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    The Portable Sales Coach
    The Portable Sales Coach
    The Portable Sales Coach
    Ebook158 pages2 hours

    The Portable Sales Coach

    By Lance Osborne

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    About this ebook

    Time is money -- which means you're pouring money down the drain when you spend your time on low-percentage selling strategies.

    How many times have you cold-called someone with no expectation that they'd have any interest in your pitch? How many times have you had to crowbar your way into someone's office to make a presentation? How many deals have you poured hours into, knowing that they were doomed from the start?

    Don't just work hard -- work smart. Read this book for the high-percentage plays in sales that will take your game to the next level. Discover how to:
    • Craft a cold call your market wants to hear
    • Get more appointments from fewer cold calls
    • Get more sales from fewer appointments
    • Find segments of your market that no one else is selling to
    • Figure out which of your customers are making you money and which are costing you money
    • Stop wasting time on people who aren't going to buy from you
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBPS Books
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781927483367
    The Portable Sales Coach
    Author

    Lance Osborne

    Lance Osborne is Founder and Chairman of the Lannick Group of Companies, a successful recruitment firm specializing in professional accountants. Over his 30-year career he has developed a commonsense approach to sales that anyone can put to work right away. Many of the people Lance has trained have gone on to become top performers in the industry.

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      Book preview

      The Portable Sales Coach - Lance Osborne

      INTRODUCTION

      SALES IS ACTUALLY A PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD PROPOsition:

      Identify someone who’s in the market for your product or your service, and

      Persuade them to buy it from you.

      Most books about sales concentrate on the persuasion component of selling. The sell like me books contain sections on How to Get Past the Gatekeepers and scripts and tips on Building Rapport so you can Connect with Your Prospect and turn him or her into a client. This may all be good stuff, but there’s a reason that persuasion is the second part of sales. You can be the best salesperson in the world, but if the person you’re pitching isn’t in the market for what you’re selling, all those compelling arguments and closing techniques aren’t going to get you the sale. On the other hand, even if you’re brand new to sales, you stand a pretty good chance of closing the deal if you happen on a guy whose pants are on fire and you sell buckets of water.

      I’ve spent more than 25 years selling and training people how to sell. I can tell you the best salespeople are not the ones with the most compelling pitches and personalities. Forget all that I can sell anything to anybody malarkey—that’s not what defines a successful salesperson. The most successful salespeople know how to get in front of the people who want to hear from them and they stay in front of the people who want to buy from them.

      If you’re new to sales and you went for a few beers with a group of successful salespeople, you might be surprised by what they talk about when they get down to telling war stories. They won’t be bragging about talking someone who wasn’t even on the market into a big sale. They’ll be talking about how many (or few) cold calls it takes for them to get a meeting with a potential client. And they won’t be congratulating themselves on the big deals they managed to close. They’ll more likely be deconstructing the instances where they wasted time on deals that were never going to happen in the first place.

      Successful salespeople don’t talk about how hard they work. They talk about how smart they work—how they get the best possible returns on the time and energy they invest in selling.

      That’s what I’m going to show you in this book—how to get the best possible returns from all your hard work. You don’t need to change how you sell. You don’t have to work any harder than you do right now. You just need to spend more time with the prospects who could and should turn into customers. This may sound like an obvious, even simplistic statement. But think about how many cold calls you’ve made where you had little or no expectation that the person you were calling would be interested in what you were selling. Think about how many deals you’ve poured time and effort into, knowing the odds were against them ever turning into sales.

      Up to now, everyone’s been telling you sales is a numbers game. And they’re right—it is. But it’s not just about quantity of numbers. It’s about quality of numbers. Successful selling is about percentages.

      It starts with figuring out the people you should be selling to in the first place. Are you calling the names on that list in front of you because you have good reason to believe they might need your product? Or are you calling them because this just happens to be the list your manager handed you to call?

      There may be an infinite number of names in your market, but you don’t have time to call them all. You just want to call the relative few who might be in the market at the time you’re calling. If you’re calling people who you know have a 1 in 10 chance of being in the market for your product, you are going to make a lot more sales than the guy calling people with a 1 in 100 chance of being in the market for his product.

      Cold calling gets you in front of the potential customer, but that’s only half the story. A prospect is just someone who’s in the market for the kind of product or service you’re selling. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to buy from you. They might buy from a competitor; they might decide to defer the purchase; their financing might fall through; or they might just change their mind.

      There are many ways for the sale not to happen. Any one prospect can turn into a great customer or a big waste of time. The trick is to spend most of your time with the prospects who are likely to turn into clients and as little time as possible with the prospects who aren’t.

      My experience in sales comes from the world of recruitment. The company I founded and operated for more than 25 years specializes in recruiting professional accountants and accounting executives. This is a very specialized sell. The sales staff has to have a good understanding of the principles and technical details associated with accounting in order to secure the sale and then come up with the appropriate recruitment strategy.

      I didn’t hire career salespeople for my company. Why? Because I knew they wouldn’t be able to adequately service the sales they generated unless they happened to have an accounting degree. So for the most part I hired accountants and then taught them how to sell.

      Unsurprisingly, accountants are very logical, analytical people who tend to base their activities and decisions on hard facts and cold data. They’re typically wary of sales pitches. Even accountants who decide to get into sales themselves tend to be leery of the persuasion elements of selling. You might think it would be difficult to teach people like this how to sell, but it wasn’t. It was surprisingly easy because I focused my training more on the science of sales and less on the art of selling (pitches and persuasion). And much of the science of sales lies in understanding and playing the percentages of selling properly.

      I taught my salespeople to evaluate all of their activities by the yardstick of the probability that the activity would result in an imminent or future sale. I told them, if activity A has a 20 percent chance of a positive result and activity B a 3 percent chance, they should totally ignore activity B and concentrate on activity A. I encouraged them, when they ran out of high-percentage prospects, to spend their time researching and planning for more high-quality prospects instead of wasting time chasing low-percentage prospects.

      They didn’t have to be great at the persuasion component of selling to be successful (although everyone did learn this side of sales eventually). They just needed to follow a sales methodology that (a) put them in front of people who wanted to hear from them in the first place and then (b) kept them in front of the prospects who were most likely to turn into clients.

      Nothing in this methodology is rocket science, but it does take a lot of planning, preparation, and discipline for it to be effective. Fortunately, accountants take to planning, preparation, and discipline like ducks to water, so it was high-fives all around.

      You’ll notice as you read this book that I make virtually no effort to motivate you. I don’t exhort you to try harder, work more, get your act together, or get your ass in gear. In over 25 years of managing salespeople, I’ve never been able to motivate anybody. Not one. In over 25 years! And I like to think I’m an inspiring kind of guy when I put my mind to it. Sure, I’ve been able to stimulate sales activity when necessary. And I’ve delivered countless pep talks over the years. Like most people in sales management, I’m a pretty effective wielder of the old carrot and stick. But I’ve learned that although I can influence people, I can’t motivate them.

      Neither can anyone else, by the way. Not your boss, not your spouse, not the keynote speaker at your next sales conference. Only you can motivate you.

      This book contains tools, tips, and techniques that will make you more successful at sales, but only if you actually put them to work. You were motivated enough to buy this book, but it will take a whole other level of motivation for you to put its ideas into practice.

      Some of what I talk about is obvious (in an it’s obvious now that I’ve thought about it kind of way), some of it is unconventional (see chapter 11: Report to Your Boss, but Work for Yourself), but all of it is common sense ("spend more time with people who’ll probably buy from me?

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