Tag Archives: sales

One step all sellers need to take before discussing pain points with prospects

By Aaron Hoos on February 8, 2013 in Business

In this post, as in most of my posts, I’m using the term “sellers” somewhat generically. When I say “seller” I mean anyone who markets or sells — whether you own an online business or an offline one, whether you’re a copywriter or a door-to-door fundraiser.

One of the basics of “selling 101″ is the need for sellers to identify and discuss pain points with prospects. It’s in just about every sales book I’ve ever read and every sales training course I’ve ever attended. It’s an essential step in the path to a successful sale because once you’ve uncovered those pain points, you can describe how they can be solved by your product or service.

As important as this “highlight-the-pain” concept is, there is a component missing from the concept and I have only recently read a great explanation about the missing link.

I recently cleaned out my bookshelf (to make room for some great new books!) and dusted off a book called Solution Selling by Michael Bosworth, written in the 1990′s. It’s been years since I skimmed the book (I’m not sure I’ve ever read, to be honest) so I thought I should actually sit down and go through it.

Early in his book, Bosworth discusses pain points and the importance to sellers of highlighting the pain. Classic. But he goes a step further and discusses the concept of “latent pain”. Latent pain, Bosworth says, is the pain that a prospect feels but…

  • Either doesn’t realize it’s a pain
  • Or has failed to find a solution so they have just grown to accept or accommodate the pain

Some examples (these are my own, not Bosworth’s) might include: Someone who has come to accept a low rate of return on their investments because they don’t know of a safe alternative that provides better returns; someone who keeps dumping oil into their leaky engine because they think the repair will be more than they can afford; or in the case of the target market for my Real Estate Investing Copywriter brand, a real estate investor who isn’t aware of the impact that copywriting might have on their ability to do more deals.

In the examples above, we see the lack of awareness of the pain or the accommodation of the pain as two factors contributing to a situation where someone simply doesn’t “feel the pain”. And as Bosworth suggests, a salesperson who goes to sell to these people will encounter resistance and even confusion because the person is not aware (or have become immune to) the pain point.

So the first step before talking about pain points with prospects — and especially before making assumptions about what pain points might exist — is to transition the prospect’s mindset from latent pain to felt pain. That is: To use the conversation (or the copywriting or however you sell) to first help the prospect discover that there is indeed pain. Then, and only then, should a seller turn the conversation to discussing the cost of the pain (and ultimately the solution).

This concept of latent pain can help to renew old prospects who didn’t seem interested in your product or service in the past, and it can increase your potential target market to people who might have latent pain, rather than just those for whom the pain is a pressing concern.

Empower your staff to do deals!

By Aaron Hoos on February 3, 2013 in Business

I get calls from time to time from a carpet cleaning company. They’ve cleaned my carpets in the past and periodically they call to ask if I want them done again. Normally I don’t like these calls but it’s a good reminder to do my carpets and they are a good company so I’m okay with it.

So recently I received a call from the company asking if I wanted my carpets cleaned, and telling me about an “amazing” 3-room deal for some fixed price. The telemarketer gave me a few more details and I agreed, and then said: “I have 6 rooms I want cleaned. How much is that?”

To her credit, she was very professional but she said something that alarmed me a bit. She said: “One moment and I’ll pass you over to my manager.”

Her manager!?! I wasn’t asking for anything crazy. Heck, if she just doubled the deal, I would have been fine with that.

Anyway, the manager came on the phone right after and confirmed my question then punched his calculator and came up with a number that, to my benefit, turned out to be less than double the deal (huzzah!). So I ordered and they showed up the other day and cleaned my carpets and did a good job.

But heck, why doesn’t the company just empower its staff to do their own deals?

Presumably these are minimum wage staff who are perhaps paid a bonus or commission for every deal they close. So empowering them to do their own deals will most certainly give them more money.

On the other hand, I get that there’s a risk that the company will give away the farm. When I first started in sales, I asked my manager to put together the deals for me and finally he got sick of it and empowered me to do the deals myself. I was freaked out but at first I ran the deals by him to make sure I wasn’t giving something away for too little. Then I gained some confidence. And when I became sales manager, I did the same thing to my staff.

Empowering your staff to do deals is easy and it will free up your time to do other things. Here are some tips to help:

  • Give them parameters. In some cases, you can give them a maximum and a minimum to work in. In some businesses, it might be as simple as just giving them a metric to use. In the case of the carpet cleaning company, the manager should have said something like: “The deal is $100 for 3 rooms. Sell that. But if they want more rooms, we’ll do $25/room” (or something like that; I have no idea what metric they charged me and maybe THAT is why they don’t tell their staff).
  • Educate your staff. Help them to know the value of doing more deals and offering to do additional rooms. Even if they don’t get a direct financial benefit from each additional sale they make (although I think they should!) help them to see that more sales increases the likelihood of job security and it makes the business stronger, which adds even more job security.
  • Role play. Give them a few scenarios to practice. In very short order, they will be able to do some of the most common deals without breaking out the calculator and putting the client on hold.
  • Reward them. Sales is hard work. People should be rewarded for the effort. Even if you don’t pay on commission, a bonus structure (heck, even some earned time off) is a good way to motivate people to do more deals.

Fall in love with ‘no’ — Follow-up post

By Aaron Hoos on January 30, 2013 in Business

Recently, I wrote a post about why business owners and sales people (and especially financial advisors) should fall in love with no.

You should go read the post but, to summarize, I suggested that “no” isn’t as bad as we tend to make it out to be and a bunch of “no’s” are just part of the journey towards “yes”!

Shortly after writing that post, I spotted a link on Twitter about someone who has created a technique for falling in love with no. It’s pretty awesome and I think you should read it.

His name is Jia Jiang and he owns a company called hooplus.com and he blogs at a site called entresting.com. His blog is built around a concept of “Rejection Therapy” in which he is attempting to make 100 odd or even audacious requests with the “hope” of becoming immune to rejection. He writes:

I am going through 100 days of Rejection Therapy, aiming to have one rejection per day by making crazy requests. My goal is to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear.

Among his requests so far, he has tried to borrow $100 from a stranger, ask a girl out to dinner, slide down a firepole at a fire station, challenge a CEO to a staring contest, have Jeff Probst sing a song to his son, make an announcement on a Southwest flight, and more. Some are weird, some are way out there, some are pretty awesome. You can see his rejection scorecard here and following along on his blog here.

I think this is awesome because Jiang has correctly identified the importance of desensitizing himself to the pain of rejection… which goes along with my assertion that we have to fall in love with “no” instead of fear it. A sales person could very well create his or her own “Rejection Therapy”. You don’t have to just become immune to the fear of “no” in a sales setting… why not become immune to the fear of rejection in any setting? Surely that will have an effect on your sales efforts, too!

Improve your copywriting with Oren Klaff’s ‘Pitch Anything’

By Aaron Hoos on January 25, 2013 in Business

I’m in the middle of reading the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. It’s a great book!

Klaff has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture cap money during his career. Not surprisingly, he has honed his presentation skills into a science and in this book, he shares that science with his readers.

As someone who has read a TON of sales and selling skills books, this one is unlike anything I have read. Most selling skills books will cover the basics like AIDA, handling objections, asking for the sale, and so on. Yet Klaff handles the topic quite differently. I don’t want to give away a lot of his info (you should just buy his book and read it) but he covers a lot of helpful ideas that go quite beyond the scope of what you might normally read in a sales book.

I can’t help but read the book through the lens of a copywriter. (I do some copywriting work at CashMachineCOPYWRITER and at Real Estate Investing Copywriter. So copywriting as at the top of my mind and so much of Klaff’s book has valuable applications to copywriting.

One of my favorite chapters with the most obvious copywriting application is chapter 5. Again, I’m not going to give away much of Klaff’s secret sauce, except to say that he closes his pitches with a formula that can also work for copywriters. I’m summarizing a bit here and taking out words that might not make sense out of context (if you haven’t read chapters 1 through 4) but here is the formula Klaff suggests:

  1. Intrigue: Tantalize your audience with the beginning of a story, particularly about a person. You should place a person in a difficult situation and then raise the question about how they will extricate themselves from it… which will be revealed later in the pitch or the copy. In effective copywriting, this can be done throughout the copy and will help to rivet the reader’s attention.
  2. Prize: Instead of coming across needy and begging your audience to buy, take the opposite approach and become the prize. Be the pursued, not the pursuer. This is such a refreshing change of pace from a lot of copywriting that tries to go for a hard sell but ends up coming across as too needy.
  3. Time: This element of copywriting is already familiar (although not always well used) and Klaff says to set a time limit and stick to it. Unfortunately, many copywriters create false timeframes (“this page can be taken down at any time!”) and most buyers can see right through it.
  4. Moral authority: This is Klaff’s way of describing how the pitcher (or copywriter, in my case) needs to be positioned as the person with the highest amount of authority in the room. He uses the example of the President — someone with a lot of moral authority — becoming instantly subordinate to his doctor — someone whose moral authority supersedes even the President’s.

If you sell — whether face to face or on the phone or through copywriting (or in some other way), go get Oren Klaff’s book and read it for yourself. You can also read more from Klaff at his site (PitchAnything.com) or on Twitter (@PitchAnything).

Fall in love with “no”

By Aaron Hoos on January 18, 2013 in Business

Moments before writing this blog, I received a call from a company who was looking for an investment from me. The deal sounded good but it wasn’t the right deal for me right now. I told them “no thanks” and the guy thanked me and we hung up.

I sort of felt bad for the guy… because I’ve sat in his chair. I’ve talked to prospects and wanted them to buy whatever I was selling and they said no. It was like being punched in the gut, when all the air goes out of you. Sure, they didn’t mean their “no” to punch you in the gut but it does, and it takes all of your willpower to maintain your composure and stay positive.

The high points of my sales experiences have been when I rewired my brain to ENJOY hearing “no”… when I fell in love with “no” and even learned to look forward to it.

CAN “NO” BE A GOOD THING?

I believe “no” can be good for a few reasons…

First, a “no” is a way for people to self-qualify them out of your service. They might not have the need you think they have, or they might not be willing to pay what you are charging. Therefore, hearing “no” from them is great because you wouldn’t want them as customers in the first place!

Second, a “no” doesn’t mean that you erase all of the work you’ve done. If your selling effort up to that point was some other kind of project, you wouldn’t just scrap it all and start over! You can reuse a variety of elements — lessons learned, presentations, refined skills.

Third, a “no” doesn’t mean “I never ever want to do business with you”. (Well, it usually doesn’t mean that). 99% of the time it means “this isn’t right for me right now”. There have been MANY times that I’ve been reminded of this lesson when I’ve pitched something, forgotten about the pitch because it was so old, and suddenly the person calls me up to do business. Awesome! Instead, that effort that you put in was just a seed that planted… and some seeds take longer to sprout.

Fourth (and this one is my favorite) a “no” is just a stepping stone to a “yes”. In Tom Hopkins’ book How to Master the Art of Selling (page 86 and 87 of my well-thumbed, always-within-reach copy), he suggests that sales people have to hear a bunch of “no” before we get to a “yes”. And then he gives an example, which I’m going to paraphrase: If you have a 10% closing ratio and you sell a product worth $100 then that means every single response, whether no or yes, is worth $10. As Mr. Hopkins puts it, “you are not paid by the sale, you are paid by the contact.”

Those four facts changed the game for me and enabled me to sell even though I faced “no” more than I wanted to hear.

NOT JUST FOR OUR TRADITIONAL DEFINITIONS OF SELLING

This truth doesn’t just apply to the type of telephone selling or face-to-face selling I’ve referenced above. It’s true for you no matter what you sell and how you sell it. And it’s not just the prospect-to-customer sale, either, but it will be true for people who are selling again to previous customers.

I write a lot of proposals (I LOVE proposals!) for magazine articles and joint ventures and projects with prospects and clients. Not all of those proposals get accepted or even responded to. They are active or passive “no’s”.

Even web traffic on your site that arrives but clicks away before buying is a type of “no”. Don’t get discouraged by it… many other people would LOVE to have that traffic on their site but you have it on your site.

REWIRE YOUR BRAIN TO LOVE NO

Earlier in the post I listed 4 ways that “no” can be redefined so that the gut-wrenching negativity is wrung out and instead, “no” becomes a constructive and even positive thing. You should always go into every sale hoping for a yes and believing that you’ll get it but now you can look forward to the outcome of every sale regardless of what the prospect says.

Business model: Consultant

By Aaron Hoos on January 17, 2013 in Business

I love business models. They act as a type of “structure” around which you can create a functioning, profitable business. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — you just need to find a business model that works for you and “plug in” your USP and your offering.

THE CONSULTANT BUSINESS MODEL

This is one of my favorite business models. It works like this: Identify your expertise in a particular area, set up a website, and pitch your services to prospective clients. That’s it! It’s such a versatile business model so the exact details will vary from one consultant to another. This was my business model for years when I was a freelance writer. This is my wife’s business model in her work as a consultant to children’s program directors for local religious organizations. In fact, this is the business model of just about every freelancer, consultant, coach, and strategist out there.

Success tips:

  • You need some type of experience or expertise or education to competently deliver your services but you don’t have to be the world’s foremost leading expert. You just need to find a target market that you can serve. Even a little experience is useful. Remember: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
  • One of the things that makes this business model so powerful is its versatility. You can start your consulting work in one field, transition into another field, and never miss a beat.
  • One of the other advantages is how quickly you can get up and running. It’s a service business, which means that you don’t need a lot of equipment or inventory. So if you have been dreaming about starting a business, you could theoretically have a business up and running this evening using this business model.
  • I also like this business model because it you can plug other monetization opportunities into it. You can pull in things from other business models, you can write books, sell products, whatever. It’s “extendible”.
  • A challenge that many people face when they use this business model is the challenge of selling. If you’re not used to selling then it might seem intimidating.
  • Related to the above: A lot of people fail because they do the marketing but not the selling and wonder why they aren’t getting any clients. This is one of the most common reasons that businesses fail.
  • I’ve also found a challenge when scaling up. You might disagree but, in my experience, this is a hard business model to scale. Your time is so closely tied to the delivery of the product or service. You almost become a celebrity brand of sorts (or, at the very least, your personal brand gets tied up in the business brand and it’s hard to extricate those two). Some businesses do it but many don’t… not without transforming the business model pretty dramatically.

Copywriting and sales ideas for when your prices are higher than your competitors’ prices

By Aaron Hoos on January 8, 2013 in Business

There is so much competition on the web that it becomes almost too easy for entrepreneurs to become the low cost provider. That choice seems like that fastest, easiest, and most logical way to gain marketshare. But it’s a scary path to take and it’s one that can be hard to come back from once you’ve started in that direction.

If your business sells products or services that are more expensive than your competitors, you don’t have to lower your price to sell more! Instead, here are some ways to sell even when you are higher (or even the highest) price provider in your market.

Incorporate these ideas into your marketing activities and content, into your copywriting, into your advertising, into your sales, and even into your overall brand image.

  • Specialize. In my opinion, the easiest way to charge more is to narrow your focus and become an expert to a small group of people. Tighten up your niche so that you are not longer the high priced service provider in a competitive market but rather the ONLY service provider in a small market.
  • Keep the conversation focused on value. There’s a reason your charge more and it is probably related to the value you provide. Chances are, you provide a higher value or a better experience or premium service compared to your competitors. Get your buyers to stop thinking about the dollar figure and to start thinking about what they end up with.
  • Educate the buyer. I’m starting to see this as a marketing technique among photographers and wedding planners (and a couple of other service providers). When buyers choose the low-cost provider, they do so because they don’t know what goes into the price. But let’s be honest: Those low-cost providers won’t be around next week, will they? Probably not. I saw this when I was a freelance writer. At first some people balked at my higher prices… until they learned that the low cost provider was also holding down a full-time job to pay their bills. Then people realized that they could pay slightly more to hire me — someone who is a full-time writer. Educate your buyers by telling them about what goes into the price… and even warning them that the lowest cost providers appear and disappear overnight.
  • Gather horror stories about low cost providers. These are almost “anti-testimonials” (and they don’t even have to be about your direct competitors) and include them when presenting your price.
  • Promote exclusivity. Make it appear difficult to visit your store, keep fewer products in stock, have customers jump through hoops to buy from you. Yes, this might sound counter-intuitive if you’ve been serving a mass market but people are attracted to things they can’t have or that are hard to get. So play hard to get!
  • Become the luxury provider. Elevate your brand to position yourself as the luxury provider for the discerning and wealthy buyer. You’ll work with a smaller segment of people but they’ll be willing to spend more. (Note: This choice has its own challenges; you’ll need to invest in a higher level of consumer experience and, if possible, get endorsements from top tier celebrities in your category)
  • Don’t bring your competitors into the conversation. Maybe businesses set up a comparison between them and their competitors by saying things like “we’re the low cost option” or “we’ll beat the competition”. However, depending on where in the sales funnel that your customers are thinking about price, you might be able to avoid talking about your competitors at all. Instead, just position what your price could be (i.e. much higher; perhaps have you’ve charged in the past) and what it is.

Brand new entrepreneurs tend to think that their prospective buyers are solely focused on price as the make-or-break element of a sale. I used to think that too. Now I realize that it’s pretty far down the list and, the more effective your marketing is, the less important price becomes.

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