Marketing Ideas for Your Business

By Bryan Flanagan, Ziglar Sales Ambassador

Here are some creative ways that business people have found to promote their businesses.  They have also found a way to put people in their stores and put a smile on their faces while they are there!

A sign in an optometrist’s office: If you can’t see what you want, you’re in the right place!

Sign in a pizza parlor:  We knead your dough!

Banner above a bank:  Let us give your legal tender loving care.

Sign outside a barbershop:  We fix $7.00 haircuts.

At a coin collector’s shop:  Drop by for old dime’s sake.

Printed on a plumber’s van:  Our flush beats your full house.

Let’s take a lesson from the above ideas and have fun with your business.

Bryan Flanagan is the premiere sales trainer.  Personally trained by Zig Ziglar, Bryan will make you proud to be in the profession of sales.  Follow Bryan on Twitter. 

Success 2.0

FREE Webcast

Focus on Your Sales Success in 2010

Featuring Bryan Flanagan, Ziglar’s Sales Ambassador

December 15, 2009       2:00-3:15 pm CST

Register for this free webcast now!

Why Is A 90% Failure Rate Ok?

By Sharon Drew Morgen

We build a 90% failure rate into our sales results; it’s so endemic in our field that we prepare for it! We hire 10 times more salespeople to get the results we seek; we get 50% longer sales cycles than we could be having; we face objections because people are responding to the sales model itself; and we lose clients we shouldn’t lose. To make matters worse, we often get turned down because our process doesn’t manage many of the buyer’s decision issues – even when our solution would be a perfect fit.

What a waste - not only for sellers, but for buyers.

This doesn’t need to happen. Sales is just an incomplete model that we’ve accepted as the way to place our products. It is directed at the product decision end of the buying decision with no ability to guide buyers through their tangle of “stuff” they need to figure out — the people and policy issues, the old vendor issues, the relationship and political and interdepartmental issues — before they can make a buying decision. It’s where prospects go when they say, “I’ll call you back.” They have to get buy-in from everything that touches their Identified Problem. Sales doesn’t offer skills for this, and buyers do this on their own.  The time it takes them is the length of the sales cycle.

Unfortunately for them, buyers don’t initially know the route through all of their decisions, either. And we meet them far too early in their decision process, leaving us waiting to close and not knowing what’s going on.  So we wait. And 90% of the prospects don’t come back because their internal issues haven’t been resolved. And buyers can’t buy until they get buy-in — even if it means they don’t resolve their need.

Sales doesn’t offer us the tools to help guide them through the route to all of those decisions. It’s quite possible to recalibrate our jobs to be not only solution providers, but neutral navigators — Buying Facilitators, if you will — much like a buddy to a sight-impaired friend who knows where they want to go but doesn’t know the exact route to get there. Or like a GPS system that can calibrate the route without driving the car or being involved with the wedding you are attending.

By focusing on the buying decision end of the equation, sales can be closed in months rather than years, weeks rather than months, and sellers can stop wasting so much of their time. And failing so often. Imagine if doctors or baseball players had the same failure rate!

Imagine if we could lead buyers through all of their unconscious decision criteria, help them discover who needs to buy in to a new solution, and help them build our product into their solution design. Imagine.

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary and thought leader in sales. Sharon Drew’s newest book, Dirty Little Secrets, details the entire system of decision making, offers tools to transform flaws in the sales module and help buyers manager their off-line, behind-the-scenes buying decisions.

Read the first chapter of The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it.

Talk Back

Give your answer in the comment section below: “You may be a salesperson if…”(with our apologies to Jeff Foxworthy!)

Lighter Sides of Selling

Sales manager Ralph asks sales manager Eddie, “Why don’t you play golf with Bill, your sales rep?”
Eddie, says, “Well, would you play with someone who cheats? Who moves the ball to a better lie? Who doesn’t count all his strokes? Would you play with someone like that?”
Ralph says, “Of course, I wouldn’t play with a guy who did those things!”
Eddie says, “Well, neither will Bill!”

Ziglar Recommends

Bryan Flanagan on Sales and Motivation
CD set
Selling is a great profession. However, the sales profession is a challenging one. Just think about it: if selling were easy, sales managers would still be doing it! This program is designed to assist you in meeting those challenges by building the sales professional and motivating the salesperson.
Order now!

This newsletter is a publication of Ziglar, Inc.  Ziglar.com

admin Uncategorized attitude, closing the sale, free, professional growth, sales, sales professional, strengthen skills, webcast, Zig Ziglar