Rather than a chore that’s a bore, think of cold calling as a performance. And rather than a drone with a phone, think of yourself as a great musician or athlete, a star performer who must (and can) excel under pressure. Great performers, regardless of their area of expertise, rehearse daily, warm up before a performance, and review each performance to figure out how to improve next time. Here’s what you do:

BEFORE THE CALL

Step 1. Remember the goal. What is the purpose of this call, depending upon the your sales process? Take a few seconds to refocus on exactly what you want the customer to do.

Step 2. Consider the prospect. Review what you know about your prospect, your prospect’s company and industry. Determine the “hot buttons” that will cause that prospect to consider taking the action that’s the goal of the call.

Step 3. Script the intended conversation. On paper, review how you’d like the conversation to go. Map out the basic flow, anticipate objections and imagine how you’re going to close.

Step 4. Rehearse the conversation. Go over the script two or three times so that it becomes more natural. If possible practice the conversation with a colleague. This greatly reduces anxiety.

Step 5. Mentally prepare yourself. If you’d done all of the above, you should feel more confident of your ability to make a successful cold call. Observe this, and let that confidence dominate your thoughts.

DURING THE CALL

Step 6. Assume the prospect needs you. Approach the call as if you have information and perspective that the prospect truly needs and can contribute to the success of the prospect’s business.

Step 7. Differentiate yourself immediately. On the typical cold call, you have fifteen seconds (more or less) to communicate to the prospect that you’re somebody worth talking to. To do this, touch one of the “hot buttons” that you researched in Step 2.

Step 8. Mirror the prospect’s speech pattern. Mirror (but don’t mimic) the tempo and rhythm of the prospects way of speaking. If the prospect talks fast, talk fast. If the prospect drawls, slow your talking speed to match.

Step 9. Move the call towards the goal. While there will be times when your cold call might engender an in-depth conversation, gradually move the conversation towards your goal.

Step 10. Close on your goal. When the time is right, close on the step that you’d like the customer to take.

AFTER THE CALL

Step 11. Celebrate or contemplate. If the call went well, celebrate, If the call did not have the outcome you would have preferred, spend a few moments figuring out why. Decide what needed to be different in order for the call to be successful.

Step 12. Repeat as necessary. Go back to Step 1 for your next call, incorporating what you learned during the previous cold call.

By the way, the above is adapted from a conversation I had last year with the brilliant Wendy Weiss, author of Cold Calling College and Cold Calling for Women.

Original post by Geoffrey James

Rather than a chore that’s a bore, think of cold calling as a performance. And rather than a drone with a phone, think of yourself as a great musician or athlete who must (and can) perform under pressure. Great performers, regardless of their area of expertise, rehearse daily, warm up before a performance, and review each performance to figure out how to improve next time. Here’s what you do:

BEFORE THE CALL

Step 1. Remember the goal. What is the purpose of this call, depending upon the your sales process? Take a few seconds to refocus on exactly what you want the customer to do.

Step 2. Consider the prospect. Review what you know about your prospect, your prospect’s company and industry. Determine the “hot buttons” that will cause that prospect to consider taking the action that’s the goal of the call.

Step 3. Script the intended conversation. On paper, review how you’d like the conversation to go. Map out the basic flow, anticipate objections and imagine how you’re going to close.

Step 4. Rehearse the conversation. Go over the script two or three times so that it becomes more natural. If possible practice the conversation with a colleague. This greatly reduces anxiety.

Step 5. Mentally prepare yourself. If you’d done all of the above, you should feel more confident of your ability to make a successful cold call. Observe this, and let that confidence dominate your thoughts.

DURING THE CALL

Step 6. Assume the prospect needs you. Approach the call as if you have information and perspective that the prospect truly needs and can contribute to the success of the prospect’s business.

Step 7. Differentiate yourself immediately. On the typical cold call, you have fifteen seconds (more or less) to communicate to the prospect that you’re somebody worth talking to. To do this, touch one of the “hot buttons” that you researched in Step 2.

Step 8. Mirror the prospect’s speech pattern. Mirror (but don’t mimic) the tempo and rhythm of the prospects way of speaking. If the prospect talks fast, talk fast. If the prospect drawls, slow your talking speed to match.

Step 9. Move the call towards the goal. While there will be times when your cold call might engender an in-depth conversation, gradually move the conversation towards your goal.

Step 10. Close on your goal. When the time is right, close on the step that you’d like the customer to take.

AFTER THE CALL

Step 11. Celebrate or contemplate. If the call went well, celebrate, If the call did not have the outcome you would have preferred, spend a few moments figuring out why. Decide what needed to be different in order for the call to be successful.

Step 12. Repeat as necessary. Go back to Step 1 for your next call, incorporating what you learned during the previous cold call.

By the way, the above is adapted from a conversation I had last year with the brilliant Wendy Weiss, author of Cold Calling College and Cold Calling for Women.

Original post by Geoffrey James

These five out-of-the-ordinary fitness trends will inspire advanced athletes and motivate the most hesitant of beginners.

Original post by Malcolm Fleschner

Launch yourself into a new circle of people waiting to talk to you.

Original post by Malcolm Fleschner

An old client of mine got in touch with me about three weeks ago, begging for help. Over the last couple of years, their site has lost all its rankings and they were desperate for change. I agreed to help with the following terms:

1. I would only be able to give them one, possibly two, months of my time.
2. Most of that time would be spent training them to do the work, rather than me doing the work. (Teach a man to fish kind of thing).

During the last few weeks, the training has taken up a large portion of the time, which is good. Training focus so far has been on learning how to blog and learning about backlinks. Here’s an outline of the few other things I’ve done:

• I’ve also been doing analysis work, looking for the on-site problems, and correcting them as I find them. Of note, the home page code had been funkified (messed up) by someone over the years. The result looked ok to the end users, but a bot may have been confused by the bad code. I also removed some old broken links leading to 404’s from a few pages.
• In addition, I created a blog as a separate section of the site so that the site could get some fresh content going. (The site had old, stale content for the last couple of years). A total of 4 blog posts have been made by the client.
• One backlink has been acquired from a blog directory (a somewhat low-quality directory).

As you can see from yesterday’s DigitalPoint keyword tracker tool, the site has had a huge resurgence in the SERPs. The green numbers denote positive movement for the associated keyword phrase (phrases are not shown).

Although there is more work to be done to move those rankings up to the top 10, at least they are now in a position to make some real moves. The obstacles to their rankings success have been removed, and that’s an important point. Before you can be successful in the SERPs, you have to remove some obstacles. Old stale content and funkified coding can be like a large iron door blocking the path to SERPs greatness. Breathing some fresh life into a site and making sure the code doesn’t cause a bot to stumble can make the difference between no rankings and decent rankings.

Now that the stumbling blocks have been eliminated, some off-page work should do wonders.

Technorati Tags: SEO, on-page optimization, funkified code

Original post by DazzlinDonna

For years, American businesses have treated sales pros as second-class citizens. That’s about to end, though, because in the future that’s rapidly approaching, solution selling will become the soul of B2B commerce. And that’s good news for the selling profession. Let me explain:

The Internet transforms any product or service that can be commoditized into a commodity. Time was that people went to a commissioned sales rep to buy a television or a stereo. No longer. People do their own research online and either buy from a local warehouse or simply get the product drop-shipped. People are even buying automobiles and houses that way, armed with knowledge that used to be proprietary, like the wholesale price of the car and comparative house sales in the target neighborhood.

The same is true of B2B goods and services. It’s now incredibly easy, for example, to rent office space, office furniture, office equipment, computers, telephone service, etc., etc. online, without ever speaking to a commissioned sales rep from any of the firms that provide those products and services. There are very few B2B products and services that aren’t edging towards becoming commodities.

From the standpoint of the traditional B2B sales rep, commoditization has been a disaster, lowering commissions and eliminating jobs. But from the standpoint of a B2B sales pro, however, the situation couldn’t be better. That’s because sales reps and sales pros aren’t the same at all. A sales rep sell products. A sales pro sells solutions.

While the Internet gives companies the power to purchase B2B commodities, most executives realize that there’s overhead connected with putting those commodities together in ways that can help a companies be more successful. At the same time, executives have learned that it’s more efficient to outsource everything that isn’t part of a company’s core competence. So while the Internet turns products into commodities (thereby making sales reps obsolete), it also creates a demand for solution building (thereby making sales pros essential.)

For example, while a CEO is well aware that he (or someone else in the firm) could use the Internet to order all that office space, office furniture, etc., actually setting up a new facility (and making sure all those products work together) would require a major investment in management time and effort. If smart, that CEO would much prefer to hand that function over to somebody else (i.e. a sales pro) who can be trusted to ensure that everything happens on time and on budget. And that CEO is more than willing to pay a premium over the cost of the various products in order to get that “solution.”

In other words, solution selling by sales pros is rapidly replacing product selling by sales reps. And that will eventually and inevitably change the way that people outside of sales view the sales function.

Consider: the main reason that sales reps were held in disrepute is that they were basically overhead — middlemen involved in the sale process purely because they had privileged access to a specialized knowledge (like the price book).

Sales pros, on the other hand, reduce and eliminate overhead. By creating a solution and owning the result, a sales pro allows customers to avoid investing in areas where they’ll be inherently inefficient. Companies can thus remain smaller, stay focused, and stay profitable - all because can depend upon a sales pro to take responsibility for that segment of their business. In other words, sales pros add major value; sales reps didn’t.

It’s only a matter of time before non-sales personnel begin to realize that, both inside and outside their own firm, they’re no longer dealing with sales reps, but with sales pros.

And thatbrings me to my previous post about dealing with internal idiots who block sales. My advice: give them a couple of years. Eventually even the most clueless “sales prevention police” will figure out that sales pros are the only reason that any firm, anywhere, can still make money on a B2B transaction in a highly commoditized global economy.

Original post by Geoffrey James

For years, American businesses have treated sales pros as second-class citizens. That’s about to end, though, because in the future that’s rapidly approaching, solution selling will become the soul of B2B commerce. And that’s good news for the selling profession. Let me explain:

The Internet transforms any product or service that can be commoditized into a commodity. Time was that people went to a commissioned sales rep to buy a television or a stereo. No longer. People do their own research online and either buy from a local warehouse or simply get the product drop-shipped. People are even buying automobiles and houses that way, armed with knowledge that used to be proprietary, like the wholesale price of the car and comparative house sales in the target neighborhood.

The same is true of B2B goods and services. It’s now incredibly easy, for example, to rent office space, office furniture, office equipment, computers, telephone service, etc., etc. online, without ever speaking to a commissioned sales rep from any of the firms that provide those products and services. There are very few B2B products and services that aren’t edging towards becoming commodities.

From the standpoint of the traditional B2B sales rep, commoditization has been a disaster, lowering commissions and eliminating jobs. But from the standpoint of a B2B sales pro, however, the situation couldn’t be better. That’s because sales reps and sales pros aren’t the same at all. A sales rep sell products. A sales pro sells solutions.

While the Internet gives companies the power to purchase B2B commodities, most executives realize that there’s overhead connected with putting those commodities together in ways that can help a companies be more successful. At the same time, executives have learned that it’s more efficient to outsource everything that isn’t part of a company’s core competence. So while the Internet turns products into commodities (thereby making sales reps obsolete), it also creates a demand for solution building (thereby making sales pros essential.)

For example, while a CEO is well aware that he (or someone else in the firm) could use the Internet to order all that office space, office furniture, etc., actually setting up a new facility (and making sure all those products work together) would require a major investment in management time and effort. If smart, that CEO would much prefer to hand that function over to somebody else (i.e. a sales pro) who can be trusted to ensure that everything happens on time and on budget.  And that CEO is more than willing to pay a premium over the cost of the various products in order to get that “solution.”

In other words, solution selling by sales pros is rapidly replacing product selling by sales reps. And that will eventually and inevitably change the way that people outside of sales view the sales function.

Consider: the main reason that sales reps were held in disrepute is that they were basically overhead — middlemen  involved in the sale process purely because they had privileged access to a specialized knowledge (like the price book).

Sales pros, on the other hand, reduce and eliminate overhead. By creating a solution and owning the result, a sales pro allows customers to avoid investing in areas where they’ll be inherently inefficient. Companies can thus remain smaller, stay focused, and stay profitable - all because can depend upon a sales pro to take responsibility for that segment of their business.  In other words, sales pros add major value; sales reps didn’t.

It’s only a matter of time before non-sales personnel begin to realize that, both inside and outside their own firm, they’re no longer dealing with sales reps, but with sales pros.

And thatbrings me to my previous post about dealing with internal idiots who block sales. My advice: give them a couple of years.  Eventually even the most clueless “sales prevention police” will figure out that sales pros are the only reason that any firm, anywhere, can still make money on a B2B transaction in a highly commoditized global economy.

Original post by Geoffrey James