Great salespeople are made not born.
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The selling landscape has changed.  Simply showing up and telling your customer about your company and it’s products and services just doesn’t cut it with today’s more demanding buyers.  Sellers have to provide more value than product knowledge or pricing – things the customer can often learn on their own with a few clicks.  In fact, recent research suggests that most customers don’t even engage a salesperson until they are 60% of the way through the buying process!

To compete in the new world of selling, you need to be equipped with better skills – skills that don’t simply get acquired by adding years of experience.  Making the same selling mistakes over and over again will not make you better.  There ARE selling techniques and strategies which work better than others and the good news is that you can learn them if you’re committed to continued growth.

Northbound’s methodologies work – period.  They have been culled from hundreds of sources and have been proven to work in the real world.  Our programs contain street tested ideas and actions that you can put into practice immediately.  The formidable combination of workshops, coaching and tools will help you implement the ideas into your own sales process.

Click here for a complete list of workshops for salespeople.

Click here to learn about full sales team development programs.

Contact us to arrange a complimentary no obligation workshop.  Contact Michael at [email protected] or 416.456.1440 to get details.  We are always happy to discuss your sales challenges.

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The Power of Handwritten Notes
Posted by: In: Sales Coaching, Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople, Uncategorized 29 Jan 2025 0 comments Tags: , , , , ,
thank_you1
In school, we used to pass handwritten notes.  Even today, it makes you stand out from the rest

I’m a big advocate of using handwritten notes in your selling process for 2 main reasons

#1 Reason: They work

#2 Reason: They are a kind gesture which makes me feel good!

Why do they work?

In today’s world of digital communication, we are bombarded with literally hundreds of messages from others on a weekly basis.  People just don’t get nearly as much stuff by snail mail any longer and the stuff we DO get it usually junk mail (sounds a lot like our email inbox too doesn’t it?).  Receiving something in the mail from a real live person is rare.  Handwritten notes such as a thank you card is even more rare.

A handwritten note helps you stand out.  Let me ask you this.  The last time you received a hand written card, what did you do with it right after reading it?  I bet you didn’t toss it in the trash.  I bet you put it on your desk, your fridge, or even showed it to other people.  What did you do with the last email “thank you” you got?  See the difference?

Why do they make me feel good?

Taking the time to hand write and drop something in the mail connotes a deeper level of thanks and appreciation.  As the famous Canadian futurist Marshal McLuhan famously quipped, “The medium is the message.”  Giving thanks to a customer for their time, or for anything in fact, is a big win-win.  It makes the receiver feel good but it helps me by building my gratitude.  And a recent study published in the Harvard Business Journal confirms what you probably know intuitively – that having gratitude increases happiness and increased happiness leads to higher productivity and sales.  What a fantastic ROI on your time!

There is one rule with sending handwritten notes including “thank you” cards.  They need to be 100% sincere.  If you ever try to pass around insincere thanks, it’s the same as passing around counterfeit money.  You will eventually be found out and your credibility will be in the toilet from that moment forward.

I’d recommend that you order some simple customized cards from any of the online print shops and start each day with a heartfelt thank you.  It’ll make someone else’s day and yours too!

How to Turn Problems Into More Sales
Posted by: In: Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople, Uncategorized 22 Jan 2025 0 comments Tags: , , , ,

How to Turn Problems Into More Sales

Become a problem solver and watch your sales grow!


Being an optimist by choice, I don’t usually recommend that people spend much time focusing on problems.  In the case of making additional sales to our customers however, it’s a great idea.  I’m sure you’re scratching your head right now trying to figure out my point.  Let me explain.


Consultative selling, the powerful selling methodology that emerged in the early 90’s, is based on the idea that to sell something, you have to be able to demonstrate how it’s going to solve someone’s problem, challenge or issue.  Companies were quick to get on the bandwagon by touting that they sell “solutions” but in most cases, it’s nothing more that marketing lip service.  How can they sell solutions when their salespeople don’t even know what their customers’ specific problems are?  Many sales forces promote solutions in search of problems.  The right way, of course, is to find the problems and then show our customers how we can help.

This selling strategy requires some research and preparation to do effectively.  There are 3 steps:

  1. Start with a crystal clear understanding of what your competitive advantages are.  Where do you have a leg up on our competition?  It might be better selection, higher quality or time savings.  Naturally your competitive advantages will vary according to the local branch and competitive landscape.  You need to know how you compare to your competition’s strengths and weaknesses if you are going to persuade a customer to use your company over them.
  2. Now, for each competitive advantage, ask, “What problems does this solve for the customer?”  Keep drilling down by asking “So what?” until you think you’ve hit an issue that is of high importance to your customer.  Often, it will boil down to factors such as saving time, saving money, increasing quality or reducing hassle.  If you have a competitive advantage of an easy, quick and hassle free order system, you ask again, “So what?”.  You might answer that this means that he saves time & money allowing him to focus on more important priorities in his role at his own business.  Bingo!  You’ve hit on problems that your customer deeply cares about.  The last step ties everything together.
  3. The final step in this process is to come up with a set of pre-planned questions that you can ask your customer that will uncover a problem, issue or challenge in this area.  In this example, you might ask, “How do you go about ordering product currently”  You might continue with something like, “How much time does that take you do you think?” or “Does that take away from your other responsibilities in your role?”  The customer replies with, “Yeah.  I spend a few hours per week doing it I guess.”  You follow with, “Well, does that affect your costs and productivity?”  Depending on his answer, you might respond with, “So would it help if you could work with a company that has an easier ordering system?”  “Sure it would,” the customer might say.  You then explain how we can help and provide some proof.

The beautiful thing about this strategy is that you are uncovering problems that you know you have a solution for, almost like a consultant, hence the term “consultative selling.”  “Sounds great but does it work in the real world?” you ask?  You bet it does.  This technique is the gold standard for selling around the world and across virtually all industries.


Good selling involves leveraging your competitive strengths.  To get customers to buy from us and/or pay more for our products, we have to give them good reasons to.  Your ability to help them solve a problem, overcome a challenge or reach an important goal will motivate them to choose us over our competition.  When you master the powerful and proven consultative selling approach, watch your sales grow!

Happy selling.

Michael

The Fine Line Between Persistence and Stalking
Posted by: In: Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Salespeople, Training 15 Jan 2025 0 comments Tags: , , ,

Megahorn Medium

There’s a difference between being persistent and being a pest!

“What’s a reasonable amount of follow-up?”  “If I’m not getting a response, when should I give up?”  “Am I jeopardizing the sale if I’m too persistent?”  These are all questions that often come up in our Power Prospecting workshop.  How often to contact a prospect is a complex subject and one that I hope to clear up for you.  Let’s take a deeper look at this issue.

The effort required to connect with someone, especially by phone, is dramatically greater today than it was even a few years ago.  In the mid-90’s, just when voicemail was becoming commonplace, a business person could expect to connect to another business person 22% of the time or just shy of 1 in 5 times.  Today, that number has jumped to 1 in 7.  With the daily tsunami of email, getting people to respond by phone is more difficult than ever.  This adds up to salespeople getting pushed to the bottom of the priority list in the business world.

To get someone’s attention and raise the level of urgency requires more frequent contact attempts than most salespeople are initially comfortable with.  I think you’ll agree that proper business etiquette is to return voicemails within a day.  For this reason, if you don’t connect live and instead, have to leave a voicemail, I recommend you give your prospective customer a day or so to return it.  It’s helpful to set the expectation in your voicemail by saying something like, “If you don’t have a chance to get back to me in the next couple of days, I’ll try you again at your desk on Thursday morning.”  When you call them on Thursday, this does a couple of things for you.  First, it separates you from some salespeople in that you kept your promise.  Second, your prospect will quickly understand that you’re going to be persistent in a polite, professional way.

A popular mistake by some salespeople is the mind reading they do of their prospect. “Gee, they haven’t called me back so I guess that means they aren’t interested.  I don’t want to annoy them.”  This assumption is very wrong.  In the vast majority of cases, your prospects are busy people, just like you are, and unfortunately, returning sales calls falls to the bottom of their to-do list.  When you eventually do connect, you will find that your polite persistence will most often generate a response something like, “I got your voicemails.  I’m really sorry I haven’t called you back.  We’ve just been crazy busy around here.”  Frankly, I’ve made over 7000 prospecting calls since starting Northbound and I’ve only had one person ever say, “If I were interested, I would have called you back.”  That’s right … ONE!  Just last week, I finally got through to two prospective customers who I had left several voicemails and emails with.  Did they say, “Michael, you are annoying me.  I’m obviously not interested.” Not at all.  In fact, both of them apologized profusely for not getting back to me and I booked meetings with each of them.

Polite, professional persistence is what often separates low performers from the great ones.

Your actions this week:

  1. Mix up your contact methods with prospects you’re trying to connect with this week.  Use a  combination of voicemail, email, LinkedIn messages, texts, hand written notes, personal visits, even fax!  You’ll see that it increases your response.
  2. Keep careful track of your contact attempts along with dates.  Try to get at least 2 contact attempts in per week and don’t give up until you’ve tried at least 7 times.

Northbound’s “Connecting to the Big Cheese” workshop teaches you a proven system to connect with high level decision makers and motivate them to want to meet.  To learn more or for pricing, contact Michael at [email protected] or 416.456.1440.

Happy prospecting!

4 Reasons Why We Don’t Set Goals
Posted by: In: Sales Coaching, Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople 11 Dec 2024 0 comments Tags: , ,

By Michael Caron, President, Northbound Sales Training

In last week’s sales tip, I suggested that you shouldn’t set New Year resolutions.  I had some feedback that some people thought I was against setting goals.  Not at all.  I’m against setting goals or New Year resolutions without having a goal achievement process to prevent the “set ’em and forget ’em” failure cycle from taking hold.  This will most often set you up for failure and disappointment & frustration — exactly opposite of what you want!

If you’re a reader of sales-enhancing literature, you’ve surely read lots on the power of goal setting. If you consistently set written, realistic goals with all the other necessary components for goal success, then read no further. If, however, you are one of the 95% of the population who doesn’t, continue reading.

A powerful question then becomes, “If goal setting is so great, why do only 1 in 20 of us do it?” I don’t know what the statistics say for the number of us who exercise, but I suspect they are similar. Both are activities that undoubtedly produce immense benefits yet seem to elude the average person. There are 4 main reasons why we don’t.

1—Fear of Failure

The dreaded F.O.F. Many of us are stopped by the thought that, “If I set a goal and miss it, I will feel like a failure.” What is not understood is that having a goal always gets better performance than not—even if the goal is missed. What’s key is the need for goals to strike a balance between being too hard and too easy. If you’re hitting your goals all the time, it means that it’s time to raise the bar. You need to be challenged more to sustain growth and generate that feeling of accomplishment that salespeople thrive on. If, on the other hand, you are consistently missing your goals and all the other components of good goal setting are present, it’s important to reduce your goals to something more realistic. If your goals are simply too out of range, you will give up and they will no longer provide the power to motivate.
Also, what people who fear failure might not realize is that failure is necessary for growth. Knowing what not to do next time can be very valuable. Winston Churchill said, “I would rather fail my way to success rather than be a successful failure”. Failing can be the greatest learning experience.

2—Procrastination

To misquote Alexander the Great, “Why do something today that you can put off until tomorrow?” The art of procrastination is worthy of an article of it’s own! Setting goals, while incredibly powerful, isn’t something that has the urgency of other countless day-to-day tasks crying out for attention. Disappointingly, like other important but low urgency life enriching activities like exercise, learning and family, we put goal setting in the “when I have time” category.

3—“I’ve done OK without them”

If you’re satisfied with a just “O.K.” life, then this is a perfectly good excuse.

4—“I keep them in my head”

When teaching our “Bulls Eye!” goal setting workshop, I often hear this one. My immediate response is a query on the individual’s goals in key areas. The typical responses are some vague generalities with no time frame, no plan and most importantly no answer as to “why?” For the immense power of goal setting to be released, they must be taken out of your head and written down. The mere act of putting something in writing solidifies your brain’s ability to focus.
Your homework: Get yourself in a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. Write down the biggest sales failure in your career to date. What were the negative outcomes? What were the positive outcomes? (yes, you will find some if you look hard enough) Lastly, what did you learn?
An M.I.T. study found that the 3% of a graduating class who had set clear, written career goals upon finishing school, had cumulative net worth 20 years later greater than the entire other 97% combined!.

With a little bit of effort and discipline to avoid the classic goal setting obstacles noted above, you too can turn your dreams into reality.

Your First New Years Resolution Should Be Not to Make Any!
Posted by: In: Sales Coaching, Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople, Training 04 Dec 2024 0 comments Tags: , , , , ,

Your first New Years resolution should be not to make any!

Achieving important goals takes much more than making a few resolutions every January

Call them what you want but technically they’re the same thing – resolutions or goals.  Typically, however, resolutions are goals that most people start the year with and are usually accompanied by short lived passion.  The sad fact is that while almost one out of two of us make new years resolutions, by the end of the year, only 12% of them are achieved.  That’s an 88% failure rate, not much better than those who don’t even bother to set some.  A recent study showed that 1 out of 4 people can’t even stick to their resolutions through the first week!

Why is this?  The simple answer is because most people don’t manage their goals as an ongoing process.  They simply “set ‘em and forget ‘em.”  We’ve all done it.  We sit at a blank piece of paper or computer screen (I bet many will be looking at it on their iPad they got for Christmas) and write some stuff down that we think are goals.  At this stage, I’d call them wishes rather than goals because most often they don’t fit the SMART criteria.

In working with salespeople for many years, where do I see people fall down?

Failure Strategy #1:  They don’t know why?

Sure, it sounds good to say, “I’d like to make $X more this year” or “I’m going to get in shape” but where did these goals come from?  Did you just pull them out of your ear or other body orifice because they sounded good?  Doing things differently to get different results is hard.  If it were easy, everyone would be rich, healthy and good looking.  OK, maybe not good looking but you know what I mean.  If it’s not clear what the fantastic benefits are of reaching your goal and what awful things happen when you don’t, you won’t have the drive to carry you through the rough spots.  If making more sales commissions this year means you can provide for your child’s university education, you’ll feel like making a couple more sales calls on a Friday when your colleagues have wrapped things up for the week.  Greig Clark, the founder of College Pro Painters and an early mentor of mine used to say, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  Hell might be a strong word but the point that success takes a lot more than just hope is clear.

Failure Strategy #2: No weekly and monthly review.

When an airliner takes off from Toronto to Vancouver, it corrects its course thousands of times to land safely at YVR.  We need to do the same thing.  Every month, you should pull out your annual goals (all of them – not just your business goals) and ask one important question, “What do I need to achieve this month that will let me hit my goal by the end of the year?”  Stuff will start falling out of your head.  Writing these down will take you about 30 minutes.  For example, an annual goal of increasing your sales by 15% might lead you to a monthly goal of “Do sales interviews & strategy with 10 customers who favour the competition over our company.”

Each week, you’ll need to do the same routine with your monthly goals to turn them into weekly goals.  At this point, they will be quite tactical and will look very much like activities or tasks.  That’s OK as they have to be bite-sized so you can plug them into your time management system.  This will take you about 15 minutes.

Failure Strategy #3: No accountability.

If you like to be held accountable, put your hand up.  Uh huh, sure you do.  Most people like to be held accountable as much as they like multiple root canals.  The fact is that people who are accountable achieve more — period!  It’s not open to debate as several studies show.  Think about the best coach you ever had in your life and I’ll bet they didn’t say, “Let’s not bother checking in to see if you did what you said you were going to do.”  Like the famous cough medicine ad, accountability “tastes bad but it works.”  If you agreed with someone to hold you to a higher level of accountability, would you invite it or fight it?  The ones who invite it will achieve more sales success and I’m willing to bet on it.

I’ve got my annual goals done and one of them is to help each of you toss out the notion of a “New Years resolution” and instead, help you build a solid blueprint for sales success in 2025.

How to Manage Interruptions
Posted by: In: Sales Coaching, Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople, Training 20 Nov 2024 0 comments Tags: ,

Do you really know the cost?

By Michael Caron, President, Northbound Sales Training

Interruptions are one of the biggest time suckers for most. Did you know that if you are focussing in the middle of a task that it takes 6 minutes to get back to the same level of focus as before the interruption? If you get interrupted just 5 times in an hour, you’re only working at 50% productivity!

You might think with the work-from-home trend, “I’m at home so I don’t have to worry about interruptions like I did when I was in the office all the time.”  WRONG! While interruptions are less likely to be from someone stopping by your desk on the way to the water cooler, interruptions abound today mostly by our own doing — our devices!

Our cell phones, our computers and even our watches are set up to over-notify us of everything from a new social post to “time to stand”.  (I know I’ve got about another 10 minutes before my Apple Watch annoys me to do that.)  If another human notified us in person as often as our devices, we’d likely want to duct tape them to the wall within a couple of hours!  Without constant interruptions from your devices, think of how much more you could get done, how much greater your focus would be and how much lower your blood pressure would be.

Here’s how to help stop your interruptions from sucking your precious time and focus.

  1. Make it clear when you can be interrupted. In an office environment, put a sign on your door asking people to only interrupt you if it’s urgent or if you’re in an open work environment use an orange pylon to indicate it.
  2. If you work in an office setting or in your home with other people around, turn your desk to the wall. People will be less likely to start chatting if they don’t make eye contact.
  3. When someone physically interrupts you, standup!  People tend to get to the point quicker if they’re standing.  Once they sit down, you know you’re in for a long chat!
  4. Get in the habit of asking people how urgent something is. Ask to get back to them if it’s important but not super urgent (but make sure you do or you’ll lose credibility).
  5. Ask people who you deal with often, to make a list of items to cover and set a quick meeting (or regular meeting) to cover off most things at one time.
  6. When you are on “focus time” turn off all gadgets or leave them in your bag. It sounds productive to multi-task but it is far less productive actually. Focus on one thing at one time!
You and your team can learn dozens of other proven time management strategies with Northbound’s Goal Aligned™ Time Management workshop. Graduates report an average productivity increase of 12%. For more information or to arrange a complimentary mini workshop for your team, contact us.
6 Language Mistakes to Avoid in a Sales Call
Posted by: In: Sales Coaching, Sales Executives, Sales Managers, Sales Training, Salespeople, Training 06 Nov 2024 0 comments Tags: , , , ,

Dialogue

Your Words Are Important – Choose Them Carefully!

1. Eliminate the grunts: Um and Ah and Uh!
Be comfortable with the silence and resume speaking when the thought is there. People who use “um” to illustrate their thought process may appear less sure and less knowledgeable.

2. Sorta, kinda, shoulda – what?
These words make you sound unsure of your ideas. Casual language sounds unprofessional and sends the wrong message.

3. Avoid absolutes.
When you use absolutes, you are asking to be proved wrong. Substitute often for always and rarely for never. Use absolutes sparingly.

4. Avoid slang or rough phrases.
Avoid using slang like “ain’t” or rough phrases like “that sucks.” They make you sound very unprofessional. Find another way to say what you mean.

5. Stop the hard sell.
Ending each though with “You know?” or “You know what I mean?” Come across as the hard sell and are annoying. People who abuse these phrases are seeking support for poorly explained ideas.

6. Avoid but and however!
These words negate whatever was said before them and send a message to the prospect that you didn’t mean what was said before “but” or “however”. Here’s an example – “I understand why you might feel that way, however, there is another way to view this.” A simple pause will serve you much better than “however” ever will.

About Len D’Innocenzo – Len is Co-founder of Corporate Sales Coaches, a US based provider of cutting edge performance development programs for over 30 years. Northbound Sales has an exclusive Canadian partnership with Corporate Sales Coaches.  If you or your team would like to learn how to ace the language of a powerful sales call or arrange a complimentary workshop, contact Michael at 416.456.1440 or [email protected]