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THE BUSINESS COLUMN

Pass me my pistol…

I am one of those ghastly people who leap out of bed every morning at around six o’clock, regardless of what time they went to sleep, and bound through the day full of enthusiasm and optimism. Interestingly, one of the common traits of successful salespeople (and I count myself as such) is energy: the ability to go the extra mile and still have energy in reserve. Of course, many people succeed without tremendous amounts of energy, but many others achieve sales success because of it. Energy is what gives you the stamina to not give up on a goal you have come so close to reaching. Being at your best all the time requires constant energy. Here are four factors that will help you increase your energy level for peak performance and sales success.

1. Good physical shape: Your overall fitness has a huge impact on your ability to sell. It affects your attitude about what you do, what you are selling, how you feel about yourself and the way you approach new customers. Have you set aside at least half an hour a day to do some type of aerobic sport? At first it may seem like it takes time out of your day, but eventually you will realise how much more energy and drive you have to push yourself further when you might otherwise have packed it in for the day. Your physical shape is the foundation of your mental toughness.
2. Mental focus: Focusing on the moment with a clear mind is crucial. Right before you take action, visualise your activities – meetings, presentations and any event where you need to perform at your best. Too often, we think about all the things we have to do instead of focusing on the moment. Another way to focus is to take a breath in through your nose and hold it for two or three seconds, then breathe out slowly through your mouth. This is the single most powerful way to calm your mind, not to mention increase the oxygen in your blood and boost your energy level. Interestingly, my son recently took up transcendental meditation. He says that meditating for twenty minutes every morning and twenty minutes every evening has transformed his professional success. What does he do? He is, that most clichéd of things, an estate agent.
3. Don’t set any limits: Think back to a time when you were exhausted but needed to continue. You probably got a second wind and finished the job. But here is what happens most of the time: energy begets energy, just like success breeds success. It adds fuel to the fire for the next time you need to sprint that extra mile.
4. Your attitude towards change: When changes occur, you have a choice about how to react. The true strength of entrepreneurs and great salespeople is their ability to adapt to a changing environment – whether it is a tough economy, the changing needs of buyers or plain old adversity. Life is like a grindstone: it either wears you down or polishes you up. It is all how you look at a changing situation.

Switching the subject from, what I would term, macro sales strategy to micro sales strategy, I wonder if you have considered taking advantage of blogs. For the uninitiated a blog is a ‘Web log’ – often a one-person, online newspaper. Nowadays, bloggers have enormous influence on marketing success. I am not talking about starting your own blog but about getting mentioned in other people’s. How? Here are some tips:

• You must have a great product. Bloggers have zero tolerance. The most important thing you can do to attract bloggers is to create a great product.
• Linking is the sincerest form of flattery. It is hard to be rude about a company, product, service or person that links to your blog.
• Flatter them. If you are clever, you will inundate popular bloggers with generic praise like “Not a day goes by that I don’t read your blog” or “I have forwarded your blog to many of my friends”. Actually, better than this, write something personal, ideally about an entry. For example: “I found your entry about waxing a surfboard very helpful, and I would like to make you aware of a new customer relationship management software product that we make.”
• Give them something. Most bloggers don’t make a lot of money from their blogging efforts. Thus, product samples, T-shirts, tickets to the soccer finals and so forth can go a long way. I am not saying that you can buy bloggers, but you can make them happy pretty easily.
• Think ahead. Befriend bloggers before you need them. Make lots of connections. Today’s egocentric, self-indulgent blogger with five page views per day may well be tomorrow’s super success story.
• Be responsive. If you want buzz, you have to return bloggers’ phone calls and emails.
• Use a rifle, not a shotgun. This is what we used to say about direct marketing. It is also true about bloggers. Don’t carpet-bomb them with emails. Target each communication to that specific blogger.
• Stay friendly whatever happens. Even if the blogger writes something negative about your company, stay in touch with them.
• Think what you can do for them. Do you have contacts or information that would be useful to the blogger so that they could improve a better blog? If you do, pass it on.

Finally, I just want to remind everyone involved in marketing a business that with all this talk of a downturn in the economy it is important to remember that your best customer is almost certainly your existing customer. Now is the time to secure existing business. It is also the time to ask existing customers to help you out. Every entrepreneur, regardless of what sort of business they run, should have a ‘recommend a friend’ or ‘introduce a client’ programme running. How you structure that programme will depend, of course, on the type of enterprise and clients you have. It may be that you have a mass-market business, in which case you will need to use mass-marketing techniques such as direct mail or email to reach your customers. You will also want to make the offers fairly general. On the other hand, if you have a small business or one with fewer clients, then consider holding events, actually talking to your customers for recommendations and also using the telephone.

Incentivise, incentivise, incentivise. No matter how large or small your clients are, everybody likes to be thanked in some tangible way for introducing new customers to a supplier. It could be a money-off voucher or a free gift or some other privilege. Anyway, if you are trying to come up with an idea for a programme of this type, do get in touch and I’d be delighted to assist if I can.

Sue Waddington

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