I know we’ve said it time and time again, and it sounds trite, but there is a lot of truth in the old mantra that, if you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t know how to get there. Here are some helpful links to inspire your planning of sales and personal success for 2010 and some advice on how to make the most from high-impact New Year’s resolutions.

• Are you motivated to get the best from next year?  A Productive Seller favourite, ZenHabits answers your top 20 questions on getting motivated and overcoming bad habits.
• Are the people around you helping or hindering your success? Now is the time to decide.
• Think about changing your working processes (trust me, process is a critical success factor, the other is activity) and becoming a more productive seller.
• Take an opportunity to think about your brand and how it is affecting your success.
• Explore ways to improve your sales effectiveness that you may have overlooked in the past.
• Get above the clutter.

High-impact New Years Resolutions

What you are looking to create for your New Years resolution is a list of top level projects (like “expand into European market”) that are underpinned by actionable items (like “write advert for French speaking telemarketer”). If you can’t sit down and do it, it isn’t an actionable item. e.g. “Write Novel” is not an actionable item, it is a project. “Research Babynames.com for main character first name” is an actionable item: providing you have the time, energy and resources available, you can begin an actionable item immediately.

The reason I mention this and underpin it with repeated examples, is that so many resolutions are broken because they contain no substance, hence are not actionable. “Get Fit” is far easier a resolution to break than “Attend gym on Monday and Thursday evenings for 1 hour workout”, providing you have – of course – defined the items that will make up your workout!

Essentially, start broad and then focus on details.  Keep the above at the front of your mind and you can’t go wrong.

Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you.

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If you’re not at one with GTD, I suggest that you check it out forthwith. Sample these excerpts from David’s newest book, ‘Making it all Work’ as a free taster.

And if that’s whet your whistle, here is a video of David talking to the boffins at Google. It’s quite long, but very informative, and of great use to us Productive Sellers.

I’ve used GTD principles as part of my personal productivity system for years. Where the challenge comes is in adapting the framework of GTD to meet your individual needs and to work with the technology that you have available. I’ll post shortly with some free on-line resources to help you manage everything, but for now here is a technologically agnostic tutorial from GTD Times to get you started on GTD for salespeople.

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Check out these ideas and free (and/or low cost) resources to help you beat the market.

• The critical focus for you has to be your client-base.  The key to surviving the recession is to diversify your sales pipeline.  If you are reliant on a few large clients to bring in your target, then you are vulnerable.  Use all of the points below to grab new clients, in new areas.  Spread your risk, then if one market drops, you still have a rich pipeline to keep the deals flowing.

 

• Don’t sell on discount.  If you drop off this cliff who knows how far you will fall! It’s about value, not price.  Focus on the added value that your product and your company brings. Educate the prospect that cheapest is not necessarily best. Highlight the hidded costs of the competition (remember to make sure that what you say is well founded; we are not in the business of slating the competition) that they haven’t thought about. It’s the old principle of fear, uncertainty and doubt – but it works!

 

• You’ve heard me mention methodology before.  If you haven’t got one, you need to get one.  The Productive Seller recommends Keith Eades’ excellent The New Solution Selling (Amazon.co.uk link). At the very least, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on selling and boost your motivation. At best, you’ll add a whole new dimension to your selling and even to that of your company.  Nothing will boost your sales career (and if you’re not thinking about job security, you should be) like driving the success of not just yourself, but your whole team.

 

• Jill Konrath (author of Sales 2.0 mainstay Selling to Big Companies (Amazon.co.uk link)) has a series of free two-minute video tips for salespeople too.  Take a look and you’ll be taking the first step on the path to reinvigorating your sales greatness.

 

• Never forget the basics.  Remind yourself of the critical points of professional selling with this great free video.

 

• In a recession, selling is all about having a powerful Return on Investment case for your prospect.  Check out this great free article by Michael Nick et al, authors of the definitive book on the ROI selling (Amazon.co.uk link).

 

• Look at your goals and your motivation.  The road ahead is tough and you need to stay focussed.  We’ve mentioned it before, but here’s a great free article from Zenhabits on motivation.

 

Finally, if you’re feeling burnt out, don’t worry.  In the next few weeks, we’ll be running an article on the practical things that you can do to deal with sales burnout.  

Click our RSS Feed and get free updates on the latest articles and advice.

Keep your chin up and sell smart.

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Recently, I was sent out to an organisation to discuss early-stage sales process in respect of telemarketing.  I became involved in a discussion about delivering effective presentations. One of the attendees was kind enough to point me in the direction of Cliff Atkinson’s excellent book Beyond Bullet Points (BBP).

A note of caution: please don’t let the presence of the Microsoft name on this book put you off.  Their involvement stems purely from the fact that Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 is Cliff Atkinson’s tool of choice, hence they published the book.

True, BBP is grounded in the classical elements of storytelling as originally defined by Aristotle and used in every film ever made.  But, if all this sounds a bit highbrow for you, trust me it isn’t.  It’s all about working out what each slide is designed to achieve from the perspective of your viewer and catching their attention at each stage.  

Cliff also provides some excellent resources, albeit for a low-cost subscription, on his website.  You can also read an extract from the book here.

Like you, I have to admit to being fairly sceptical. While I have great respect for the individual who recommended this, like many of you I’ve sat through what must be hundreds of hours of turgid, monotonous PowerPoint presentations, many from some of the World’s largest companies.  I’m not sure I believed there could be an alternative!    I was pleasantly surprised!

Essentially, what this book does is provide you with a process to create compelling presentations that combine classical storytelling techniques with the use of visual media, enabling you to separate yourself from the read-as-they-go brigade of verbatim PowerPoint presenters.  So what does that mean for you, the productive seller.

Well, before I tell you that, let me talk you through my encounter with Beyond Bullet Points.  I was called upon to deliver a tender presentation, proposing a complex learning solution, to a group of public sector managers.  The solution I was proposing was radical and high risk.  I needed a presentation that would not just create a vision but really inspire people to drive it.  Time to test drive Beyond Bullet Points.

I received my copy of the book with one week to go until I was due to deliver my presentation.  I was busy every day, so I had no choice but to prepare the presentation in the evenings.  This meant reading the book as I went.

Firstly the layout.  Aside from the introduction, which gives a brief overview and sets down the minimum requirements to run PowerPoint, the book opens with a story.  I won’t spoil it for you, let’s just say it makes engaging reading and does a fantastic job of illustrating the BBP approach.  The clarity of the layout and style allowed me to quickly get to grips with enough BBP methodology to build a credible presentation, even if I didn’t have time to study all of the book in detail.

The book goes on to explain the science and research behind BBP before drawing you into creating your first five slides (Act One in BBP parlance).  And the great thing about creating these?  You’re not going to use PowerPoint!

All your initial work is done using the BBP story template (a Word document), which comes on the enclosed disc along with a number of other resources.  This template guides you in the creation of a powerful, narrative-based presentation, using simple headlines and single, clear images that define your messages in an engaging way.

You are encouraged to think about your role and the role of your audience, before tying this into your desired outcome.  You generate a headline for each slide, relative to the desired effect (where am I, who am I, what challenge do I face).  You don’t think about images at all at this stage, and you definitely don’t create any bullet points!

There is a lot of information about creating tension (remember, this is a story after all) and focusing  the audience on a call to action (vital for us productive salespeople). All of this hangs off the BBP mantra of clean, effective, visual slides that combine a single headline with a simple, highly relevant image.

In Act One you prepare your audience by “orienting, interesting, engaging, motivating and focusing them”.  Act Two is all about the meat of your presentation.  Planning the rest of your slides (again using the story template), writing headlines, prioritising slides and sequencing them.  Act Three draws your story to a resolution by re-using some of your slides, including your call to action, albeit with some graphical changes.

One of my principle concerns was how valid a story-based approach would be for a serious sales presentation.  The reaction to my presentation blew this concern out of the water.  I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that I received many plaudits from a group of managers who sit through (often turgid) PowerPoint presentations on a daily basis. Words like “inspiring” and “powerful” were bandied about, with one manager even saying that it had motivated them to try and address the subject that very day!  Experience has shown that Cliff’s view of the importance of a story-based approach is accurate:

“One objection to using Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is the misconception that a story structure is not appropriate for informational presentations.  The thought that people don’t need to be engaged or motivated when faced with new information is based on the mythology described in Chapter 3 that assumes that you can pour facts into the passive minds of your audience and the will automatically ‘get it’.  The research reality is that people need to actively engage new information, so offering them tools and techniques to do so will help them learn better.  Why pass up the opportunity to engage your audience, when doing so can increase focus, and involvement?” Cliff Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points, Page 98.

Quite simply, Beyond Bullet Points means that your sales presentations are going to be powerful, engaging and hence more productive.  Not only are they going to win you more business, you are going to revolutionise your use of PowerPoint as a tool to influence, inspire and motivate people. That has to be a good thing.

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Just a quick word on Twitter and social networking in general. I’ll definitely be talking more about how you can use these resources to define your personal brand (another subject that we will be looking into very soon), raise your profile and win more clients, but for now take a look at this excellent article from the Community Marketing Blog.

Although you may want to reconsider, as apparently “over-heavy Twitter use will make you cold, cynical and facile – ultimately leaving you heartless and dead inside.”

Also, you (morally bereft!) productive sellers with aspirations of Boardroom greatness, may be interested in this funky little tool, which keeps you up-to-date with the Tweets of top business executives.

Finally for this week, with all the doom and gloom around the recession, it’s a great time to return to productivity basics and think about what positive Psychology can do for your business. (Does productivity drive positivity or is it the other way around?!)

Next week we’ll be looking more at the science of presentations and how you can use it to win more business.  In the meantime here’s a completely unrelated snippet about poo as a weapon that made me laugh.

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What can we in sales learn from a junior Senator who has all but talked his way into the most powerful job in the world?

In her excellent article ‘The new Cicero’, published in the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins expounds the classical origins of Obama’s power.

Wait, wait, wait I hear you shout (that’s Anaphora by the way!) I don’t care about the Greeks and the Romans, I just want to sell!

Steady there Brutus; down Gladius for a moment and let’s see what’s in it for us productive sellers.

We are all about inspiring, right? And not just in managing our team, or dealing with colleagues; we inspire customers to buy our solutions.  Sure, we engage with the prospect in  a lot of ways, probing, uncovering pains and developing relationships, but at some point we have to present our product or service to the prospect’s decision-making unit:  this may be a low-key affair, or it may be a full on, stand-up presentation with PowerPoint and a projector.

This is where our sales rhetoric comes into play.  It’s not something we think about, not really.  We may have been on presentation skills’ courses and learned about body language and not reading from our slides, but very few of us have bothered to look into the true art of rhetoric.

Here are a few classical pointers to get you started:

1. Know your prospect organisation: its structure, its objectives, its pains and what it requires from your solution.  As Charlotte reminds us “In his book ‘On The Orator’, [Cicero] argues that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the highest state of knowledge – “otherwise what he says is just an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage”.”

• Does someone else in your organisation have experience of your prospect’s sector? Leverage their knowledge.  Test your presentation on them.  You might even want to take them to the presentation with you.

2. Know your solution: An extension of point 1. It sounds obvious, but I have encountered so many (unproductive) sellers who have a poor knowledge of their product and/or sector.

• If you can’t talk around the subject take someone with you who can: an engineer, a consultant, anyone professional in outlook and appearance, who can lend the weight of knowledge to your assault.

3. Remember, prospects are human too and humans have emotions. Aristotle taught us how to appeal to the prospect using pathos, logos and ethos.  What this means for you, the productive seller, is that you need to:

demonstrate to the prospect that both you and your company are qualified to speak on the subject (Ethos) (see points 1 and 2).

call upon the prospect’s pains, which you should have uncovered earlier in the sales cycle, to tap into their emotional responses and then link to this emotional response to the value of your solution (Pathos).  If you struggle to find pains, check out a leading sales methodology like Keith Eades excellent The New Solution Selling.

have a strong Return on Investment case ready for your solution, supported by substantive facts and figures, all of which are to hand during your presentation. This switch to logic (Logos) serves the double function of both adding to your credibility as a speaker and underpinning your emotional argument with substance.

4. Add power to your openings and endings with Tricolons.  Caesar did it with “Veni, vidi, vici.” (I came, I saw, I conquered); Obama with “I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”

5. Add even more power to openings and endings with Anaphora and Epiphora.  This is the use of repetition at the start (Anaphora) or end (Epiphora) of a sentence in order to empahise a point.  In the video (above) you can see a famous Obama example.

e.g. “When they heard what we were planning, they said the market wasn’t ready, they said the technology wasn’t stable, they said we were crazy.  They were wrong.  Ladies and gentlemen…”

6. Use Praeteritio, “mentioning by not mentioning” when you have to refer to a negative.  Obama does it with: “Tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the heights of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy…” He distances himself from imperialist sentiments while making the audience feel empowered by the very thing he is claiming to reject!

• e.g. I think what is important is not to focus on the difficulties that your existing system is causing, or the cost to date, but rather the short term financial and business gains that we can work together to achieve through…” (that’s a Tricolon too!).

This is just a short introduction to what is a complex, ancient and very powerful subject that definitely has relevance for productive sales.  But like anything, if you take the time to learn about it and assimilate it into your style, you and your selling will only be richer and more productive for it.

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I am going to assume that you are in, or moving into sales and that, like all salespeople you want to have as much success as possible with the least amount of stress.

It doesn’t matter how you measure that success; whether you want a seat on the board, or you just want to be rich. What matters is how you lift yourself above the next salesperson, in terms of that success, without losing all your hair (assuming you still have some!).

How to do this – simple – control the things you can and develop a strong mindset and great systems to trap, track and manage the things you can’t, leaving your sales day clutter free. You will have more time to focus on new opportunities and your existing customers will applaud your service for its efficiency and attention to detail.

Who am I, you may be asking yourself. Well, I was a salesperson who found himself in the position of consultant, advising technology companies on taking products to market, combined with undertaking sales directorships in other businesses.

This left me with a huge number of conflicting responsibilities. I had to come up with a way, not just to survive, but to thrive, and quickly! One of my great strengths has always been quickly digesting the complex and distilling it down to a simple set of actions. It was time to focus the approach that I sell to companies, to my own life and work.

This blog is about what I did (how it has been and is developing) in order to achieve a Zen state of productivity that is focussed on allowing me to drive my sales and my business interests forwards and delight my customers. More importantly, it is about how you can achieve this state, without compromising on the service of existing customers, your other business commitments and, importantly, your personal life.

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