The key to selling consistently at the highest level is the ability to change your emotional state into one that’s well adapted to the needs of the customer. As I’ve explained HERE, to change your emotional state you must learn to change your physiology or your focus (preferably both). There are two types of techniques for accomplishing this:

• Long term techniques that create a favorable environment for a productive emotions. Example: working out and eating healthy foods.
• Short term techniques that create a quick (but temporary) burst of the productive emotion. Example: drinking a big cup of coffee.

Nearly every successful sales pro has a pocketful of short term fixes for emotional states. (My particular favorite, which I learned from Tony Robbins, is a fast physical movement that quickly puts me into a state of readiness.) However, the greatest benefit often comes from long-term techniques which involve modifying your day-to-day routine.

I recently had a conversation about this subject with Jeff Keller, author of the bestselling book Attitude is Everything. (He uses the term “attitude” to encapsulate the concept of “emotional state” but it’s really much the same thing.) He believes that most professional sales reps would be far more successful if they made three subtle, but long-term, changes in their daily “work ritual.” These changes alter your focus and hence create a better environment for the productive emotions that will help you sell:

1. Start each day with at least 15 minutes of positive input. The idea here is to create a “library” of positive thoughts in your head, so that you can draw upon them if the day doesn’t go exactly as you’d prefer. He recommends reading an inspirational book as soon as you wake up, and spending your commute listening to motivational audio files rather than the news. If this is too much, consider investing in mp3 files of music that you find motivating and energizing. You can use such music on you iPod to “pump yourself up” right before your big meetings or to cool yourself down when things get challenging.
2. Reduce your exposure to broadcast news media. Much of today’s news programming consist of “if it bleeds it leads” stories followed by commercials offering some form of security or comfort. The idea is to amp up your fear/anger/frustration and then provide you an action, like buying “comfort food,” which promises to relieve the pressure. This constant flow of negative imagery can actively create a negative attitude about life and the world, so it is best avoided. (My own technique: I listen to the non-commercial BBC news, as rebroadcast on NPR.)
3. Avoid people who have a contagious negative attitude. You probably have one or more friends, relatives, or acquaintances who make you feel tired and drained. They always seem to have something sour to say; criticisms come to their lips far more quickly than compliments. Such people are toxic to your attitude (and hence to your success in sales) because, if they’re not actively tearing down your enthusiasm, they’re trying to think the same way about the world as they do. If you want to maintain a positive attitude, then sharply limit your daily exposure to such people.

What I like about these techniques is that they’re easily folded into a regular work day. Unlike long term physiological changes (like eating better or working out), Keller’s techniques don’t require a large investment in time and effort, and you can buy motivational CDs and books on eBay (like HERE) or Amazon (like HERE) for pennies, and avoiding kvetchers is simply a matter of finding something better to do than listening to them kvetch.

Original post by Geoffrey James

Those of you who’ve read “Selling Sucks” know that I’m a big Rush fan - in the beginning of the book, when I explain the differences between buying and selling, I mention that when Rush tickets go on sale, nobody has to sell them to because I’m rabid to buy them!!

At one of the shows I brought a copy along and asked “Gump,” the band’s drum technician, to pass it along to drummer Neil Peart for me, as I thought they’d get a kick out of seeing them mentioned in the book.

Well, yesterday I checked my mail and found a hand-written thank you note from Neil Peart himself!!

I was so excited and happy to receive that - and still am - and it made me realize how far small gestures can go. It only took him a minute to write that and drop it in the mail but it made my day. It’s even got me ordering thank you cards because I realized I can make someone’s day when I return a reader’s gesture with a note from me.

Don’t forget that the little things go a long way. It’s something you come to realize when you stop chasing the immediate sale, and start thinking about what you can do for people instead, whether it’s solving problems in their business or just putting a smile on someone’s face!

Original post by fjr@nevercoldcall.com (Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr.)

Featuring Jeff Grill - VP Marketing, Mimeo.com
Viewing Time: 5:7

Original post by (Selling Power)

Website and visitors: generates hardly any number of leads

You have company website in order to inform potential customers. Spending money for marketing purposes is OK and every company has a website.

SEO: You have applied the best SEO you could do or pay for and got high ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live! Spending more money. After inserting a free web statistics solution, you knew the site got traffic, but not enough visitors.

ADVERTISING: So you bought Adwords or Text Link Adds or whatever. Spending even more money. This resulted in more visitors.

BOOKMARKING: Tried sneaky bookmarking on Digg, Reddit, Technorati, etc. This resulted in more search engine links, but no real increase in visitors, as your products or services are not HOT. No problem as this bookmarking didn’t cost you any money. Still, less than 3 percent of all the website visitors submit their contact details.

WHITE PAPER: Thus you wrote a White Paper, and made it downloadable from your website after visitors submit their name and email. This increased the level of contact details to 4% - an increase of 1%. It might be the subject; it might be the products or the type of services, who knows. The fact is and remains: only 96% or more of all of your visitors come, read your website and leave without a trail or trace. The 4% is only what remains as a start for lead generation, as each one needs to be contacted to see if they really are interested.

Email marketing:

The next idea was to use email marketing: sending out tagged emails to potential buyers. These could be retrieved and traced when the receiver clicked n the link inside the email. Great idea, but you didn’t have enough email addresses to send out. Thus you had to buy email opt-in lists. This sounds like getting into spamming, not? Pushing people into your website is almost like luring them to visit your website. Moreover you had to build a special ‘Landing page’ to ultimately keep their interest further.

Have you already questioned yourself?

What is the likelihood of sending an email to someone with an appropriate message at the appropriate time?

This is multiplying probabilities:

For instance:

* Probability of addressee related to your proposition: 40%

* Probability of appropriate message (is he interested): 15%

* Probability of timing (now or next year or later): 9%

* This becomes: 0.40 times 0.15 times 0.09 = 0.0054 or 0.5%

Meaning in order to get one interested person, you have to send out 185 emails. Thus if you want 10 possible Leads, you need to send out 1850 emails. WOW!

These Leads still need to be qualified, thus your return on emails will be much lower.

(Note: these numbers are just an example and differ from industry to industry and product or service proposed.)

Conclusion: you will be needing massive amounts of email addresses. These you only can obtain by buying them. Spending more money.

Build on the natural inflow of visitors:

Still you have visitors coming to your website by their own means. Not being pushed or lured by an email campaign. They are pulled in by your content and the interest in your solutions, products or services. Thus what you need is a solution able to reveal the identity of the visitor by company name. Their location, language, website,… Just like any web analytic solution, the search terms used and the pages visited can be captured and listed. This allows for identifying their interests and needs.

Not web analytic: website visitor identification solution:

At first you might think you just need a web analytic application or service, however there is a important difference: web analytic aggregate data about the website, whereas website visitor identification solutions aggregate data by visiting company. For each visiting company a record has to be inserted in the company data base. Once a system stores companies in a data base, a CRM is not far off. Just add the possibility of entering contacts, events/actions and agenda for having a basic CRM.

The CRM becomes more sophisticated by the integration from the website visitors and their visits with the capabilities of the CRM. This will enhance the CRM functionalities into a different kind, as the data from the website flows into the CRM, keeping the CRM a lively information source. Of course in order to use a visitor identification solution, you will be spending money. However this is spending money to leverage the investments and expenses made for your website.

Website visitor identification integrated in CRM:

In order to inform further about the visitor identification combined with CRM, please visit LEADSExplorer

Business benefits:

* Identify your business opportunities with Leads, Customers, Ex-Customers, and Missed Customers

* Nurture and convert interested parties into Leads, into Prospects, into Sales using the integrated CRM

* Internet Data Mining for Company info and finding Contacts.

* Get Sales reasons to: call, email, send letter, leaflet, visit: using the appropriate, timely message

* Re-contact the indicated returning known visitors

* Get more lead opportunities

* Reduce significantly the acquisition cost for: Leads, Prospects and getting Appointments

* Reduce significantly the Customer Retention costs

LEADSExplorer http://www.leadsexplorer.com/en/le/t/BusinessProposition.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Colin_Herridge

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