Authenticity: The Key to Sustaining Relationships

We have a lot of fun in this column finding interesting ways to communicate, to stand out and to turn heads from our competitors. Selling, at its best, is a great sport and a wonderfully challenging and invigorating way to make a living. But it is also important to remind ourselves from time to time that nothing sells better, over time, than honesty and authenticity. Read More

Body Language – Deeply Wired Secret to Communicating with Others

I recently watched a TED talk and was reminded again about the importance of body language in communications. Studies continue to confirm that body language is even more important than speaking in terms of the perceptions we have of each other, and that we form and trust those impressions amazingly fast . . . often in milliseconds. So as salespeople, that means we can have developed and delivered the most elegant presentation ever, but if we have not passed the body language test, it will likely fall on deaf ears. Read More

What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Selling

I have to admit it . . . I joined the legions of people over the past few weeks that went to see Star Wars. You know, an entertaining movie can teach us a lot about communications and selling.
 

For example:

 

• When people experience a movie they enjoy, they don’t stop thinking and talking about it when the movie ends. The movie and story get into their heads, and they keep thinking and talking about it long after the event.

Read More

ACTION!

Happy New Year Everyone! January is a great month as we all come out running and gunning into the New Year.
 

Part of the New Year tradition involves setting goals and making resolutions. If there is one thing I would advise each of you to embrace and elevate in 2016, it would be developing what I call the “ACTION” habit. Here is what I mean. Read More

Happy Holidays From Mr. Shmooze!

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Just a quick note this week to wish everyone a great Holiday Season and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

We All KNOW This. The Best of the Best DO it…Relentlessly.

Two salespeople compete with each other selling similar products. Each one has been invited to make a presentation to the decision maker. Both salespeople are excellent presenters. Both products are of equal quality. The price is very close.
 

Salesperson A has not kept in personal contact with the buyer beyond some auto-marketing that his company sends out.
 

Salesperson B has developed a personal communication plan which called for keeping in touch each quarter, being alerted for articles and information he might send along to help his buyer’s cause and, of course, he met the buyer for lunch over the past year or so, actually introducing the buyer at that lunch to someone the buyer could do some business with.
 

Who do you think is going to get the order? Read More

The Risk and Cost of NOT Buying

One of the toughest hurdles we often face as salespeople is when a buyer is afraid to make a decision. Such buyers are often extremely uncomfortable with change, or with making a mistake, and they assign disproportionate risk to the buying decision without calculating the risk of maintaining the status quo. Read More

Thanksgiving Sales Tip

Here is a simple but profound sales tip this week. Thanksgiving is a great time to personally reach out and thank your clients. Here is an example of a note to send around: Read More

A Sales Lesson from Political Campaigns

The political season is always a great time for us as marketers and salespeople to see how the various teams try to “sell” their candidates and how the candidates try to sell themselves. We see all sorts of approaches, some of them laughingly transparent, but it is a great learning opportunity nevertheless. It is still early in the election cycle, but we can already learn one lesson about communicating in the process of developing relationships. And that is . . . we must be consistent and authentic. Read More

Are We Raising Peoples’ Spirits? A Powerful Lesson in Communications and Emotional Leadership

For some reason several new books have recently been published about the man many historians consider to be one of the most charismatic people of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). Of course his strategy and politics are open to healthy debate, but hardly anyone disagrees that his personality and will were extraordinary. Even Winston Churchill described FDR as “the greatest man I ever met.”
 

So what does this have to do with the art and science of selling through relationships? Let’s focus for a minute on one attribute that does indeed apply to our ongoing theme . . . his ability to lift others’ spirits. Read More

Finding the Balance

We can learn so much about selling from our day-to-day lives. Take waiters and waitresses at restaurants for example. We can experience quite a range of services:
 

• Simply not well trained. This is the person who has not been trained or mentored well. He/she has no sense of timing, does not check in and often simply disappears for long periods of time, etc. People who are sent into the “field” without good training can lose customers, and the restaurant owner (or us as business owners) may never know what happened.

 

• Probably had some training but is rough around the edges. This is the waiter or waitress who butts into conversations and does not listen well. He is checking in and doing what he has been told to do, but with a lack of maturity or grace. He has been trained, but not mentored by a real pro, a big difference.

  Read More

The World’s Best Salespeople are also the World’s Best Time Managers

I have worked with great salespeople at all levels all over the world. Some of them generate high six-figure and seven-figure incomes. Here is what all of these superstars have in common . . . they have a keen sense of the value of their time and they do a ferocious job of managing it very, very well.

Now you may say that you do not have the resources they use to manage time, but many of them did not at the beginning either. In any case, some of the principles they follow can apply to anyone who gets paid for producing.

5 Tips for Time Management Read More