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As a sale professional, what would you do in this situation?

Your new client just signed an agreement putting you way ahead of the previous year. Not only would it catapult you in your organization and the industry, your personal income was about to reach new heights. Then, the following week, the person who signed the contract is replaced and in walks a new decision maker.

His first order of business is to cancel all new contracts because of a strategic change in the company’s direction. There is no real logic to this cancellation and it can absolutely change the game. On top of that, the new guy brought all of his old relationships including your largest competitor.

How would you react? How would you handle your fears?

1. After receiving the news you go home crushed by the days events. You spend considerable time pondering how it will affect your future. You consider the ramifications of finishing the quarter at the low end of the sales rankings. Your concern grows as you review your monthly bills. Alternative strategies aren’t even a consideration. You do nothing but ponder the damage to your career that has just taken place. You feel hopeless.

2. You go home and after a few minutes alone in the mental fetal position, you question your entire identity, purpose, and career path. Although brief, self doubt rules the moment. A short time later you emerge out. You hunker down and develop your best strategy to win back the client using all of the tools available. Additionally, you identify where you are going to replace that revenue should you fail. You explore and create options. You become stronger because you know the fight is just getting good.

As you can see both options have aspects of fear. But only one option (choice 2) will help you overcome your fear and help you excel in sales. The other option (choice 1) will polarize you and your business

How Fear Can Polarize You and Your Business.

Fear can cause target fixation as we impose our will and try to force unnatural outcomes.

Fear can cause us to refuse to develop alternative plans because we struggle with clouded thinking.

Fear can cause us to replace logic with unsubstantiated emotion.

Fear can make us hostages to our nagging thoughts that create an escalated feeling of doom and gloom.

Fear usually keeps us conservative. As a result our business lives go void of any risk taking.

Even great sales professionals with tremendous track records have fear. The difference is that the best are fearful of not being the best, or not winning. They use fear to make them more competitive. The best sales people don’t let fear rule them.

Struggling salespeople are fearful of losing. They are stuck in a comfort zone. They let fear interfere with their sales careers and their personal lives.

Now, which type of sales person do you want to be?

3 Simple Steps to Overcoming Your Fears & Excelling Your Sales Career

1. Name something that you were fearful of that you absolutely didn’t get through. Can’t name anything can you? We get through everything.

2. Develop a plan B and take action immediately. Have plan C ready to go in case you need it.

3. Recognize what your mind and body does when fear pays a visit. Invite it in, and then invite it to leave.

Excelling in sales is about going where no others will go. Don’t try to tell me there’s no fear attached to that. The key is to recognize and use your fear so that it becomes your friend. Healthy fear tells us we’re on the edge of breakthrough achievement. We’re in the right place doing the right thing. That’s a little different than letting fear own us.

To become a high achieving sales professional, you must first become an expert communicator. Ask any sales person if they would like to make $250,000 a year and they universally say “yes.” But then look at the tool kit they use to pursue clients, and more than likely you will find that the sales tools are dull.

After 19 years of working with sales organizations in general, and high achieving sales professionals specifically, I’ve found that there are many tools that are prerequisite to advancing your income. These five that I will cover here are words and phrases that will create an environment with your prospect where they are telling you the truth. And since your most precious commodity is time, you can’t afford to waste it with people who lie to you.

1. “What would you like to accomplish today?”

I get called on by many sales organizations (some of them household names) and rarely, if ever, does a sales person start a meeting with, “What would you like to accomplish today, Bill.” This one question will save you hundreds of hours a year from working on things that don’t matter. It’s a way for the prospect to begin to share their problem with you. Just because the tool sounds simple, doesn’t mean it’s used.

2. “Is there any financial impact to this problem?”

I’m assuming that you’re not giving away your solution for free. And that in fact, there is a price the customer pays to buy and a price the customer pays not to buy. I want to understand the difference. By asking this question, you will start to learn what the financial consequences are for “not buying.” Then when you talk about your fee, the prospect will be comparing your fee to the cost of the problem. Sales amateurs will very rarely help the prospect make that connection. High achieving sales professionals deal with money more elegantly and eloquently. And this question will help you put money on the table without it just being about “your price.”

3. “Let’s do this.”

Get advances if you can’t close. “Lets do this” is a proven technique that allows you to talk about the next steps in the process while you move your prospect forward toward a final decision. Let’s suppose you’re an hour into the sales call and the prospect has shared with you some of the problems he has, but he’s still unsure of your product or service’s value. You want to go back to your office and study them prior to giving a proposal. In this case, you would say, “Let’s do this. I’m going to go back and put some thought into this and then let’s set a time we can come back in a week and take it a little further.” The better process manager you are, the better sales person you are.

4. “Here’s how we (I) typically work.”

Use this on the very first call where you’re laying out your process for getting them a solution. The high achiever needs to be thought of as an expert, not just in sales, but in the industry domain that you play in. Experts have processes and procedures. If you don’t have a sales process, get one immediately.

5. “I have a sense that…”

The elite sales executive pays close attention to their feelings. The “gut instinct” is a powerful internal communication device for you. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. If something does sound right, you’ve got to call it.

“I have a sense that…” are words in your sales professional toolbox that you can use to begin this conversation. I encourage my clients to use this if they are thirty minutes into the first call and the prospect hasn’t shared any problems or pains that he wants to fix. You might say, “In the first thirty minutes of our discussion today I haven’t heard anything that’s really a compelling reason for you to change from your current source. I kind of get this sense that if things just continued on it wouldn’t be all that bad.”

Give the prospect an opportunity react. It’s a way for the prospect to come back to you and either say yes, you’re right and it’s over (which is OK because as I said earlier, time is your most precious commodity, so move on) or he will convince you that he does have a problem worth exploring. And then, you will have control.

Letters are among the most popular means of communication throughout history. People loved exchanging messages through letters especially those that come far away. By now, letters were given new and different functions, most notable of which would be in business. Among the most popular type of business-related letters is the sales letter because it is a very important tool for reaching customers and prospects. This is why sales letter writing has been deemed to be a very important aspect in marketing.

Many entrepreneurs have observed the power of sales letter writing in capturing a significant portion of the market. As such, many businesspersons went their way on writing their own sales letters. Alas, not all of these aspirants were able to succeed with the materials they wrote. Some of these letters were not effectively written and were seen not to work as well as the others. It is thus important to know what makes of a good sales letter before writing one.

Here are some useful tips in sales letter writing:

- Gain Your Readers’ Trust: When your readers receive your mail, they should be able to put confidence in you so that they would feel safe to establish some business relations with you. The most common technique of doing so is by putting testimonials in sales letters to let people know of others who swear by your offerings. You may employ other tactics to gain people’s trust, what is important is for them to bank on what you say.

- Show That You Are Credible: Trust is just one step for people to give you some of their time, you also need to show them that you have something truthful to say to them. You should be able to show them that what you offer delivers its promise. Good means of doing this is by including scientific studies, successful stories and other materials that exhibit the truth in what you say. You need to show it more than you need to talk about it.

- The Letter should be Memorable: You can almost always expect people not to pay attention to your sales letter immediately. They simply might not need your product at the time they receive your letter, or they might not just be interested. However, this does not automatically mean that the sales letter is a failure – people can still respond to your sales letter after days, months, or years as long as they would remember it. If you can make your sales letter memorable, chances are the reader would be able to remember your products when the time comes that they are needed.

- Catch Attention: While looks are usually underestimated, it is important to make your sales letter writing very attractive whether you use visuals or not. It is not at all impossible to catch attention with mere words alone. Use bold statements that tickle your readers’ fancy. A boring letter would just end up in the trash with other junk mail. Be sure to make your sales letter writing upbeat and interesting so that your prospects would be enticed to read on and know more about what you offer.

- Give Clear Instructions: Winning trust, appearing credible, making your letter memorable, and catching attention is not enough for effective sales letter writing. It is important for your readers to be informed what they should do next by giving them clear instructions on how they could respond to your sales letter. Be sure to include how they can contact you and make it easy and convenient for them by leaving a mailing address, email, website, fax, or phone number where they can reach you easily. Of course you have to make sure that these are working well so you would not miss any customer.

- Give Rewards: People love bonuses whenever they purchase something. You can offer gifts, discounts, and other promotional offers to your customers. You can also give rewards to those who respond immediately so that you can easily reap profits from your sales letter writing.

- Reach Your Reader Personally: It could be very tempting for you to just hit the mail merge option of your word processor. However, they can make your sales letter writing very detached and unappealing. People like to be addressed personally and it is best to reach them as individuals.

Billions of dollars from business-to-business marketing budgets are spent each year on sales lead generation. Billions more dollars are spent to fulfill and follow up on marketing responses, and to determine which sales leads are qualified and ready for sales attention. Unfortunately, much of this investment in B2B sales lead generation is wasted. Why? Because many sales lead generation programs and lead qualification efforts are not in harmony with the needs of sales.

With this in mind, have you optimized your company’s sales lead generation programs to be in harmony with the needs of your salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Have you built consensus with sales management on the definition of a qualified sales lead? Has this definition been clearly communicated to all parties?

Typical definitions include criteria such as:
- Does the prospect have a need or an application for your product or service?
- What is the prospect’s role in the decision-making process?
- What is the prospect’s timing for purchase or implementation?
- What is the status of the prospect’s budget?
- What is the size of the opportunity?

2. Have you calculated how many qualified sales leads are needed in the sales pipeline in order to meet or exceed the company’s sales revenue goals? Have you broken that number down into how many qualified sales leads are needed each month and each quarter? Have you built your company’s sales lead generation programs with those target numbers in mind?

3. Have you put in place programs specifically designed to weed out the non-prospects and nurture the longer-term, not-yet-qualified opportunities-only forwarding the truly qualified sales leads to salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors for follow-up? Have you budgeted appropriately for this important sales lead development function?

If you answered "yes" to these questions, the good news is that you are not guilty of wasting your company’s sales lead generation investments. Instead, you are probably well-respected by the people in sales and corporate management.

Do you distribute, re-sell or sell wholesale products? If you do, you will soon encounter what may be your biggest opportunity for success… or failure. A large order from your best customer. A large order that exceeds your current financing capabilities. If you deliver it successfully, you can count on taking your company to the next level. If you don’t, your competitors will be the ones that eat your lunch and take their business to the next level

So, how do you handle an order that is too large for your business? You finance it. How? Using purchase order financing.

Let’s look at how things work in your business right now. Every time you get a purchase order from a client you go ahead and order the product from your suppliers. You either pay your supplier upfront or using bank financing. The supplier delivers the product and then your client pays you 30 or 60 days later.

However if you don’t have enough money to pay your supplier, the whole transaction falls through. Purchase order financing can provide you with up to 100% of the funds needed to pay your suppliers and make the sale.

There are only three major requirements to qualify for purchase order financing:

1. You must have a purchase order from a large credit worthy commercial customer
2. Your supplier must drop ship items directly to your customer
3. Your sales must be final (e.g. no guaranteed sales or consignment)

If you meet these three criteria, you have a very good chance of qualifying for purchase order financing. Purchase order financing works as follows:

1. You get a large purchase order from a client
2. The purchase order financing company issues a payment guarantee to your suppliers (usually through a letter of credit)
3. Your supplier drop ships the order and you issue an invoice
4. Once your client pays the invoice, the transaction is settled

With purchase order financing, your sales capabilities will no longer be limited by your financial strength. You can sell as much as you can finance. And – if your clients are credit worthy and good payers –you can finance as much as you want, the sky will be the limit.

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