What does trust have to do with it?

What does trust have to do with it?

Does trust play are in business? In marketing and sales? How about operations or finance?

According to The Trust Edge by David Horsaager, you can gain faster results, develop deeper relationships and create a stronger bottom line, when people trust you.

According to Horsager, trust is defined as a confident belief in a person, product or organization.

Trust should be congruent. It asks that you do what is right, deliver what is promised, and to be the same each time.

We know trust is important. People want to work with companies and individuals they know like and trust.

If you are not trustworthy people will stop buying from you (89% according to Horsagger.)

So how do you develop trust? The simplest way is to have trust transferred from a someone to you. The reason referrals work so well is a transfer of trust. If you trust me, and I introduce you to a prospect with the expectations that you can help them, this introduction goes a long way to building trust.

Likewise, if a referral is handled poorly, that impacts trust relationship for all parties.

In what ways can you develop trust, other than a personal introduction?

Marketing messages that are consistent and meaningful to the prospect and not lying to the prospect of the sales and marketing process.

Doing what you say you are going to do when you say you will do it.

Being consistent in word and deeds is important.

Being responsive is essential.

Honesty plays a big role.

My belief is that trust is given at first but must continue to be earned.

How do you build trust with others and how would you like others to build trust with you?

 

May Blessings be upon you,

Ron Finklestein

Marketing Site is www.akris.net

Consulting site is www.businessgrowthexperience.com

 

Sales Has Changed

Sales Has Changed

 

The old sales process focused on the relationship only as it concerned getting the sales. We wanted the prospect to buy at all cost. In this model the sales representative holds all the power and it was not important if the client liked and trusted you. The sales person had the knowledge and the power.

The New sales approach flips the old process upside down. This had to happened. In the old model the sales person controlled all the power and the prospect had to see the sales representative to learn what was going on. The smart sales representative understands that power has shifted to the buyer and if the buyer does not like or trust you they will not buy from you.

Here is how it is working today. The true sales professional knows his business well enough to understand who he can help. He also understands that the prospect must want help. He asks questions to discover the need and evaluates the prospects’ willingness to share. He then assesses the opportunity to see if this is the best use of his time. He may walk from this opportunity.

If the sales profession chooses to participate in the sales opportunity, he begins gathering data to gain clarity on how to best help the client. At this time, he might discover it does not make sense to continue. All though the sales process the sales professional is helping the prospect understand the rules of how the sales call(s) will progress.

After all the data is gather the sales profession will present with the intent of closing the business. The success of the presentation is dependent on how well he gathered data during the sales process. After the presentation is made and the business is closed, implementation begins.

To Your Success,

Ron Finklestein

Info@akris.net
www.businessgrowthexperience.com

P.S. Check out our free report. Everything you knew about generating leads is wrong at Http://www.akris.net

 

Is Coaching Effective?

It has been a few months since I posted any content on this site. I have been writing but it has been for several other sites. I wanted to share a recent excerpt found in Entrepreneur Magazine.

“A business coach will enable you to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses, and they will help you build a road map for success. This can be absolutely critical for people who have never run a startup before, and it will also give you the necessary tools to properly manage current and future employees. An industry study found that CEOs who consent to business coaching are able to improve their working relations by 77 percent, and this ultimately leads to a 53 percent boost in productivity and increased profits of 22 percent.”

Is this true? Yes…but. The issue is whether the individual will act on what they learn. Here is an example.

Just finished a coaching engagement with a client that had his best commissioned month ever in the sixty years his company has been in existence ($98K). He likes to give me credit but he did all the work. I have clients who learned the same action who did not get the results because they did not implement what they learned. It is all about action.

Here are some of the articles I recently published.

This article discusses how minor changes can lead to massive results.

https://www.hershpr.com/sales/one-degree-difference-become-a-sales-leader-and-grow-sales/

Enjoy and I look forward to reading your comments. Feel free to share these articles and help others.

To Your Success,

Ron Finklestein
ron@businessgrowthexperience.com

Sales Tip # 10 – Perception is Reality

Perception is Reality!

In this short video (57 seconds),  you will see the impact perception has on another person’s reality. If you are dressing, speaking, or doing things that are not congruent with other’s expectations of you (in your job), you can be perceived at not trustworthy and loose opportunities.

Leave me a comment if you have experienced this problem. Share your experience below.

Not making your sales numbers?

If you are not achieving the level of success you know you are capable of achieving, take five minutes and go through this sales assessment. There is no charge and I will not ask for your email address. This will give you an indication of what you need to do differently. If after taking this assessment you want to learn more, just send me an email.

Here is the link. http://businessgrowthexperience.com/do-you-need-us/

Business Growth Advisor

Ron Finklestein
330-990-0788
ron@ businessgrowthexperience.com

What I learned at my Sales Lunch & Learn

What I learned at my Sales Lunch & Learn

I do a monthly lunch and learn sales coaching program each month. In an effort to reach more people I recorded the session and posted it on YouTube. The link is below. I do not plan to keep this public long so if growing sales is important to you, take some time to watch/listen to this video.

After a short while, I will make this video private and only my client will have access to it via Google Plus.

This video was recorded live as part of a coaching session to private clients of Ron Finklestein and the Business Growth Experience. Ron discusses some challenges sales people must overcome, what business owners expect from people selling to them and nine actions they must take to become more successful. To learn more on implementing these actions please check out our sales training web site at http://www.businessgrowthexperience.net.

If you prefer personal coaching, check out http://www.businessgrowthexperience.com and download our free report: Six questions Prospects Want Answered Before they buy.

If you work in Northeast Ohio and want to attend one of these Lunch & Learn events please click here  http://saleslunchandlearn.eventbrite.com.

 

http://youtu.be/nv_sfMZ8Vz0

Our gift to you – our readers

Our gift to you –

 

As a sales trainer and business coach, one of the biggest problem I  see is lack of follow through-not because they can’t follow through – but because they do not remember to follow through. This is because they do not have a process, system or method that works they can use daily. This lack of follow through is most pronounced in the sales area.   

 

Dr. Tony Alessandra created an 60+ page eBook on how to sell collaboratively. The content of this book is extraordinary. It is a complete, proven process on selling that works. As a thank you for being a reader, I am making this eBook available to you.

 

Please read it, use it and implement what is discussed. It will make sales easy.

 

Just click on this link and you will be taken to the page to download the Collaborative eBook:

http://www.businessgrowthexperience.net/ron/

Enjoy!

Ron Finklestein
ron @businessgrowthexperience.com
www.busineessgrowthexperience.com

The Fuel that Drives the Engine of Your Sales Success

The Fuel that Drives the Engine of Your Sales Success

It is important to identify the prospects that will have the highest need for your product or service.  These are your best prospects—the ones who are most likely to buy, use, and recommend you and your services.

When you have identified your best prospects and know where to find them, you can use your marketing skills to generate leads that will most likely result in profitable sales. Qualified lead generation is the fuel that drives the engine of your sales success.  The techniques discussed here can keep you supplied with highly qualified leads.

How can you identify those prospects that are most likely to want to hear your message? And, once you’ve identified the profile of those most likely to buy—your TOP 20%—where can you find prospects in large numbers who fit that profile?

Begin with an analysis of your sales over the last year or two.

In your analysis, you look at three things:

1.            Who bought what?

2.            How did you find and sell those customers?

3.            Why did they buy what they bought?

Possessing the right marketing skills is crucial in properly identifying the right kinds of prospects for a company. Smart companies accomplish this responsibility by profiling the top twenty percent of their current customers who typically provide eighty percent of their profits.

Looking for new business is very expensive. Therefore, companies need to avoid the wrong kinds of prospects for them.  Just as it is critical in distinguishing the attributes of the right prospects, a company needs to outline the characteristics that make-up the bottom twenty percent of their customer base. Anybody in business can easily recognize who the complainers, price-grinders, and transaction-oriented clients are. By clearly understanding the bad traits of those bottom twenty-percent, companies can much easier avoid the wrong prospects.

This is a review of one chapter from our (Dr. Tony Alessandra and Ron Finklestein) new book. Let us know and we will notify you when it is through the publication process. The book is called The Definitive Sales Playbook: How to Grow Sales and Retain Customers (Soon to be available on Amazon.com.

Ron Finklestein
Download our free report on the Six Questions Prospects Want Answered BEFORE they Buy from YOU. www.businessgrowthexperience.com
ron@businessgrowthexperience.com
330-990-0788

 

 

Ways to Increase Sales and Grow Revenues

Marketing Outcomes / How to Grow Sales and Increase Revenues

Every prospect wants to know why they should buy from you. They want to know the outcome they will experience before they want to know how you will create those outcomes. Let’s start with four basic facts …

1.    Every prospect has a problem. This problem creates some negative emotions.

2.    Every product has features: Features are merely objective facts about a product (or the company behind it). In three-dimensional products, features include size, shape, weight, construction, color options and more. You need to be able to tell your prospect the feature of your product or service that will solve the problem. In information products, features include number of pages, size, frequency of publication (for periodicals) and the types of information that are presented.

3.    Fortunately, most features are there for a darned good reason: Prospects don’t want features. They want you to change their lives for the better. Product features are merely the means to that end. That means features can have a place in ad copy – like telling prospects how many issues they’ll get per year … how many big pages are in your book … or that your widget is made from carbon steel for strength or carbon fiber for lightness.

Beyond that, features are a yawn because they’re about the product; not about the prospect. Or, as in the examples above, they can help demonstrate how your product delivers a benefit. The good news is, just about every product fact – every feature – is there to provide a benefit that your prospect IS willing to pay for. Tell your prospect in no uncertain terms the benefits of a particular feature. But we do not want to stop there.

4.    Each benefit has a positive emotional outcome for the buyer. Many time there are more benefits associated with each product feature than are obvious to the average buyer. Each benefit or combination of benefits producing one, two, three or more new benefits you never thought about before. The secret to selling and marketing and most any other revenue generating activity is to identify each and every benefit a product provides – and the emotional outcome your buyer will experience.

5.    Your prospect is buying emotionally first, then they intellectualize & justify the purchase. Connecting the feature, benefits and outcomes makes it very easy for the buying to understand why you are the right and safe choice.

Outcome that sing and soar – in five simple steps

Here’s a little exercise to help you drill down to the outcomes prospects are willing to pay for and then connect those benefits with powerful response-boosting emotions that your prospect already has about those benefits (or the lack of them) in his life.

By the time you’re through, you will have a complete list of company and product features … you will have squeezed every possible benefit out of those features … you will have fully defined the outcomes of those benefits and you will have connected each one to a powerful emotion your prospect has about each one of them.

In short, you’ll have a comprehensive “features/benefits/emotional outcome” inventory you can refer to as you create your marketing message, write your copy, build your sales presentation or create contents for your website.

Going through this exercise can go a long way towards finding new themes and adding power to your sales and marketing.

To begin, create a spreadsheet with these headings:

Problem

Negative Emotional Outcomes of Problem

Feature that Solves the Problem

Tangible Benefits of that Feature

Positive Emotional Outcome Prospect with Experience

Rank

 

Write until all know problems are identified and documented. Document how they feel when they experience this problem. Next write the feature of your product or service that solves the problem and document the benefit of that feature. Finally, describe the positive emotional outcome the buyer will experience.

When complete, rank them in order of importance.

He is an example of what your table should look like.

Problem: Sales have plateaued

Emotional Impact of Problem: So frustrated because no matter what I do, I just can’t figure out how to take the sales to the next level. And I’m always the one having to do the sales

Feature: Learn how to build a sales and marketing system

Benefit of Feature: You can stop being the only “sales guy” and start leveraging your marketing and sales processes so that customers come to you to purchase, instead of you chasing them. You will grow sales!

Emotional Outcome: You’ll feel a great sense of relief … no more anxiety about “where is the next sale going to come from?” and you won’t have to be chasing prospective customers all the time … prospects who are hiding from you.

When you complete this process you will have all the material you need to write a great sales letter, create compelling web copy, and build a powerful sales presentation and some much more.

This process is where increase profits and grow sales begins. You need to understand your prospects better than they understand themselves. When completed, you can tell them exactly what they can expect when they work with you.

If you want a more detailed, step by step process, go to www.businessgrowthexperience.com and download our free report: Six Questions Your Prospects Want Answered before They Buy.

To Your Success,

Ron Finklestein www.businessgrowthexperience.com

Ron@businessgrowthexperience.com 330-990-0788

p.s. Go to www.businessgrowthexperience.net and supply your email address. We will notify you when we launch our membership site that will take you step by step through our sales and marketing system to help you grow sales and increase revenues.

Well I hate being sold to!

I have been a big fan of Neuromarketing. Neuromarketing is simply understanding how the brain like to process information and creating a marketing message that resonates with the brain. A business associate of mine, Dennis Andrew, wrote a really good article on how to sell using some simply Neuromarketing techniques. Below is his article unedited. I know you will enjoy this.
If you want to reach Dennis here is contact info: Dennis Andrew, NNOS Studios, 503.877.4880 ~ direct

 

It seems that most of the emails I get are just selling, selling, selling. Well I hate being sold to. When I meet someone I want to know how they think, not if I’m a qualified buyer.

Here’s a bit of info you’ll probably enjoy. It’s on how clients make decisions.

Understand that the “decision-making” part of the brain is like a child, not an adult. It needs to be unlocked, not forced. It doesn’t choose something because it is a logical decision. If it did, everyone’s products would be sold. People make decisions based on emotions and (after the decision is already made) then it mixes with another part of the brain that FINDS (creates) a logical justification.

To unlock it, you must work around the fact that this part of your client’s brain is self-centered. That’s why it is all about them and little about you or your company. This part is always searching for any disruptions and things out of the ordinary. It is also searching for things that are familiar, concrete, recognizable…all tangible input.

Be sure to use contrast like before/after, fast/slow, with/without, and express it visually as much as you can. The optic nerve is some 40x faster than the auditory nerve.

When you engage with them, it is the beginnings and endings that get remembered. Talk about the most important info first and repeat it at the end. Don’t talk about who you are and what you do first.

Since we all have preconceived biases about products/services, it is very important to note that we rate experiences not by the experience as a whole, but by the best/worst moments, and the beginning/ending. What is ugly (or beautiful) here, is that we form our perception of the person/company by the ending of the experience. Don’t end the client experience with a bill.

People don’t remember you by what you tell them, but by how you made them feel. Likewise, they won’t remember your company by what they gave you or got from you, but by how they FELT as a result of that.

Clients’ brains are looking for the gap…what you offer that others don’t. Present these in sets of three. The brain likes “3.”

I ran across a statistic showing that people are willing to pay 4x the price if they know they’re getting twice the value. If the value of your product is unknown, only then does price become the default differentiating factor between you and competition. Price is what they pay, value is what they get.

Don’t sell the features, sell the benefits those features provide.

If you have any question or want to learn the six questions your prospects want answered before they, go to www.businessgrowthexperience.com and download the free report.

If you want to learn more on how to grow your business, give me a call. We specialize in helping business owners grow sales, increase revenues and shorten the sales process.

Sincerely,
Ron Finklestein
www.ronfinklestein.com
330-990-0788
ron@businessgrowthexperience.com

 

Eleven Cardinal Sins of a Sales Representative.

Eleven Cardinal Sins of a Sales Representative.

If you are in sales or wonder why your sales are suffering, ask yourself if you are hurting yourself by:

  1. Being desperate. If you are desperate, do not let the prospect see it. It will chase them away faster that junk yard dog.
  2. Being artificial. People are looking for authenticity in their relationships, especially a sales relationship. People want to know you can be trusted.  You do not want your prospects thinking of you as Jerry Springer.
  3. Being unprepared. There is no excuse for not being prepared. With the internet you can find most everything you need to know before the sales call. You can bet the prospect did his homework on you. You are not John Wayne. Don’t try to wing it.
  4. Not planning your sales call. Walking into meeting without an agenda is inexcusable. I was in a meeting where the sales rep did not have an agenda and he did not confirm what he thought was the agenda, and the prospect was not happy.
  5. Being late. Most prospects take being last as a sign of disrespect: of his time. This is a great way to start off on the wrong foot.
  6. Taking longer than you said. If you asked for 30 minutes don’t take a minute longer. Ask for permission to continue if you must or schedule a second meeting.
  7. Not focusing on solving the problem. Most business owners are busy and they do not care to create a relationship with you unless they have a reason. Talking about your hunting trip may be fun for you but your prospect is not particularly interested. Focus on him and his problem.
  8. Talking too much. If you are talking you cannot be listening to the prospect and his problems. A great sales rep is an excellent listener. They listen with purpose: to understand.   Watch Dr. Phil if you want to see how it is done.
  9. Being a liar. Be honest. If you cannot help them tell them. They will respect that and listen the next time you request a meeting. Jim Carey you’re not (I hope)!
  10. Being a liar again. Don’t lie and tell them your product does something it can’t. It takes a short time to destroy your reputation you took a life time to build.
  11. Not be respectful. Do what you say you will do when you say you will do it. Many times a prospect needs something from you to do his work. Deliver what you said you would when you said you would do it.

 

Need help with growing sales, increasing revenues and shortening the sales process? Give me a call for a free not obligation discussion of your most pressing sales issues.

 

Ron Finklestein
Business Growth Experience
www.aboutbusinesssuccess.com

330-990-0788 / ron@businessgrowthexperience.com

 

Can you be Successful at Sales?

Anyone can be successful at sales provided you have the right behaviors and mind-set.

In 2003, Tim Connor published a book called Soft Selling.   In it, he compared how poor salespeople and successful salespeople managed their selling time differently.   He allocated the salesperson’s time into six major categories:

·   Prospecting

·   Sales Presentation

·   Service

·   Administration

·   Travel

·   Self-Improvement

 

He found that when it came to time management, poor salespeople allocated their time as follows:

·   10% on prospecting,

·   23% on sales presentation,

·   15% on service to others,

·   30% on administration,

·   20% on travel,

·   and a meager 2% on self-improvement.

 

These numbers are stunning at first glance if you believe and take Connor’s numbers seriously.

Note that only 10% of a salesperson’s time was being spent on prospecting and a whopping 30% of their time was being spent on administrative duties.    In other words, the salespeople who failed were spending more time managing their paperwork and administrative duties than managing or growing their sales pipeline.

 

10% of a poor salesperson’s time was being spent on prospecting.  It’s no wonder their sales were falling short of their expectations and their sales pipeline remained empty. They were spending more time on paperwork and presentations when they should have been out looking for new suspects to qualify. Contrast these numbers with how well successful people managed their time when it came to selling.  Connor found that good salespeople spent their time as follows:

·   45% on prospecting for new business,

·   10% on their sales presentation,

·   20% on service to others,

·   5% on administration,

·   10% on travel,

·   And 10% on self-improvement.

If you want to learn how to get better at sales and be seen as a partner to your customers check out Collaborative Selling. To learn more go to www.akris.net 

 

Sincerely,

Ron Finklestein
Business Growth Facilitator
www.businessgrowthexperience.com  

 

 

Ultimate Sales Machine

Chet Holmes wrote the bestselling book The Ultimate Sales Machine.

What a pleasant surprise to find that he referenced a article I wrote for http://www.entrepreneur.com called What Successful Businesses Have in Common. These 14 traits show up again and again when examining the reasons behind business success. I am including it here for your reading pleasure.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/management/leadership/article83764.html

Ron Finklestein
Business Growth Facilitator
ron@ businessgrowthexperience.com
330-990-0788

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