14 THINGS YOUR PROSPECT DOESN'T CARE ABOUT

OCT. 21, 2010                 by Don Cooper, The Sales Heretic™

Too many salespeople, professionals and business owners are way too in love with themselves and their products and services. As a result, they spend far too much time throughout the sales process talking about things the prospect doesn’t remotely care about.


It wastes your time and theirs, leaving everyone annoyed, frustrated and cursing each other under their breath.

The simple fact is, your prospect doesn’t care about:

1. Your product

2. Your service

3. Your processes

4. Your research

5. Your people

6. The history of your company

7. The size of your company

8. Your mission statement

9. Your marketing materials

10. Your awards

11. Your quota

12. Your commission

13. Your profit margin

14. You


What do prospects care about?

1. Themselves

2. Their family

3. Their friends

4. Their pets

5. Their company

6. Their job

7. Their causes

Get it?

Good.

If you want to increase your sales, stop focusing on the things prospects don’t care about and start focusing on the things they do care about. Everybody will be a lot happier.

Carola Linnaeus

Excerpted from: University of California, Museum of Paleontology

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linné or Carolus Linnaeus, is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use today (with many changes). His ideas on classification have influenced generations of biologists during and after his own lifetime, even those opposed to the philosophical and theological roots of his work.

Biography of Linnaeus
He was born on May 23, 1707, at Stenbrohult, in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. His father, Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus, was both an avid gardener and a Lutheran pastor, and Carl showed a deep love of plants and a fascination with their names from a very early age. Carl disappointed his parents by showing neither aptitude nor desire for the priesthood, but his family was somewhat consoled when Linnaeus entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine. A year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden. However, its medical facilities had been neglected and had fallen into disrepair. Most of Linaeus's time at Uppsala was spent collecting and studying plants, his true love. At the time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum, for every doctor had to prepare and prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants. Despite being in hard financial straits, Linnaeus mounted a botanical and ethnographical expedition to Lapland in 1731 (the portrait above shows Linnaeus as a young man, wearing a version of the traditional Lapp costume and holding a shaman's drum). In 1734 he mounted another expedition to central Sweden.

Linnaeus went to the Netherlands in 1735, promptly finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk, and then enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies. That same year, he published the first edition of his classification of living things, the Systema Naturae. During these years, he met or corresponded with Europe's great botanists, and continued to develop his classification scheme. Returning to Sweden in 1738, he practiced medicine (specializing in the treatment of syphilis) and lectured in Stockholm before being awarded a professorship at Uppsala in 1741. At Uppsala, he restored the University's botanical garden (arranging the plants according to his system of classification), made three more expeditions to various parts of Sweden, and inspired a generation of students. He was instrumental in arranging to have his students sent out on trade and exploration voyages to all parts of the world: nineteen of Linnaeus's students went out on these voyages of discovery. Perhaps his most famous student, Daniel Solander, was the naturalist on Captain James Cook's first round-the-world voyage, and brought back the first plant collections from Australia and the South Pacific to Europe. Anders Sparrman, another of Linnaeus's students, was a botanist on Cook's second voyage. Another student, Pehr Kalm, traveled in the northeastern American colonies for three years studying American plants. Yet another, Carl Peter Thunberg, was the first Western naturalist to visit Japan in over a century; he not only studied the flora of Japan, but taught Western medicine to Japanese practicioners. Still others of his students traveled to South America, southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Many died on their travels.

Linnaeus continued to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a multivolume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal specimens were sent to him from every corner of the globe. (The image at right shows his scientific description of the human species from the ninth edition of Systema Naturae. At the time he referred to humanity as Homo diurnis, or "man of the day". Click on the image to see an enlargement.) Linnaeus was also deeply involved with ways to make the Swedish economy more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign trade, either by acclimatizing valuable plants to grow in Sweden, or by finding native substitutes. Unfortunately, Linnaeus's attempts to grow cacao, coffee, tea, bananas, rice, and mulberries proved unsuccessful in Sweden's cold climate. His attempts to boost the economy (and to prevent the famines that still struck Sweden at the time) by finding native Swedish plants that could be used as tea, coffee, flour, and fodder were also not generally successful. He still found time to practice medicine, eventually becoming personal physician to the Swedish royal family. In 1758 he bought the manor estate of Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal collections. In 1761 he was granted nobility, and became Carl von Linné. His later years were marked by increasing depression and pessimism. Lingering on for several years after suffering what was probably a series of mild strokes in 1774, he died in 1778. His son, also named Carl, succeeded to his professorship at Uppsala, but never was noteworthy as a botanist. When Carl the Younger died five years later with no heirs, his mother and sisters sold the elder Linnaeus's library, manuscripts, and natural history collections to the English natural historian Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society of London to take care of them.

Linnaeus's Scientific Thought

Linnaeus loved nature deeply, and always retained a sense of wonder at the world of living things. His religious beliefs led him to natural theology, a school of thought dating back to Biblical times but especially flourishing around 1700: since God has created the world, it is possible to understand God's wisdom by studying His creation. As he wrote in the preface to a late edition of Systema Naturae: Creationis telluris est gloria Dei ex opere Naturae per Hominem solum -- The Earth's creation is the glory of God, as seen from the works of Nature by Man alone. The study of nature would reveal the Divine Order of God's creation, and it was the naturalist's task to construct a "natural classification" that would reveal this Order in the universe.

However, Linnaeus's plant taxonomy was based solely on the number and arrangement of the reproductive organs; a plant's class was determined by its stamens (male organs), and its order by its pistils (female organs). This resulted in many groupings that seemed unnatural. For instance, Linnaeus's Class Monoecia, Order Monadelphia included plants with separate male and female "flowers" on the same plant (Monoecia) and with multiple male organs joined onto one common base (Monadelphia). This order included conifers such as pines, firs, and cypresses (the distinction between true flowers and conifer cones was not clear), but also included a few true flowering plants, such as the castor bean. "Plants" without obvious sex organs were classified in the Class Cryptogamia, or "plants with a hidden marriage," which lumped together the algae, lichens, fungi, mosses and other bryophytes, and ferns. Linnaeus freely admitted that this produced an "artificial classification," not a natural one, which would take into account all the similarities and differences between organisms. But like many naturalists of the time, in particular Erasmus Darwin, Linnaeus attached great significance to plant sexual reproduction, which had only recently been rediscovered. Linnaeus drew some rather astonishing parallels between plant sexuality and human love: he wrote in 1729 how The flowers' leaves. . . serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. . .

The sexual basis of Linnaeus's plant classification was controversial in its day; although easy to learn and use, it clearly did not give good results in many cases. Some critics also attacked it for its sexually explicit nature: one opponent, botanist Johann Siegesbeck, called it "loathsome harlotry". (Linnaeus had his revenge, however; he named a small, useless European weed Siegesbeckia.) Later systems of classification largely follow John Ray's practice of using morphological evidence from all parts of the organism in all stages of its development. What has survived of the Linnean system is its method of hierarchical classification and custom of binomial nomenclature.

For Linnaeus, species of organisms were real entities, which could be grouped into higher categories called genera (singular, genus). By itself, this was nothing new; since Aristotle, biologists had used the word genus for a group of similar organisms, and then sought to define the differentio specifica -- the specific difference of each type of organism. But opinion varied on how genera should be grouped. Naturalists of the day often used arbitrary criteria to group organisms, placing all domestic animals or all water animals together. Part of Linnaeus' innovation was the grouping of genera into higher taxa that were also based on shared similarities. In Linnaeus's original system, genera were grouped into orders, orders into classes, and classes into kingdoms. Thus the kingdom Animalia contained the class Vertebrata, which contained the order Primates, which contained the genus Homo with the species sapiens -- humanity. Later biologists added additional ranks between these to express additional levels of similarity.

Before Linnaeus, species naming practices varied. Many biologists gave the species they described long, unwieldy Latin names, which could be altered at will; a scientist comparing two descriptions of species might not be able to tell which organisms were being referred to. For instance, the common wild briar rose was referred to by different botanists as Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina and as Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro. The need for a workable naming system was made even greater by the huge number of plants and animals that were being brought back to Europe from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. After experimenting with various alternatives, Linnaeus simplified naming immensely by designating one Latin name to indicate the genus, and one as a "shorthand" name for the species. The two names make up the binomial ("two names") species name. For instance, in his two-volume work Species Plantarum (The Species of Plants), Linnaeus renamed the briar rose Rosa canina. This binomial system rapidly became the standard system for naming species. Zoological and most botanical taxonomic priority begin with Linnaeus: the oldest plant names accepted as valid today are those published in Species Plantarum, in 1753, while the oldest animal names are those in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758), the first edition to use the binomial system consistently throughout. Although Linnaeus was not the first to use binomials, he was the first to use them consistently, and for this reason, Latin names that naturalists used before Linnaeus are not usually considered valid under the rules of nomenclature.

In his early years, Linnaeus believed that the species was not only real, but unchangeable -- as he wrote, Unitas in omni specie ordinem ducit (The invariability of species is the condition for order [in nature]). But Linnaeus observed how different species of plant might hybridize, to create forms which looked like new species. He abandoned the concept that species were fixed and invariable, and suggested that some -- perhaps most -- species in a genus might have arisen after the creation of the world, through hybridization. In his attempts to grow foreign plants in Sweden, Linnaeus also theorized that plant species might be altered through the process of acclimitization. Towards the end of his life, Linnaeus investigated what he thought were cases of crosses between genera, and suggested that, perhaps, new genera might also arise through hybridization.

Was Linnaeus an evolutionist? It is true that he abandoned his earlier belief in the fixity of species, and it is true that hybridization has produced new species of plants, and in some cases of animals. Yet to Linnaeus, the process of generating new species was not open-ended and unlimited. Whatever new species might have arisen from the primae speciei, the original species in the Garden of Eden, were still part of God's plan for creation, for they had always potentially been present. Linnaeus noticed the struggle for survival -- he once called Nature a "butcher's block" and a "war of all against all". However, he considered struggle and competition necessary to maintain the balance of nature, part of the Divine Order. The concept of open-ended evolution, not necessarily governed by a Divine Plan and with no predetermined goal, never occurred to Linnaeus; the idea would have shocked him. Nevertheless, Linnaeus's hierarchical classification and binomial nomenclature, much modified, have remained standard for over 200 years. His writings have been studied by every generation of naturalists, including Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin. The search for a "natural system" of classification is still going on -- except that what systematists try to discover and use as the basis of classification is now the evolutionary relationships of taxa.

Top 21 Sales Call Mistakes...And How to Avoid Them

By Geoffrey James


In the era of the Internet, face-to-face meetings with customers are increasingly rare. Because of this, you want to make sure that your customer meeting goes smoothly. With that in mind, here are the 21 things that you absolutely MUST NOT DO when meeting with a customer:

• MISTAKE #1: Fail to plan the call. Sounds simple, but trying to close when should be qualifying (for example) is a lost sale.

Fix: Never enter a door without first thinking about what you plan to accomplish.


• MISTAKE #2. Flirt with the receptionist. It may seem tempting, but unless you’ve got soap-opera-quality looks, chances are you’re only going to annoy (or even alarm) the admin, who will tell the boss.

Fix: Stay polite, friendly and respectful.

• MISTAKE #3: Be rude to the admin. If you act all arrogant and superior, you’ll just antagonize the help.

Fix: Once again, be friendly and respectful of the staff - admin and otherwise.

• MISTAKE #4: Show up with a crowd. If you bring too many people, it will draw customer’s comments about why your costs so high

Fix: Use webconferencing when you need to include additional resources.

• MISTAKE #5: Fail to check your appearance. Don’t show up with something amiss that a quick stop in the client’s bathroom could head off.

Fix: Make a quick pit stop - with a look-over - before the call.

• MISTAKE #6. Pretend to drop by. Who are you kidding? Do you think that it’s going to cushion the rejection if you pretend that it’s not a sales call?

Fix: Have something important to say or sell that justifies your presence.

• MISTAKE #7: Arrive late to the call. If you don’t arrive on time it tell the customer clearly that you don’t give a damn about them or their time.

Fix: Always arrive 15 minutes ahead of time. If you drive to calls, get a GPS.

• MISTAKE #8: Be too business-like at first. Remember you’re building bridges with another human being, not just a notch in your sales gun.

Fix: Smile and be friendly… but don’t get too gushy.


• MISTAKE #9. Be too friendly at first. There’s no better way to seem phony than to pretend the prospect is a long-lost friend.

Fix: Approach each prospect with respect for their time, and appropriate courtesy..


• MISTAKE #10. Talk more than you listen. Initial sales calls are all about relationship building and gathering information, which you can’t do if your mouth is moving.

Fix: Get curious about the customer and ask questions.

• MISTAKE #11. Argue with the customer. If the customer doesn’t agree with an important point, arguing is only going to set that opinion in stone.

Fix: ask the customer why he holds that opinion; then listen.

• MISTAKE #12: Discuss politics or religion. Such subjects are almost always a trap into opinionated quicksand that’s hard or impossible to get out of.

Fix: keep the discussion on business or neutral ground.

• MISTAKE #13: Dive into your product pitch. Sure you’ve got something to sell, but if you pitch too soon, you’ll get pitched out the door.

Fix: Ask questions to understand needs, before you pitch.

• MISTAKE #14: Appear flippant or sarcastic. A good-natured laugh at a joke might be taken personally by someone watching out the window, without hearing the context.

 Fix: Watch your demeanor at all times.

• MISTAKE #15: Lack requisite product knowledge. The prospect doesn’t want to hear “I need to get back to you about that”…over and over.

Fix: make sure you’re trained on your current products and policies…before the call.

• MISTAKE #16: Forget the customers’ names. What could be more embarrassing than actually forgetting whom you’re talking with?

Fix: Write down the names down of everyone in the room with a small table diagram.

• MISTAKE #17: Ask personal questions. You may think that the customer is your friend, but you can easily screw up if it gets too personal.

Fix: Keep the conversation focused on business issues, especially the customer’s needs.

• MISTAKE #18. Answer your cell phone. Ouch! Ouch! What were you thinking? How could any telephone call be more important than a real live prospect?

Fix: Turn it off and leave it in your briefcase.

• MISTAKE #19. Overstay your welcome. Your prospect has hundreds of other things that he or she could be doing, rather than spending time with you.

Fix: Set a time limit for the call.

• MISTAKE #20. Let the meeting meander. This isn’t the time for a wandering conversation that slowly gets to the point or a long series of complicated questions.

Fix: Provide brief agenda of how you expect the call to proceed.

• MISTAKE #21: Fail to Follow-up. If you’ve had a successful meeting, you want the customer to remember what was decided.

Fix: Schedule your follow-up activities immediately after the meeting. Then do them.

Five Rules for Effective Cold-Calling

By Geoffrey James


Cold-calling is always a challenge. Here are five rules to help you make the process as productive as possible:

• RULE #1. Know your target. Based upon your previous sales rates, figure out how many prospects you need in order to generate the number of sales needed to fulfill your quota. For example, if you must generate five sales a week to make quota, and on average you typically close one out of five prospects, you will need to convert 25 leads into prospects every week.

• RULE #2. Know your timeline. Based upon your previous experience, estimate the amount of time it will take to convert those leads prospects. For example, if you typically convert 1 out of 10 leads into prospects and you need 25 prospects a week, you’ll need to call 250 suspects every week. If it takes you, on average, 2 minutes to qualify a lead, you’ll need to spend 8 hours a week making qualifying calls.

• RULE #3: Know your purpose. Cold calls are for prospecting and qualifying leads. They are NOT selling calls. Unless the suspect, of his or her own accord, brings up a desire to purchase, do not go into your sales pitch. In most cases, your goal is to get a meeting with the suspect thereby transforming the suspect into a prospect. Don’t overreach.

• RULE #4. Know your script. Based upon your experience or the experience of your peers and manager, define a conversational way to ask, during an initial conversation, whether or not the suspect has a budget, authority to spend the budget, and a need for your offering. If you need help with this, check out: “The Ultimate Prospect Qualification Tool.”

• RULE #5. Know thyself. Lead qualification requires you operate at peak performance. Think of yourself as a top athlete who must win, even on days when you don’t start out feeling confident and together. Do whatever it takes to get yourself in an up and positive mood. Focus on what motivates you and why you want to win this business.

BTW: These rules are based on a conversation with Thomas Ray Crowel, author of “Simple Selling: Common Sense That Guarantees Your Success.”

SevenInsights That Make Selling Easier

By Geoffrey James


I’ve been rereading Jeff Thull’s book “Exceptional Selling“. He’s peppered the book with interesting observations and insight about selling, many of which have sparked me to think about key sales issues.

Here are some of his gems, with my own interpretation of their deeper meaning:

• INSIGHT #1 Salespeople are guilty until proven innocent. While you and I know that selling is the soul of business and a good way to help people, most folk (even in business) tend to look upon the profession with suspicion. The minute you walk into an office, you need to prove that you can add value and that you’re not trying to pull a fast one. Sad but true.

• INSIGHT #2 When you’re feeling pressure, you’re doing something wrong. If you’re constantly end the quarter with a flurry of activity, trying desperately to make your numbers, you haven’t managed your time, or you’re not thinking your sales process through. Selling is not an “unnatural act.” It’s supposed to be easy, not a struggle against time and fate.

• INSIGHT #3 Never answer an unasked question. It’s all too easy to scuttle a sale by raising issues that haven’t yet entered a prospect’s head. Such behavior usually occurs when the sales professional is so afraid of losing the sale that he begins surfacing (and answering) objections that exist only in his own paranoia. Remember, you can’t read minds, so don’t try.

• INSIGHT #4 One opinion does not make a consensus. It’s human nature to take one opinion (usually the last you just heard) and turn it into a final judgment. However, one opinion is meaningless. Just because the last prospect thought your offering was a waste of time, doesn’t mean that the next prospect will feel the same way.

• INSIGHT #5 Always protect the customer’s self-esteem. It’s absolutely true that EXACTLY half of all the customer you meet will be of below average intelligence within their demographic. Even so, it’s your job to help them make good decisions and advance their careers. And you have to do this gently, without making them feel foolish.

• INSIGHT #6 The purpose of a proposal is to reinforce already-made decisions. While proposals can sometimes help to develop an opportunity, in most cases, the proposal requesting (and writing) process happens after the prospect has already defined the problem and (probably) defined the solution as well.

• INSIGHT #8 Remain professionally involved and emotionally detached. This is perhaps the best advice that anyone ever gave a sales professional. Taking things personally is the surest way to make yourself miserable. You can care about the customer, your career and your own firm, but it’s crazy to use any of those as a proof point for your self worth.

Fine In The Past

Great Advice From My Friend David Kale    Copyright MMXI

I call it FIP. Fine in the Past. It refers to all the sales and marketing efforts, ideas, policies, principles, techniques, and strategies that worked well in the past, but are no longer effective. The past is everything that’s pre-2010.

I still recall a poignant moment with an attendee at one of my seminars. During the break he came up to me and said this: “I’ve been in business for seventeen years. And we’ve done well. But now, it seems like everything is changing, and I don’t know what to do.”

He went on to explain that he had built his formerly thriving tool and die business on certain core principles: Quality workmanship, competitive prices, and good service. Those principles, adhered to with discipline and conviction, had brought him word-of-mouth business consistently over the years. But they were no longer working, and his business was floundering. The pain and confusion were written all over his face as he contemplated the prospect of seeing his business wither away.

Those principles are some of the most common examples of FIP: Business principles and policies that were sufficient on which to build a business, but today are not. At one time, you could distinguish your business from others on the basis of these and other FIP principles. Now, however, the bar has risen. Because there is so much churn in our marketplace and the competition is so fierce, the kinds of service and quality that were sufficient to distinguish yourself from your competition are no longer sufficient. Your customers expect previously outstanding levels of service and quality from every supplier. What was sufficient a few years ago is still necessary today, but no longer sufficient.

That reliance on quality service and word-of-mouth marketing is an FIP principle. When viewed from the perspective of effective sales and marketing approaches, these principles are passive. They rely on your customer’s coming to you, recognizing the superiority of your product or service, and then talking about you to others. Your job is to create an attractive operation that will pull customers to you and then keep them coming back.

When everyone else operated in similar fashion, that was FIP. But when more and more competitors appear, and they make the same claims as you do, your reliance on passive marketing methods relegates you to second choice.

I’ve seen literally hundreds of businesses of all sizes who never reached their potential because of an inability to do sales well. They were perfectly capable of rendering outstanding service at competitive prices but struggled to survive. These FIP principles were so deeply ingrained in their mindsets that they never learned to do sales as well as they could, and their businesses never reached the level of prosperity and success that they could have reached. The economic landscape is littered with the remains of businesses who were excellent in providing their product or service, but mediocre in selling it.
Here are some other FIP practices. See if they apply to you.


FIP # 1: Creating sales by relying totally on outside sales people.


It was OK to hire a number of sales people, give them some basic training, and then charge them with “Go forth and sell a lot." Sales territories were geographically based and each sales person was a clone of the other. Accountability was a nasty word that no one repeated.


Alas, this FIP practice is a prescription for inefficient sales practices. The better approach is a variety of sales methodologies, based on the potential and dynamics of the customer.


FIP # 2: Sales management by pay plan.


In other words, pay them straight commission and everything will take care of itself.


There was a generation for whom this worked. Unfortunately, today’s work force is rarely motivated by just money.


FIP # 3: Reliance on "on-the-job" training.


Everyone can learn how to be an effective sales person. Just put them out there in a sales territory, and sooner or later they will figure out how to do the job well.


When the job of the sales person was simpler, and the customer less sophisticated, this was OK. Today, of course, it positions your sales force as the less educated, less competent one in the market.


FIP # 4: Hiring by “feel.”


When it comes time to hire a new sales person, find someone who has some experience in the industry and about whom you “feel” good.


This is a prescription for a group of clones who please the boss but are rarely what the job demands. There are far more sophisticated and effective hiring criteria and practices than this one.


The list of FIP positions can go on for quite a while. These are the most common. If they apply to you, it is time to rethink your position and move your sales and marketing efforts into the 21st Century.