Announcing a global talent search for TED2013 speakers
UPDATE: Get details on online signups for events near you: list of opening dates for TED2013 auditions.
The best moments at TED have often come from unexpected places. But this year, we’re pushing that to an entirely new level. We’re staging a global talent search to bring together the most remarkable lineup in TED’s history. A series of public talent searches in cities around the world will reveal voices, talents and ideas that delight and surprise.
How to Sell Anything
Selling is easy – especially when you have a system to follow.
People always ask me what my selling methodology is. Is it Miller Heiman, Sandler, Spin Selling, or Dale Carnegie?
Nope. None of them; in their entirety, at least.
I simply believe in training needs-based sales that paints a vision for clients, and highlights how a product can remove roadblocks to achieving that vision.
Kind of a hybrid of a number of sales methodologies. I guess you can call it the jamarspeaks method! Ha…
Needs-based vision selling – this is how to do it:
1. Upfront Contract – Sandler sales teaches setting an agenda or expectations at the beginning of your sales presentation. You are the leader in your sales process. Tell you clients what is going to happen over the course of your sales presentation, and what result you want to create with your meeting.
2. Tell me where you currently are? - You can’t sell someone something new (or create a problem) without knowing the current state of your client. What products or solutions are they currently using? What picture can they paint of the current state of their business or household. Get deep inside your clients present state, and you will win.
3. Tell me about where you would like to see your business? – Here is your chance to help your client get emotionally involved in your product. People buy emotionally and reinforce that decision intellectually. By having your clients creatively describe what their business or home looks like after you work with them causes them to invest in your solution without realizing it.
4. What roadblocks exist between 2&3? – The whole reason why someone would by your product is to solve the problems that keep them from achieving their vision. Dig down deep and help your client come up with tons of relevant reasons why its tough to get from point-A to point-B. This is the juice that you will sell from.
5. Let’s chat about how we can help you… – Finally! It’s time for you to present your product. You will only communicate to your client the features and benefits of your product that relate to the roadblocks the expressed in step 4. This makes your price and presentation relevant to your clients needs.
6. Close – Ask for the order. Why do all of that great work and not ask for the sale? A phrase as simple as, “would you like to jump on board?” can be the difference between winning and losing a sale.
Jamar Cobb-Dennard is a sales and marketing expert who helps companies without a sales force have a sales force. To receive your free trial of a software that will track your referral revenue, centralize social media updates, and automate email/text/postcard marketing, click here.
What is Outsourced Sales Management?
A conversation with business broker and business coach, Doug Boehme, helped me realize that outsourced sales management is avant garde.
Apparently outsourced CFO and outsourced HR services are pretty commonplace, but outsourced sales management is fairly new.
Please comment and let me know what you think of the market perception of the understanding of these services.
For those of you thinking, “How does outsourced sales management work?”, let me break it down for you.
Outsourced sales managers serve two audiences:
- Companies without a sales force who want a sales force
- Companies who have a sales team with no sales manager
The main advantage of using an outsourced sales manager is that you get expert experience at a fraction of what it would cost to hire a full-time VP of Sales. Employees in this role typically cost $60,000-80,000 per year in base salary, and up to an additional $140,000 in commission.
An outsourced sales management company like Outsourced Sales Force costs $5,000 per year in retainer, and $20,000-$40,000 in commission.
Yowzers. As a small business owner, which amount would you rather pay?
Outsourced sales managers typically perform two functions:
1. Sales recruiting, which includes but is not limited to:
- Creating a profile of the perfect sales recruit
- Creating a recruitment advertising plan
- Writing all recruitment ad copy
- Implementing the recruitment ad strategy
- Phone screening
- Personality testing
- Outlining sales staffing structure
2. Sales management, which includes but is not limited to:
- Creating the sales and marketing plan
- Defining sales path-to-closure
- Creating the sales “presentation”
- Determining, measuring, and managing sales key performance indicators
- Daily activity “check-ins”
- Monthly sales training meetings
This service is on the bleeding edge of what is going to create an economic revolution in small business.
For those of you that have experienced outsourced sales management, how has your experience impacted your business?
What would you change about how outsourced sales management is currently executed to make it more effective for the small business owner?
Jamar Cobb-Dennard is a sales and marketing expert who helps companies without a sales force have a sales force. To receive your free trial of a software that will track your referral revenue, centralize social media updates, and automate email/text/postcard marketing, click here.
10 Ways to Leverage Strategic Partnerships
Here are 10 simple ways that you can leverage a strategic partners relationships with your target market.
- Logo on Website - Put your logo on a partners website and their logo on yours. Be sure that the logo will click through to your site, you track the amount of traffic that comes from that referer, and know how much of that traffic has converted to revenue.
- Receipt Stapler – If you own a retail store (or send invoices to B2B clients), include a promotion from a strategic partner with the receipt to every one of your clients.
- Logo Items as Gifts - Every time one of your strategic partners’ clients buys from them, make sure that they get a fun and usable chochkey from you that includes your logo.
- Banner in Store – Is your message inside your partners sales materials, retail store, and office? If not, it should be!
- Product Placement - Where can you creatively place your products inside of your partners’ product offering? Is it a pop-up standee in the corner of the conference room? Will your product fit well as an accessory in the bathroom? Get creative and put your product everywhere!
- Bag Coupons - If your strategic partner has contact with your target customer, get your coupons inside of every transaction – invoice stuffers, and bag stuffers rock!
- Email Newsletter Swapping - Do you have an email newsletter? One of the most challenging parts of creating this piece of marketing every month is coming up with content. Make it easy on yourself (and your strategic partner) by writing for each others’ e-newsletter. You not only get the content taken care of, your name will be in front of other potential clients, and your clients will see more value in you as a provider of 3rd party information.
- Co-Advertising – Save money by advertising with your strategic partner. You may not be able to afford a $3,000 full-page print ad, but you may be able to if you split it with 3 other service providers with similar conversations to their target markets.
- Client Seminars/Event Night – The Young Professionals at the Skyline Club pulled together all of their resources and clients in November, and threw an amazing client appreciation night. Instead of the event costing us $1,000 a piece and entertaining 10 people at a time, we spent $175 each and had 75 people in attendance. How can you do something similar for your business?
- Auto-sell – Is your product sold as an “automatic add-on” when someone buys one of your strategic partners products? Every time a MegaSell attendee buys one of my follow-up seminars, they automatically get $750 worth of “free” product from my strategic partners. This builds my strategic partners’ client base, and adds value to my product offering.
What are some other things that you can do to leverage strategic partnerships and promote each others products/services?
Jamar Cobb-Dennard is a sales and marketing expert who helps companies without a sales force have a sales force. To receive your free trial of a software that will track your referral revenue, centralize social media updates, and automate email/text/postcard marketing, click here.
Like this:
Want Success? Look at the Man in the Mirror
Michael Jackson said it first in Man in the Mirror:
Man, I used to rock that cut so hard while riding in the back seat of my parents gold Ford Thunderbird.
Now Lil Wayne is bringing it back with Bruno Mars in this 2011 hit:
The point is that if you want the world (and YOUR world) to change, you have to BE the change, DO the change, and then watch it come to fruition.
During a heated discussion with an ex-girlfriend, I subtly told her that she wasn’t the type of person I wanted to be with by telling her the traits of the person in my “perfect relationship”. The very fact that I was willing to have conversation is a good clue as to why we are no longer together…
Regardless. Her response to me was “you’re not even those things, so good luck finding that!”
In part, she was right. I’m growing into the person that I want to be and want to be with. She was also absolutely right in the fact that if I want to “have” then I have to “be” first.
Caption on Play It Again Sports owner, Elain Hale’s, mirror
What are your goals this year?
How do you have to “be” in order to achieve those goals.
After looking in the mirror, and thinking about your “be”, how do you need to shift so you can create the reality you want in 2012?
Jamar Cobb-Dennard is a sales and marketing expert who helps companies without a sales force have a sales force. To receive your free trial of a software that will track your referral revenue, centralize social media updates, and automate email/text/postcard marketing, click here.
What Makes a Great Salesperson?
I met with Troy Burk of Right On Interactive today, and he asked me a great question – what makes a great salesperson?
I like meeting with Troy. He asks hard questions, is a good thinker, and comes from the perspective of literally building Exact Target’s sales team from the ground up.
I thought long and hard (for about 22-seconds…), and came up with the following answers:
- Hard Work – A salesperson can have the cleanest look, best lines, and a resume that makes him look like a king, but if he is not willing to bust his hump and make hundreds of calls, he’s worthless.
- Listening – I have a client who is a horrible listener. He railroads over what his clients are saying to him, and is a football field away from catching what his clients “aren’t” saying to him. A great salesperson is a fantastic listener, and can truly communicate their way into closing a sale.
- Connects the Dots - A salesperson who can connect the gaps between where a clients vision for their company is and the challenges that it will take them to get their with the salesperson’s product, is worth their weight in gold. All a client cares about is “how can you get me to my vision with your product”. Can your salesperson make that connection for your prospects?
What other traits do you feel the greatest salespeople possess?
Jamar Cobb-Dennard is a sales and marketing expert who helps companies without a sales force have a sales force. To receive your free trial of a software that will track your referral revenue, centralize social media updates, and automate email/text/postcard marketing, click here.
jamarspeaks
