Sales Intelligentsia

Prospecting Tools: Business Name

Your business name should be easy to remember, easy to pronounce and descriptive without being generic. As easy as that all sounds, large companies spend millions developing unique, marketable names because they realize what a powerful asset a recognized and respected name is. You must do the same. As a very personalized business, sales is almost completely a relationship-driven thing: Your name and reputation are inextricably linked. You can use your own name with a descriptive tag line, i.e. Marilyn Rose, Medical Writer, if it fits the above criteria of pronouncability and memorability. If your name is very unusual or hard to pronounce consider using an easier to remember company name.

If your company or product name elicits a response that requires you to repeat it then you have a serious problem. If it is regularly mispronounced or mixed up you have a problem. If you stumble while saying it…you get the idea. You have to go to your marketing people and complain loudly until they give you a better name to work with.

Products As Solutions: Sell the Benefits, not the Features

The entire sales process is based on solving problems for your customers. Those solutions are not always the obvious ones inherent in your product. A financial planner may see the real benefit of her work as a significant increase in future income for a client. The client, however, may see it very differently. He or she may have been experiencing stress about not preparing properly for their future. The stress may be related to fear or ignorance that keeps them from taking action to help themselves. The financial planner solves that problem by coming in and relieving that stress by offering them a way to take the first steps. The planner thinks she’s selling future security but the reality is that she is selling stress relief right now. By tailoring her product presentation to address these immediate fears in addition to the long term benefits she’ll give her client the relief they need now.
Everything you offer to any prospective client is a product including things, services, advice, psychological benefits, increased income and other less tangible results. Before you go out to sell you must consider your products from every angle with particular focus on how they look from the customer’s viewpoint. We tend to know our own products from a features point of view whereas our customers think of them in terms of what benefit they will derive from them. This Features/Benefit pairing is a classic advertising technique that you should learn and use when developing and promoting new products and services.

Feature/Benefit Comparison

Analyzing what you do from a features/benefit point of view may be an enlightening experience because the things you consider powerful features may not resonate with your customers while things that you haven’t considered can be vital selling points. A powerful sports car may have a 300HP engine, leather seating, GPS system, etc., all of which are features. The benefits of those features are a different story. They tend to be much more visceral and emotional and include a return to youth, a feeling of personal power, a statement of status and success, etc. While you might cover the technical features of your product in your ads and sales presentation, you must address these emotional benefits as you cover each technical item. For instance you’d stress the feel of the cool leather, the powerful acceleration and throaty roar of the engine and the limited exclusivity of owning such a rarefied beast.
There is a simple exercise you can do to learn more about how a customer might view your products called a Features/Benefit comparison. This exercise is often done by advertising copywriters before they sit down to write compelling ad copy about a new product. It helps them identify the ‘hot button’ benefits of that product that will grab attention and create immediate interest in owning it.
Start with a blank sheet of paper for each product or service you offer. Divide it into two vertical columns and title the left hand one Features and the right Benefits. On the features side list all of the technical features of your business. Specifications, specialized experience and skills, tools you have, locations, previous client names and any other things you think are important about what you offer. On the Benefits side, next to each feature, write down the actual benefit to the customer of that feature. Benefits include saving or making money, saving time, relieving stress, enhancing self-esteem or business success, fixing emergencies or broken items, etc. Their must be a clear benefit for you to write it down. If a feature has no corresponding benefit put a line through it: It has no place in your sales presentation or marketing.
A good example of a feature that may have no real benefit is the fancy office. If you have a nice office in a prestigious location but seldom have clients in that office for meetings, it is not a benefit. It may make you enjoy work more which benefits you but it is not a selling point. In some businesses the appearance of success is very important because it conveys a sense of security and the feeling that the customer may share in your success, both of which are compelling benefits. In other cases, the appearance of excessive prosperity may turn off customers. I remember one very successful local real estate agent who saw her sales of middle class homes slide after she purchased an expensive German car. Her clients had the perception that she was a little too concerned with getting their money. When she switched back to a mini-van similar to the ones her typical clients drove, she started selling again.
Once you start to learn the benefits of your products you’ll have a clearer idea of how they appeal to your customers and you’ll spot areas where you need to strengthen them. Look at all the things you are selling and at the demographic profiles of your best customers and change the things that don’t directly benefit those customers. You may not have to eliminate anything, you’re more likely to add benefits or only sell the features that you know will appeal to a specific customer.

Never Leave A Feature Hanging

From now on, there is rule you must follow until it becomes a habit: Whenever you mention a feature of what you do, you must immediately describe the benefit to your customers of that feature. Never leave a feature hanging. If I tell a prospect that my recording studio has a web site I must immediately follow by saying it offers instant information about our capabilities, past experience, equipment and scheduling. All the prospect has to do is look us up on the Internet to schedule a session or check on the availability of a piece of equipment, saving them time. The benefits? Saved time and instant 24 hour access.

Ultimately, the buyer, when faced with a product feature, asks themselves this: What’s in it for me? If you follow up each feature with a benefit, you’re anticipating and answering this critical question.

Sales Prospecting: A Geology Lesson

Before anyone becomes a customer they are a prospective customer or prospect in sales lingo. Depending on what it is that you sell, your prospects can range from almost anyone on the planet to a very few select individuals who have a specific need for your products. Selling something like food that everyone needs is very different than selling something very specialized like enterprise supply chain software. If you own a grocery store your prospects are so universal that you really don’t need to do any prospecting to find the ideal customer. Anyone on the street is a likely prospect.
It is almost a given that most salespeople have a much narrower potential market because it is in the nature of salespeople to be specialists. You must go prospecting to find those specific people who have a demonstrated need for your products and the ability to pay for them. Before you do any selling you need customers and the more targeted you are in seeking those customers the easier it will be to sell them.

Targeting

Target markets are groups of people who share a similar set of demographics, i.e. similar lifestyles, interests, income and education levels, backgrounds, etc. When you’re selling a very specific set of solutions (your product) you need to target your efforts at groups of people whose demographic profiles fit your market. Before this gets too confusing let’s look at it another way.
The original use of the word prospecting meant searching for valuable minerals or resources like gold or oil. Prospectors used everything from rumor to science to find likely spots before they started digging. Now, geologists use their knowledge of geological science to identify areas likely to produce riches. They look at local geology, rock formations and make-up, overall global geology including things like plate tectonics, that tell them where the mineralogical action is. Only after comparing hundreds of potential sites and doing exhaustive research will they recommend that the expense and massive effort of digging a mine be undertaken. Their preliminary research is designed to minimize risk and maximize return.
The amount of prospecting for likely customers that you do will have the same result. If you picked ten people at random from a crowd and gave them your sales pitch you would be lucky to sell even one of them, no matter what you were selling. If you put together a demographic profile of people likely to need your product and targeted a group of ten people with that profile including a proven need and the ability to pay, your closing ratio (or sales success rate) would be much higher, perhaps even 100%!
The importance of this aspect of the sales process cannot be underestimated. If you do an excellent job of prospecting to find an ideal customer group for your business, the sales process will become immensely easier and far less mysterious. You will spend less time explaining, little time cajoling and no time talking people into anything because they will already have a defined need for your products and a demonstrated desire to buy. If you are lucky you’ll become what many so-called ‘professional’ salespeople often deride: An order taker.

Order Takers

In the sales profession an order taker is a salesperson who sits and takes orders from anyone who walks in or calls needing their products. They don’t pitch, close or ‘hammer’ their customers, they simply take orders. Salespeople who must fight for every order and go out and constantly drum up new business put down order takers as unimaginative and unskilled clerical types. I see it a little differently.
As a salesperson you are not just a professional, you are a business owner. Your interest is in generating work, income and profits, not just sales. For many of us being order takers would be an almost ideal situation. We’d sit in our offices or shops and customers would come to us ready and willing to buy on the spot. It sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
The degree to which you are a salesperson vs. an order taker is determined by marketing and the type of business you’re in. Marketing is everything you do to bring customers to you prior to the sales process and everything you do afterwards to ensure their loyalty and generate future business. Sales is a part of the marketing process, the vital part where you turn prospects into customers. You have to learn your own science of prospecting geology and how to find the signs and formations that point you to the gold. With the right targeted profile you can reach out via marketing and work your way to becoming a very happy order taker.

Customer Profiling

I’m going to assume you already know something about your customers, even if you’re just starting out. That knowledge may not be accurate or even useful but it will serve to get us started creating a profile of a typical customer for your products. Start by listing any common attributes your current customers share. Some to consider include:
• Age
• Income Range
• Location
• Education including number of years and major interest
• Job Description
• Interest group membership including associations, industry or academic groups, hobbyist groups, etc.
• Sex, religious background, ethnic background, race, etc. Note: This information is gathered to help to find and sell to your prospects, not as exclusionary criteria. The more you know, the better equipped you are to serve their needs.
As you consider each likely or proven customer make notes of any attributes or interests that are common to the majority. These are pointers which can lead you to like-minded people who may share a need for your products. They also help you to create profiles of highly profitable customers so that you can go out into the marketplace and focus your sales efforts on similar prospects.