Bill Fitzpatrick has written several articles which we hope you'll find both informational and inspirational. Bill is constantly creating more informational material and as they come available they will be placed on this page for your viewing. Please check back periodically for more articles and inspirational tips !

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Area Canvassing

Effective Prospecting

Teach Your Customer to Say YES!!

Creative Marketing

Area Canvassing

A Fun Way to Prospect

Ever thought about how to find people to whom you can make a sales presentation? Well if you've been in the sales profession for more than an hour, it probably absorbs a good bit of your time. Most sales people have a positive attitude and truly believe that if they can get in front of a potential customer, they have a strong chance of making a sale.

Selling is a tough business and for those involved in outside personal sales, a large amount of time is spent in acquiring leads on potential customers. Some companies make it easy by running an effective advertising campaign that produces leads, or by aggressive telemarketing programs. But, these programs are expensive, the leads may be of questionable value, and in some cases, the company may even charge for the leads to defray the overall expense.

The basic rule of sales is that you have to talk to enough people (not everyone will buy), they have to be the right kind of people (they must have the need and the authority to buy), and you have to tell them your story (you have to present the features of your product) in order to be successful. How you develop those leads is basically up to you.

Most sales people I know tend to look at leads produced by others as a gift, rather than as a primary source of business. Highly successful sales people have developed their own lead production system and use it very effectively. The methods vary, but the result is the same, a steady supply of potential customers. In my experience training sales people, this message has come through over and over again. Once you positively identify the profile of your customer, then you have to figure out how to make contact and to obtain an appointment to present your product.

The best source of leads would obviously be a list of names of everyone in your town who has an absolute need for your product, is qualified to buy it, and can afford to buy it from you. If you were selling stethoscopes to doctors and nurses, the first part is easy. Go to the yellow pages of the telephone directory and get the number of every medical facility, doctor and nurse in town. Unfortunately you've only solved the first part of the problem. You know where they are, but now you have to figure out how to get through the layers of "interceptors" who will try to insulate your prospects from you. These "interceptors" are the receptionists, secretaries, appointment schedulers and other administrators who get in your way. You could get sick and schedule a lot of medical appointments in order to get in the room with a prospect, but that might get expensive and time consuming. So this is the point where the true sales person earns their pay.

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Effective Prospecting

The Key to Your Success

It has been said that successful people develop the habits of doing those things that unsuccessful people choose not to do. This theory is especially true in evaluating the success of sales people.

My experience in recruiting, training and leading sales people bears this out. The most successful people I have ever worked with developed strong habits they followed day after day. For many, this habit involved prospecting or finding more people to tell their story to.

An acquaintance of mine who has been highly successful in personal sales as well as sales management really amplifies this rule when he tells me there really is a secret to success in sales. It involves three parts and goes like this: You have to see the people; you have to see the people; and you have to see the people. If you will do that you can't help but be successful. That's all well and good, but let's face facts. In order to see the people, first you have to find them.

Ask any group of sales people which step in the sales cycle they find most challenging, (and the least desirable) and you will be sure to hear the word "prospecting" from a large percentage of those responding. Simply stated, many consider the task of prospecting "drudge" work and not a lot of fun. It involves the greatest potential for rejection of any step in the sales cycle and is the single most significant reason people leave the profession for other less stressful positions. Every sales person I have ever met is positively convinced that if they can get face to face with a prospect, they can make a sale.

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Teach Your Customer to Say YES!!

Resolving Objections

Many new sales people dread the point in the sales cycle where they ask for the order and the customer says no. In many cases this comes as a real surprise. After all, as you made an inspired presentation, your customer(s) were right there with you. They smiled when you smiled, they laughed when you laughed and they nodded their heads at the appropriate times. So what happened? Well, usually what happened was that the sales person never really answered all of the questions in the mind of the customer. The presentation may have been great, but the signals the customer was sending were merely those of being polite.

Objections should be sought out and resolved throughout any presentation. This allows the sales person to judge how the sale is going and to assess the buying motivation of the customer as each feature of the product or service is explained. Some sales trainers describe this process as "taking the customer's temperature", or "trial closing", and each of these terms describe the process fairly well. I like to call it "teaching the customer to say YES!". I feel if I can get the customer into the habit of answering yes to a series of questions throughout the presentation, when the final question to buy comes, the result will be very predictable.

This process also allows me to determine if I'm going in the right direction and filling the customers real need. For example, in selling a financial services product I could be focusing on the ability of the product to build wealth, when in reality what the buyer is looking for is income protection. That can be a big difference in finally closing the sale if I haven't answered an unspoken question in the buyers mind. He or she may not see the fulfillment of their need in my product and without telling me, decide to shop around to find something more suitable to their real needs.

So how difficult is this whole process? Well, actually, it's very easy to master. It involves being a good listener and it also involves tailoring your presentation to stop at specific points throughout to let the customer talk. It also involves rehearsing your presentation to not only present the features of the product, but also to develop a series of questions that will usually elicit a "yes" answer.

Want to learn more? Sign up now for the online course, "Ask for the Order"

Creative Marketing

Thinking Outside the Box

This article is not intended to teach you how to improve your business. It is also not going to teach you how to generate more leads or more traffic. What I hope it will do is to suggest some things you need to think about to develop your own business. Things you need to be doing to ensure your own success. Because in essence, regardless of your position in your company or business, you must be your own marketing director and your own marketing department. In this whole process, you’ve got to be pro-active and not reactive. Further, whatever will work for one business, might not necessarily work for another. Your challenge is to find what works for you.

To begin with let’s distinguish between marketing and selling. Marketing means making your potential customer aware of your product or service, and creating the five key ingredients of ATTENTION, INTEREST, DESIRE, CONVICTION AND ACTION in order to develop sales opportunities for you. Selling on the other hand means demonstrating your product or service to a customer, resolving their objections and asking for the order.

My personal experience is that lots of people have extraordinary skills in Developing, operating, or producing a product, but many of these very talented people still think that marketing means stopping for a loaf of bread and some milk on the way home.

Developing a successful marketing program means that your challenge is to get your product or service in front of enough people. The problem is that they have to be the right kind of people, and you have to make sure they hear or see your message. But all too often today, many business owners think that all that has to be done to be successful is to open the door, put up an attractive sign and run an ad or two in the newspaper. Unfortunately, that only works sometimes.

I talked with a small business owner in an onsite service industry a short time ago. He was very frustrated. He said to me, “You know, I’ve already visited my Competition and tried to compare our two businesses. I have a much more attractive facility, my prices are not only competitive, but in some cases, lower than theirs are, and with I offer a better selection.”

“And yet”, he said, “They are doing twice the business as me. I don’t know what the problem is. I run ads and I have an internet web site, and I have very classy brochures, what can be wrong?”

What’s wrong is that his ads have not been in the right places and his brochures are kept in his facility and only given to new customers when they show up. What’s wrong is that the public, his potential customers, don’t know anything about his terrific facility. They simply don’t know he’s there.

If you'd like to learn more about how to expand your own business, sign up today for the online course, "Ask for the Order" and begin thinking outside the box.

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© 2004 William G. Fitzpatrick. Contact Sales Motivation Solutions for permission to reprint this article in local publications.