How do you increase business profits? Answer the following questions carefully, and you’ll have a good start.
1. Can you increase the average sale? A restaurant with 25% profit margins might make 50% on additional sales to existing customers (less labor to bag one large order than two smaller ones). Asking “What would you like to drink with that?” works, and it’s just a start.
2. What’s the least expensive way to get a customer? Before you spend another thousand dollars advertising to get new customers, could you get as much business by spending a few hours contacting previous or existing customers?
3. What low risk ideas can you try? I once sent a letter to several visiting basketball teams, inviting them to visit our restaurant, and giving the coach a free meal as an incentive. The cost? Two dollars. The pay off was two busloads of customers. At that rate, you could increase your business profits even if nine out of ten ideas fail.
4. Have you tested prices? I knew a store that sold a product for a $1.05, that cost them $1.00. At a price of $1.20, it is doubtful that they’d lose half their sales, but if they did, they’d still make twice the profit. Some things even sell better at a higher price. Test.
5. Can you measure your advertising results? How do you know that you’re not spending more for a customer than they’re worth? Coupons, customer surveys and other methods of measurement are a must.
6. How do you know your customers are satisfied? The worst restaurant meal we ever ate went down without a comment, but we never returned to that restaurant. Maybe the owner should be talking to the customers.
7. Can you enhance the percieved value of your product? Years ago, I sold walking sticks for $10 at flea markets, and $20 at craft shows. Sometimes location alone can enhance the percieved value of a product. What else can you do?
8. What are similar businesses doing? See what your successful competitors are doing. Can you do the same?
9. What other products can you sell? There’s a reason stores have candy and magazines near the checkout. Extra sales are a great way to increase business profits.
10. Can you use your customers as salesmen? Word of mouth is a start, but what other ways can you get your customers to bring their friends to you?
These were culled from a longer list. I call it “stolen business ideas,” because I can’t credit the original authors. I took them where I found them over the years, with grattitude, but without notes.
About The Author
Steve Gillman has been studying every aspect of money for thirty years. You can find more interesting and useful information on his website; http://www.EverythingAboutMoney.info.
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It doesn’t matter if you are in an auto sales training, TV and radio sales, estate sales or time share sales in my conversations with sales management over the years, I’ve found that top producers all have one thing in common: they’ve taken the time to sit down and create goals for themselves and committed to sales training.
Even if during the sales seminar they were skeptical when they started the process of goal setting and planning, every one of them has become a true believer.
What Is A True Believer?
A “True Believer” isn’t someone who just works sales leads. They are someone who has been amazed by the incredible power of goal setting and the power of their own mind to be sold on the sales job. Every one of them has accomplished far more than they ever believed possible even if they are in mobile home sales or business sales they are the ones that move up to the top.
It didn’t stop with sales goals or material successes. This belief runs deep in all areas of their life. They’re convinced of the power of the mind and want share that with the world. They just seem to live in a world that favors them. There life has become an extension of their sales attitude.
Are You Happy With Your Current Training?
I defined happiness in training as, The progressive assimilation of worth while skills that will help me to reach my professional goals. As a sales trainer, I have been working progressively, step-by-step toward making permanent lasting impact on every sales professionals life.
This purpose alone can generate a continuous feeling of success and achievement within me, but if it doesn’t translate in your personal sales training it is all for not. The sales game has always been the more people you sell, the more successful you will be. As a sales professional, you have more control of this than almost every other profession. Geoff Thomas a sales associate is found of telling his sales staff, “Your raise is effective just as soon as you are.”
I know you can create an environment of happiness for your customer through fabricated rapport skills but a genuine joy for sales will close more deals than you can imagine. Without your skills of salesmanship, there would be nothing for company to do. When you walk out of the office in the evening, it is natural for you to feel like a winner. This goal is well entrenched in the sales experts I know. It also gives you the psychological momentum to overcome obstacles and plough through adversity as you reach your sales goals and assist others.
Sales training more than anything else should have you recharged as you go back out into the world. If the sales seminar doesn’t motivate you to work every sales lead more efficiently than why bother.
Does Your Training Connect With Your Values?
Every great trainer has a personal strategic planning process. It usually begins when you determine what you believe in and what you stand for - your values. If your values and the trainers match this is the glue that holds the core concepts of the sales training in place. These values shape our personality and our character as a sales professional.
Your virtues and qualities are the sum total of all your thoughts, actions and beliefs since the moment you were born. Your values, virtues and inner beliefs are the axle around which the wheel of your life turns. All sales improvement begin when you clarify your true values and commit yourself to live consistently with them. It’s been said, “You must stand for something, or you will fall for anything!” Great sales trainers know the value of the sales process and believe every prospect they meet can find value in their product or services.
When Attending A Training How Specific Should Your Goals Be?
To achieve success in training you will find trainees are successful because they’re very clear and committed to their values and specific outcomes from the training. Unsuccessful trainees are fuzzy or unsure they perhaps were forced to the training without a buy in from the sales manager.
When a training is a complete failure, you’ll find that the trainer didn’t clearly outline the real values of the training at all. These trainers stand for nothing and hope their audiences fall for everything.
While training the sales staff at Positive Changes, our sales staff had access to a wealth of resources designed to help them succeed in their goals. For instance, use the Sales Mastery series to stimulate your other-than-conscious and keep you on track with specific, clear and organized sales goals. They trained each franchise location to set goals for the day, week and the month. Using these mind trips within themselves helped them to enroll others into its use.
Copyright 2005 Patrick K. Porter, Ph.D. never happy without trying to make sales training more enjoyable through out the world for sales organizations everywhere. Visit http://www.patrickkporter.com to see the latest in sales persuasion training available.
Attn Ezine editors / site owners. Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your website as long as you leave the links in place, do not modify the content and include our resource box as listed above.
I would like you to begin thinking of mailboxes in a new way.
Contrary to popular belief - it isn’t a symbol of an inept postal service. In fact- it is one of the Best ways to communicate with your customers. And I am not talking about sales flyers either!
Are You Saying Thank-You To Your Customers?
Here is one of the shocking basics of selling.
If you don’t THANK YOUR CUSTOMERS for choosing you - you are average - perhaps even less than average.
I want you to consider the thousands of dollars you have spent in the last month. Mortgages, car payments, groceries, advertising, marketing - and yet - I would bet a Diva Dollar that very few - IF ANY - thank you cards have hit your mailbox.
Saying Thank-You Is Being Respectful
Remember - your customers have options. They could have chosen someone else. They could have waited and done nothing at all. Instead - they chose you.
So what have you done to thank them?
Here is a Diva Rule - E-mails Don’t Count!
Why? Simply - they are boring. And if you look in the Sales Diva Dictionary under the word BORING, you will find this phrase: Losing Money.
I Lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve Getting Fun-Mail - Don’t You?
I don’t know about you - but I will open a personal card with handwriting much faster than I would open a bill. Your customers feel the same way!
Five Sales Diva Rules of Saying Thanks:
1. Show attention to detail. Send a personal thank you note in the mail within 7 days of receiving business from a customer.
2. Don’t send a cheesy corporate card. Instead - find something that represents your customer!
3. Handwriting Rules. If you slap a cursory “Thanks for your business” and signature - you are wasting a stamp. Write a short note directly to the person as well.
4. Don’t Pre-Write The Card. As tempting as it may be to pre-write cards - don’t do it. It will come across as vague and “canned”.
5. Thank ANYONE that helps you. If someone gives you a lead, a phone number, some Free Advice - anything that makes your life a little easier - pop a card into the mail saying Thank You!
Don’t let another week go by without thanking your customers as well as the many people that help you. We all remember those who are appreciative of our business and help - and we quickly
forget those who don’t. Where do you want to be?
copyright 2005
Sales Diva, Kim Duke of The Sales Divas helps women biz owners and entrepreneurs attract amazing clients and customers, effortlessly! To learn more about increasing YOUR sales - and
to read her FREE how-to-articles, visit her website http://www.salesdivas.com
Do you know that some of the greatest salesmen do it on the phone?
Yet, I keep hearing how cold calling is a nightmare, how they hate it, and how even some sales gurus say “cold calling is dead.” Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard from my own sales trainees, at least in the beginning:
1) RejectionAll I got was No’s and the phone slammed in my ear.
2) All I got was voice mail jail and no one ever returns my calls.
And there are others, but most come back to the same thing: the obstacle you are facing isn’t out there in the cold cruel world. It resides right between your own two ears. Your own beliefs are the obstacle. It isn’t anywhere else.
For this article we’re going to deal with the “all” syndrome and rejection.
A client and I once developed a cold calling campaign plan. He was to make 200 cold calls in the next week. We developed the general idea of what he was going to say, who he was going to call, and how he was going to say it. Then we practiced it until he sounded natural.
When we got together the following week, I asked, So, how’d it go?
“Horrible, all I got was phones slammed in my ear, P.O.’d people and No’s galore. It just didn’t work at all.”
How many calls did you make?
“30, and after all those No’s, I gave up.”
How many appointments did you get?”
“Only one.”
So, what was your success ratio? How many appointments for how many calls?
“Let’s see, I think that is….1 in 30, or 3%.”
And what was our original estimate. Wasn’t it 1 in 25? So, how can you say that it was a failure? You weren’t far off.
“…….but….but…all of those No’s, 29 out of 30. That was mostly failure!”
Let’s see, at 1-2 minutes per call for No’s, and maybe 5+ for the yes, how many minutes did you spend to get just one appointment? Isn’t that around 60 minutes to get an appointment? Not bad if you ask me. What would have happened if you had made all 200 calls?
“Maybe 6-7 appointments….Wait a minute, didn’t we target 8 appointments for the 200 calls?!?!”
How many calls were necessary to achieve your goal of 8 appointments a week? (This is probably THE MOST important question since it tells you clearly what you have to do to get the needed RESULTS).
Another thing would have happened if he had made the 200 calls: He’d have gotten better and better, gotten over his fear, and probably would have seen his call success improving toward the 1 in 25 calls, or even better.
I tell most of my clients that they need to make about 500 calls to get good at it. The trouble is that most never reach 500 calls, or if you do it takes them 2 years to do it, and by that time either the boss has eliminated you, or if you are a business owner your overhead costs have eliminated you.
It all started with the “all” syndrome. In other words our belief that
ALL we got was no’s,
ALL we got were Voice Mails, and that NO ONE ever returned a call.
It’s the glass half full or half empty issue. That is a belief that in this case isn’t valid.
Use the Plan - Do - Improve/Optimize scenario.
Plan what you are going to do,
Do it (make sure to measure the results so you know what works and what doesn’t), make changes (new plans), and
Go back through that loop over and over.
Let’s apply that to the scenario above.
Develop what you are going to say, how you are going to say it and to who. Find the reasons why someone would even want to talk to you and develop it.
Measure your success, measure how many successes you had out of how many calls. In most cases, it really isn’t as bad as everyone makes out.
Now that you have the key measurementsfix them. That means, change what you say, how you say it, or who you say it to, and watch the numbers. Do they go up, or down? Capture what works, and learn from what doesn’t. You’ll see those numbers constantly moving up.
Learn the best way from the experts…get every book you can, go to training classes, hire a sales coach.
You are always in control. Don’t be at the mercy of anything, someone else, the environment, the market place.
Sales Results — not just Training
Typical results
Leads — up 5-10 times Sales closes — up 4-5 times
Alan Boyer, The Leader’s Perspective, LLC
Reach Further Than You EVER Thought Possible…FASTER
http://www.leaders-perspective.com
Is formal and informal training important? After all we can all learn from other employees or from outside consultants we bring in can’t we?
Well, in my previous life as a consultant IT project director I
noticed people would often be too busy doing their own job to learn the skills of an outside consultant too.
That’s despite massive efforts made to train people.
But unless skills are used regularly after training they fade
away.
Learning from others in your own organisation can also be
fraught.
Learning by “sitting next to Nellie” as it’s known can work. But it means that any weak custom and practise procedures are copied.
These weak procedures may actually be the direct opposite
of the company strategy.
Also if you’re learning from someone because they’re just about
to leave the company, for whatever reason.
You don’t get their total focus on teaching you their job.
So ways of doing things can become less and less effective as
time goes on.
That means that service to your customers becomes worse. Simply because the people serving them don’t know the best way of working.
Research shows that over 60% of customers leave a business
because of poor, ineffective or indifferent service.
Let’s look at the story of two woodcutters
Once there were twin brothers. They were tall, strapping lads who had both become lumberjacks at the same time. One year they took part in a logging competition together. Each was strong and beat everyone they came up against. Until they reached the final where they met each other.
They seemed evenly matched. The crowd looked and urged them on as they both started cutting timber at a strong rate of knots. After an hour one of the brothers stopped for a few minutes. Let’s call him the “idle chopper”. He soon resumed work but every hour he kept stopping.
Eventually the competition finished and it was immediately
obvious that the idle chopper had cut down significantly more
wood than his brother.
His brother shook his hand to congratulate him and asked, “how on earth did you cut twice as much wood as me despite stopping so frequently?”
The idle chopper smiled and said “I wasn’t really resting I was
sharpening my axe so my cuts went deeper faster than yours with
your blunt axe.”
The “idle chopper” was really the “smart chopper” because he’d
taken to heart what President Abraham Lincoln had said.
Abraham Lincoln said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
People can look at training as a complete waste of a company’s
time. Because it’s preventing their staff from getting the job
done.
But look at the woodcutters the one who kept stopping to sharpen
his axe won.
The same is true of any company that gives their staff training.
It may stop the busy, busy time for a short while but it means
that staff become more productive and therefore achieve more.
Getting yourself and your staff trained is essential if you want
to continue to grow and develop.
If you don’t you’ll be like 90% of businesses over a 10 year time frame and be out of business.
It’s really that stark a choice.
There are a number of effective training strategies that I would
recommend you to use.
Two of the most powerful are as follows:
a) A Weekly Company Workshop
b) Formal Courses - with a twist
Let me explain exactly how they work so that you can go and apply them in your business immediately.
Weekly Company Workshop
1) Set-up an hour per week where all employees gather together.
The first workshop is the Set-up and Introduction Workshop.
2) In this workshop you all brainstorm the issues and problems
that you and your customers have with the company.
Someone is designated to takes action notes. That is notes that
simply list the actions to be taken with the person responsible
and the date to be completed (always before the next meeting).
3) You then prioritise and agree the issues amongst everyone
there.
Hint: Give particular weight to customer issues as they are quite likely to resolve one or more internal issues too.
4) Provide a full list of prioritised issues to all attendees.
The attendees should be everyone who works for the company,
unless they’re sick.
The Second and subsequent workshops are Issue Eaters
5) Take the first issue from the list that was issued the day of
the last meeting - it’s that important.
6) Brainstorm possible solutions to the issue.
For example the customers are returning a product to you in large numbers but you can’t see why. The issue is “You don’t know why the product is being returned”.
Several possible solutions occur:
a) Ring customers and ask them why they’re returning them. Also
ring customer’s who’ve kept them and ask them why too.
b) Send every customer a questionnaire asking several questions,
including one on returns and also specifically for the product in question.
c) Ask the sales force to go and see each customer and ask for
their most honest feedback.
d) The managing director to ring the companies concerned to see
what the problem is.
Collate the answers and provide the information and analysis to
the group the following week.
7) If the solution calls for a better procedure or company
process to be implemented designate someone to write it and for
it to be issued before the next meeting for review and agreement.
Only address one issue per session - even if you finish it in
10 minutes. But you must focus completely on that issue.
9) Review the solution and check that it is working. Then sign it off and add to the list of completed issues.
Guess what you’re building with the documentation?
It’s a company handbook that allows new staff to get up to speed on how your company has got to where it is now and what the current procedures and processes are.
Not just that. It means that at a stroke you’ve pooled the
brainpower of your staff to produce new and better ways of
working that help customers and your staff.
You tell me. Do you think your customers are going to become even happier with an organisation that addresses and resolves issues?
Now you may be thinking I’m only a one person or two person
company?
This method applies equally well to you too.
The great thing about it is that as long as you document you’ll
have processes in place when you get more staff.
Formal Courses - with a twist
1) Have a formal training strategy for each person. It doesn’t
matter whether you’re a one person or 3,000 person company. You
need a strategy because otherwise you’ll get asked for training
that doesn’t fit with your company goals.
2) Plan what courses staff (and you) should attend during the
year.
3) Attend the course - there should be no excuse for non-
attendance.
4) Now here’s the twist before your staff go on the course tell
them that you’re going to ask them to do a short presentation on
the course at the next weekly meeting to all the staff. The
presentation is a short summary of the course content, and the 6
to 10 things that the person has learnt and will apply in their
job. Followed by 10 minutes of questions.
The reasons for this are:
a) Others benefit from hearing what the course was all about
b) The attendee will pay much more attention to the course and
learn more from it
c) You’re training staff to feel comfortable giving presentations in a relaxed environment.
d) Other staff may learn things they can apply in their job.
5) Make sure that they do the presentation. If not you get none
of the benefits outlined previously. Make sure everyone does the
presentation, even someone who is quaking in dread. Help them get over it by letting them stay seated, or just present over 2-3 weeks. But make sure they do present - it must be a condition of attendance.
6) Been on a course yourself? Right. You do the same as your
staff. They’re learning about what you do.
Finally and most importantly there is a set of Golden Training
Rules I always use which is
a) Training must be applied when you return from the course
b) You and your staff must support attempts to use the training.
It may not work very well initially as people start to apply it.
c) Re-train at intervals because skills can only be improved by
repetition. Look at karate, golf, football and other sports you
have to keep practising to get better. It’s the same with work
training.
For example people learn everything on a time management course
but maybe only apply 10% of what they learnt and forget the rest.
When they go again they learn pretty much the same thing but then apply another 10% of what they learn and forget the rest.
So over time they apply more and more of what they’re taught
until eventually they’re using all the time management techniques and are experts. Get them to teach new staff!
d) Once you’ve got trained up experts use them to train your own
staff.
Does training staff stop the company making money? Ultimately the answer is it makes you even more money than you did before they were trained.
Remember the two axmen?
You want to be the smarter chopper.
Jim Symcox, also known as the Marketing Magician has worked as a consultant since the mid 1980’s.
He is a marketing coach, copywriter and the author of “How to Leap Ahead Of Your Competitors”.
He lives in Manchester, United Kingdom with his wife and 4 children. He is also a member of the University Gilbert & Sullivan society and enjoys singing in a show each year.
For a free chapter from “How To Leap Ahead Of Your Competitors email him at web@acornservice.com with “ezinearticles” in the subject line.
