Tag Archives: sales growth

Sales Coaching

Sales Coaching – How to Find Clients

What do you do when you are just starting a business and need your first client? What if your existing clients have closed their purse strings? What if you just want to grow your business and the only way to do that is to get more buyers? In all three instances you have to find a way to get clients willing to pay for your services.

There are lots of ways to get new clients. Before you set out to do any of those things you need to prepare to effectively get more new clients. That means the first step to finding new clients for your business is to prepare your proposition for business.

When it comes to a proposition many people mistakenly think of a pitch for your services as your proposition. Unfortunately, when you approach a potential new client that way you position yourself as an ordinary sales person. Once you put yourself in that slot it spells BIG trouble for your efforts to get more clients and more sales.

As soon as you put yourself in the ordinary sales person slot you trigger the defenses of your potential new client. Once that potential client becomes defensive they get extremely skeptical and they don’t trust you. If they don’t trust you they will never hire you as their service provider.

No one hires a service provider they don’t trust. Trust is mandatory in any service business. Once you put your trustworthiness under question it’s a tall order to overcome trust issues.

The other problem with centering your proposition on your services is you immediately trigger objections.

That’s why you hear things like, “I already have a (insert whatever you do)”.

That’s why your certifications or level of experience come into question.

That’s exactly why these potential new clients think of you as an expense they can live without.

When you develop your proposition think about what the people who buy your services are looking to get, solve, or overcome. Put yourself in their shoes and look at it from their perspective. Imagine if a software sales rep called you and asked if you’d like to buy their CRM program.

What would you say? No.

Now imagine if that same sales rep called and asked if you would be interested in some ideas to close more sales. I’ll bet you’d say “yes”.

The first proposition was about a thing. The second proposition was about what the potential new client wants the thing only comes into play if they have a need waiting to get filled.

How much could you increase your sales starting now?

Get “The Blueprint for Increased Sales” eBook and audio here (FREE)…

[http://increasesalescoach.com/blueprint-increased-sales.html]

Increase Sales Coach Cheryl A. Clausen helps business owners, entrepreneurs, and SOHO’s in service industries get highly qualified prospects contacting you – giving you an unfair advantage.

[http://increasesalescoach.com/blog]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3064074

Sales Coaching

How Business Coaching Can Help to Increase Sales

For small to medium businesses owners, it is necessary to wear many hats. Many find it an almost overwhelming task to handle the responsibilities of sales, marketing, accounting, management… and run their business, too. All too often, the need to increase sales takes a back seat as so many other areas of the business need attention. When a business owner finds himself in this position, it is time to call in a professional Business Coach. A Business Coach is just like any other type of coach. His/ Her responsibility is to guide, advise and support business owners and managers to insure the overall effectiveness and profitability of a company.

Business coaching provides many services to help the small to medium sized company owner. One of the greatest benefits to hiring a business coach is the guidance needed to increase sales. A coach gives the business entrepreneur an opportunity to work one- on – one with a skilled professional who is adapt and capable of finding solutions to increase profits and drive sales. Coaches are motivating, supportive, confidence- building leaders who have the ability to bring out the best in a business owner by encouraging and empowering those who may have lost their edge or are feeling the pressures of business ownership.

Many companies enlist the services of a Business Coach to train employees in a group setting or in seminars that are designed to develop, teach and groom staff in the art of effective salesmanship. Salespeople generally leave these meetings with more confidence, increased enthusiasm and the knowledge and skills necessary to generate more profits.

Company management and coach can brainstorm for ideas that will increase brand recognition. Having the public familiar with your company and its products and services is a major step to increasing revenues. Business coaching guides and assists in taking an in depth view of your complete sales process and together, you will be able to pinpoint ways to improve your marketing techniques and methods to meet and achieve your goals.

Business coaches are well skilled in identifying market segments, trends, and effective ways to market your business that can lead to increased sales. Together, you can identify target markets and ways to initiate creative marketing techniques to capture more of the market share and produce results.

Hiring a Business Coach is fast becoming a viable solution for companies that are having problems in the sales department. Even those companies that are reaching their sales goals use coaches to further enhance and improve their operations. Working with a good, knowledgeable Business Coach can well be worth your time, money and effort when you begin to realize to increased sales that his expertise can bring to you business.

Business coaching helps you to identify where and how sales can be increased.

Wendy works with business owners to successfully explore untapped opportunities for increased sales using business coaching

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Wendy_Hearn/52082

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Sales Coaching

Life Insurance Marketing Techniques – Use a Sales Marketing Advisor Or Sales Coach?

There is no argument that acquiring life insurance marketing techniques that improve your sales growth is a strategy of attaining success. At first it is hard to determine if the advice of an insurance sales marketing advisor or sales coach would be more beneficial. Looking at this report clarifies the advantages or disadvantages of each ones’ skilled techniques.

Both a sales marketing advisor and sales coach are experts at providing advice, tip, tricks, hints, and demonstrations to advancing quicker to achieving your goals. They are both honest about providing constructive criticism over methods insurance marketers, brokerage sales directors, and recruiters may currently be using. After having a ten to fifteen minute conversation with any marketer, I never encountered a conqueror implementing all the correct techniques. Extra wisdom with outside insight would be beneficial virtually every life insurance marketing firm.

The marketing strategies refer to a mastery of prospecting of a wide spectrum of talents. These include prospecting methods for acquiring new insurance brokers, increasing quality of lead response, converting interested brokers to signing a contract, and the prized result of ending up with producers consistent in writing valuable premium cases. Oh, add in improving performance procedures of providing unique broker service. This would not only include new brokers but also maximizing and improving sales from the existing broker force.

Start with the values of an insurance sales coach. Like a pro sports player often has a personal trainer, so will a marketing firm, insurance agency, or even an independent broker or general agent. The sales coach is very flexible as training can be one on one or to a group. Here we are not talking about a rah-rah motivational speaker who only has home office experience or no insurance knowledge whatsoever. The coach is a not only a guide, but a trainer, teacher, instructor, and tutor all in one. Expect to pay an hourly rate for individual services rendered. However if the coach is training your entire marketing staff, or group of brokers, a flat more economical fee can be determined. Do not forget one of the coach’s strongest abilities. That is as a speaker when you are giving a sales seminar. This is an excellent method of upping attendance, and strengthening recruiting.

Contacting an insurance sales marketing advisor, provides a different set of values. The advisor is viewed more as a mentor providing expert advice and suggestions. This is strictly one on one with clients that include the insurance company recruiting director, a brokerage managing general agent or independent marketing organization. There is usually not a face to face consultation, as it a big cost advantage to use the telephone or a conference call. The number of marketing advisors, especially those specializing in the facets of insurance brokerage, is very slim. Like a lawyer their fee could be an hourly rate, however a short introductory to answering briefly a few questions are on the house. Unlike a coach, there is improved willingness to give out some free advice. However, they are not going to instruct your staff, your brokers, or speak at your next recruiting seminar.

You may be surprised by how much knowledge insurance sales marketing advisors have locked up somewhere in their tiny crammed brains. This is not simply attained by reading well-written business sales books and inspirational materials. It is all acquired by talking many years with thousands of insurance marketers, and secondly by implementing a method few sales coaches have at their disposal. This is a personal analysis of hundreds of thousands of agent and broker data records spotting unique trends and characteristics that are constantly changing. An insurance advisor of authority status can rattle off personally researched facts and figures you will never see printed in any insurance magazine publication. You will often find out not just the pros of proceeding on your present path but also all the possible pitfalls of any directions taken.

Evaluate your needs and review the benefits a coach and advisor both provide. Before making a decision, remember that placing a phone call is free.

Well published author, Don Yerke likes to concentrate on what you don’t know or what no one else dares to print. Tell it like it is.

Watch for his new paperback book debuting on Amazon early this summer. It is loaded with great insurance marketing and recruiting information.

Come and get your FREE “Think and Grow Rich” Ebook by Napoleon Hill instantly. The website address is [http://www.agentsinsurancemarketing.com]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2074720

Sales Coaching

Effective One on One Sales Coaching Sessions

Recently I have read posts on this subject on a several popular blogs. My most recent “snooping around” session revealed on one of those blogs that an “effective One-On-One coaching session should be planned six months ahead of time”. My curiosity ended, as did my snooping session. If you are holding your coaching session every six months you should be fired as a sales manager! You sales people are customers of your leadership, and they need service from you more often than every six months.

There are four types of coaching sessions:

Behavioral – something has come to your attention that must/should be shared. Though we think of these sessions as addressing negative behaviors you should use them to recognize positive behaviors also.

Discovery – As a manager you have uncovered a developmental issues that should be addressed. This is the first session of a field training program that should end with a bi-lateral contract between you and the sales person.

Follow Up – These are frequent mini-sessions to check up, and exchange feedback.

Bottoms Up – If you are a great leader this should happen often. Instead of you discovering a developmental issue one of your team members seeks out your help. Why? Because you are trustworthy and they know you are there to serve them.

First a note about tone. Attitude is everything. If this is a behavior coaching session do not send mixed messages. If a negative behavior issue is serious enough to warrant exploration and coaching, don’t mince in other topics. The outcome of behavioral coaching sessions are usually uni-lateral next step contracts. If you have discovered a specific sales skill that needs improvement you do want to recognize those other skill areas that are best in class. If this session is a follow up you should summarize previous discussions, recognize progress and discuss next steps. The key to follow up coaching sessions is that this is a bi-lateral agreement to next steps.

Coaching sessions should be orderly. You should control some parts of the discussion and you should let your team member control others. However, this is not a free flowing, never ending conversation. You may end up being friends with some of you sales people but remember, friendship is the outcome of effective leadership, leadership is never the outcome of friendship.

The coaching session outline;

Warm Up – I guess you could just hit them over the head, but why? This is a team member. The only reason to minimize this part of the discussion is if you have uncovered a negative behavioral issue that if not addressed could result in the termination of this team member. Initiating a serious conversation with frivolous small talk is disingenuous.

Orientation – If this is the first coaching session to reveal something you have discovered, particularly if the team members overall contributions are satisfactory, this part of the discussion is crucial. For instance, if you are concerned with this team members prospecting skills you should discuss what lead to this discovery. “Jim, thanks for your first quarter results. It helped show the others that the goals are achievable even with this difficult economy. But I was exploring our CRM system and think I discovered something. I noticed that you not only made your goals, but had the highest proposal to contract closing ratio! In fact, you also had one of the highest closing ratios in moving prospects from the needs analysis to the proposal, congratulations! But that led me to think, are you motivated to dramatically increase your earnings? Because if you are I think I discovered something that is holding you back…” Now the stage is nearly set for you to focus the conversation.

Focus – This is the meat of the conversation and two-thirds of your time should be spent here. But step back a little. Dust off those sales skills from your past life. If you sold like I did, you’re best sales pitches were not about what you told a prospect right? First you need to sell the need. Continuing our conversation with Jim…”Since you have world class skills at the end of the sales cycle, I did a little arithmetic. You may already know this but if you were able to put 3 more prospects into your pipeline every quarter your earnings would increase by 10%!” My best sales presentations came about because of the questions I asked! You need to use your open ended probes, your directional probes and confirming probes. You need to find out if the lack of prospecting is a skill gap, or a will gap (see separate articles on each subject on blog). If Jim agrees he has a need to increase the number of prospects in his pipeline, you’re halfway home! You now have to come to agreement on how to satisfy that need.

Contract – Every coaching session should end with a contract. Simply put this is the agreement going forward, which defines each person’s action plan and roles. In my Sales Excellence Process there is a form which defines each person’s commitment. The contract (unilateral or bilateral) should be driven by what you determined to be the cause of the problem. If the issue is skill then you as the leader will have an obligation to the sales person to deliver the training. If the issue is one of will to do the task then the sales person will have more obligations to the contract while your role will be inspecting what you expect.

Coaching sessions are the most important duty of a sales manager. How you go about delivering a coaching session will define your leadership. Get your mind right! Are you there to help, or are you there to catch someone doing something wrong? Remember “Cool Hand Luke”?

Boss: Sorry, Luke. I’m just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.

Luke: Nah – calling it your job don’t make it right, Boss.

Sales Performance Advisors delivers field ready tools to help sales people, sales managers, directors and executive management optimize their sales results.

You can contact Gregory Deming @ (925)216-5081
gregorydeming@gmail.com

You can view our blog @ http://www.peaksalesperformance.wordpress.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/2063716

Sales Coaching

Buying Email Lists – Perspective From the Insurance Sales Coach

Are you thinking about buying an email list to increase your insurance sales? Before you make that purchase there are some things you should consider Before you throw money away that could be invested more wisely for a better return. Plus you want to make sure you aren’t getting yourself into legal hot water and potentially huge fines.

It sounds like such a great idea. You could buy a list of 1,000,000 names and then send your sales message to those people. Just think if even 1% of those one million people bought from you, why you’d get 10,000 new clients. Hold the send button email breath it doesn’t exactly work that way.

Exactly how did the company selling you those email addresses get those names? Typically those companies have a website where visitors have to agree to get messages either knowingly or unwittingly from a whole host of other companies in order to get something they want. As an example, during the political campaign season there were banners ads all over the internet you could click on claiming you would get a free t-shirt for your favorite candidate for free.

Once you clicked on the banner ad you went to a website where you had to jump through a bunch of hoops agreeing to get other free gifts from other companies in order to finally get your free t-shirt. So if you did everything you needed to do to get your free t-shirt does that mean you wanted email from those other companies? Not likely.

The legality of this process is tricky and one I’d never personally want to risk. I certainly would never want to jeopardize my personal integrity with the people I hope to work with in this way. The people who got on this list didn’t really agree to opt-in to your email list. They may have opted in so they could get a free gift, but that isn’t the same as opting in to your opt-in email campaign.

That’s exactly what could create a legal or technical nightmare for you. When you send out your email thinking these folks are happy to get your message you might just get a nasty surprise. When some of the big internet service providers get a sudden burst of emails from an unknown sender, you, going to their clients they’ll flag you as a spammer and block all your messages so no one on their service gets them. Your own internet service provider may also flag you as a spammer when they notice that all of a sudden you’re sending a huge number of outgoing messages and they could block you from sending any email messages to anyone through their services. Both of these nasty surprises are a headache and can take a great deal of time and sweat equity to correct. A third nasty surprise is far worse.

Either one of the internet service providers or even an individual email recipient could report you as a CAN-SPAM legislation violator. Guess who bears the burden of proof on that deal. Yep, you guessed it…you.

Even if none of those bad things happened a purchased email list is still a bad investment because they’ll opt-out of your email campaign in huge numbers. Even the ones who don’t opt-out are about as likely to do business with you as you are to win the lottery. So getting a return on your investment will be challenging to put it in the best way I can.

There’s simply no logical reason to buy an email list when you could easily build your own list of highly responsive people who will buy from you. All you need is a one page website, a way to capture information from your visitors, and an offer to give them something they’ll want. Then once you send them the information they asked for they really have opted in to “your” list and you can legally prove it if you ever needed to. Plus you have the opportunity to develop a relationship with this stranger and convert them to a buyer.

Discover how to increase your sales without rejection. [http://increasesalescoach.com/yes.html]

Selling Insurance made easy. Get your free report here. [http://increasesalescoach.com/selling-insurance.html]

Increase Sales Coach Cheryl A. Clausen Gets Results Sales Training Can’t BECAUSE it’s never just a sales issue

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Cheryl_Clausen/56791

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