People buy from people. Say it three times. Say it to yourself every morning. Don’t forget it. It is a mantra that has to be remembered when trying to sell your products and services, even over the web.

Too many business owners and sales people try to sell their product or service, neglecting the fact that their customer is a person. In fact, the customer is a person who has feelings, influences and a mind of their own. They want to be connected with, and to trust and believe the person from which they are buying.

Think about it from this perspective, all things being equal, when you go to buy things, don’t you prefer to buy from the nicer person? The person who stops and listens to your needs and helps to tailor your solution? Of course you do, and so does your customer. Sure, you can build good processes and great products, and strive to reduce your cost of sale with operational streamlining but be careful it doesn’t reduce your connection with the customer. A connected customer delivers much more to a business than one-off revenue.

Too often, the sales person races in with their pitch and looks to close the deal quickly and hopes to leave with a contract in hand. Often, there is no effort to build a relationship, they are just looking to close a pitch. However, if they focused on closing the relationship and building a connection with the person, they might find that not only do they win their much anticipated sale, they also gain word of mouth buzz and other potential sales connections that this new-found friend can bring to them. They earn trust and commitment from their audience with their quality of relationship building.

And, it doesn’t matter what medium you use to sell either.

Why do you think some websites succeed in converting sales better than others? Additionally, why do some telesales professionals manage to hook you in every time and convince you that you really do need their urgent offer? The answer is simple; because they sell into their customers’ listening and build a relationship over and above a sale.

In sharing some of this knowedge on where the marketing world is moving I would love to share this video. If you are only just recognising the power of social media, I urge you to watch this video and see for yourself the impact it is really having. Enough to make you stand up and take notice. Honestly – watch it! It will only be 4 minutes out of your life, but it should change your perception of the evolution of media if you havent already! Tell me what you think…

Is your business made up of minders, finders or grinders? And what is the ratio of each? In today’s fast moving economy it is critical to have and appreciate all three personality types, especially in a professional services business.

The theory behind finder, minder and grinder personality types as part of your team is not a new one, but a pertinent one when looking at how to operate and grow effectively.

Your finders are the people who lead the business development for your firm, bringing in new business, forging new relationships and up-selling existing customers in a dynamic way to generate revenue and “feed” your business.

Your minders are your overseers. These are the people that make the ship run smoothly, managing delivery of outcomes, ensuring things get done. These are your operations people, supervisors and managers.

Your grinders are the ones who get the work done. These people are the cogs of a business, turning out outcomes and providing services.

Each role is absolutely critical to the success of a company and they all think that they are the most important. Without finders you would have no new business coming in the door, and no new projects for your team to work on. Without minders you would miss your deadlines and fail to monitor and achieve your profitability and success. And without grinders, nothing real would ever get delivered to your clients.

There is one rare type of professional to look out for in a services business however. They are they type that can carry all three roles and flip between them as required, with ease. If you find one of these, be sure value it for the quality jewel that it is.

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The real questions are however, do businesses truly recognize and properly rate the critical importance of their sales people; and, do businesses ensure that their sales people are skilled and motivated enough to sell in a more than ordinary fashion?

It’s hard to find any business in the world that doesn’t have something to sell and doesn’t want to make money and succeed. It doesn’t matter whether the company is selling services or products, if they don’t have sales people who “feed” the business, the business won’t exist. So, as you can imagine, motivating, training and energizing the salesforce should be as critical to a business as advertising and promotion. Without a strong sales force, a business can’t close a sale and book revenue.

With that said, here are some tips to help motivate and empower a collective salesforce.

Give your team the power of positive feedback.

Executives are fooling themselves if they think a sales force will work forever on financial motivation alone, but that’s simply not true. Most sales people are a personality type that requires feedback. They emotionally connect with their customers, peers and networks, constantly seeking approval, satisfaction and achievement.

The business owner or manager’s role is to support and reinforce the efforts of a motivated sales person. Without realizing it, a manager can drain the motivation right out of a team. A manager can strip away motivation them by creating a stressful, negative work environment.

Guide and support them in building their own approach

Many people “fall” into sales as a career, finding themselves to be good at it early on. As they improve their techniques and confidence, they gradually work their way higher and higher up the food chain of a business until they reach the ceiling and seek entrepreneurial opportunity. 

Few people who sell well have undergone formal training, instead learning and growing “on the job”. They are hungry, and constantly seek new ways to achieve success. So I encourage you to offer them the opportunity to build their own pitch and in turn their own success.  In support of this, consider putting in place some training options that make it more comfortable and easier for them to sell their own pitch, because they own it.

Listen to them

Sales professionals face off with customers everyday. They are the people at the front of your business. They are the people that you should ask first when considering ideas for a new product or service stream, well before you start designing it.

Too often businesses think they know better than the person facing the customer, and push products that they think will fit a market down to a sales person without consultation. The thing they forget is that their sales person has the most valuable insight available into your customer’s values and behavior — if you can’t ask the customer directly, consider asking your team member’s advice on marketing, promotion and product positioning. After all, they talk to the customers every day.

Over the next 30 days I am going to build myself a blog actively http://stretchyourself.wordpress.com – this requires that I produce a lot of hopefully good quality content (my goal is one piece per day), and share my personal and professional message with the world.  I am doing this for two reasons:

1.  I have a lot of people telling me that Social Media is the new marketing tool of the future – that all of my clients should use it to promote their companies, products and key people individually.  But do I really believe it works for humble Brisbanites and other Aussies to build local brand and benefit their personal growth - hmmmm…. tough question…  So I am doing this experiment to PROVE it to myself that there is (or isn’t) a point in going on the journey and putting in the effort. 

After all… how can I ask my clients to spend time and money building the complex social media strategies I read about if I am not prepared to invest the effort in my own personal brand. 

2.  Yes I’ll admit- for a while now I have wanted to build my own personal brand to a stronger place, and have my friends and associates know more about what I do, and who I do it for and why it is so important to me.   Too often we live in comfortable apathy of friendship, knowing a little about our friends, and happily sharing everyday experiences that leave out some of the most important personality-defining parts of our lives – our work!  Its easier that way.  Easier peasier….   

At the risk of being struck down I am going to step out of the easier shadow and “have a go”….   So by building this social network – I can be the guinea pig of our community – and you can either watch me drop exhausted and hungry to the floor of the spinning wheel in the cage, or you can help me to survive and grow by feeding me comments, feedback and networks and helping me succeed at social networking. Then, hopefully you can smile and know whether it works, and whether Aussies are conditioned to be social networkers. 

The reason it is called Social Networking, is because it requires people to engage with each other for it to work.  So again, I ask you to help me, but this time I am going to show you how you can:

a.  Please consider subscribing to my blog – it is about real life marketing, sales and business development, small business, large business, professional services, personal branding and making marketing work for you.  I’ll try not to bore you to death, and in about a month or so, I will drop back to a more moderate authoring pace, once it is up and running (fingers crossed). 

b.  Please consider providing me with comments and feedback – sharing your thoughts with me and our networks and community.  Positive and negative please. 

c.  Please consider contributing your thoughts to my blog.  Your marketing and real life experiences – I would love to set up pages for others to contribute in the vein of real life marketing and business experiences, best practise lessons, ways through the maze of marketing and selling well… tricks of the trade even! 

d.  Please please please would you consider linking me to your networks, and sharing my plight to build a social network.  I promise, the experiment of daily blogging wont go on forever, its just a furious starting phase.  Retweet my messages, share my stories with your facebook connections,  join my worlds of Social Networking on Linked in, Facebook and Twitter, be a part of the web that makes social networking SOCIAL. 

e.  Guide me to places that are worthy of connecting – for my own interest and my clients’ interest – I would love to know of places to find great content, and sources of quality information for my clients.  I aspire to build a web of resources, tools and information, to write for other publications and grow as a person - this is only the start of the journey!!!

e.  If you want to – come along for the ride – set up a blog and we’ll go on the journey together.  A couple of my friends have indicated an interest in taking this path, the best way to learn and grow is by experience and what better way to stay motivated than to work together. 

f.  Promise me this – that you will smile knowingly every time you see another piece of my noise on your facebook page and understand that I am undertaking this as an experiment – and hopefully you can see value in the experiment at the end of a month or two… maybe it will prove or disprove the value of such a journey in the future and save one of my clients or friends a whole lot of misspent effort. 

I thank you implicitly for your support in this experiment.  I will let you know how it is going from time to time – if you are interested.

Many people I meet as a marketer ask me how quickly their marketing will lead to sales and ultimately, revenue. I reply by asking them what their time to sale is and what their level of awareness is within their target markets? I also like to understand how many happy customers or clients they have created over time. Occasionally I get some puzzled looks. Whenever I do, I offer this simple Marketing lesson.

Have you ever heard of the principle that one satisfied customer can bring you up to 10 more customers in a shorter amount of time than you can build them all by yourself? Well, let me show you why:

There is five stages to building a customer from no-awareness to full blown evangelist. Get it right and you’ll only have to go through the initial campaigns once or twice to build the initial base of satisfied customers extolling your virtues.

This is the foundation I build many marketing campaigns on, ensuring I have strategies to take a potential customer on the journey through each stage. 

Awareness: You must make a customer aware of your product or service category, your business and its capability. At this point of the process, lets face it, many potential targets are largely disinterested or indifferent as they can’t see a need for your product or service in their life much of the time. This step is a hard, often cold part of the sales process, full of apathy and rejection.

Interest: Something happens in a potential target’s life or business for them to move from basic awareness phase and raise their interest in your offering. A target cannot get to interest if you haven’t raised awareness of your brand and offering or capability with them — except through step five: satisfaction. This is the point of a process where we would qualify a target as a warm lead and nurture them carefully to build their interest into hungry desire. 

Desire: This is the hottest and most volatile point of the marketing and sales process – if you can take a customer on the journey and identify when they have clearly hit the desire phase of the sales process, then all you have to do is close the deal. But be warned, at this point you have done all of the hard work to build a client’s awareness and interest in your product or service. If your product or service is not desireable enough (or your competiton is more convincing at this point) then you will lose the sale to someone else and all your effort will be wasted.

Action: This is the point of the sales process where a customer parts with their money. At this point the decision is already made and you have no influence over the outcome. If you have built awareness of your top-notch product or service and managed to hold on throughout the process constantly nurturing your lead with care, I would hope that you would be closing your sale and booking your commission here.

Now, the linchpin:

SATISFACTION: The reason businesses strive for satisfied customers and not just paying customers is because a satisfied customer takes the initial step of raising awareness out of your equation for the next round of promotion. A satisfied customer sits around with their connections and makes a recommendation to their peer at a time when their peer is interested and has a need thereby cutting the hard, cold marketing out of your cycle.

The sales cycle is intrinsic to every business. You won’t invest in marketing and be rewarded overnight, but if you understand the process you are investing in, it can be a much more rewarding journey, as you wont be tempted to give up half way there.

http://technorati.com/business/gurus/article/7-tips-to-get-your-business1/

Whether you believe the economy is about to double dip, or fight on and surpass last year’s sigh of relief, there is one thing for certain: consumer confidence appears to be on the rise and core industries are once again gaining momentum. Building activity is expected to reach new euphoric highs in most states this year, and the resources industry is back at the helm of the national soapbox. Once key national companies start making agressive decisions, peripheral supporting service industries (ie engineering; legal; architecture; project management etc) always see growth as a follow through. So, how do you capitalize on emerging opportunities and put yourself in the sweet spot for growth?

TIP 1: Review the segments primed to move in your target markets and select the highest priority that is the most beneficial to your business.

TIP 2: Evaluate the quality of your existing relationships in high growth sectors: Are they all you need to support your growth in these emerging high priority areas? Do you need to extend your customer-centric relationships? How many people do you know that influence customer decisions in your new priority sectors?

TIP 3: Consider how your business profile and key personnel are positioned in these industries. Take a long, hard, critical look at that ways that you can reach out to your ideal target markets in dynamic ways that demonstrate your ability to deliver over and above the market standards. Ensure your business has the tools for communicating in the new economy and your staff have the skills and confidence to lead you out into the market. If they dont, create and implement rigorous train programs.

TIP 4: Scan and monitor the competition. Are you demonstrating your points of difference and USP effectively? Are you drawing contrast with your competition or trying to look the same?

TIP 5: Do you have partners and affiliates that can support and assist your growth through connection, co-operation and co-beneficial relationship into your ideal markets. Don’t be selfish at this point – reciprocal partnership is a much more satisfactory working arrangement as everyone is energised from success because everyone benefits.

TIP 6: Once you’ve taken the good hard look, take some good hard action — identify targets, build plans to reach those ideal markets with your profile, capability and USP. Train your team, develop your tools and get yourself some deadlines for action and implementation.

TIP 7: Follow through. The biggest failing of well considered professional services marketing is the “failure to act.” We all like billing hours and making money, but dont let it take your eye off building marketshare in growth markets for the future.

The last thing anyone wants is to wake up one day and find they are working in last year’s dying market, struggling with a declining industry, facing change on the back foot. If this is indeed the new recovery, then take heed that there will be winners and losers. Count yourself on the winning team, and take your marketing medicine early so you can catch the biggest, juiciest worms in the unturned soil of the last 18 months of fear and disbelief.

1.  A realisation that previous or existing clients have moved on and will no longer provide business to your company combined with the sick feeling you get when you look at your pipeline. 

2.  A desire to grow your business and move away from the sameness, and gradual decline that comes from marketing neglect and/or a focus on delivery of service or “billable hours”.

3.  A dynamic and driven approach to step up and grow a business into a perceived opportune market segment, or patch. 

Two of these realisations are awakenings, driven by neglect of marketing, the other is a step forward in an existing growth strategy.  Ever taken the time to think about where your strategy sits on the panic scale?

But what is the value of customer service in this vein?  Is it any surprise that the telecommunications industry as we know it is in decline?  That customers are seeking any way around and through the industry that does not require dealing with large, incumbent companies? 

After all, these are the companies that are keeping telephony and telephone-based sales and marketing alive.  If they cant do it well, why should anyone expect to use a telephone to provide service effectively? 

Telephones still lie at the central heart of real communication.  If you cant sit in front of someone to communicate with them, then telephone remains the next best thing in my opinion. 

Email, on the other hand is a tool… and should be used as such.  Too many people expect to use it to convey feeling and emotion and all they manage to convey is apathy and lazyness.   Email is great at conveying requirements, actions, deliverables, needs or schedules, hopeless at connecting, emoting and making people understand the emotion behind your conviction. 

 I urge you today to reach out to another person and resist the urge to take the easy path.  Sponsor my errant telecommunications company, despite their failings and use the device that connects REAL people far more than the Internet or the email ever can.  Pick up the phone and arrange to meet someone face to face.  Reach out to another human being in the face of building your business, friendship or circle of activity, dont just pass them by, too lazy to really communicate. 

The telephone company might be dying a slow and painful death by lack of service, but dont let your friends and business connections die of the same disease.