Stuck In A Rut

If You Are Ready, I Can Pull You Out

Ruts are caused when the same route is travelled over and over. It may be your rut or the rut that everyone follows. You feel safe. You have been there before.

There lies the problem. If you want things to change, you have to get out of the rut.

Today, I am specifically talking about our ability to get more business. There are only two ways to grow reveneue in business. Develop new business or sell more to our existing customers. Sounds simple, right? I am finding that our ability to accomplish either of these are limited by comfort zones. It is easier to stay in the rut. We ask people that we are comfortable with to buy more. When they say no, hey we gave it a shot.

If you are in any type of direct sales and you are not growing your revenue, it is a safe bet that if you analyzed your asks over a period of weeks, over 80 percent of your proposals will be to less than 20 percent of your overall account list AND your prospect to ask conversion ratio is worse than that.

If this makes you a little uncomfortable or if your first reaction is nu uh, that's ok. I have a tow chain hooked on and I am trying to pull you out of the rut. It's not always easy out of the rut. It is just much more profitable.

A Must Read For ANYONE That Cares If Advertising Works

How I Win the Ad Wars

Frankly, I Cheat. You Can, Too.

I became an advertising salesman so I could buy groceries. A college dropout with no financial safety net, I installed aluminum guttering on houses during the day and changed reel-to-reel tapes in an automated radio station at night. Our format was radio preachers who needed your money to pay for the airtime we sold them.We were the number 23 station in a city of 23 stations. Our best ratings book showed us with a cumulative weekly audience of 18,000 people in a city of 1.3 million. We had between 400 and 800 people listening at any given moment. That sounded like a lot of people to me. One day I asked the manager why our station played no ads.“You think you could sell some ads?” he asked.I nodded like a bobblehead doll.“Do it,” he said as he walked away.I asked the back of his head how much I should charge.“Whatever you can get,” he answered, without ever looking back.When you sell ads on the tiniest station in town, you don’t compete with the other stations, you sell only those businesses with too little money to afford anyone else. In fact, the money my clients gave me every month was usually all the cash they had. If my ads didn’t work, I’d have groceries in my pantry but my clients wouldn’t. A man learns fast in that environment.The first thing I learned is that people are bored by advertising for the same reason they’re bored by anything else: lack of relevance.
"If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot."- Emil Cioran
When ads are relevant, customers respond. Are your ads relevant, or are they answering questions no one is asking?My job at the radio station paid $3.50 an hour plus 15 percent commission. Within 3 years I was making about $6,000 a month. That was doctor/lawyer money 30 years ago. Strangely, I never made that many sales calls. Most of my clients called the station to ask if they could buy ads from me. Usually, a friend had told them how much money they were making as a result of the ads I was writing and they wanted in on the action. "What does it cost?" they'd ask. These people didn't care about the radio station or its format. They just wanted to grow their businesses. When the owners of my radio station sold it for 11 times what they paid for it, I decided I’d rather become a self-employed ad consultant than move to Los Angeles and become a station manager for them.The second thing I had learned, you see, is that good ads work no matter how they’re delivered. I saw my ads work on virtually every radio and TV station in the city and with tiny variations these same ads performed as direct mail letters and fax machine blasts. The secret wasn’t in reaching the right people. The secret was in crafting a message that would be relevant to the public.My ads worked because I cheated: I insisted my clients let me deliver a message guaranteed to move the needle on the “Who Cares?” meter. Ads fail when no one cares. An extremely common mistake is to believe that discounting the price of a product is guaranteed to win the interest of the public. But I've seen that strategy fail dozens of times. A half-price turd is still a turd. When a client belligerently demanded that I write some magic words to help him sell a load of crap that no one in their right mind would ever want to buy, I looked down at the ground, dropped a wad of spit on the toe of his shoe, then looked up into his face and said, “No.”Yes, it was a rude and vulgar thing to do but I can assure you it shortened the argument. Word of my little stunt spread. Some saw it as the action of an egotistical lunatic. It’s possible these people were right. But others saw it as the mark of a young man who had the courage of his convictions. These people may have been right, too.Every business owner is on the inside, looking out, and what they see is entirely different from what their customers see. Customers are on the outside, looking in. Great ad writers remain on the outside, looking in. They are advocates, not of the business owner, but of the business owner’s customer. This gives them their great advantage.Do you have the courage to learn what your company looks like from the outside, looking in?

The preceding was from Roy H. Williams' Monday Morning Memo this week. If you do not subscribe, go to www.mondaymorningmemo.com

Education without action is entertainment. Will you take action this week? How about today?

Good Habits Are Easy To Break

This is one of the hardest posts I have ever written on this blog. Why? Because I am embarrased that I went nearly three months without writing after posting over 70 times in three months.

I got out of the habit. The hardest time to quit something you need to be doing is the first time. It gets easier after that. You are already a quitter. I wish that worked with bad habits.

It happens in all areas of life. To all of us. Diet, exercise, work, relationships. You skip a few times and you feel guilty. Not guilty enough to jump back in. Before you know it, you have gotten away from the things that you know need to be doing. Things that made you successful to begin with. Things that made you feel better about yourself or led to your goals.

Think about it.

You know it's true.

There is a habit missing in your life. You realize that the first skipped workout was 118 days ago. No need to go back now. You haven't made a cold call in 3 weeks. You hope nobody notices. You haven't called to check on that client in nearly two months. You meant to, but now you have waited so long they won't want to see you for sure!

It happens to all of us in one or more places in our life, Successful people recognize it and get past it. Get back on the horse.The first time is the hardest. What good habit will you work on restarting?

Whew, I am glad I got this one written! It's been bugging me for weeks!

3 Objectives Of Sales

Concentrate And Focus Your Efforts

It is easy for sales people to get focused on busy work and not on the most important things that they do each day. Whether you are in retail, service or direct sales, these three sales objectives will keep you on track. If you are doing things in your day that do not lead directly towards these objectives, then you need to re-think your prioroties.

Sales Objective #1 - Get Results For Your Customer or Satisfy Your Customers Needs.

As long as you make these your first priority, the others fall into place pretty well. Without a satisfied customer, your job becomes much more difficult and less satisfying. In order to find out customer needs and expectations, you must simply ASK and work on strategies to help them get there.

Sales Objective #2 - Retain and Increase Your Current Customers

This is the first of two ways to grow revenue. These are customers that you already have. The acquisition cost is already absorbed. These are the best places to grow revenue because they already have some level of confidence in you or your products. Mc Donald's was one of the pioneers in understanding that it was important to upsell. "Would you like fries with that?" turned into "Would you like a value meal?" All in order to slightly boost an average order.

Banks look at their customers based on how many products they are involced in. Checking, Saving, Debit Cards, Credit Cards, Home Mortgage, Personal Loans, Christmas Club, etc.

If you have a customer that spend less than your average order or ticket, you should evaluate why that is. What can I do to grow that customer? Especially if you know that that customer uses another vendor and has considerably more potential.

Sales Objective #3 - Develop New Business

The second way to grow your business is to develop new business. This is normally the most difficult part and where most sales people struggle. It involves developing relationships with people they have not talked to before. It usually takes more effort to get appointments or to get them into the store. New business is needed to make up for the attrition of existing customers and for just bottom line growth.

You must have specific strategies and goals to retain and increase your current business and to develop new business while keeping the focus on the first objective of getting results for your customers or satisfying their needs. When you look at how much time you are spending on each of these directly each week, you may be surprised at how much better you COULD be!

Proud To Sell

When I was a kid, my granddad had a little sign in his office the stated, "Selling is like shaving, if you don't do it every day, you're a bum."

I used to think that was a very odd sign. I never really quite got it. You see, my granddad was a debit insurance salesman. He went door to door each week and collected premiums from the less affluent part of St. Louis. He was mugged three times, but kept at it until he retired.

While the sign is still a little corny, I have to say that I do get it now. No matter what you do in business or life for that matter, you are selling. Whether it be products or yourself, you are selling. You sell at work. You sell in relationships. Selling is nothing more than persuading someone to partner with you by providing them with something that they feel they want or need.

Too many people in business are offended or ashamed to be called a salesperson. Why? If you do it correctly, you are making people happy by providing something that they need or want. There are those that manipulate people and lie that give us all a bad reputation (remember Eve and the apple? Eve got sold a bill of goods!), but that can be overcome by working side by side with the customer and helping them get what they REALLY want!

Be proud to be a part of what is REALLY the world's oldest profession. Selling. Now, who have you helped TODAY?