Most of you know by now that I’m a car guy.  I should point out, however, that I’m not a NEW car guy.  In fact, my daily driver is a 2006 Cadillac Escalade.  It’s the newest vehicle I’ve ever owned.  I bought it, used, over three years ago.  I’ve put nearly 100,000 miles on it. It’s as least as nice now as it was when I bought it.  Most of my vehicles are.  I have friends who buy new, or much newer, cars than I have – and in a couple of years they are in worse shape than my 16 year old SUV.

“Sure,” you’re saying.  “You’re a car guy, Troy.  It’s easy for you.”  Keeping a vehicle running well and looking good is easy – and so is keeping a sales territory healthy.  In both, you have to do the little things before they can become big things.  You do a little bit of the right things every week, and the right things happen.  Let me explain.

My Caddy doesn’t get trashed in the interior because every time I gas it up or arrive home, I immediately clean any trash out of it (spoiler alert – I have been known to drink a bottled water or soda, empty it, and toss the empty into the back seat floor; I also have been known to eat in my car).  I wash it at least once a week (this prevents rust and other nastiness), I change the oil promptly when it’s time, and do any other maintenance as required.  This saves me time and money because I don’t have to do the “rollercoaster” cycle of vehicle maintenance.  Stick with me, I’m getting to the sales stuff.

By cleaning the interior and washing it, I don’t have to spend $150-200 to have it detailed.  The other maintenance works the same way.  Now, think about your own sales territory.

The common sales cycle for most salespeople looks like this:

1. Do a bunch of prospecting to find people in the buying market.
2. Sell your guts out to this group of people (riding the rollercoaster up).
3. Make some sales and put up some numbers.
4. Run out of prospects (down goes the rollercoaster).
5. Return to step 1 and repeat.

This cycle frustrates management and costs salespeople money.  Properly maintaining your sales territory is about doing smaller amounts of the right things week in and week out, so that you never run out or prospects, nor out of time to work the ones you have.  I hear salespeople complain all the time about the “metrics management” approach to sales management – but it works.  That’s why those metrics exist (and why I always create them in my own sales audits that I conduct).

If you really want to be effective and efficient at the “territory maintenance” approach to your selling, do this.  Budget certain amounts of time each week for certain activities – and then block times to do them.  For instance, if two hours of telephone prospecting will get the job done, make an appointment with yourself on your calendar to prospect, and then keep it.  If you need to do 8 appointments per week, block time for that.  Etc.  Manage and maintain your territory, and you’ll never be that salesperson who is scratching for new business to try to make a goal or quota.

By the way, my plan is to drive my Escalade for two more years.  Why? Because I like it.  A lot.  And because it’s still as nice as it was three years ago – and probably thirteen years ago.  That’s because I maintain it.

I just returned from speaking at a conference of independently owned businesses in Las Vegas.  As usual with this group, I had a great time, made some new friends, and made some new business connections.  They are truly great people, and honestly, they are a lot of fun in the sessions.

As I was looking through the business cards that I received from attendees, however, something struck me.  Most of the businesses had slogans on their cards, as you might expect.  And a majority of the slogans were centered on phrases like, “We’re a family business,” “your local source,” etc.  That’s normal – but it started me wondering what those company owners wanted to accomplish with those slogans.

Slogans like these are designed to create emotional appeal.  By saying that you are a family business, for instance, the idea is to conjure an image of the All-American family that customers support through their patronage, rather than a big, faceless corporation.  That’s okay, if your customers are prone to such emotional appeals – but fewer and fewer customers are susceptible to emotional appeals.

The problem is that buying decisions today are made based on intellectual rationale, rather than emotion.  That’s not to say that relationships don’t matter – they definitely do – but the basis for those relationships (or at least the start of them) has less to do with personal affinity than with a business decision-making process to select the best vendor for the customer’s needs.

Worse, these slogans send a subliminal message.  That message is, “We’re not the best, but you should root for us.”  It’s what I call “Underdog selling.”  Yes, people definitely root for the underdog – but they don’t buy from them very often.

When I ask these business owners why the customer should care, they always respond with answers like, “Well, we have great service,” or “our customers aren’t just a number.”  In other words, they use “me too” statements that have no real benefit to the customer.

I like to give slogans and taglines the “so what” test.  That’s what speakers do when they think about a speech.  They imagine the audience saying, “So what?  Who cares?  What’s in it for me?  It’s all about me!”  Most of these slogans don’t pass the “so what” test.  That said, there is a way to make slogans like this meaningful.

What you’re really trying to say when you say things like “we’re family owned” or “we’re local” is that the customer’s buying and ownership experience is different.  Okay, great.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  How is it different?

Do you ask different questions than your competition?

Do you give the customer a more personalized presentation than your competition?

Do you focus more on the customer’s buying process than you do your own sales process?  Even better, do those two processes harmonize?

Can you flex and create a more customized solution than your competition?

Does your post-sale experience differ in a positive way from your competition?

And if the answer to any of these is “yes,” how can and do you prove it?

The problem with “we’re small” emotional appeal is simple.  Not all customers think that big corporations are something to be avoided.  Don’t believe me?  Ask your customer if he/she buys from Amazon.  I love independently owned companies, and support them whenever I can.  That said, the best way to get a roll of burgundy colored duct tape to me the next day is to buy it on Amazon (yes, I just did that), so that’s how I spent that money. If you go down the road of thinking that a “we’re small” emotional appeal is an automatic advantage, you’re going to lose a lot of business.

Instead of saying “we’re small,” “we’re family owned,” or “we’re local,” find ways to say “we’re excellent at what we do and here’s why we are the best solution for you.”

In today’s intellectual, information-based world, selling is about discovering customer needs, finding ways to solve those needs, and continuing to solve those needs on an ongoing basis.  Failure to do so is to surrender your sale.

I have a few guilty pleasures.  One of them is (or at least was) professional wrestling.  I stopped watching several years back for reasons that we might get into in a future article, but up until then, I was a fan.  I’m particularly a fan of the wrestlers of my youth, and so when videoed retrospective interviews of them became popular, I watched quite a few.  One of the best is called Kayfabe Confessions, done by a guy named Sean Oliver (“Kayfabe” is wrestling lingo for pretending that everything you see is real).  Oliver’s interviews were a cut above the rest in terms of production values and questions asked.  And, not surprisingly, Oliver has his own retrospective book now, which inspired this article.

In it, Oliver notes that at the time he started, most such interviews were done by a guy wearing a T-shirt like the wrestler being interviewed.  He, however, always wore a suit and tie because “that signifies that something important is happening.”  I thought about my own sales career, and I had to agree – even when I was in an industrial sales territory, I’d leave the office with a jacket and tie.  I might remove them if the situation demanded, but I’d start out with them.  Why? Because I wanted my customers to know something important was happening.  I see many ways that salespeople diminish their own importance every day, and the visual presentation is only one of them.

So, how do salespeople diminish their importance?  Here are my thoughts – I’d like to hear yours.

1.   Here’s where a lot of people are going to get mad at me.  When I started in sales, the philosophy was, “dress one notch better than your customers.”  So, I always had a jacket and tie available to me.  Sure, I took it off for some calls but I left it on for others.  As an example, if I were going to a manufacturing plant, I might take off the jacket and tie to meet with the maintenance man – but I’d have them on to meet with the plant manager.  As time goes on, I have seen average sales dress go from “casual” to downright sloppy.  When I bring this up, salespeople squeal that “my customers wouldn’t like it if I dressed better.”  Why not?  You are selling yourself as a resource – if you look like an unmade bed, you undermine that sale.  My advice is as it always has been.  Dress professionally.  For men, a well pressed shirt and slacks are the minimum standard.
2. Going in empty handed. I have always carried a briefcase – at a minimum, a zipped up padfolio with literature and other supplies in it.  Some salespeople say, “I don’t want to carry a briefcase because I might intimidate my customer.”  That’s just silly.  Guess what?  Your customer knows that you’re a salesperson, and that your objective is to transact business.  Going in with a briefcase gives you more carrying capacity for items that make that transaction easier.  So why leave it in the car?  Walking in empty handed is just dumb – yes, even with the tech we have available to us today.
3. “Just.” One of the worst words I see salespeople using is “just.”  As in, “I was just stopping by to…” or “I was just calling to….”  When you say “just,” you disempower every word that comes after “just.”  Why?  Be assertive and let your customers know that you are using their time wisely.  Again – you’re a salesperson.  Be proud of it.
4. The stop by. Since I mentioned “just stopping by,” let’s talk about that.  Stopping by is a poor substitute for an appointment.  An appointment is a commitment to meet at a specific time and place to discuss a specific topic.  That topic is usually on the pathway to transacting business.  Having appointments connotes respect for your time and your customer’s, and it is the core of professional selling.  Stop-bys help you fill out a call report or make a CRM entry, but they seldom yield more than a quick “hello.”  And while we’re at it…
5. Agenda free sales calls. Every sales call should have a reason for being and an objective to be reached.  To not do so is to waste time.  I see entirely too many salespeople doing what they call “P.R. calls,” which is “hey, just seeing how you were doing.”  Your customers are busy, and a “P.R. call” denotes nothing important. It will not generate anything important, either.

There are, unfortunately, many more ways that salespeople kill their own importance.  All of them have their root in a feeling of shame about being a salesperson.  There’s no reason to be ashamed – selling is a profession that is both proud and incredibly important.  Ask yourself what ways you employ to make your sales calls important to your customer – and what ways diminish them.  Then think about why.

My closing thought is this:  Sean Oliver was by far the most successful of the “behind the scenes” interview producers.  Maybe that’s because his interviews were important.

Whoops!  We’ve all been there, right?  You make a mistake.  How do you recover from a mistake? Maybe it’s a big one, maybe it’s a small one.  I made one last week in this space.  I sent the Navigator out without the correct article link.  I loved that article too – if you haven’t read it, read Schrodinger’s Proposals.  But, in my excitement to get it out, I forgot to get the right article to link to the “read article” button.  Facepalm time.  Here’s what’s funny – I always test every link before I send the article.  Except last week, darn it!

I caught my mistake immediately after I sent it.  This is the moment of truth in mistake recovery.  What do you do when YOU realize your own mistake, but the customer (or reader) hasn’t caught it yet?  If you are a regular Navigator reader, you already know what I did – but even so, let’s walk through how to recover from a mistake.

1. Own it. I immediately fixed the link and re-sent the Navigator to the recipients with the subject line beginning, “CORRECTED.”  I know that sending two Navigators within five minutes of each other might have been an irritant to my readers (and if you were one of those irritated, I do apologize), but it’s better to irritate them than to have them click a link to the wrong article.  When you discover a problem, own up to it, to the customer, RIGHT THEN. Get out in front of it.  It’s always better to be in front of a problem than behind it.  But, if they do discover it first, own the problem as soon as you understand it.
2. Find out what the consequences have been for the customer. In the case of the newsletter, there were no consequences.  In most sales and business situations, there are. Never assume what those consequences are – ask.  The root of all good things in selling is the ability to ask the hard questions.  Ask this question.
3. Alleviate the consequences. If at all possible, make the customer whole again.  Whatever damage has been caused by your mistake (and normally, if you get out in front of the problem, that damage will be minor), fix it.  No questions and no excuses.
4. Don’t place blame on anyone but yourself. This is the time to take one for the team.  Don’t say “it was this department” or “it was that guy.”  You are the face of the company – so be the face of the problem.  You have all the time in the world to solve the problem internally, if others need to be addressed.  To the customer, it was YOUR fault.
5. Go the extra mile. Now that you’ve owned the problem, fixed the consequences, and taken all the blame, figure out what you can do to give the customer something extra to make up for all the trouble.  What this is might depend on the customer and their needs – it could be something personal or something that accrues to the benefit of the company.  The only way you will know is by knowing your customer inside and out – you do that, right?

If you wait for a problem to be discovered – as all too many salespeople do – you’ll have a much bigger job of recovery.  Get out in front of it, and you will be in a much stronger position.  In fact, sometimes getting out in front of the problem can actually build trust with your customers.  That’s how to recover from a mistake.

This was a pretty good lesson – you’d almost think that I messed up the newsletter on purpose, wouldn’t you, so that I could write this article?

Spoiler alert – I didn’t.