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Competitive Advantage Ezine
Formerly Sales & Marketing Strategies and News Ezine
September 22, 2005 http://www.thecompetitiveadvantage.net
Lori Smedley, Editor lsmedley@douglaspublications.com
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CONTENTS:
* Ask the Expert: Three Ideas for Greater Sales Success, By Barry J. Farber
* Career Enhancement: Lose These Three Bad Speaking Habits
* Competitive Advantage: Benefit by Befriending the Competition
* Marketing Boomers: Consumers Turn the Tables on Vendors
* Sales Training/Management: Translate Training Into Improvement
* Web Marketers: Reach Out and Touch Customers—Online
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Ask the Expert
Three Ideas for Greater Sales Success
By Barry J. Farber

Successful selling requires more than a desire to make money or rise to the top. Success comes to you only when you combine product knowledge, professional expertise and personal confidence. What are you doing every day to improve your skills?

Your knowledge and commitment to learning provide the enthusiasm to sell with passion. The more you learn, the more clearly you picture what it takes to succeed, and the more excited you become to apply what you’ve learned. That translates into better service for your customers and more sales for you.

The more excited you are, the more you apply the things you learn, and the better you become at them. The better you become at them, the greater the service you provide your customers. Here are three ways to make that happen:

1. Keep your customers’ interests at heart. Selling is always about creating win-win situations. It doesn’t matter to your customers how excited you are about a new product or project unless your customers know what it means to them. Describe the situation to make them excited, too.
2. Increase your depth of knowledge. Learn as much as you possibly can about each customer’s business and business goals. How can your product—and your knowledge about that product and its applications—help that customer’s business grow? When you demonstrate how much you know, in terms of providing the best possible solutions to customers, you will earn greater credibility and increase your sales.
3. Learn to recognize success when it happens. Don’t hold out for an amazing event or a once-in-a-lifetime idea that will turn your customer’s organization around. The solution that seals the sale could be a small thing that makes one person’s job easier, such as how your product can help decrease the customer’s workload.

Sure, it’s a lot of fun to come up with a “big” solution. That delivers a great boost to the ego that’s easy to confuse with success. Remember: The “little” ideas often are more impressive: They’re solid and consistent, and those are the things that will keep your customers coming back for more.

Over the years, I’ve worked with highly successful people with careers that range from sports to science, education to entertainment. One common sentiment I hear from them all is that at the end of their lives, they’d like to look back and ask “How much did I learn, and how much did I serve others?”

Constant learning and constant action. We learn from our actions, and we act from our learning. One without the other suffers. With both, sales soar.

Barry Farber is the author of 12 Cliches of Selling and Why They Work (Workman Publishing). President of Livingston, N.J.-based Farber Training Systems Inc., he’s the nation’s top-rated speaker on sales and gaining access. Visit him on the Web at www.barryfarber.com.
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Career Enhancement
Lose These Three Bad Speaking Habits

Whenever you give a speech or presentation of any kind, you want to win over your audience. To do so, you must lose three bad habits forever: Never apologize, confess or make excuses. If you do, you are saying to your audience “Don’t expect a lot from me today because I’ll disappoint you.”

Here’s how to sidestep those speaking pitfalls:

• Avoid apologizing. Don’t say “I’m sorry I didn’t bring a sample, but I couldn’t arrange it on such short notice.” Instead, cast your comment in a positive light. Example: “I’m working on getting you a sample, and I can deliver it next week.”
• Stop confessing. Don’t say: “I’m so nervous” or “This is my first time speaking in public.” That only serves to increase the audience’s scrutiny of your performance. Instead, proceed with your well-rehearsed speech, knowing that nervousness is far more evident to you than to your audience.
• Drop the excuses. Don’t make excuses such as “I just found out about this presentation yesterday, so I didn’t have as much time to prepare as I would have liked.”  Instead, put your energy into delivering the best possible presentation, and then stand behind your performance. Tell yourself “I did the best job I could given the circumstances.”

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Competitive Advantage
Benefit by Befriending the Competition

Cozying up to the competition may seem counterintuitive, but a growing body of evidence seems to indicate that—at least in some cases—it works. Competing CEOs who are friends become more successful leaders of their companies.

Charles O’Hearn, CEO of Summit Educational Group, a Boston-based tutoring firm, found that his friendship with at least one competitor has boosted his company.

For the last 10 years O’Hearn has cultivated a friendship with Lisa Jacobson, the CEO of New York-based Inspirica, one of his competitors. While he doesn’t share every detail of his business, being buddies with Jacobson has given him a sounding board for problems and helped him get a handle on emerging business trends.

Jacobson is a good CEO, and O’Hearn sees that as a positive feature of their friendship. “I like playing with people who are better than me,” O’Hearn says. “That makes me a tougher competitor.” And, he figures, if Jacobson bests him at something, at least he can call to find out how she did it.

O’Hearn and Jacobson may be on to something. Kaihan Krippendorff, a professor of entrepreneurship at Florida International University believes that competition isn’t the name of the game. Krippendorff analyzed 400 business case studies and found that business people who felt they were in business to knock off the competition were less successful than those who sought instead to maximize profits or increase corporate value.

So keep your business secrets close, but remember: A friendly competitor may just be able to give you insights that an “enemy” never could.
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Marketing Boomers
Consumers Turn the Tables on Vendors

Marketers take note: When it comes to data collection, the information flow has been pretty much all one way—from consumers to companies that offer courtesy cards, frequent buyer clubs and other discount cards. But soon the data flow will go both ways, as handheld data-collection devices hit the market, forever changing the way buyers make decisions.

With the ability to collect information at the point of sale about corporate social responsibility, environmental stewardship and fiscal responsibility, as well as pricing, product reliability and customer satisfaction, buyers will hold companies to an even higher standard than they do today. Purchasing decisions will become more sophisticated and less predictable.

Marketing messages will need to be even more carefully crafted and even more targeted. Marketing and advertising will also need to be more transparent, as truth in advertising will take on a whole new meaning once buyers are able to instantly determine whether a product delivers on a promised feature or benefit.

Handheld devices aren’t on the market yet, but within five years such devices will provide consumers with unprecedented amounts of information.

The possibilities for such devices are endless. For example, shoppers who are concerned about the environment, labor practices or the degree to which a company is involved in addressing social issues could scan the product’s bar code and instantly learn the manufacturer’s track record on each issue. Consumers might also search for information about hiring practices, customer satisfaction and safety ratings.

“The only requirement would be an accessible database of pertinent information,” writes Direct, an Ezine serving the direct marketing industry. “But that’s not likely to be a problem. Without a doubt, thousands of databases would be put together for consumers to use.” There already exist many databases to which the devices offer convenient, user-friendly access.

Eventually, making corporate information available to consumers will be accepted practice. Companies that are not forthcoming will find it increasingly difficult to attract and keep customers. “Handhelds are going to shift the balance of power,” writes Direct. “With these devices in hand, consumers will be able to provide us with an instantaneous referendum on the ways our companies operate.”

Bottom line: Putting more information—and therefore power—in the hands of consumers might seem risky, but in the end, companies will benefit. Occasional buyers will become frequent buyers, and companies will quickly know whether a new product is being accepted or rejected by the marketplace.
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Sales Training/Management
Translate Training Into Improvement

You invest a lot of money in training employees. Protect your investment by asking them to take these steps to make the most of the sessions they attend:

• Come with a plan. Encourage your employees to spend time thinking about what they want to take away from the training session. Developing a list of three to six overall goals will help them focus on the training’s potential value.
• Get to the session early. Employees should try to meet the trainer and communicate their interest in the program.
• Sit near the front. They will get more involved. And they will hear better.
• Question and comment. The direction in which the leader takes the session will reflect employees’ interests more fully.
• Leave employee responsibilities in good hands. Members should make advance arrangements with teammates so they’re free to concentrate on the training and not their day-to-day duties.

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Web Marketers
Reach Out and Touch Customers—Online

Pleasing customers online requires a tricky balancing act. On one hand, you want to operate efficiently to contain costs. But customers also want to know there’s a helpful, knowledgeable person out there in cyberspace who will answer questions, give advice and guarantee satisfaction with an online purchase.

While most customers expect prompt, attentive service in person and on the phone, they’re especially insistent on speed when they transact business on the Web. They want quick answers to e-mail inquiries, a toll-free number to contact a live person and frequent updates on the status of their order.

Most executives who run companies that provide online service understand the need for speed in customer satisfaction. But with the technological capacity of the Internet at their fingertips, they may lean too heavily on automation as the backbone of their service delivery.

For example, some service reps are encouraged to use “auto-responders” to reply to customers’ e-mails (with messages such as “I’m out of the office today but will call you Monday” or “I check my e-mail every morning at 8, so I’ll reply personally at that time”). But these auto-replies are no substitute for giving customers instant information via real-time human interaction.

Show trust with online customers. If Web shoppers want to exchange products, for instance, consider mailing the replacement immediately rather than waiting to receive their return.  

“Customers love to be trusted and they will honor the deal,” says Thomas Bergman, customer service manager at the Ear Plug SuperStore (www.earplugstore.com).  “Though I expected to lose money on this policy when I began, I have never been stiffed on a return.”

Design a Customer-Friendly Web Site
An appealing home page can make a great first impression on a customer. Most people who surf online will skip sifting through a cluttered, overwhelming site. They seek simplicity, clarity and reassurance that your company is credible and committed to service.

Create a Web site that highlights your company’s commitment to great service with these tips:

• Use headlines. Glance at your local newspaper’s front page. Notice the banner across the top with concise headlines drawing your eye to various articles below. You can use the same approach to welcome customers to your Web site. For example, when you visit the home page for Zenith National Insurance Corp. (www.thezenith.com), you can click on “The 7 Myths of Workers’ Comp” to learn about Zenith’s service.
• Create a clutter-free zone. Customers appreciate a tidy, well-organized Web site. Give them four or five choices to drill down for more information. If you burden them with a long menu listing dozens of prompts, you may drive them away. On Southwest Airlines’ home page (www.southwest.com), there’s plenty of white space and a photo of smiling employees. Customers aren’t swamped with reams of text or other flashy, overstimulating features.
• Provide contact information. One of the biggest traps that undermine online service is when companies make it hard for customers to obtain more information. Provide a “Contact Us” link on the home page and on every page. Realize that some visitors may stumble upon your Web site through a “back door,” so tell them how to contact you on every page, saving them from extra clicks to learn your phone number, fax number and e-mail and postal addresses.
• Update your Web content. Alert customers to when the site’s content was last updated. If they arrive at your home page and see “Last updated October 1, 2002,” they will question whether you maintain an accurate, timely site.

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Competitive Advantage Ezine, formerly Sales and Marketing Strategies & News Ezine, is published by Douglas Publications LLC.
Visit us at http://www.thecompetitiveadvantage.net.
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