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[Note: Watch for upcoming posts where I'll be interviewing some CEO's of companies that are changing the tools we use as sales professionals.]

If you’re selling a product that is virtually, if not exactly, the same as all of your competitors, then you are selling a commodity. Many salespeople mistakenly resort to discounting as their only selling strategy in order to get business when selling commodities.

You don’t always have to resort to this. There is a way to deal effectively with commodity selling that I’ll share below.

When selling a commodity you are also selling your personal capital too.

What is personal capital? It’s the attitude, knowledge and skills that you bring, as a sales professional, to the customer that are independent of the products you sell.

What are some examples? There are a million of them: product knowledge, knowledge of how the customer needs to be invoiced/shipped/packaged, good people skills with the employees at the customer, ability to run customer meetings with productive outcomes, anticipation of customer needs before they are expressed, etc.

Here’s the best part about all of this. Customers are willing to pay you more for the same product they can buy from your competitors because of the personal capital that you bring to the table. This is exactly why order takers make such poor commodity salespeople.

“This sounds great Scott, but my customers don’t even appreciate that I do these things for them. All they talk about is price.”

The problem is that you haven’t communicated to them the extra value that you bring. Customer surveys have consistently shown that most customers don’t know the added value that you provide to them. Furthermore, these same surveys also show that if they were aware of the added value they wouldn’t be as price sensitive.

So, how do we communicate this extra value?

Every six months show them a formal report that tells them what they are buying from you and include a section labeled “Additional Services.” List all the added value services you provide (such as the examples listed above) in the Additional Services section and put a big N/C next to each item. You can deliver this report to them at a scheduled meeting that you advertise as your semi-annual customer satisfaction/update meeting. This information will open their eyes to all of the added value that you bring that goes unnoticed. You’ll probably get some good feedback too.

If you’re selling a commodity, be sure to sell yourself first and your product second.

Please tell your business associates about Sales Vitamins™. To subscribe: <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> for the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Every customer you have was once a prospect. Either you, or someone in your organization, had to initially get a decision maker’s attention. The following are some things I have learned about doing it simply and effectively.

What I’m talking about here is what is commonly called an Elevator Speech because it represents how much time you have to show the prospect your value when you first meet. An elevator ride is usually no longer than 30 seconds, which should be the maximum length of your Elevator Speech.

I first met many, if not most, of my best customers in the most unexpected places (car dealerships, weddings, drivers license office, etc.) where having a good Elevator Speech in my hip pocket paid off. It can also be used effectively in routine prospecting.

Decision makers have two things you want: attention and time. You’ve got about 30 seconds to get their attention. Here are the basics to start crafting the two different types of Elevator Speeches that you’ll need (you’ll use one of the two depending on the situation).

1. Someone asks you what you do for a living.

a. Introduce yourself if you haven’t already.
b. State one or two key standout value propositions that you and your company provide to your industry. Please do not sound like you are reading from the Yellow Pages. Boring! I do not believe these value propositions necessarily have to be unique in your industry; they just need to be compelling.
c. Tell them the bare bones basics about your company and its products/services.
d. Ask for their Elevator Speech, which will help qualify them and provide you with their contact information (not to mention that it shows you have some interest in them, which never hurts).

2. You initiate the conversation. Basically this just represents some important changes to the sequence.

a. Introduce yourself.
b. Ask for their Elevator Speech. You can optionally skip the next two steps if they are absolutely not a prospect for you.
c. State one or two key standout value propositions.
d. Tell them about your company.

This is one skill that requires a lot of practice. My wife used to make fun of me for practicing my Elevator Speech prior to going to a prospect rich event until she saw the positive results. I eventually even got her to play the role of the prospect when I was practicing.

Please tell your business associates about Sales Vitamins™. To subscribe: <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> for the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Sales Vitamins™ has subscribers from many different countries. Today’s post is meant primarily for my U.S. readers.

I’ll admit it. My eyes water every time I hear the U.S. national anthem. Here’s why.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. and it’s a holiday that honors the men and women that have given their lives in military service. This holiday does not honor war itself in any way, but rather gives tribute to those that have made the greatest sacrifice as a result of it. Because they have given their lives, we enjoy many freedoms. One of these liberties is the ability to pursue the career and destiny of our choice.

If you are a U.S. citizen celebrating Memorial Day today, please pause, if just for a moment, to remember what these men and women, and their families, have done. All of us are beneficiaries of their heroism.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Fact: As sales professionals, we are ultimately in control of our sales career. This isn’t a good thing, this is a great thing! But it also requires us to take on certain responsibilities if we want to maximize this control.

The following are five truths about our sales career:

1. We are our own best sales career counselor. No one cares as much about our career as we do, not our
employer, our manager or anyone else.
2. We are responsible for our own development and training. This may mean getting our employer to train us or for us to seek training on our own.
3. We must think beyond our current sales job; we are in a career, not a job. As I’ve written in another post, Sales Staff Turnover, few sales jobs are permanent.
4. We are ultimately our own best motivators; no one else can motivate us over the long haul.
5. The most successful sales professionals are those that stick with it. I’ve never met a number one salesperson that got to that position in 3 months - it took years and usually spanned over several employers.

Do we have 100% control of our sales career at all times? Hardly. The “Divine Director of Sales” in His heavenly office can grab the wheel from time to time, but our individual actions, and inactions, will have a huge impact on our sales career.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

In the 1973 movie, Magnum Force, Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) says his now famous line, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

No matter how inflated our ego is or how much we suffer from low self esteem, we all have two things in common: a key selling strength that must be optimized and a key sales weakness we must navigate around. It’s how we are put together by the big man upstairs. No one is exempt.

Highly successful athletes, politicians and actors are examples of people that showcase their greatest strength and do their best to conceal their greatest weakness. The key to all of this is that they know these things about themselves.

Since sales success is so critically dependent on a number of skill sets, doesn’t it make sense that we should be aware of our greatest strength and use it to our advantage? At the same time wouldn’t it be helpful for us to be cognizant of where we are not strong?

Tiger Woods is generally considered to be one of the best golfers that has ever lived. He acknowledges that his short-irons are a weakness for him, but he also knows that he can hit a driver like no other. Guess what his game strategy is? He uses his driver (his strength) in a way to avoid as many short-iron shots (his weakness) as possible.

We might be tempted to ask, should we work on our weakest sales skill in order to make it stronger? Yes, but I have a few rules for this:

1. We must work on our weak area only after we are sure that our strongest area is razor sharp. Our strongest area is our money maker.
2. When in front of a customer we must be sure to leverage our strength to the maximum; this is not a time to be experimenting with improving our weakness.
3. We can and should use a coach (e.g., sales trainer, sales manager) to help us with our weak area.
4. We can’t always avoid exposing our weak area, so we should ensure that we have at least an adequate and acceptable strategy for handling it.

Sales professionals can be either weak or strong in the following areas: prospecting, account management, presentations, customer meetings, product knowledge, account planning, time management, record keeping, etc. This is a concept where sales management can play a valuable role in helping their individual team members fortify their strength and manage their weakness.

Now go to work on making your sales strength even stronger and your weakness manageable.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

For us to be most effective in attacking our target markets we must first define them and, secondly, be able to identify individual companies within them. This sounds really simple but it is amazing how many companies haven’t taken the time to do this.

One of the primary ways that we have traditionally identified markets and individual companies within those markets is by assigning them SIC codes. You remember SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes; they’ve been around since the 1930’s. The problem with SIC codes today is twofold. They were created when the U.S. was predominantly a manufacturing oriented country and SIC codes only have four digits, which can be limiting.

SIC codes needed to be updated to better reflect a changing North American economy and provide more options for classification. To do that, NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes were created and are replacing the old SIC codes. This industry coding system was jointly developed by the U.S., Canada and Mexico and has six digits. The Federal Government has been using NAICS codes since 1997.

NAICS codes can help us in several ways:

1. SIC codes are falling out of favor and are being rapidly replaced by NAICS codes. What a golden opportunity for us to take a fresh look at how we segment our markets.
2. Many industry reports that are now available either from public or private sources use NAICS codes. If we are still using SIC codes we won’t be able to use this new information very effectively as a benchmark for our own businesses.
3. NAICS codes can open our eyes to many service industry opportunities that were missing in the old SIC codes, which could play a prominent role in how we re-segment our markets.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are giving us increasing abilities to segment our markets through automation and NAICS codes are playing a key role. NAICS codes can be a very helpful tool in helping us focus our sales efforts. For a complete list of NAICS codes please see 2007 NAICS Codes.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

I am fortunate to get many emails asking questions and making comments about sales.

There is one common theme that carries through all of this correspondence. All of our customers are just like us in the most important way. They’re human.

I received an email recently that helps make this point. I got permission from the sender to publish it anonymously. No further comment needed.

“Scott,

I have to deal with a nasty customer almost daily. If he wasn’t such a big customer I wouldn’t even bother with him. I was listening to yet another one of his complaints when the conversation took a turn I hadn’t expected. All of a sudden he apologized for “barking” at me so often and began to tell me about recently losing his wife to cancer. I was obviously very moved by his loss and his vulnerability. I will never view this man, or any other customer, as just a “customer” again. It reminded me that we are selling to people, first and foremost.”

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Neuro Linguistic Programming (also known as NLP) was created in the 1970’s. The idea behind it was to understand human communication beyond just the words being used, with obvious implications to sales. Over the last 30 years most researchers have come to the conclusion that it is a highly subjective semi-science that should be used with caution, if at all.

NLP was initially used in psychology and counseling. It wasn’t long until sales practitioners of one sort or another started applying NLP theories to sales training. Am I the only one that has noticed that every new type of pop-psychology is ultimately applied to sales? My most displeasurable example of this was the distortion of the data about the importance of body language in communication (The Myth of Body Language in Communication). I still hear sales trainers refer to that and it makes my skin crawl.

The meta-model of NLP says that when one human being communicates with another they go through the following steps: the speaker first has a thought, it’s coded into words, the words are spoken, the hearer receives those words, the hearer decodes those words and then interprets the thoughts. The concept is actually fairly interesting to consider because, after all of those steps, the potential for misinterpretation in human communication can be better understood. Clearly we can see how this could apply to interactions with our customers.

As appealing as the theory sounds, it is generally accepted that NLP has not withstood the test of time (especially in the area of sales training). It has not been adequately supported by legitimate research and smacks of “new age” thinking, which has more of a spiritual or philosophical appeal.

My feeling is that NLP sales training is unproven and if it were advertised on TV you’d find it at 3:00 in the morning on an infomercial.

Stick with the sales basics that are proven over time and represented in Sales Vitamins™. There are no magic pills in sales.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We have two big adversaries when it comes to sales proposals; the following tip can help with both of them.

1. Sameness. All proposals tend to look like every other sales proposal in the known universe to our customers and prospects. This is not a good thing.
2. LIT (Lack of Information Transmittal). Because of the way we format our proposals we often don’t communicate our added value. This can kill things right out of the gate.

What are the generally accepted rules of thumb from a salesperson’s perspective for sales proposal construction?

1. Bigger is better
2. Hide the pricing
3. Stuff it with as many brochures as we can find
4. Make it look really professional with pre-printed tabs, etc.
5. Find all the “boiler plate” text available and “find and replace” the customer’s name into it
6. Make lots of copies and send out more than the customer could possibly need

What are the general rules of thumb from a customer’s perspective when viewing a sales proposal?

1. Where’s the pricing page?

Our customers and prospects go right to the pricing page when initially viewing a proposal and could not care less about all the other filler we include.

Since we know this, we can use it to our advantage and overcome the Sameness and LIT (Lack of Information Transmittal) issues with the following proposal tip. Here’s how it works.

First, put the pricing page in a place that is easy for the customer to find. This will immediately make us look different. Next, comb through the entire proposal and find the absolutely most essential value added items that we would like them to see. Lastly, include these items on the pricing page.

Since we know they are going to immediately dive for the pricing page, we need to put the most important points where we know they are going to be looking. The pricing page. In fact, with this technique they can’t avoid seeing these important points.

This technique will hopefully get us invited to the “short list” party where we can do additional in-depth value selling.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

I used to find that some salespeople would inexplicably go into a “blue funk” for an indefinite period and then snap out of it and be fine. During this period their sales would suffer and they seemed unhappy with their job and even their personal life. I looked for a long time to identify the cause of this “blue funk” and eventually figured it out.

Depression. Yes, the common cold of mental illness that afflicts 10% of the U.S. population each year. Once I learned more about depression I could see possible signs of it in some of the salespeople that I managed.

Most importantly, this knowledge helped me to get help for some of them in order to get them back on their feet. Job stress is one of the most common triggers of depression. Sales can be a very stressful job. Sadly, 80% of those that are depressed don’t seek help even though it’s commonly just a chemical imbalance that can be successfully treated with short term medication and counseling.

I know this is something we don’t like to talk about but I’ve seen it as a real issue in countless sales organizations. An issue, by the way, that can effectively be dealt with and once resolved can get the salesperson firing on all cylinders again. Win-win.

Sales management frequently misses this not-so-uncommon cause for sales performance issues. What are some of the common signs?

1. Loss of joy in one’s life and career
2. Weight gain or loss accompanied with a lowered level of energy
3. Trouble concentrating and lowered self esteem
4. Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
5. Irritability

As you can see, all of these common symptoms are going to hinder someone’s sales abilities.

A smart, experienced and knowledgeable sales manager knows to consider all possibilities when it comes to performance issues with a salesperson, including depression. If we feel one of our employees might be struggling with depression, then we need to get them help. Obviously we would want to confidentially work through our HR organization before approaching the salesperson.

If you feel you are personally struggling with depression, then get help for yourself.

We don’t have to live with this problem; it’s not permanent. Those wrestling with depression are not alone. We don’t need to let this get in the way of our, or anyone else’s, sales career.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer