Monthly Archives: February 2009

Building a Professional Practice?

Posted on February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment

By Chuck Terry,
Executive Vice President & CSO – Carew International

It Isn’t What You Know or Even Who You Know,
but WHEN You Know Them

One of the most significant challenges to effectively developing business for any professional practice is developing good selling skills. As an attorney, accountant, engineer, etc., it’s safe to say that had you wanted to become a sales person, you probably would have…right? The fact is that one of the most important parts of building a thriving practice is bringing in new business. Of course, performing well for your clients is the baseline for success. Even having achieved that, unassisted word of mouth advertising isn’t enough to grow or even sustain your practice.

For a professional service firm, it is common knowledge that networking, speaking and publishing are three essential legs of the business development stool. The end goal for each of these inter-connecting approaches is really the same: Make contact with other people who may need your services or know someone else who might. What makes that strategy so difficult to execute is you can easily become discouraged when you put forth the effort to work on each leg of the stool, yet little business may be immediately realized from your activity.

Ever noticed an ad for a funeral home? Probably not. But if you pay attention, the next time you watch television you just might see one. The same “invisibility” phenomenon occurs with many products and services. Unless you are actively seeking what is being offered RIGHT NOW, you might not notice even the best crafted advertising or promotional messages. That same effect is what discourages many professionals from continuing the discipline of writing, speaking, and networking. There is not much immediate gratification, so the discipline diminishes.

The trick to consistently “making rain” in your practice is to stay focused on the three legs of the stool on a continual basis. Not just when things slow down, not just when you are in the mood, but all the time. Setting a weekly goal for time solely dedicated to staying connected with your network is a great tactic. Frequency of contact within your network is essential, but not just any contact. Try to find ways to add value every time you reach out. The people in your network are much more likely to give you help if you are looking for ways to help them first. Be an information resource. Send them relevant articles, etc. Continually be on the lookout for ways to assist the individuals within your network and they will be more inclined to assist you.

In many cases it may take years for the folks you are meeting today to realize a need, but continued attention to networking diligently will pay huge dividends down the road. Stay active, stay engaged, stay connected and you will stay busy in your practice for years to come!

Chuck Terry is the Executive Vice President and CSO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.

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Posted in Sales and Leadership Insights

Tagged Business, Business skills, Positional Selling, Sales Leads, Sales Performance, Sales Prospecting, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Selling

Selling Isn’t Just About Building Relationships

Posted on February 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

Is “Bob The Doughnut Man” Selling for You?

By Chuck Terry, Executive Vice President and CSO – Carew International

First things first let me just say that this is not an anti-doughnut campaign and I certainly have nothing against the basic concept of doing nice things for people. Now that we have established that premise I would like to tell you a story that illustrates the difference between relying solely on personal relationships to gain new business and balancing relationship building with functional sales skills.

My story involves a motivated sales professional that I knew within a company with which I was consulting on sales process improvement. To protect the guilty I will call him “Bob” for the purposes of this piece. Bob was incredibly diligent and one of the hardest working sales professionals you could ever meet yet he was failing miserably at his job as a route sales professional with a major consumer goods manufacturing company. He was meeting every numeric activity quota such as calls per week, his customers spoke well of him, yet he wasn’t hitting his sales targets.

When his new manager traveled with him he was quite impressed with how Bob would start early and stop at the local bakery so he could take fresh donuts to his clients then swing by again in the early afternoon to take cookies to his later appointments. Everyone was glad to see Bob and his freshly baked treats. While Bob was universally liked by his customers (at least the ones who weren’t dieting) it became apparent after a couple of ride along sessions with his manager that Bob just never seemed to get around to talking much about business. He was so focused on trying to make friends and get his customers to like him that he never took the time to learn about his customer’s needs. He was well versed in their personal lives but knew very little about their businesses.

The new manager came to learn that Bob had been rushed into the field as a new hire to fill an open territory. He was well versed in the industry and knew the product line inside out but had never received any training on how to sell, a situation not as uncommon as you might think. The sales manager arranged for Bob to be professionally trained in a selling system that taught him to leverage his relationship building skills in order to build the rapport he had already established into credibility and trust. Once his customer’s began to trust him as a business advisor they began to share their needs with him as they related to their businesses. Bob was still bringing doughnuts but now he was also bringing business value to his customers.

At last report Bob had turned things around in his territory. He is still not quite hitting his numbers but he is getting closer every month. Bob has learned what many sales professionals have and are learning every day. Gone are the days when going out and just making friends are enough. To succeed in sales today professionals need to be able to add value to the businesses of their customers. Success is built upon a balance of both interpersonal skills and functional sales skills and processes. One without the other is nothing more than “Bob the Doughnut Man”!

Chuck Terry is the Executive Vice President and CSO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

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Posted in Sales and Leadership Insights

Tagged Business, Business skills, Positional Selling, Sales, Sales Performance, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Selling

A New Way to Prospect!

Posted on February 9, 2009 | 4 Comments

Prospecting for Customers in the “New Economic Reality”

In a February 6th report in the Wall Street Journal noted economists referred to our current National financial state as a “slow motion train wreck”. Not great news on the surface but there are companies that are growing their businesses and expanding through tough economic times in spite of the wreckage. What do they know that others don’t? Is it luck, some sort of divine intervention, or is their sales mechanism simply better than their competitors?

While there is no simple or universal answer to those questions enterprising companies that want to prosper during tough times have at least one common place to focus that will help them to emerge as winners during a slow economy…their sales organization. With most of the companies that I am speaking with there is one particular area of the sales function that seems to differentiate the companies that are gaining market share from the ones that are just trying to hold on. That area of distinction occurs with how many quality prospects are going into the sales pipeline. Wherever you find companies with healthy pipelines you invariably find sales people that are prospecting more effectively.

I don’t know many sales professionals that enjoy cold calling to develop prospects. Maybe they shouldn’t do it anymore? In today’s climate of economic pressure and constant interruption marketing we need to reexamine our traditional look at the process of cold calling. The sales professionals I referenced above that are the more effective at filling their pipelines are for the most part doing very little “dialing for dollars”. Instead, they are almost always masters of networking through social and business groups in new and creative ways. They are making a lot of “warm calls” through introductions from peers and leveraging ever growing social/ business networks to feed the pipeline.

There are a growing number of social networking and business networking avenues that savvy sales professionals are tapping into such as Facebook, Jigsaw, and LinkedIn. These virtual networking mediums can make the process of building a professional business network a far more effective strategy than the “old school” process of cold calling by telephone. But don’t think that fully leveraging such strategies is as easy as signing up and beginning to tap into new prospects. These new electronic vehicles require a thorough understanding of how to effectively operate within their guidelines as well as a carefully planned and religiously executed strategy.

Before you think I am advocating telling your sales force to stay home in their pajamas and mine the internet for gold let me clarify that what I am actually advocating is only one piece of an overall networking strategy in a changing sales climate. Your team will probably need to be given some specialized training around how to become more effective networkers in both live and virtual environments to support this approach to building a deeper pipeline of prospects.

Say good bye to the old days of pounding the phones and hello to a brave new world where your next big deal may only be a mouse click away.

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Posted in Sales and Leadership Insights

Tagged Business, Business skills, Positional Selling, Sales, Sales Leads, Sales Performance, Sales Prospecting, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Selling