now almost everybody goes to the Internet for the big picture. By the time the salesperson is pulled onto the scene, the buyer is more than half way toward the purchase decision. Jill explains how this radically changes the role of the salesperson and how to best embrace and take advantage of that new role. Not many succeed How crucial is it to get command of this new role? Very. Jill cites some startling statistics: “According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, only 15 percent of executives say their meetings with salespeople met their expectations. From that, only 7 percent of execs actually scheduled follow-up conversations. Ouch. That’s not good!” With a proper understanding of today’s buyers and the agility to bring the right knowledge and skills to the sale, you can be the salesperson who gets the call when a client is just about ready to pull the trigger. “Being agile isn’t easy. But constant change is the new normal, and we have to figure out how to stay afloat—and even thrive—in this ever-evolving ecosystem,” Jill says as she introduces her new book. Check out reader reviews on Amazon and cruise Jill’s own site for more information. If you’re in sales, or working hard to build your startup, this is probably a book you need to...
read moreWherein I Attempt to Explain Conflicting Survey Results!
Survey says! It’s a catch phrase that’s been in the American lexicon since Richard Dawson started hosting Family Feud in 1976. The show’s main hook is the embarrassing answers contestants give when they try to guess survey results. It can be equally as embarrassing trying to explain survey results, even when the surveys come from solid sources. For example just today I tweeted that one survey found that small businesses added 35,000 jobs in May while another said small businesses weren’t going to hire in the coming months. Sageworks makes it their business to know what privately-held companies are doing, and these are generally the smaller and medium sized businesses that propel the economy. They recently reported that both payables and receivables have been creeping up over the last year compared to the previous six years. At the same time a Constant Contact survey found that small business revenue is on the rise. What gives with all these seemingly conflicting data? Plus or minus how much? The first thing we need to note is that it’s darn tough to know exactly what’s happening in small businesses. They aren’t required to make the kind of reports that publicly held companies are required to file. So it comes down to surveys and despite the confidence levels statisticians put on their work, they can be wrong. However, there is an explanation for these contradictory results: small businesses do what’s necessary for success. For example, with the growing payables and receivables, some experts suggest that small businesses have merely found a way to work around banks’ current reluctance to loan money. Small businesses are essentially loaning money to each other! This makes a lot of sense when you have long term relationships with suppliers and customers. You know that they are credit worthy and maintaining the relationships is beneficial for all parties. Surveys vs real life In a survey this shows up as growing payables and receivables; in real life it shows up as a growing willingness to work with one another when things get difficult. I think it’s an admirable trait. Of course, there are times when payments need to be collected, and I’ve given some advice on that in the past. One way to take the error out of surveys, is to average the results of similar surveys conducted by different pollsters. And although I haven’t done this formally, I’ve been seeing a lot of surveys indicating profits are up in the small business sector. We know that employment hasn’t shown any dramatic increases, so it shows that small business are learning to do more with less. Often when we come out of a recession, businesses of all sizes are quick to forget the lessons that the recession taught; they can become too anxious to hire and otherwise increase overhead. While many may complain about this recovery, at least small businesses seem to be holding on to the lessons it taught us. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good...
read moreHow Many Natural Disasters Does It Take to Ruin a Small Business?
A major hurricane—winds at least 111 mph—hasn’t hit the United States since 2005, and I’m not forgetting about “Hurricane Sandy” and the devastation it caused. Technically, Sandy wasn’t a hurricane. However, we should take Sandy as a stark warning that stands in the midst of some pretty mellow years in terms of hurricane damage. While I’m not a fan of saying “we’re due” for a major hurricane, I am a fan of saying small businesses should take disaster preparedness somewhat more seriously. It’s always easy to think that bad stuff is going to happen to “the other guy.” But remember, to everyone else, you are the other guy. Many businesses that were caught unprepared during Hurricane Sandy took a long time to recover, even when they didn’t suffer substantial damage to their physical plants. More on that below. Hurricanes and more For East Coast businesses, NOAA offers a general guide to hurricanes and hurricane preparedness that you can download for free. It’s good, especially in its ability to scare you to action. To get a more comprehensive picture of natural disasters, including tornadoes, wildfires and floods, go to Ready.gov. And once you’re sufficiently concerned, head over to the Small Business Administration website and go through all the information and materials they have specifically for getting your business ready should a disaster strike. Hurricane Sandy hit more than 23,000 New York City businesses and most of them had fewer than 50 employees. Disasters like that claim about 40 percent of the businesses they hit, according to FEMA. Just as it takes a solid business plan for success in business, it takes a solid disaster plan to come through these terrible situations and land on your feet. Please backup your data It’s no secret that many small business owners still refuse to take data backup seriously and when disasters like a Hurricane strike, it’s easy to lose valuable business information forever, even if the roof doesn’t get blown off your building. Until a few years ago, many backup devices were vulnerable because they were typically kept in the same location as the devices they were backing up. But now, with cloud backup services widely available and inexpensive, there is really no excuse for any small business to lose important data during any kind of natural disaster. We need to add a word of caution here, however. If you’re located in a hurricane or flood zone, it’s not very helpful if the data center you use for backup—or your web presence—is only one block away. When you sign on with any data center service, find out where their facilities are located and how well they are prepared to deal with natural...
read moreSmall Biz Scams: A Real Growth Industry
I can’t tell you if the S&P 500 will be up a year from now, but I can tell you that scams targeting small businesses will have increased. My hope is that our awareness and vigilance increase even more. With that aim in mind, let’s look at one scam that’s making the rounds right now and then share a few tips. School’s out and they’re out to get you! As schools are winding down, businesses are receiving phone calls from scammers posing as a local school employee. This person says that the school has lost purchasing account information and persuades the business to share the account information over the phone. Later, someone calls the business back and places an order “for the school.” Often the scammer directs the business to ship the order to a third party address. However, sometimes the scammer has the order shipped to the school. That adds one more step to the scam—the bad guy has to contact the school pretending to be the vendor and say that the business has wrongly shipped an order to the school and have them forward it to the correct address. Whenever you receive an inquiry like this, before you start to give out information, hang up and call back the number you have on file for the account. Also, in the same way, independently verify large orders. A bull market for scams Small businesses can be especially vulnerable to these kinds of scams. Another one that’s hitting entrepreneurs is the advance fee loan scam. With loans being hard to obtain, it’s easy to see why owners would take this bait. It’s a simple scheme: A loan “broker” takes an upfront fee with the promise of finding a loan for the business owner. The loan, of course, never materializes. Complaints to the FTC about this specific scam jumped from 43,000 in 2012 to 53,000 in 2013, according to NFIB.com. Giving small business “the business” is booming. Awareness and training Fortunately, there are a lot of online resources to help business owners stay one step ahead of the scammers. The federal government regularly updates a page on small business scams. Bookmark it and check it at least once a month. It will keep your senses sharp for anything fishy that comes down the pike. Share the information with your staff. And speaking of fish, make sure you and all your employees can smell a phishing email from a mile away. Usually these are emails that look like they come from an important source—like a bank or an e-commerce site—and urge you to take fast action to change a password or confirm something, otherwise your account will be deactivated. Identify the phish You and your employees need to know how to tell where questionable emails really come from. They might say Bank of America Customer Service, but when you find the real sender it will be some obscure email address. However, the words “bank-of-america” might be buried inside the email address somewhere, giving it a faint scent of authenticity. Some email software will reveal the true address by hovering over the sender’s “name.” Sometimes you need to look in the email header. Checkout this article on TechRepublic for more information. Finally, as I mentioned above, train your employees to recognize scams,...
read moreDo You Know the Real Cost of Doing Business?
There are some basic attributes of small business owners and entrepreneurs that I really admire and they make me enjoy being around them. These include traits such as: Enthusiasm, Personal sacrifice, and Optimism. In their best form, these traits can help propel a small business to great success. However, if they aren’t tempered with realism, they can also take us down a dark alley that leads to potential failure. Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was first growing my Internet business, I remember a conversation I had with a friend. I was about a year and a half into my project and I proudly told her that we were already profitable. With one simple question, she cut to the quick: “Are you paying yourself a salary at fair market value?” She continued, “If you aren’t paying yourself a salary, you aren’t really profitable because you’re still funding the business.” Sacrifices are costs She was right. It is very easy for enthusiastic and optimistic entrepreneurs to overlook the personal sacrifices they are making and misjudge the actual status of their startups. You might label not taking a fair salary “sweat equity,” but holding sweat equity in a business that can’t show a profit is not an enviable position. Here’s another example of failing to face the real cost of doing business. An acquaintance of mine had been in the mail order catalog sales business for many years. When e-commerce started to bloom, he decided it was the future and that it would be easy for him to start selling on the Internet. After all, with the catalog business, most of the infrastructure was already in place. He had a warehouse, shipping, customer service, writers, a graphic artist and everything else required to get products to customers. Out with the old! He developed great enthusiasm for the e-commerce side of the business and waning enthusiasm for the mail-order side of the business. He allowed his web sales to essentially “piggyback” on the existing business. For some time he kept charging overhead to the mail order business, giving his new pet project a “free ride.” Even though this guy is a very savvy accountant, he let his optimism for the eventual success of his new venture blind him to the true cost of running an e-commerce division. The mail-order business soon died. Could it have survived if the owner hadn’t abandoned it for a younger, prettier business model? I don’t know. The e-commerce business never worked out either. Moral of the stories: Don’t rush into an exciting new business venture with your eyes wide shut. Be optimistic, enthusiastic and willing to sacrifice—but also be a...
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