Do You Have Value to Sell in a Recovering Economy?

Take the "Value Forward" Test

By Paul DiModica

"Value" is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "relative worth, utility, or importance".

Value during a recession often becomes clouded and harder to identify. Yet many sales and marketing teams during this economic position still utilize standard methods of vendor communication by talking about their firm's value and how great they are. This generalist approach places salespeople in a defensive position with prospects about why they should buy from them, especially when funding is tight.

To sell more in a recovering economy, you must have a premeditated value program. Companies need to have their value out in front before the sales cycle begins to make it easier to sell.

Most marketing programs use a passive communication model of "here it is, this is what we do". This process over the long haul just wastes money and valuable selling time.

How much time during an average sales cycle does your sales team spend prospecting, educating new prospects on why your product or service is different, and managing competitive issues?

Too much!

To sell more, you need to use "experiential marketing" techniques to help the sales team get inbound qualified leads where prospects see your business value BEFORE the sales team tries to sell them.

If a prospect "experientially" experiences your business value before the sales team talks with them, the result is competitors are eliminated, the sales cycle is shortened, and a profitable gross margin is maintained.

WHY?

When a prospect approaches your firm after having experienced your business value prior to the first sale, your sales team can then spend most of their time personalizing how they will help the prospect use your product or service as a business tool, instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time in the sales cycle cold calling.

So should you advertise more?

No.

Advertising is a passive medium and does not educate prospects on your value. It is a means to express why "you think" you have value. Prospects must confirm you have value based on their own internal metrics which cannot be done through ads in magazine, TV or direct mail.

In fact, most advertising is focused on projecting what the advertiser wants the prospect to "see". But at the end of the day, the prospect does not care about anything except their personal business needs.

So how do you create a "value forward" approach to your sales?

Instead of talking about how great you are, show prospects your product or service value by giving them business content for FREE up-front which will induce them into a sales action step to call you. We call this the Value Forward 5% Marketing Rule. Give 5% away to prospects to get them to pay retail for the remaining 95% and you and I make up what retail is.

Marketing tools like webinars, teleseminars, social media, newsletters and workshops are the key to communicating your value first to generate qualified leads. These marketing devices allow your prospects to learn about your value through their own filtering and judgment process and if done correctly, they will call you and say "I am interested."

Take the following Value Forward Test to see if you pull your value behind you.

Value Forward Test

1. When explaining your sales value proposition to prospects, do you sound like everyone else?
2. When you present your offering to prospects, do they expect you to drop your price to match your competitors?
3. Do prospects see you as a peer and provider rather than a vendor and a predator?
4. When you explain your product or service, can the prospect visualize the difference between your company and your competitors?
5. Every time you meet or chat with a new prospect, do they say they have not heard about your company?
6. Are most of your qualified leads generated from cold calling?
7. Does your marketing generate at least 3 qualified leads per salesperson each month?
8. Has your sales cycle timeline increased by at least 25% during the last two years?
9. When you meet with a management prospect, do you have a lot of competitors?
10. Does your marketing budget allocate more money for brochures and tradeshows than engagement devices like newsletters, webinars and teleseminars?

 Correct Answers:

1. No 2. No 3. Yes 4. Yes 5. No

6. No 7. Yes 8. No 9. No 10. No

Scoring:

80% and Above

Your value is well defined and during a recovering economy your business revenue capture program should hold up well and allow you to grow your business regardless of the economic environment you are exposed to.

50% to 70%

If you score in this zone, your business value is confusing to targeted prospects and your sales and marketing operating costs may increase and be less effective during the recovering economy. You need to create more in-depth communication on why prospects should buy from you and how you are different.

40% and Below

Your value is buried deep inside your company, it will be difficult to grow your business during a recovering economy.

So . . . stop saying how great you are and start proving it before the sales cycle begins -- and you will sell a lot more!

I welcome your comments.

To your success!

Rick Erling

About Rick Erling and The CxO Group


Rick Erling is CEO and Founder of The CxO Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have business coaching partners in five countries making us one of the world's largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.


We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales process, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the "value variance" gap between the two. Once we have identified the "Value Variance" between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.


Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies' revenue, within a constricted economy by investing in business growth acceleration strategies. For more on increasing your revenue capture effectiveness, subscribe to my Email Newsletter, follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your firms revenue growth acceleration strategies, check out my coaching and consulting firm, The CxO Group, email me, or call me at (972) 727-6880.

New Research - Sales and Marketing Metrics - Are Your Marketing and Sales Processes Working?

By Paul DiModica

Marketing and selling products and services is a metric game and time management business model. In this economy, success is all about knowing your numbers and managing your time — number of leads generated; the number of qualified prospects generated from those leads; the number of leads that progress through your sales cycle steps; and ultimately the number of deals closed.

Do you know your metrics?

How do you compare?

Every lead that is not qualified distracts from your available time to find and sell product and professional service prospects that are in the buying cycle now.




Speed is a business success tool.

When your sales pipeline is small, your sales forecast accuracy and lead quality diminishes.

To increase the size of your sales pipelines and time management success, focus on making your targeted prospects take action steps with you during your sales cycle to prove that they are qualified. The world is full of professional lookers that will waste your time . . . and ultimately reduce your revenue capture success. The faster you qualify a prospect based on the action steps they take . . . the more you will sell.

“There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities.” –Michael Dell

To be more successful, do what you don’t like doing first.



What kind of action steps should prospects take to prove that they are qualified?

1. Have your prospects confirm their targeted date of purchase and when they want to be operational – to make sure it is within your normal selling cycle time.
2. Have them tell you who will be signing the contract.
3. Get them to verbalize how your offering will fix their business issues. If they can’t, then you may have incorrectly communicated your business value.
4. Get your prospects to talk to your existing customers earlier in your sales cycle. Customer referrals communicate your value three dimensionally through the eyes of others.

In sales, you work for yourself and you are an entrepreneur. You own your business. Accelerate your speed, improve prospect lead qualification and apply perseverance and you can sell more even in today’s crazed economy.

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.“ –Steve Jobs

I welcome your comments.

To your success!

Rick Erling

About Rick Erling and The CxO Group


Rick Erling is CEO and Founder of The CxO Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have business coaching partners in five countries making us one of the world's largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.


We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales process, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the "value variance" gap between the two. Once we have identified the "Value Variance" between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.


Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies' revenue, within a constricted economy by investing in business growth acceleration strategies. For more on increasing your revenue capture effectiveness, subscribe to my Email Newsletter, follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your firms revenue growth acceleration strategies, check out my coaching and consulting firm, The CxO Group, email me, or call me at (972) 727-6880.

How to Use Reverse Value Methods to Close More Deals

By Paul DiModica

As salespeople, we have become subservient to our sales quota, prospect opportunities, prospect expectations, and the pressure to beat the competition so much that we often come across as weak-kneed caricatures of ourselves when interacting professionally with prospects.

As salespeople . . . we need to eat more Wheaties!

So often, you hear marketing and salespeople talk to prospects about their business value and how great their firm is by saying:

“We are the largest provider in the world!”

“We have the greatest support!”

“Our service is the best!”

This all comes across as white noise to management prospects who hear the same thing over and over again.

Due to companies’ efforts to become more “customer centric” sales organizations, many have become too accommodating and predictable in their sales approaches and are now being trampled by prospects who manage their sales cycles (and your sales commissions) for you.

To sell more, you must become a strategic advisor to management. The key words here are “strategic advisor.” Strategic advisors help prospects fix business problems. As you know, prospects are not always well-informed. So sometimes the prospect does not know what the problem is, or worse, they “think” they know how the problem should be fixed. If you are trying to be a strategic advisor, speak-up, be heard, and stop being so passive in your value demonstration.

Use a “Reverse Value” sales approach to sell more.

“Reverse Value” communication is a sales methodology of proving your value to management by not talking about your product or service, but instead proving you are a knowledge center that can help them by challenging their own current thought process.

By disagreeing with management prospects (when they are wrong) and informing them (by proving your value) how their observations can be modified by your firm to help them reach their business objectives, you are proving you have value greater than your competitors who all speak in lockstep.

If you sound like the competitors (for all practical purposes), you are the same as your competitors (a commodity).

How do you know if you have enough business confidence to use “Reverse Value” techniques with management prospects? Take the following test.

“Do I Need More Wheaties” Test

During the last six months, have you told management prospects that their business or assumptions were wrong (in a professional way)?
___ Yes ___No

During the last six months, have you verbally explained in detail to a management prospect the business risks of not making decisions or what could happen if they buy from the wrong vendor?
___ Yes ___No

During the last six months, have you submitted in writing to a management prospect the business risks of not making decisions or what could happen if they buy from the wrong vendor?
___ Yes ___No

During the last six months have you told a middle-level manager that you cannot move forward (give them a presentation, give them proposal, etc.) in the current sales cycle unless you meet the executive who signs the contract?
___ Yes ___No

Have you ever asked a prospect to explain your value to you and why they want to buy from you?
___ Yes ___No

Do you focus on three or less business industry verticals when trying to sell your offerings?
___ Yes ___No

Can you describe how your product or service increases income or decreases expenses to your prospect?
___ Yes ___No

Do you feel more comfortable talking business strategy than features or functions?
___ Yes ___No

Do you feel more comfortable talking to prospects at the level of VP or above?
___ Yes ___No

Do you read five or more industry trade publications a month like Restaurant News, Manufacturing News, etc.?
___ Yes ___No

Correct Answers

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Yes
5. Yes
6. Yes
7. Yes
8. Yes
9. Yes
10. Yes

To feel comfortable using the “Reverse Value” selling concept, you need to score 70% or more on the above test. Reverse Value methods require confidence, professionalism, industry knowledge, and the ability to intellectually discuss with management prospects business issues that position you as a thought leader.

Be a seen as a thought leader, and sell more.



To your success,

Rick Erling




About Rick Erling and The CxO Group

Rick Erling is CEO and Founder of The CxO Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have business coaching partners in five countries making us one of the world's largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.

We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales process, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the "value variance" gap between the two. Once we have identified the "Value Variance" between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.

Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies' revenue, within a constricted economy by investing in business growth acceleration strategies. For more on increasing your revenue capture effectiveness, subscribe to my Email Newsletter, follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your firms revenue growth acceleration strategies, check out my coaching and consulting firm, The CxO Group, email me, or call me at (972) 727-6880.

6 CEO Success Scorecard Attributes Needed To Grow Revenue

by Paul DiModica

When coaching CEOs to increase corporate performance, we holistically assess our client’s business and look for operational variance gaps and best practices usage in the company’s business marketing, sales, strategy and financial management approaches to help them maximize their year over year growth.

Through our advisement programs, we assess their current financial position and compare their P and L’s (profit and loss reports) against their competitors from our proprietary database of financials submitted by over 50,000 CPAs. Using this analytical methodology, we have identified six specific business benchmarks that we use to chart our client’s current position as compared to their unique industry and that is used as a CEO success scorecard.

If you are looking to grow your business — metrics is a key business driver. If you are trying to succeed in a down economy — then your action steps must be proactive, not reactive.

Are you managing your company by business and financial metrics? Is your management team knowledgeable about your industry or are they just ambivalent?

6 Scorecard Areas You Should Manage Monthly

Financial LIQUIDITY

Measures your ability to meet daily financial obligations and includes:

• Inventory (or staff bench unitization rate) in stock in days
• Account Receivable in days
• Accounts Payables in days

PROFITS & PROFIT MARGIN

Are profitability trends favorable in the company?

• Gross Profit Margin
• Net Profit Margin
• Advertising Cost to Sales
• Rent to Sales
• Payroll Percent to Sales
• Operating Cash Flow Margin

SALES

Are sales growing?

• Sales Year Over Year Growth
• Sales by Product Year to Year
• Sales by Services Year to Year

BORROWING Capacity

Is the company borrowing profitably?

• Interest Coverage Ratio
• Debt to Equity Ratio
• Debt Leverage Ratio

Corporate ASSETS Usage

Is the company using gross fixed assets effectively?

• Return on equity
• Return on assets
• Fixed asset turnover

Employees Performance

Is the company hiring effectively?

• Revenue per employee
• Employee turnover by department
• Profit per employee

Each one of these assessment areas should be placed into a monthly scorecard that gives you month to month and year to year comparisons. If your CFO or accountant does not do it, find someone who will.

Growth can be attained for those who manage metrically — those who don’t will get the same results that they got last year . . . and may not be around next year.

To your success,

Rick Erling


About Rick Erling and The CxO Group

Rick Erling is CEO and Founder of The CxO Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have business coaching partners in five countries making us one of the world's largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.

We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales process, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the "value variance" gap between the two. Once we have identified the "Value Variance" between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.

Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies' revenue, within a constricted economy, by investing in revenue growth acceleration strategies. For more information, visit: http://www.thecxogroup.com/

8 Role Playing Tips To Increase Your Sales Success and Improve Lead Quality!

By Paul DiModica

Role playing is an underused sales tool by most technology and professional service companies. When employed correctly, it can increase your sales team success, improve your market lead to prospect conversion, identify sales skill gaps and allow you to develop an esprit de corps amongst your sales team as they experience sales education as a team.

Conversely, when incorrectly used, it embarrasses your sales account managers, produces poor sales/management interaction, diminishes lead generation quality and hides sales training requirements from your executive staff.

It is estimated that only 21% of sales teams actually role play sales issues and objections during the sales year.

So, how should role playing be used?

Role playing is a business tool to manage sales stress when communicating to prospects.

As sales stress increases during prospect interaction, salespeople lose control of their verbal responses, shoot from the hip and simultaneously lose control of the sales cycle. Sales stress develops when salespeople are not prepared to respond to the weaves and bobs of prospect questioning. Managing prospect questioning through a trained process will reduce sales stress and increase sales success.

Sales role playing, like any other training tool, needs to be a structured process with guidelines in order for your sales team to get the most out of it. The sales program should have specific goals based on written objectives. Pulling a salesperson into a corner office and grilling them as a CEO buyer may be as effective as focusing on targeted sales skill improvement based on increasing sales efficiency on sales techniques like prospect questioning, cold calling, demos, etc.

8 Role Playing Tips To Increase Your Success!

1. Never make role playing easy. Salespeople must learn to be able to handle pressure (and stress) in the form of difficult inbound questions from prospects based on the prospect’s probing need to know about your value, price, competitive positioning and feature/function offers. Being tough in role playing makes salespeople ready for any outcome.
2. Role play by title of buyers. Salespeople need to adapt to their sales verbal communication skills by buyer title. The way you sell a CFO of a Fortune 1000 firm is diametrically different than a president of a small private firm. If you are selling a VP of Marketing, than role play with someone who will act like a VP of Marketing.
3. Create a Prospect Buyer Dictionary. Catalogue the words that your targeted prospect buyer will use during your sales cycle and use them during your role playing practice. The more you sound like the buyer, the faster they will see you like themselves and as a peer.
4. Split role playing between sales peers and sales management. Sales role playing should be carried out by both sales management and sales team members to allow for diversity of approach and experience. Have each team member take turns being the buyer or the seller.
5. Make a list of your top ten sales objections and use them during your role playing sessions. Selling management is just managing their understanding of your value. Value is communicated based on your ability to show the prospect how you can help fix their business pain. Always role play your 10 toughest sales objections so salespeople can see how to manage value expectations with their most common objections and questions.
6. When role playing with salespeople, redirect all conversation away from the sales process. Prospects (even qualified prospects) at times will change subjects and “steer” salespeople away from sales cycle conversation. To sell senior management, salespeople need to chit chat less and stay on the targeted goals of the appointment or conversation by qualifying the prospect and moving forward in the sales cycle. Role play with sales team members to see how quickly and succinctly they bring back the conversation to the discussion about relevant business issues.
7. Tape record all role playing sessions. Role playing is a reusable, educational tool that should be listened to over and over again. By recording your sales role playing session, you can later document great sales objection responses and disseminate them in written form to your sales team.
8. Document each salesperson’s role playing strengths and weaknesses. Role playing is a replicable, scalable sales tool. Understanding and managing your sales team’s skill sets will help them hit their sales quota faster. If a salesperson crumbles under the pressure of sales role playing with their peers or their direct sales manager, how will they perform in person? And how many qualified prospects are they burning through by saying the wrong thing? Through role playing, you can help individual salespeople increase sales quota success.

To Increase Your Sales Income and marketing lead quality – Role Play More!

To your success,

Rick Erling

 

 

 

The Five Stages of Prospect Value Identification

By Paul DiModica

Prospect value identification is an integrated process of perceived and actual value delivered based on your offering and your customer's perception of that offering at various stages of your sales cycle. There are five steps of prospect value identification that take place during your sales cycle and they include:

1. The Vendor's Perceived Value - This is a vendor presented value and is based on how you see your value and how you communicate its status to your prospects or existing customers during the pre-sales cycle through your firm's marketing communication and sales step process.
2. The Customer or Prospect Transitional Value - This value happens in tandem during the discovery process where the prospect matches or rejects your perceived value (vendor's perceived value) with their perception of your value. This is a value conversion step during the sales cycle.
3. The Prospect's Perceived Value of Your Offering - This value happens when your prospect or your customer finalizes their perception of your value relative to your competition and makes an assumption (correctly or incorrectly) of the value of your product or service relative to price, the business results it produces and the alternative options they have for purchase or non-purchase.
4. The Prospect's Actual Value - This is the alignment by the prospect or customer during their post-sale decision process to determine if the perceived value communicated by you in the pre-sale matches their perception of your actual value in the post-sale.
5. The Value Gap - This is the measurement or gap between the vendor's perceived value believed during the pre-sale steps and the prospect's actual value calculated after the first sale.

Prospect value identification by its very nature is a layered, intricate process that must be aligned with your sales and marketing communication as an integrated approach. Prospect value observation starts at the beginning of your sales cycle and your position is often determined based on your entry point into the organization.

Enter into a prospect's organizational chart below the title of Vice President at the beginning of your sales cycle and you are entering into the commodity zone of buying. Prospects below the title of VP generally make business decisions based on your offering's features, functions or price.

When you sell management at the Vice President level and above, they buy based on their perceptions of your business offering's value. This is a variable option that you can manipulate if you can sell correctly.

Often there is a gap between what firms believe in themselves and what their prospects actually experience.

It is not what you sell, but how your prospect positions the value of your offerings against the alternative buying options they have that must be managed.

To sell more, sell above the commodity line, manage the prospect's perception of your business value, and control the value gap between their perception of your value and your perception.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs, you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it. Nicholas Dewolf, Founder Teradyne Corp

To your success,

Rick Erling

Use Geo and Spatial Marketing Segmentation to Grow Your Business

Think Small to Grow Large

By Paul DiModica

When working with clients, we often help identify new business market gaps to launch into as well as existing markets to exploit using a segmentation model based on multiple variables including, but not limited to, the client’s core competence, competitive position, corporate financial capabilities, market demand, business assets, and risk tolerance.

■Are looking to open a new office in another city?
■Should you sell overseas?
■Will prospects in London, Las Vegas and Chicago buy your offering based on the same marketing characteristics?
■Should you increase your offering’s price?
■Should you set up a channel partner program to expand?

These are all relevant business growth questions that CEO’s ask on a regular basis.

When trying to expand, it is important to know the best practices needed to grow your business. To answer these questions, consider enrolling in one of our coaching programs.

Segmentation marketing is one key business driver to understand how to maximize top line revenue growth.

To answer these questions correctly, management teams must understand the basis for business growth.

Two types of segmentation marketing methods are:

1.Geo-marketing segmentation
2.Spatial marketing segmentation

Geo-Marketing Segmentation

When building your business growth plan, there are different marketing propositions that must be developed for the geography that you market to. Prospects are not rigid, stone-like clones of each other. They have unique value identification demands based on the geography they live in. Prospects in London, Tokyo, Boston, Chicago and LA all have different drivers that make them acquire. Do southern people in the U.S. buy different from people in the midwest?

Geo-marketing is the subsegmenting of these unique buyer variables around the traditional 4 P’s of marketing — Price, Promotion, Position and Product.

Geo-marketing can:

■Subsegment for you geographic opportunities within larger geographies (Dallas within Texas)
■Help identify new markets to enter
■Refine sales and marketing budget allocation
■Personalize your marketing messages

Spatial Marketing Segmentation

Spatial Marketing goes even further than geo-marketing by helping you analyze not just the geography of where your targeted prospects live, but also the intersection of buyer value based on your offering’s distribution capabilities, competitors, buyer lifestyle, communication capabilities, buyer financing capabilities and even weather, all within the same buying zones. When creating your value forward marketing programs, remember to build value uniquely, not globally, based on the spatial buying characteristics of the prospect you are trying to sell (i.e., well-to-do retiree buyers in a waterfront community may perceive value for the same offering differently than prospects who live in a midwest farming community).

Spatial marketing can help you:

■Forecast demand
■Profile your customers
■Minimize marketing investment mistakes
■Increase customer satisfaction levels by understanding the demographic flow of complaints (who complains and why)

Use spatial and geo-marketing segmentation methods as business tools to increase the return on investment of your marketing programs and as a foundation to make premeditated business decisions based on logic, not emotion.

“If you want to be a big company tomorrow, you have to invest and start acting like one today.”
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Founder IBM

To your success,

Rick Erling

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About Rick Erling and The CxO Group

Rick Erling is CEO and Founder of The CxO Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have business coaching partners in five countries making us one of the world’s largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.

We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales process, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the “value variance” gap between the two. Once we have identified the “Value Variance” between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.

Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies’ revenue, within a constricted economy, by investing in revenue growth acceleration strategies, For more information visit http://www.thecxogroup.com/