IN MEMORY OF ZIG ZIGLAR...
This month SOLD features Zig Ziglar's wisdom on sales.
In his article Zig Ziglar shares his experience in sales and sales people: "Actually, there is no such thing as a "typical sales person." Sixteen-year-olds can be exceptionally good at selling and 80+year-olds can be sharp and effective. They come in all sizes, shapes, colors, and they can be either male or female."
What's inside January 2013:
The Edgerank algorithm for Facebook is one of the reasons why the social media site has become so successful. But what is Edgerank? Edgerank measures the amount of interaction to a particular item in a news feed receives in terms of likes, clicks, comments, and post shares. It helps rank your Facebook news items in order of the ones you will be more likely to care about based on this information. Keep in mind that negative feedback and spam reports can also factor into the algorithm for determining PageRank, so this makes taking advantage of the Edgerank algorithm critical for businesses. This is especially true for businesses trying to make sure their marketing campaigns are viewed by others as much as possible.
For example, if someone has several pages of news items to read on their Facebook page, you’ll want your information at the top of that page. Fortunately, there are a few ways to make sure this happens.
1) Avoid Looking Like Spam
It’s easy to be overzealous when running a marketing campaign. In some situations, it makes total sense to cast a bit of a wide net in terms of possible appeal to those viewing your Facebook feed, but it can also increase controversial posts to your campaigns that generate negative exposure.
So the problem with casting a wide net is the potential feedback and “spam” responses become too high which can seriously hurt your PageRank. This is why I recommend taking a measured, more conservative approach to posting.
2) Be Brief and Timely
You’ll enjoy a better Edgerank based directly on how much interest your posts generate. This interest is often connected to how popular your topics are within a certain time frame. Whatever major news items are currently in progress will generate a lot more interest, thus a greater Edgerank, than something that is old news.
Facebook readers are also drawn to more concise statements and quality content than long winded posts. Capture their attention; give them good information that’s educational and engaging but brief. Less is more.
Stop resisting it. Business owners and Sales Management must take a couple of hours to write a short bullet point business / action plan for the company. If you do not get your Sales people to each write a sale plan than you are making a big mistake. Add this to your Good Sales Practices.
As a Sales Coach, I have seen many good salespeople become directionless, and without purpose, because they have no plan. However, it must first start with the Small Business Owner or Sales Manager. It does not have to be some long multi-page document that is impossible to follow-up. 2-3 pages with Goals, Strategies, and Actions that will be reviewed regularly and easily is more than sufficient.
Success comes in many forms. People in sales are naturally competitive. Persistence and hard work, many times are wasted, when there is no clear direction, strategy, or metrics to mark the milestones that will lead to success.
Every day, I hear from sales people who are confused, frustrated or defeated by facing what they feel is a nearly insurmountable objection:
“I am sorry, but I am very happy with my current supplier/vendor. We have been doing business with them for many years and have no reason to change…”
This position strikes terror in most sales people and many ask me for advice on how to overcome this.
One of my best friends is not particularly good-looking, but he’s always dating really attractive women. I wanted to know what his secret was, so I asked him. He said “I talk to a lot of women. Most of them are not into me, but some are.” I then asked him if all those rejections made him feel bad. I’ll never forget his answer: “It’s like basketball: you make some and you miss some.”
What if we could redefine losing? What if losing was a necessary step toward winning? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to fail as much as needed in order to achieve our goals?
We live in a data driven world. Data has achieved a few high profile successes recently: Nate Silver predicting the US elections, Moneyball strategies in sports and the rise of personal analytics to get data on almost every aspect of our lives. Data and analytics have also become omnipresent in some shape or form in most businesses - optimizing data within a company has become a necessity. A recent Aberdeen Research study indicated that most best-in-class companies had a culture of information sharing and the findings above show that SaaS can help foster this culture.
This article was published in SOLD Issue 18.
If you think your customers exist solely to “buy your stuff,” you’re missing a huge part of the picture. Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers, says your customers are uniquely equipped to influence your product development, sing your praises, and even close sales for you. He describes seven things they can do better than you.
Read the FULL article at http://www.soldlab.com/news/2013/01/11/7-things-your-customers-can-do-better-than-you
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