selling

Years ago, when The Tonight Show ruled late-night TV and when all the guests weren’t celebrities promoting their latest book, movie, or TV show, host Johnny Carson interviewed the Girl Scout who sold the most cookies that year. This young lady, Markita Andrews, set a cookie-sales record that has yet to be broken. What was her technique? In addition to hard work, she used a framing strategy to make her customers view the purchase as a trivial expense:

It's ten days to Christmas and we're already two days into Hanukkah, so I'm ready to call the season's retail sales:

• The worst performing stores and brands will often evidence the "best" advertising, only the results won't be their fault.
• The best sales results will come from businesses that offered low prices, and they won't get credit for any marketing success.

Jos. A. Bank is running a big sale this weekend. Wait a minute, it seems that it runs a big sale every weekend. Buy one, get two free. 50% off all merchandise. There are endless permutations of the deal, but they all center on putting the store pretty much in permanent fire sale status.

I’ve heard from several friends in call center operations that outsourcing inbound telesales to the Philippines has resulted in close rates below expectations. In at least one case that I know of, a company is re-establishing an internal sales center to try to get to the root of why telesales is harder to offshore than customer care.

If you want to get someone to do something, speak into his right ear. Research by Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University Gabriele d’Annunzio in Chieti, Italy, shows not only that we have a preference for processing spoken information via our right ear, but requests made to that ear are more likely to be successful:

Consider this: conversation is to selling what cooking is to eating. 

Process.

Not ingredients, nor consumption. 

by: John Caddell

Market segmentation is a very attractive concept. Analyzing a group of customers, comparing it to the capabilities of your product set, and deciding who are the highest-probability targets. Salespeople then focus their efforts on this narrower set of prospects. Sales then follow.

At its worst, though, segmentation allows you to fall in love with a small pipeline. After all, if the prospects are in the target segments, they should be easier to close than an undifferentiated mass.

by: John Caddell

You never read about selling in books about innovation. But, for B2B products, the first sales of a new product or service are crucial lifelines. Let’s be clear about this: no matter how cool, fast, inventive, or buzzworthy your product is, if you can’t bring paying customers on board, it’s not worth anything to your business–in fact, it’s a drain.

by: John Caddell

I was honored to contribute to a new e-book, “Selling Through A Slump” (free-registration required). Some of my favorite people (and friends of this blog), such as Dave Stein and Jill Konrath, also contributed.