Jumpstart Your Business

In response to my post A Different Look At Selling, Alan Zell sent me an article of his from which I excerpted the following gem:

Sales people spend someone else’s time, space, effort, and/or money and how well they do this determines their relationship with that person - the customer. They are in business to ensure that the customers’ time, effort, and/or money is spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. Thus, selling is a partnership. If customers believe their partners are misspending their time, space, effort or money, they soon break off the partnership.

The seller should not consider him/herself as representing his/her firm, but rather as the customer’s liaison to the firm . . . the job therefore is to represent the customer by finding which of the firm’s services or products will fill the customer’s needs. It means that the first obligation of any business is to put the most proficient person or people in front of customers. To do less is being penny wise and pound foolish.

Salespeople should be taught several basic questions to ask of themselves:

• Who has a need for what I am selling?
• Does it help solve customers’ problem(s)?
• How will it help them be better?
• Am I the right person and am I using the right method(s) to make my presentations?
• Does my offering solve my/our problems rather than the customer™s problem(s)?
• By solving my customers™ problem(s) will I be solving mine or will solving my problem(s) also solve my customers™?It can be summed up in a formula for successful selling:.c y C a / cya = ?

  This is a division problem with a solution = C ¦ Customer

  In words it says if you always cover your customer™__s then for sure you always cover your __s

If you are interested in the entire article please send us an email at ynot@ychange.com

First level selling, or getting the customer to buy your product, used to be the process of showing the customer the features and benefits of your product or service and then asking the customer to buy. There were many techniques developed to handle the customer’s objections and the process was termed closing the sale and it typically left the customer feeling used, bruised and abused.

Second level selling, or getting the customer to buy your solution to his/her problem, which we currently practice is a process where we focus on the customer’s need/pain and show how our product or service would satisfy the need or alleviate the pain. This is more to the benefit of the customer but still does not solve the one very troubling problem that always remains for the customer - how to prove to him/herself or to others that the investment that was just made was a worthwhile one.

This brings us to third level selling, or teaching the customer how to sell. A colleague of mine Alan Zell, defines selling as a four step process: that involves Buying, Marketing, Presenting and Selling. In order to get the customer to buy we actually need to show the customer how to sell him/herself or others that the investment that was just made during the buying process was a sound one.

Here is a test I give to my clients so that they can get a feel for whether they are fully prepared to go into business for themselves.  The scoring is as follows:

• “Strongly agree or all of the time” answer score 5.
• “Agree or most of the time” answer score 4
• “Can’t decide or sometimes” score 3
• “Disagree or almost never” answer score 2
• “Strongly disagree or never” answer score 1

Here are the Questions:

1. Are you a self starter?
2. Do you like being your own boss?
3. Do you care about making money?
4. Are you willing to work 60 to 80 hour weeks?
5. Are you a good leader?
6. Do you recognize good ideas and move on them quickly?
7. Do you have confidence in yourself?
8. Is a good standard of living important to you?
9. Do you deal well with change?
10. Are you well organized?
11. Do you like to plan?
12. Do you make decisions quickly and then carry them out?
13. Do you have a lot of will power?
14. Do you like competing?
15. Do you have experience in the area you’re going into?
16. Do you stay current with your marketplace?
17. Do you like setting goals?
18. Is taking the first step easy for you?
19. Do you like to surround yourself with good people?
20. Are you flexible?

Score each question and then tally the score.  If your score is higher than 85 you’re should be a strong performer.  70 - 85 says your chances of success are pretty good, all things being equal.  Less than 50% and you should spend time doing some personal development.

Nevertheless, there is also the “luck” and “being in the right place at the right time” factor.  And therefore a lower score is not a definite indicator of failure just as a high score is not a definite indicator of success.

Let’s imagine that one of the following happens:

• One of your workers looses it and shoots the place up.
• There is a serious fire in your restaurant kitchen.
• Your partner is seriously injured in a motor accident.

And the press comes snooping with questions that are relevant…. Have you made plans to handle the crisis?  Will the receptionist/host/hostess tell the same story as the person in the office or the person on the loading dock.

Is there an official or designated spokesperson for the company in times of crisis?  Are you prepared to present a unified voice and a single face to the public and not appear to be completely out of control even if you really are?

Put together a plan of attack and update it often.  Don’t get caught unprepared.

As business people, we need to understand our customers wants and needs.  Wants and needs are driven by the “value box” we live in which ultimately drives the way we think.   We’ve always been told that the prerequisite to being effective is being able to ‘think ouside the box’.  This may makes us effective thinkers. 

To be truly effective, we need to be effective doers and that means we need to understand what the other person wants.  This means learning to think as they do or learning to think inside their box. 

So…Thinking outside the box is not enough.  Remember, if you think the way you’ve always thought, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

 

Remember that you’re in business to provide your customers with a product or service that they’ll acquire based on it’s ability to satisfy a need or want they currently have.  The emphasis here is on customer not product/service or your business. 

Everything you do should be geared toward your prospective customers:

• Your web site should be geared towards the prospective visitors and their needs not what you want it to look and feel like.
• Your e-mails should relate to the needs of the people you are targeting not what you want to say about your product or business.
• Your letters and flyers should follow the same principles like your email

Customers are always tuned to their favorite Radio Station WIIFM “What’s In It For Me” and the theme song of your radio program should always be “You,You,You.”

Is the Pope Catholic?

When more than 50% of us are doing something, it is safe to say it is a part of our daily lives, our society and our culture, and like the light bulb and the telephone, it is not going to go away.  Yes I’m referring to the Internet and to the more than 73% of the population that is connected to it these days.

So what?  Well, 67% of those on line have used the Internet to buy something and 6% of us are using it daily to make purchases.  This is a trend which is building and if you can’t recognize this you are basically asleep at the wheel.

So yes we do need a web site and here are some basic rules of the internet highway:

• Your web site represents your business and is just as important as your store front so make sure it is well built and looks professional. 
• It is a location until you make it a destination.  It is just like a billboard in the dark along a busy highway and you have to turn the spotlight on it or only you know it’s there.
• You need to market your clicks and  mortar storefront using the same marketing strategies as you do for your bricks and mortar storefront.

A good web site combine with other new media like e-mail, blogs, RSS feeds, electronic kiosks and podcasting can be a very effective strategy today.

Give us your opinions…….

Let’s forget for a moment the emotional reasons you’ve had for who knows how long about going into business for yourself:

• Not wanting the 9-5 routine anymore and having more time to spend with the family
• Not wanting a boss anymore and being able to make your own decisions
• Wanting to make ‘beaucoup bucks’

Let’s ignore the reality that you’ll most likely work 16 hour days, end up doing what your customers want and won’t make any money for at least 18 months.  So we’ll give you all of the above.  You still  have to answer yes to four basic questions.

1. Have you identified a product or service that you will sell?
2. Are there people who will buy it and do you know how to go after them?
3. Do you know how to run the business day-to-day and how to manage the financial bits and pieces?
4. Do you have the money to start it up and keep it running until it starts to fund itself?

Whether or not you answer yes to any or all of the above, you still need a business plan to prove to yourself that you clearly understand what you are about to do.  Read  ‘elements of a business plan’ at: http://www.ychange.com/small-business-consulting-articles.html.

What else do you think the entrepreneur should pay attention to?

As businesses grow, more people are in contact with the same customer and as time progresses, bits and pieces of customer data starts to reside in different parts of the organization.  It becomes increasingly difficult to obtain a unified version of the true customer picture and different people relate to the same customer in different ways, trying to relieve different customer pain points based on their version of the customer truth.

There has to be one version of the customer truth that everyone can relate to otherwise we end up with a dissatisfied customer.   So, integrating customer data into one place is a necessity regardless of the size of our business.