Time for another old blog post.  I wrote this one, admittedly, in a fit of pique – but it still holds up well.  There’s really not much I’d change, but I will add some tips on how to manage your schedule at the end.

“Scheduling Integrity” is an important part of sales professionalism.  If you don’t know what that is, read on.

Well, the phone just rang.  Looking at the number, I knew what was about to happen.  Sure enough, it’s a person that had requested a meeting with me today, and that meeting was scheduled for a few hours away.  And she was calling to ask if I would reschedule.

“Reschedule.”  That word really is a pain in my rear end, to tell you the truth.  The call went like this:  “Hi, Troy, we have a meeting today.  I’ve had a conflict come up, and I need to know if we can reschedule.”  I agreed to do so, but not happily.  See, I know what “something came up” means, and so does everyone else.  “Something came up” means “Something better came up.”  The problem is that, while something better came up for the other person, now I have an hour of my business time that I’ve already committed – and I can’t sub in another meeting.

I’ve come up with a term for this, and it’s “schedule integrity.”  Basically, it means that when you make a meeting, you take it seriously and honor it.  When someone – anyone – agrees to meet with you, they are making a commitment to you.  Your commitment to them should be at least as serious; more so if you are the requester of the meeting.  Cancelling a meeting that YOU requested is a big sign of disrespect.  It shows that you don’t know how to manage your schedule.

You see, in most meeting dynamics, there is the person who expects to ask for something, and the person who will be asked.  We’re talking about the basic customer/salesperson relationship here.  It happens in networking environments, as well.  A while back, I was asked to “meet and do some networking” with someone that I know.  An hour before the meeting, he did the ‘cancel and reschedule’ number.  On the rescheduled meeting, he canceled a half-hour before the meeting.  I haven’t rescheduled, and I won’t.  Again, a lack of respect.

It’s not tough to avoid these situations.  When you request and get a meeting, consider that time locked on your schedule, and set new meetings at times that don’t conflict.  That’s what adults – and professionals – do.  And as I noted, the dynamics are different depending on whether you are the requester or not, but if you request meetings with someone that continually reschedules, consider that a message that your meeting won’t happen, and won’t be productive if it does.

If this were an occasional situation, I wouldn’t take the time to blog about it; however, I am constantly amazed by how many salespeople fly by the seat of their pants with respect to scheduling.  Professionals always have something scheduled, make the most of their time, and respect the scheduling of others.  If you don’t have this trait, and you’re wondering why you’re not part of the ‘elite’ group of salespeople, here’s a big indicator.  This is basic time management.

These rules do of course change in the event of personal sickness and personal emergencies.  I had a candidate reschedule an interview on Monday with no penalty due to illness: I prefer to keep the vomit reflex as far from my office as possible.  But I find that situations like that are the exception and not the rule.

Bottom line – if you want to be respected as a professional, and treated as one by your customers and associates, step one is to have (or adopt) schedule integrity.

Now that you understand schedule integrity, here are some tips on how to manage your  schedule:

1. Maximize customer face time during face-time hours.  Every industry has hours that their customers will be more available – you should be working to maximize yours. 
2. Regularly disqualify old proposals so you’re not spending time chasing things that won’t close.  Here’s a video giving ideas on how to do this.
3. Build prospecting time into your schedule a week ahead – make an appointment with yourself and keep it. Schedule integrity matters for commitments to yourself.
4. Don’t let “better things” come up.  When you make an appointment, consider it inviolate for all but the most dire of emergencies.  “I can close a sale over here” is not a dire emergency – if a customer calls requesting a meeting time that you already have booked, simply explain that you’re booked and land on a new time.  The fear is that the customer will decide to buy elsewhere because you’re in demand.  Nonsense – customers appreciate that you keep your commitments, and will understand that you will treat THEIR commitments the same way.
5. Underbook yourself.  That’s right, I said UNDERbook.  If you plan a day when you’re going hammer and tongs from meeting to meeting, I will guarantee that something will come up and you’ll miss a meeting.  Don’t be that guy or gal.  Book a strong week but a reasonable one.  With technology the way it is today, if you end up with 30 extra minutes between meetings, you can always do productive work in your car.
6. Always give the customer value for time spent.  More on that here.

If you respect your schedule and those of your customers, they will respect you and yours.

I’m often asked how to create an effective sales presentation. Creating a great sales presentation isn’t hard – but you have to remember who the star of the show is.  Hint – it’s not YOU.  Too many salespeople think that the presentation is all about THEM and THEIR stuff, and not about the CUSTOMER.  This is one of the primary aspects I work to get across in my training.

Here’s the thing – the customer cares what YOU can do for THEM.  They care about THEIR problems.  So any tutorial on how to create an effective sales presentation begins with that focus, like this one does.  It’s a great video, and it’s a good investment of five minutes of your time.

For more on sales presentations, here’s a video of me speaking at a convention in Vegas a few years ago!

I’m starting a new series called “60 Second Sales Tips,” and the point is pretty apparent – to give one great sales tip that only takes you a minute to watch.  Here’s the first, and it’s about a word tat you should stop using, if you’re using it.

One of the biggest time wasters in sales is a backlog of non-viable proposals clogging up a sales funnel.  Salespeople tend to be the eternal optimists, thinking that “one more call” might get the deal done, when in fact, the customer has declared the deal dead – they just haven’t told you.

Still, when is it time to let go of that optimism and disqualify proposals? That’s hard.  Some of it is gut feel, and some of it is science.  Ultimately, your customer will tell you to disqualify proposals – you just have to be listening.  Here are five signs that it’s time.

One of the best ways to avoid burnout in sales is to have a good work/life balance. You have to have time to be YOU – but that also means knowing how to build your work time. Here are some ideas.

Salespeople who sell from fear, rather than from an approach of giving customers positive reasons to buy, tend to lose out.  One of the most common fear-based approaches is the old “I don’t want to give the customer too much info, because I’m just doing free consulting” approach.  This is why that works against you.

Recently I learned of the “180 Day Challenge;” which is the idea that if you do anything every day for six months, you will get exponentially better results.  So, I’m taking it (my challenge is a daily video), and I challenge you to do the same.

I see the posts all the time on LinkedIn.  “Hey, can someone give me a great script for prospecting/presenting/closing/etc.”?  Sometimes I even get asked the same question myself – and my answer is always the same.  No.  I can’t give you a great sales script, and no one else can.  There’s no such thing.

Scripts are for actors and theater.  In a script, everyone knows their lines and rehearses them, and the result is predictable – which is pretty much the opposite of selling, where your customer doesn’t know their lines and the result isn’t predictable.  The key to selling is something that all the “scripters” don’t tell you.

The key to selling is authenticity.  Here’s the thing – whether you are reading a script, or just memorizing and reciting it, your customers know.  And as soon as you are perceived to be inauthentic, customers will RUN from you.

The desire for a ‘great script’ is obvious.  It’s fear and insecurity.  Salespeople believe that the right combination of magic words will get the result that they want, and that if someone smarter and more experienced than them builds that combination of words, then they’ll sell, right?

The truth is that the most important words in selling come not from YOU, but from the CUSTOMER.  The real win in selling isn’t about the words you say, but the questions you ask – and even those have to be expressed in your own words and your own personality, or again, customers will perceive you as inauthentic and won’t buy from you.

So – how do you get an audience with your customers?  Have an idea of how you can solve their problems and explain what that is in a concise sentence or two – the words depend on you and your personality.

Ask good questions that get at their needs, in your own words.

Present to those needs, again in your own words.

Ask for the business, naturally.

That’s it.  Be YOURSELF.  It’s okay to be the best version of yourself that you can be, but be yourself.

And if a sales trainer tells you that they will give you a “Script,” find yourself a new sales trainer.

12 Business Books I Recommend

What’s on my Bookshelf?

A  couple of days ago, I got a LinkedIn message from a friend from Switzerland.  He said he’d been watching my videos, and was trying to identify the books on my bookshelf behind me.  I’ll tell you a little secret – I read a lot of business books, but I don’t KEEP that many.  The ones that I do are ones that I refer to and use on a regular basis. I responded with some recommendations, and then I decided to show you what’s on my bookshelf.  These are the books that the Sales Navigator reads and recommends.

I know this one will be a bit controversial. That’s okay; I’m no stranger to controversy. I’ve seen a lot of comments on Facebook, Twitter, and on LinkedIn saying, “When this is over, we all need to stop buying our stuff from China. Everyone needs to look for American stuff and buy it!” Sounds great. In theory. In reality, it’s anywhere from “extremely difficult” to “impossible.”

You see, many things nowadays simply aren’t made here – or are so expensive that most people can’t afford them. Start at your feet. I wear dress shoes a lot for work. The cheapest pair of USA made dress shoes – not a certain brand or quality, just the cheapest I can do, period – is Allen Edmonds, starting at $395 a pair. I do OK financially (or at least I did before this madness started), but I can’t spend almost $400 on dress shoes. Want sneakers? New Balance has some Made in USA sneakers. They start at about $170. I found Made in USA cowboy boots for $1500. Work boots are better – Wolverines are $120 (although not all Wolverines are made here) and Red Wings are around $300. The point is this – many, many people simply can’t afford that.

What about jeans? That’s not an awful situation; All American Clothing has men’s jeans for $55, and women’s for $140. Again, the cheapest I could find. I was surprised to find out that my “All American” Duluth jeans were actually made in Vietnam, at $70 a pair.

How about dress shirts? I wear a lot of those, and finding an American made dress shirt under $100 is impossible. Period. Again, that’s a big spend for most people. I have two dress shirts from a high-end Italian brand. I looked – it turns out they were made in Bangladesh. If you wear suits as I do, even spending $1000 or more is no guarantee it’s not made in China.

The point is, unless you have a LOT of cash to spend, and are VERY selective in your purchasing, you’re not going to be able to even get dressed in the morning without wearing items made in China. It’s not a consumer choice that most people can even make.
Household goods are the same way, as are appliances. Even our food. I love Ritz crackers, and I’ve noticed that they have a tendency to crumble nowadays. As I was throwing away part of a box this morning, I looked. Made in Mexico.

And then there are the things we don’t even know about. I take Losartan for blood pressure. It’s probably made in China, my doc told me, and I have no control over that. If you live in a house built in the last fifteen years, it was probably nailed and screwed together with fasteners made in China.

Why is this? Is it simple corporate greed? That’s the popular line, of course. Some might be, but more of it is due to corporate (and small business) SURVIVAL. Like consumers, businesspeople can only play within the rules that are on the table, and since 2000, when China got Most Favored Nation trade status, those are the rules. Think about this. China can import our raw materials, take our designs, make products, and ship them back to us far cheaper than we can make them ourselves. It’s not just the cost of labor, although that’s a part of it. We have massive built-in costs in taxation, regulation, and other soft costs that drive the cost of manufacturing in the US higher than in many other countries – and results in the fact that for many goods, small, high-end boutique manufacturing is all that can be done.

If we really want to make “buy American” more than a bumper sticker or a Facebook virtue-signal, the rules must change, and that’s out of the hands of consumers or corporate America. That’s in the hands of our elected officials. Whether we want that is a different story, and perhaps a conversation for another day (arguing about that is not the purpose of this post) – but until then, businesses and consumers can only play the hand they are dealt.