Tag: business tips

Reasons Why Customers Are More Important than Price (Infographic)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
Price and value are different definitions of how customers react to a product’s purpose. Price talks about the scale of the worth of a product or service by labelling the amount that customers will pay. On the other hand, value discusses the unique propositions of the product, which will enable customers to know more about the usefulness of their purchase. For example, some products have particular storage consumption which is indicated on the packaging of the product; it may be for 24 months or 12 months which suggests the quality that is prescribed when use. Most products and services ensure quality performance by ranging their prices through what the customers can afford. But not all consumers are checking prices based on the trend; customers sometimes look into the value of a product and what it can step up for them when they use it. Reasons Why Customers Are More Important than Price

When Does the Sale Stop and the Negotiation Begin? (Infographic)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
Sales equate the well-being of a company, it manages the income and expenses of a business and can cover its costs to create a stable operation. This also builds a healthy relationship with potential clients and investors since the data included on sales reports will provide sufficient knowledge to the company’s credibility. Without sales, one cannot interpret the current status of the company’s operations, increase the overall impact to customers, and provide the necessary growth for the business. When Does the Sale Stop and the Negotiation Begin?

How to Ask Powerful Sales Question to Uncover Buyer Needs (Infographic)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson

Asking effective and probing sales questions is critical to uncover buyer needs. These questions often depend on several factors such as the level of competition in your industry, as well as the value your products and services provide to your customers.

By asking the right sales questions, you will be able to understand the nuances behind the different behaviours and needs of your customers. Powerful sales questions are the root of how you can prove your brand’s long-term relationship to your customers.

In this article, we will discuss the different techniques and tips on how to formulate powerful sales questions to uncover buyer needs, but first, let’s define the importance of “the art of questioning” in sales.

How to Ask Powerful Sales Question to Uncover Buyer Needs

Poor Accountability — The Poison for a Sales Team

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
Try to think about the five most prominent, most successful names in your industry today. With their standing with your industry’s market nowadays, it’s easy to assume that they’re already doing everything right and they have the luxury of keeping their place no matter what they do. However, before they all got there, it’s inevitable that they also faced numerous challenges and problems during their growth. This is especially true for their sales department. As one of the most dynamic teams of any organisation, the sales team are always on the move to close deals and convert leads into customers. This exact nature, however, is what also makes them one of the likeliest to face problems over time. While some problems can be relatively small and harmless, others do need additional time, effort, and expertise from your team. In either instance, however, they should still have a strong sense of responsibility and accountability to accept these problems and work on them efficiently.

The Effects of the Lack of Accountability

One of the most tell-tale signs of lack of accountability in your sales department is when the staff within it starts blaming each other, the market, the products or services, or the customers for the problems they’re facing. Instead of looking internally, they begin deflecting the blame to external factors. Over the years, numerous companies have faced this issue — it’s quite a common occurrence no matter how undesirable the situation is within the owner’s expectations. Conflicts are natural in every workplace, but these unresolved conflicts can become a deadly poison for the rest of your department, too. A lack of accountability in a sales team disrupts the compatibility within the entire group. The immediate effect of this in your sales department staff is that they won’t be able to perform as well as they did before the conflict arose. This, in turn, affects your sales figures, as it stands to be the biggest risk for decline. Over time, the conflict spreads across the entire department. If your organisation is small and tight-knitted, it may even spread across the whole workforce. This affects the overall efficiency of the company, which results in deteriorated quality. Customers you’ve retained over the years eventually stop coming back due to these failures on your part and the organisation is left with the inability to acquire more customers.

Solving the Issue

Poor accountability in an organisation can occur for various reasons. It can be due to poor company culture and staff structure, which makes salespeople more likely to blame each other or someone else when they face setbacks. It can also develop due to poor management. Without positive and motivation management, conflicts arise, and the employees will become embittered when under this kind of management. Luckily, building a sense of accountability doesn’t require business owners and their salespeople a degree in rocket science. Here are some tips you and your team can get started with:

  • Clear up job roles and responsibilities

People can blame others if their roles and responsibilities are not clear enough. Remove confusion about job roles by explicitly defining them. If there are gaps or new roles and processes, identify them and account for them as well.

  • Develop a sense of ownership

When employees feel they are closer to the company, they become more accountable for their professional actions. Conduct team building exercises and programs to bring your sales team closer to your company. Coaching programs can not only help develop the skills and responsibilities of your sales team but also help them understand their company better. When proper structures, cultures, and management have been set, the more your people grow and take ownership of their actions and mistakes. To learn more about KONA’s Sales Training, Call Centre Training, Customer Service Training and Sales Management training in Sydney and around Australia, telephone us at 1300 611 288 or email us at info@kona.com.au.

Stop Hunting Unicorns! (Are They the Customers You Want?)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson

When it comes to proper strategy-making, one of the factors that you need to determine to effectively conceptualise the entirety of your campaign is the market you’re targeting.

In other words, what kind of customers you’re aiming to sell your products or services to.

This will significantly dictate what tone you should go for with your sales pitches, what kind of behaviour you should expect, and what improvements you must implement based on their problems.

When you manage to pinpoint the correct niche or attract the right customers, you can expect that your business will experience exponential growth in many aspects. This is a scenario that most entrepreneurs dream of achieving because it solidifies their chances of success and keeps their company afloat.

However, knowing if you’re targeting the right people can be a hit or miss — often because you’re trying instead to reach for the unicorns.

What are unicorns?

Generally speaking, unicorns are mythical beasts that are majestic in appearance yet hard to catch or even catch a glimpse of.

They are often attributed to having mystical abilities that make them valuable for anyone who manages to find or befriend one. Their roots trace back to the ancient seals of the Indus Valley Civilisation, accounts of natural history from the ancient Greeks, and even in the Catholic Bible.

In more modern and business-related contexts, a “unicorn” is a descriptive term for an individual that is not unlike the term’s origin. It refers to someone who exceeds expectations and is almost a perfect choice, yet is difficult to catch or keep, often due to a mismatch between the business and the individual.

It is a term most commonly used in human resources, which Divestopedia describes as “when those who are responsible for hiring candidates have impossible expectations […] In other words, human resources is looking for a mythical candidate (i.e. a unicorn), rather than facing reality.”

But what does this have to do with your customers?

Based from the connotation of the term “unicorn” in human resources, we can define “unicorn” customers as those who seem to be the perfect match for your business, the ones that you should be targeting with maximum effort because they’re the ones that fit your ideal customer profile.

However, like in human resources, they are the type of people that you’re most likely wasting your time finding, because of impossible expectations that may not be grounded on the reality of your business or the niche they belong to.

While it seems ideal to hunt for them as they’re the people that you believe need your products or services the most, again, you may be targeting the wrong ones. Simply because, like the unicorn of legends, they don’t exist. Businesses that hunt for customers that are unicorns are akin to companies looking to hire unicorns — they often have these expectations merely because they “are rushed, lazy, or actually have no idea” about what they want.

When you hunt for unicorns, you’re essentially wasting your time, as:

(1) They don’t even exist, and

(2) Even if they do, they aren’t the customers you would want despite thinking that they are.

Already, you’re setting yourself up for failure by forming your whole strategy around the idea of attracting the customers that your business doesn’t need.

How to avoid targeting unicorns and start hunting customers that you want and need

The answer to this dilemma is simple: define your target market realistically by making an in-depth analysis of the different factors that go into forming this profile. Base your ideal customer profile around your reality and facts backed by research, not on expectations. You can start creating a good image of what your customer should be like by employing these steps:

  • Look at your current customer base

If your business has been operating for some time, your best resource for customer profiling is your existing customer base. What kind of people are they? Why do they buy from you? Which ones bring in the most business? People like them are likely to buy from you, too.

  • Check out your competition

Whether you’re old or new to the market, you can always benefit from observing what your competition is doing and whom they are targeting. By analysing what they’re up to and what kind of customer base you have, you can find an opportunity to find a niche they haven’t touched on before and base your customer base off that.

  • Analyse what you can offer, and who’d be interested in it

When you have a product or service, it means that you already have a solution to an existing problem. It’s just a matter of matching it to the right customers that need what you can give to them. To do this, make an objective analysis of what you have, and then make a list of people that most likely need the benefits that your solution gives them. This is an excellent base to start from when building a more specific customer profile.

  • Define your demographics and psychographics

Think about the following factors to give you a more concrete idea on what kind of customers you need to target: age, location, gender, income level, education level, marital or family status, occupation, and ethnic background. Psychographics also help build a better profile for you. Consider the following personal characteristics: personality, attitudes, values, interests/hobbies, lifestyles, and behaviour. These aspects can help you develop a clearer image of the kind of people you’re looking for.

  • Evaluate your decision

Once you’ve defined your target market, ask yourself these questions to see if you’ve managed to reach a set of reasonable expectations:

  • Are there enough people who fit into the criteria?
  • Will they see a need and be able to reap benefits from what I can offer?
  • Do I understand who they are and what drives their purchasing behaviour?
  • Can they afford my prices?
  • Can I easily access and contact them from my communication platforms?

Remember: It’s time to stop hunting for unicorns because that’s detrimental to your business’ success. Instead, start looking for the ones that do exist by establishing your expectations on reality.

To learn more about KONA’s Sales Training, Call Centre Training, Customer Service Training and Sales Management training in Sydney and around Australia, telephone us at 1300 611 288 or email us at info@kona.com.au.

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Are They Suspects or Prospects? (Infographic)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
As a salesperson, it can be frustrating to realise that the person you’re pitching to in a demo or sales call isn’t serious about the transaction. Worse, you just wasted all that time and effort to someone who wasn’t going to close the deal when you could’ve pursued someone else entirely and made a successful lead. When you are selling a product or service to a new client, they can fall into a specific type depending on their likelihood of buying from you. While marketers do vary on how many categories a new client can be classified under, two types are consistent with every list: suspect and prospect. Defining these two categories and knowing how to differentiate between the two can immensely help you and your sales team label leads in your sales funnel quickly and save precious time. Are They Suspects or Prospects - Infographic

Should Business Owners Get a Degree in Sales? (Infographic)

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
One common question that many aspiring entrepreneurs ask is if they should have a degree in sales in order to run a successful business. The truth is there is no definitive answer for that since it really depends on what stage of your career as an entrepreneur you are at. If you are just starting out in your business, and you are still quite young to have enough time to balance school and business, then a degree in sales can help you equip with the different methodologies which one cannot just immediately pick-up and implement through the day-to-day operations of the business. However, having a degree in sales is not a requirement and does not guarantee that you will be able to run a successful business. Many business owners still fail in their venture despite having multiple degrees in sales, management, and marketing. On the other hand, many notable entrepreneurs that never even earned a college degree have been able to establish successful global brands – just look at Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Should Business Owners Get a Degree in Sales? ( Infographic)

Focus on Who’s Important: Ways to Identify a Prospect from a Suspect

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
It is true that when you have a high quantity of prospects, you will never run out of people to share your opportunity and your products. However, in today’s increasingly competitive sales landscape, quality beats quantity, and so having a handful of high-quality prospects is preferred than having a bunch of low-quality leads that, at any chance, will never convert into a customer. Read on as we detail in this post what makes a quality prospect, and how to easily identify them from the haystack of low-quality “suspects” that exist in the market. Definition of Prospect: A lead which has a high probability of turning into a customer. A prospect can be an acquisition officer who is genuinely looking for an enterprise platform, or a man looking to buy a gift for his wife. They have real motivation to purchase and want to hear about your offer to make an actual purchase decision. Regardless of their motivation to buy, they still need to be convinced that your product is worth their investment. Definition of Suspect: Any person who shows the same interest as the prospect but does not have any means or intention to buy the products/services you are selling. A suspect can be an office employee who wants to impress their boss by presenting information about your solution, even if their boss does not need the solution in the first place. They can also be a website visitor who only wanted your premium content and are just sticking around to see what else you have for them.

Ways to Differentiate Prospects from Suspects

  1. Prospects Share Critical Information

On the other hand, a suspect is not looking to buy from you, which means they do not have to give you proprietary or personal information about them. If someone is genuinely looking for a solution, he or she will be willing to provide you with the details.

  1. Prospects Tell What They Need

Prospects have the genuine need for your help and will waste no time to get more information about the product/service you are selling just to address the issue at hand. Depending on the immediate nature of their need, they may even clear the schedule to set a sales demo.

  1. Prospects Have a Specific Acquisition Timeline

Another significant differentiator between a prospect and a suspect is their timeline. Prospects generally look to buy sooner rather than later. A suspect cannot tell when they will be ready to buy, and as such spending time working on that suspect can be a very expensive mistake. It is important to ask for your prospects early on and move them back to marketing if they need more time deciding.

  1. Prospects Know When to Make a Decision

Prospects know exactly what their need is all about, and the features to look for to satisfy that need. By asking the question “Have you made a purchase decision like this in the past and how did you go about it?”, you will be able to uncover better insights about them that will allow you to create a more effective sales proposal.

  1. Prospects Are the Decision Maker

If your contact keeps on referring to other people when talking about their company’s past purchase decisions, then there is a good chance that you are just talking to a suspect. As such, it is wise not to structure a good deal for a person if they are not in the position to make the final decision. If your potential customer ticks all of these boxes, then chances are they are a prospect. Now that you know how to differentiate prospects from suspects, you will now be able to increase your sales team’s productivity and improve your sales performance. If you need help in honing your salesforce’s prospecting skills or want to expand your knowledge by undergoing our Corporate Sales and Management Training program, email us today at info@kona.com.au or call us at 1300 611 288.

Sales Excuse # 3 – Our Price is too high!

Posted on | by Sienna Anderson
high-price-road-sign

In Sales Excuse #1 we looked at the common excuse of “No One is Buying”. In Sales Excuse #2 we looked at ways for sales people to improve their time management

In Sales Excuse #3, how often do your sales team say they didn’t make the sale because “Our price is too high? We are too expensive”, “Our competition is cheaper than us!”, “If we were cheaper we could sell more!”?

This is just another excuse where sales people focus on their own ‘3Ps’ of Product, Price and Problems rather than on the value they can add to customers.  There are some simple things we can all do to have quality conversations with our customers, which in turn, leads to better quality sales and repeat business.

At The KONA Group we train and coach Sales Teams every day that are looking to improve their results and when price is a common excuse for underperformance we recommend the following 3 insights as a starting point.

1. Have the right conversations.

Quality Conversations start with Quality Questions.  Asking interesting ‘High Value’ open questions that encourage your prospects and customers to talk about themselves and their business is critical. You want customers to value having a conversation with you, not look for a reason to get rid of you as early as possible, so how do you have these conversations? It’s easy really, you ask the right questions based on your customers Business, Market, Competition and Future…. and then you shut up and listen.

In meetings with customers and prospects your salespeople should only be talking 20% of the time. Listening means really listen, not just be quiet whilst waiting for your turn to speak.

2. Adding value to your customers BUSINESS is the key to make selling easy.

Adding value to an existing or potential customer is not just about selling your product or service. Often during a quality conversation with a customer many opportunities to add value will emerge and while some of these will involve your products and services, if you look at the non-product related challenges they face from a Business perspective, you will find more opportunities to add value.

Most businesses are bombarded with salespeople trying to flog them a product or a service regardless of their need however your Sales Team will be amazed at what happens when they start to have quality conversations focused on the customer’s Business rather than the 3Ps. Think rapport building on steroids!

3. Make it about the customer, even when you want it to be about you…

It is easy to say ‘Put the customer at the centre of everything your do’ but salespeople rarely do. It is not about you but rather is always about the customer, even when it really is about you.  The moment a customer or a prospect believes that you are only in it for yourself then TRUST melts away and you are back to a price based haggle.

Put your own self-interest to one side and focus on the customer, their organisation, their issues, their strategy and allow the opportunities to add value with your products and services to emerge.  You may even find that you never have to actually close the deal, your prospect may do it for you! At the end of the day, all else being equal, most customers will make a price-based decision.  It a salespersons job to make sure that all things are not equal.  

They need to be the difference, the X factor, the point of differentiation, and then their customers will buy from them, regardless of price!

 

Going forward: If Quality ‘non-product’ conversations are a challenge for your team then customised sales training and coaching WILL help your people to become more successful. Constantly ‘sharpening the saw’, as Stephen Covey puts it, is a critical component of being a sales professional.

So to discuss how we can design a customised sales training and coaching program for your organisation please contact the KONA Sales Performance Specialists via email at info@kona.com.au or call 1300 611 288.

Because Hope Is NOT a Sales Strategy

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Author – Garret Norris – https://www.linkedin.com/in/garretnorris/