Four things a b - to - b salesperson could do to create loyal customers

   

Last week, was at a b - to b sales intervention for a glass company. Key concern of the salespeople - how do we ensure a set of loyal and happy customers? What we have right now is a bunch of customers who negotiate every inch of the way for prices and if the price is not OK, then the order is shifted to someone else. Even though our product quality is good, but then so is the competition:

a. In a b to b situation, there are multiple decision makers in every company. While purchase and technical buyers are of course to be contacted all the time, how about talking to buying influences within the company from where the need emerges eg if you have a new design for a glass bottle, talk to the brand manager who handles perfumes and cosmetics. Understand his brand plan for the next year - how many products does he plan to launch this year, where are his products selling, what are the gaps in the product portfolio, etc?

b. Study the business challenges (pain areas) for the company: This could be - falling sales, poor brand image, delayed payments, low profits, attrition amongst key people etc. Link your solution to these problems. eg a consulting company used to sell training programs on the basis of skill improvement. The CEO used to be more worried however about retaining his star performers. The consulting company started connecting better with the Sales head and CEO when the the solution was demonstrated as a retention tool and not a skill improvement tool.

c. Convert product benefits to specific financial benefits for each customer in $$$. eg a auto paints company designed a new formula which had better flow ad viscosity parameters and tried to sell it technically. But the client said No to the 30% price increase. Things were stuck for about six months till the technical team linked the better product to financial benefits to the customer. The superior product would result in faster cleaning of the paint shop, leading to more machine uptime, leading to higher production of $5.2 million dollars, and profits of $1.1 mn. The company's sales team researched all this information and presented their findings to the senior leadership at the customer. They got a 22% price increase. They did a similar activity and created customized cost benefit calculations for their top five customers and got an average price increase of 24%.

d. Use social media to position your company well: If you are a packaging organization. Create a blog where you regularly post articles that talk about your technical ability - eg a new packaging solution that your company has designed, a success with a customer, etc. Connect with your customers on Linkedin. Post these articles on the blog and send a link to your customers. Do this once every ten days and over a period of time your customer forms an opinion about you.

Maneesh Konkar is a sales strategy and leadership consultant. Subscribe to his blog "young leaders at every level" or connect with him at maneesh@directiononeonline.com. Follow him on twitter @youngldrs 

Set Smaller Goals, Get Bigger Results

Click on link to go to original article

BY DAN & CHIP HEATH

What do you dread at work? Maybe it’s filling out expense reports. Making a cold call to a sales lead. Giving a long-delayed performance review to T.J. (aka “the Crier”). You dread it, you avoid it, you procrastinate. You check out Google News instead.

There’s a way out of this cycle, and it comes from self-help books. (We read them so you don’t have to.) Start by thinking about housecleaning, the most unpleasant part of our everyday existence, other than forwarded kitten emails. Here’s a surefire way to fight chore inertia. It’s called the 5-Minute Room Rescue, and it was proposed by the FlyLady, a “home executive” turned organization guru. You set a kitchen timer to five minutes. Then you rush to the dirtiest room in your house — the one you’d never let a guest see — and, as the timer ticks down, you start clearing a path. When the timer finally buzzes, you can stop with a clear conscience. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

The trick, of course, is that the dread is always worse than the thing that’s dreaded. So once you start cleaning house, you probably won’t stop at five minutes, especially when you see progress. You’ll get Big Mo on your side — or at least Big Mop — and an hour later, things will look great. By scaling down the goal — just five minutes! — you can overcome your own inertia.

In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Dr. Robert Maurer of UCLA’s School of Medicine writes about his patient Julie, a divorced mother of two, who was 30 pounds overweight, depressed, and fatigued. He knew that the solution to her problems was exercise. He also knew that talking about thrice-weekly aerobics was likely to get him slapped. So he gave her a challenge: “How about if you just march in place in front of the television, each day, for one minute?”

That was the kick start she needed. One minute of low-intensity exercise did nothing to improve her health but everything to improve her attitude. When she came back for her next visit, she asked, “What else can I do with a minute a day?” Within a few months, as Dr. Maurer slowly stepped up Julie’s challenges, her resistance to a serious exercise program disappeared.

We’re all used to hearing about stretch goals, and when you feel empowered, stretch goals are useful ambition teasers. But when you feel overwhelmed, stretch goals are a recipe for paralysis. Michael Phelps needed a stretch goal. Julie needed a whisker goal, a target that was a hairsbreadth away from the status quo. We need these more modest steps because they help us get past the “startup costs” — the apprehension and fear — that deter us from doing the tasks we hate.

Ken Blanchard, author of the classic The One Minute Manager, knew that managers hated having to give feedback to employees. So he gave managers a whisker goal that he called “one-minute praisings.” He pointed out that most managers put off giving feedback until something goes very wrong, and then they swoop in with criticism. He called it “seagull management”: Managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, and then fly out. He challenged managers to give frequent, quickie assessments. Concentrate on catching your employees doing something right, he counseled, and then reinforce it with immediate, specific praise.

Whisker goals are particularly well suited to our current moment. Adversity taps our strength. When you’ve just laid off someone, it feels like too much to bear to offer constructive criticism to another employee. When you’ve given up your bonus and had your budget cut, it feels like too much to consider going back for that master’s degree. In hard times, we retrench. We maintain. We certainly don’t stretch.

But retrenchment is the wrong response to adversity. Adversity calls for change, and change doesn’t arrive via a miracle: It arrives via a kick start. During World War II, the government needed to orchestrate a massive increase in industrial production at the exact same time as its most talented industrial minds were being called away to fight. Government officials trained new people to look for tiny steps forward, not big leaps. A training manual advised workers to “look for hundreds of small things you can improve. Don’t try to plan a whole new department layout — or go after a big new installation of new equipment. There isn’t time for these major items. Look for improvements on existing jobs with your present equipment.”

Change can start with small measures, and it can be rewarded with small prizes. Maurer cites a Toyota employee-suggestion program. The carmaker receives 1.5 million employee suggestions every year, and it holds an annual awards ceremony to celebrate the single best idea. The lucky employee gets a fountain pen. (Lehman Brothers handed out million-dollar bonuses. How’d that work out?)

Dread and inertia are the enemy. But you have a powerful ally: the kitchen timer. Set it for five minutes and get to work clearing a path.

FILED UNDER GOAL SETTING, PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT, PRODUCTIVITY · TAGGED WITH SMALL GOALS, SMALL STEP, STRETCH GOALS

10 Signs You Might Be an Arrogant Leader

10 Signs You Might Be an Arrogant Leader

JANUARY 28, 2013 UNCATEGORIZED ONE COMMENT

All of us are arrogant to some degree sometimes. I know I am. Some of us are better at fighting it than others. Some of us are better at hiding it. Some folks are lucky in that they just don’t struggle with it as much. But all of us have struggled with pride, ego, or arrogance at one point or another. And if you’re thinking to yourself that you never have, well, you just did.

I’m no Jeff Foxworthy, but you might be an arrogant leader if…

1. You’re always right.

2. They’re always wrong.

3. You just happen to be the smartest person in any room you’re in. (Weird coincidence, eh?)

4. You never ask your team about anything.

5. You never even think you need to ask your team about anything.

6. You can’t remember the last time you admitted a mistake.

7. You can’t remember the last time you think you made one.

8. You’ve convinced yourself you’re being “decisive,” when everyone else thinks you’re being “a jerk.”

9. You’ve convinced yourself you’re “holding people accountable,” when it’s pretty clear to everyone else that you’re just going off on them.

10. You think none of the above have ever applied to you.

How I Gave up Email and Reclaimed 3 Hours a Day

Most weekends you will find me speeding down a trail on my mountain bike. Bring on the drop offs: I want to jump them; bring on the hops and bounces and falls. I consider myself someone who can handle the things that life throws my way. But there is one thing that raises my anxiety levels into the red zone: email.

One day while driving home, I thought: "Why don’t I just stop using email altogether?" That night while drifting off to sleep I imagined my email-free life. I liked the picture. Within the same week, I made the decision to cut email out of my life.

1. Track Your Current Productivity Levels

In order to start this experiment, I needed to track the difference in my productivity levels with and without email. I started my no email journey by installingRescueTime, a tool that tracks your workday activities and calculates a productivity score for you. The system is fully customizable. It took me a few hours to input the online sites and tools that make up my working day. I also inputted all the sites and places that I would deem as distractions. From there I ranked each item on a distraction scale from -2 to +2. I worked in my normal way for one week so that I was able to benchmark, after I implemented changes. My productivity score at the end of the normal week with email was 23 percent. 

2. Notify People

I started letting people know about my decision and thought it would be the easiest part of the process. It proved to be the hardest. I put a note on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to announce my decision. I put an auto-responder on my email which read as follows:

Subject: No More Email

Body: As many of you know, I am on a mission this year to reduce email with the aim of completely removing it out of my life.

My reason for wanting to do this:

1. I believe it is a time waster.
2. I believe it sucks people dry of valuable time that could be spent productively working on things they love.
3. I believe that it is a duplication of all the systems we already use.
4. It basically serves as a notification system to convey information we already know.

So, please do connect with me in the following places: 

• Twitter 
• Facebook 
• LinkedIn 

Thanks for helping and if you feel so inclined, I would love for you to join me on this mission of simplifying my space and time.

Kindly,
Claire

The reaction to my decision was interesting: a few people even decided to join me. Others told me that I was mad. And still others had full-on debates with me via Facebook as to all the reasons why moving from email to other mediums made no sense whatsoever. The most interesting response came from my clients: they were genuinely relieved. My decision meant less email for them to deal with, no matter how small that daily number was in the larger pool of emails they were rummaging through. I felt encouraged. I knew I was on to something.  

The most interesting response came from my clients: they were genuinely relieved.

3. Move Clients to Project Management Systems

After notifying my clients of my decision, I also explained to them that all work would be moving into a collaborative space. I set up accounts with Huddle,TeamworkPM, Basecamp and Asana. I would’ve preferred to only set up one tool but each of these platforms offer something unique that my respective clients needed. In order to not cause too much disruption, I decided I needed to meet the client where they were on tools they already used. The primary goal of these systems was to reduce the email deluge, and they did, because email notifications from the system can be controlled. I also trained my clients to classify their communications as follows:  

• Day to day discussions that do not need to be retained for future reference
• Important information that needs to be referenced over and again by team members
• Information that needs to to move to a task list because it requires specific action

Each of the project tools addresses these three types of communication very well. The message sections are suitable for day-to-day discussions. Important information that the team needs to refer back to over and over should always be documented in whiteboards and notebooks which are easily accessible, and any information that relates to tasks should always be managed in the task section of the project tools. 

With the exception of one client based in South Africa, a country which still struggles with broadband speed, every single client made the transition with ease and all of them have subsequently implemented the same tools into their own businesses. 

All the project tools allow for document sharing and Huddle also allows for online editing which means that documents do not need to be downloaded and uploaded all the time. 

The Results: Benefits and a Changing Work Day   

The transition was far easier than I expected and what surprised me most was how relieved clients were to make the change with me. The greatest benefits that I have found include:  

• I have reclaimed on average three hours of every working day. 
• I am able to get home and switch off. I cook, exercise and read at night which I love doing and I do all these things guilt free. 
• I no longer start the day with email. Instead, I open the project tool belonging to the client who I will be giving my attention to for that day, 
• I no longer experience the compulsive need to empty out my inbox all the time. 
• I handle less than 10 emails per day. 
• At the end of every day, I write down my task list for the following day. After this, I open my email and clear it out using the file, action, delete principle. This never takes more than 20 minutes. 
• I no longer have to waste time searching for attachments and information within emails because it is all contained within the files and whiteboard or notebook sections of the project tools. 
• I no longer have file sharing problems because the files are accessible anytime, anywhere. With TeamworkPM, I also have Dropbox integrated which means that file sharing is even more simplified. 
• I no longer have lengthly team meetings via Skype or in person. I have educated my clients to start the week off with a Monday morning check-in where one strategic issue is discussed and all team members give a quick breakdown of what they will be doing for the coming week. 
• Meetings, when they do happen, are now happening in a collaborative space and I have noticed that people have become more accountable. 
• Managing overall performance is easier for me because with a very quick glance the entire team’s performance can be seen. This makes identifying bottlenecks much easier. 
• I no longer need to email and request progress reports from individual people. The system shows me where people need help due to slipping deadlines or where some employees do not have enough work.  
• Because full teams are collaborating in one space, I have found that cross pollination of ideas and understanding of different work streams has increased because people are exposed to what other team members are doing. 
• I no longer multitask as I did before. I open one project tool at a time and give that client my full attention before moving to the next. 
• People who work with me have a realistic time frame in mind when they can expect communication back from me because I have communicated to them what days of the week belong to them and their project. 
• My productivity score has gone from 23 percent when I was using email as my primary communication tool, to 68 percent over a period of 10 months. 

Exceptions to My "No Email" Strategy

Some people are not fazed by an inbox with 16,000 emails in it so this type of project might be a bigger anxiety that your inbox. Also, for people who do not deal with large volumes of email, my system will also not be as applicable.

Of course my email accounts are still in use for verification purposes when I am signing up to online tools and software. I also receive receipts from online purchases via email and my website does have my email address for first time clients. Rather than cut it out completely, it would be fair to say that I have found a way to tame, reduce, and manage it - and I plan on continuing working this way for the foreseeable future. It’s been a very worthwhile journey. 

--

How about you?

Is email volume and management an issue to you? What measures have you put in place to ease the pain? 

--

Claire Burge is a productivity specialist who heads up the international company Get Organised in Ireland. Connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.http://99u.com/articles/7274/How-I-Gave-up-Email-and-Reclaimed-3-Hours-A-Dayhttp://99u.com/articles/7274/How-I-Gave-up-Email-and-Reclaimed-3-Hours-A-Day