The Salesby5 Blog

Considering the economy and the difficult job market, it’s an especially important time for new graduates to be well prepared for success, especially online. The wonderful part about this time in history is how connected and accessible recruiters, executives and decision makers are online. This means easier access for the folks that are leveraging the free tools available to them. Let’s review some of the tools and tactics I suggest for accelerated success.

1. Have a High Speed Summary on Your Resume

If you haven’t heard already, people are busy. No one has time to review your twelve page resume and nobody cares about all your extracurricular activities, at least not on your resume. Your resume is merely to get your foot in the door. To do this, I suggest you do things a bit differently. I tell job hunters to include a high speed summary at the top of their resume (under their contact information), instead of an objective. A high speed summary includes 3 or 4 bullet points of what makes you awesome and sets you apart. Make it as powerful as you can, showing leadership, dedication, intelligence or whatever special qualities you are able to bring to life. If you’d like to pick up my favorite free template, head over to lifeclever.com and download it.

2. Clean Up Your Social Networks

One would hope that you would never show up to a job interview with a beer in hand – save that for when you’re golfing with the CEO after you’ve been hired. Similarly, you should review all your social networks, online photo galleries, blogs and other websites for less than flattering photos. Promptly remove them as any person who is hiring can likely find them as well with a quick search on Google, Facebook, MySpace and the assortment of other nooks and crannies online. Instead, why not make your sites a place to help sell yourself with pictures of you doing great things with and for others. Make these sites sales tools that work for you by telling the real story of you, instead of working against you. Test this by having your friends search for you and see if they can pull up anything questionable about you.

3. Register on Linkedin

Sure, you’ve been on MySpace and Facebook for some time now. It’s time for you to also register on Linkedin. Never heard of it? No problem. Head over to Linkedin.com to get started. Complete as much information as you can that is pertinent. Just like a resume, have someone proofread what you’ve written for accuracy and grammatical errors. Use a headshot of yourself (not bonging a beer). While you’re at it, why not make all your headshots, avatars, and gravatars match across your websites. Yes, it takes time but you develop a consistent personal brand. Also, remember to create the personalized URL, it’s a breeze and free.

4. Join Twitter

Have you heard of Twitter on tv? If you don’t know what it is, hop over to Common Craft and learn about it. While you’re there, why not brush up on some other topics like Google Docs and RSS. Once you’re on, use Twitter to contribute to the conversation in a positive fashion. Provide great links to things you’re passionate about. Help others who are struggling by encouraging and coaching. People are grateful and others notice. You’ll see that Twitter is chock full of decision makers and you can speak to them – directly! Here’s a hint, if it’s available, use your real name or a shortened version of it as your user name. Once you’ve chosen this, do your best to use it across all your networks. Come find me, I’ll follow you back.

5. Set Up Your Google Profile

Remember the resume that you’ve been working on and the Linkedin profile that you sweat over? Why not pull all that information over to your Google Profile. No Google Profile? No Problem. Get one now. Be sure to link to your other pages and networks. Have a look at mine, if you want an example. You can also do this with PeoplePond for additional hits on Google.

6. Get Involved In Your Community

Your parents and friends have already told you, but getting involved in your community is a great way to get connected. Getting involved can mean applying your abilities for non-profit at a place of worship, participating in one of the many “camps” or even attending a tweetup. There are amazing people all over, be sure you get outside of your usual group of people you’re comfortable around and meet some new ones. You never know when that next person will be your next mentor, boss or business partner.

If you’ve applied these six steps, you will soon have a number of new friends, contacts and abilities. You’ll be amazed as to how easily “searchable” you become online as well as how well you can leverage the internet to make you look as good as you are. If you have additional suggestions, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

As seen on MySA

Most companies and experts look at the relationship businesses have with their customers in three steps with seven stages. The three steps and seven stages are:

Pre-Purchase
1. Awareness
2. Knowledge
3. Consideration

Purchase
4. Selection or trial

Post-Purchase
5. Satisfaction
6. Loyalty
7. Advocacy

Too bad so many companies take this approach because it has a fundamental flaw. What’s wrong with it? Advocacy should be in the pre-purchase step. Most companies think that only buyers can be advocates, but the fact is that some of your best advocates may not have made a purchase yet – and maybe they never will.

Smart marketers focus on building advocacy during the pre-purchase step for three reasons:
1. To potentially turn non-buyers into advocates.
2. To lead more buyers into becoming advocates.
3. To use the advocacy elements to influence the consideration stage and improve the purchase potential.

To focus on creating advocates in the pre-purchase stages, consider the following:

1. Teach your team that some non-buyers actually create a lot more revenue than the average customer spends. As a matter of fact, some studies have shown that in some businesses the highest spending customers are not the most effective advocates. This is why we like to teach employees to never label a customer as “just a looker.”

2. Make it a company goal to deliver an amazing and delightful experience to every single customer. I love the retailer who told me that her goal is to have every customer who leaves her store feels better than when they came in.

How the experience is delivered varies from business to business (or organization) but what doesn’t vary is that retailers who deliver a superior experience have identified the steps to delivering the experience. It’s usually a combination of activities including a warm welcome, a drink or some other gesture, and may include a surprise that delights the customer. The easiest way to get customers to advocate your business is to give them something to tell others about. People are going to talk so give them the something to talk about! What happens that your customer will most likely tell a friend or family member about?

3. Capture contact information for all visitors. Businesses or organizations who only capture the contact information at the point of sale are losing revenue opportunities and potential advocacy by non-buyers. Give the customer a reason to give you the contact information in the pre-purchase phase and you’ll increase the number of post-purchase people.

A special thank you to our new friend Doug Fleener for allowing to share this info. http://www.dynamicexperiencesgroup.com

Photo by ajstarks

Research indicates customers’ first instinct reactions to new products or new ideas are not totally predictive of final behavior.  I conducted a research study asking customers how likely they were to purchase various new products in the next 6 months.  I then followed up to see if what they said they would do, was what they did. The results were surprising — of the 809 times customers said they would absolutely, definitely WOULD NOT PURCHASE, about 20% or one in five actually did make a purchase. Of the 246 who said they absolutely, positively, definitely WOULD PURCHASE, less than half the time or only 45% of the time did they actually buy. The bottom line — just because a customer says no – is no reason to give up trying to make the sale.  If a customer says yes, close the sale quickly.

- Doug Hall, Eureka! Ranch

I know of a particular instance where an insurance agent was working with a couple to sell them long term care insurance.  The couple later made a decision, got dressed up and came down to her office to tell her that they were not interested.  During that time, she was able to close the deal, even though their plan was to say no.  A few years later, both the husband and wife fell ill and were able to use the coverage.  The husband called the agent during his recovery and thanked her for selling them the insurance, even though they had planned to not purchase it.  It saved them tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, all because she sold through the “no.”  Do you have a success story where you kept selling, even after a customer said no?  Share with us in the comments.

Photo by Nan

This weekend I passed the billboard seen above. With a little research, I found out that Your Wife is Hot was the most popular among the respondents to the recent NEWS online survey on the effectiveness of billboard advertising.

I was pleasantly shocked; it made me look three times and I wanted to take a photo. That has only happened once before, when I encountered the worst billboard I had ever seen, and I only wanted to take a picture then so I could show people what not to do. At SalesBy5 we are not usually fans of billboards because most lack a call to action or the ability to track performance. However in this situation, with the South Texas heat already breaking 100 degrees a few days this year, their advertising was spot-on.

A few months ago we wrote about brand promise and brand experience, so I called Jon Wayne Heating & Air Conditioning yesterday to talk to them about writing this blog. After a few rings an automated phone system answered and promptly hung up on me. I called back, which I would not normally do, but I was in search of answers. This time their system worked, so I asked if there was anyone available I could talk to about their billboard. Unfortunately no one was available, and I was told to leave a voice mail. Persistent, I then asked if I could get the cell phone number of someone to talk to, and was once again told to leave a voice mail. Finally, I offered to leave my name and number and have the person call me back as soon as possible, but was once again told to leave a voice mail. Dejected, I ended up doing as I was told.

It is rare that we see good advertising, let alone great. We are exposed to so much clutter that letting something through our subconscious gate keeper is huge! I have mentioned this billboard to about 15 people now and also wrote about it on Twitter. As Seth Godin puts it; if something is remarkable, people will remark about it. I say people are going to talk, so give them something to talk about with your ads, pitches, and brand.

No one from Jon Wayne was heard from as of press time which is now 24 hours later!

Photo courtesy of Derrich.com

Today, many of you may have experienced either a delay in the use of your Google services including Google Reader, GMail and other Google services (Google claims that only 14% of users were affected).  In case you were wondering, Google is updating from an older standard of networking to the shiny, new IPv6 for a better and faster user experience.

Around noon today, Google sent out a tweet that they were aware of the issue, working on a fix and they would be releasing more information soon.  Then, at 2:15 PM CDT, they released a blog post, explaining the problem with 5th grade simplicity, apologizing for the downtime as well as including the reason for the downtime.  It’s great to see a company as large as Google recognizing that people rely upon them heavily and communicating in simple terms that everyone can understand.  How do you feel they did with their communications?

How do customers perceive your products, services and innovations?

5% ROI success rate: The Boston Consulting Group found that only 4.5% of innovations meet or beat targets for return on investment. This is an 86% decline, down from the 35% innovation success rate reported in 1985.

83% of brands are becoming commodities: A survey by Copernicus Marketing Consulting found that in 40 out of 48 categories consumers perceived brands as becoming more alike and, in only 3 categories (automobiles, liquor, and beer) was brand name considered more important than price.

The  key distinction between innovations that exceed ROI expectations and those that fail is dramatic difference.  Invest your resources in products or services which customers truly perceive an overt benefit in and provide them with a real reason to believe. Otherwise, you better fail fast and fail cheap!

Source Doug Hall

Our purpose at Salesby5 is to inspire others. We talk of inspiration often, as it has so much to do with sales. One of the stars on our team is Kya, who is our Brand Evangelist. She has radar that picks out “REAL.”

She has a unique strength to know if someone is sincere (real) or fake in seconds, where most are about 100 times slower. Why does this matter? She can pick off someone trying to get a date, sell copier toner or attempting to get in your wallet faster than my computer can get an Internet connection. Tomorrow’s success is today’s real. This is why we fire customers who are rude, lie or don’t pay when they say they will pay. This is why we do not take a customer or vendor who we do not feel has the REAL Win-Win attitude versus just WIN. We need to feel good about making them prosper or there are plenty of others.

A few thoughts on being real regarding sales:

If you have to remember your pitch: Fail
If you can’t remember the prospects problems and your opportunities: Fail
If you remember a client’s child’s name because you care: REAL!
If you remember they love Papouli’s Greek Grill’s Mediterranean Salad for lunch on Thursdays: REAL!

The point: Get real or get a new job. Today is about transparency and about being real. Fake billboards or sales pitches that leave me wondering don’t work anymore. Do you need some REAL in your life?

photo by Korrigan

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hearing Malcolm Gladwell speak for the first time. He told the story of a man named Vivek. Vivek was born and raised in Mumbai, but he was living in Silicon Valley with his family. His 12 year old daughter decided that she wanted to join a basketball team. Wanting to spend more time with his daughter, Vivek decided to be the basketball coach for his daughter’s team, though he didn’t know anything about the game. To learn more, he watched basketball on tv. What struck him as unusual was that the teams would score, then run to their side of the court, much unlike soccer, where the team scores then the opposite team has to work their way down the field. Having viewed this, he made two decisions: 1) he would never yell at the girls 2) he would teach the girls to play a full court press style of defense. For those of you (like me!) that don’t know about a full court press, it means that you play defense across the court, versus running back to your own side after scoring. To do so, he had the girls waving their arms frantically when the opposing team was throwing the ball back into play, in hopes of intercepting the ball. If that didn’t work, the girls were to surround the girl who caught the ball and wave their hands wildly to block. Fortunately, the strategy worked. The girls, with no basketball experience in their past and a coach who didn’t know the game, went to nationals the first year. The most interesting part was the reaction from the opposing teams coach. Initially, the coach would yell at his girls. Then, the anger would be directed towards the referee, who was clearly “blind” and “incompetent.” Finally, the aggravation became too much for the opposing team and the wrath was cast on Vivek and his girls. They were called cheats, would sometimes have a chair thrown onto the court and Vivek was even threatened by an opposing team’s coach.

Vivek and his girls basketball team is a brilliant example of focus and of rewriting the rules of the game. Vivek knew that his group of undersized, non-athletic 12 year old girls would not be the super star team of athletes, but likely the kids going to Cal Tech. Knowing this, he stayed away from the popular and glamorous portion of the game – offense – and maintained absolute dedication to the part he knew his girls could dominate – defense – on every play, in every game. Vivek rewrote the rules by not going toe-to-toe with the best and the brightest in the league; he created a separate path that was within the rules, but not necessarily the norm.

Consider this, in battles where underdog armies, those considered to be 1/10th the size of its opposition, go to fight, they typically win about 30% of the time. When those underdog armies create a strategy outside of the normal methods of battle, the winning percentage jumps to 65%! Take a look at your company and your sales process. Are you battling the 800 lb gorilla daily? If so, are you using Vivek’s full court press strategy or are your sales being stifled because you’re playing by the rules that your competitor wrote. And, if you are, how fast can you get your new strategy in place?

This week on EOtv, Jim Collins gave his “tip of the week” regarding how to find the right people to fill a key seat.  There are six generic characteristics that any person in a key seat should have. 

The right people…

1. Share your core values- When they walk in the door, they already have the same values. (Rather than you having to turn them into people with those values.)
2. Don’t need to be tightly managed – They are self-managed, self-disciplined and self-motivated.
3. Do what they say they will do – Thus, they are very careful about what they say they will do.
4. Have responsibilities – They don’t think in terms of “I have a job,” but rather, “What am I responsible for?”
5. Have window-and-mirror maturity – When things go badly, they’re comfortable looking in the mirror and taking responsibility; when things go well, they look out the window to point to others for their success.
6. Are passionate about everything you do – Whether it’s your core values, your culture or your product/service, they passionate about being a part of your team.

Do the people in your key seats possess these six characteristics?  How much more smoothly would your company or organization run if these described everyone on your team?