Saleslife's Blog

“Image Is Everything”

saleslife — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:23:29 +0000

“Image is everything” has been a tag line for Canon Photographic equipment for many years. This is a great tag line for business in today’s environment as well, especially when your business is uniforms.

What is image and why is it so important in today’s marketplace?

Business professionals are under constant pressure to deliver value to their customers, especially as pricing and features become indistinguishable between different companies. Image is one of your many weapons to combat “sameness” and will enable you to separate you and your organization from the rest of the pack.

Image begins with how you present yourself and your organization to customers and extends to your ability to create interdependent relationships with your clients. A professional, personal presentation and the development of customer relationships based on trust, credibility, and rapport, will lead to the ability to identify value creation opportunities for your customers.

Appearance Matters

Often times, today’s casual business environment leads to a less professional approach to business. Appearance is often a forgotten tool to gain confidence with your customers. As professionals, the greatest compliment that we can pay a customer is to take the time to be prepared from an appearance perspective. Meeting each customer interaction with appropriate energy, a positive attitude, and a clean, polished appearance is a way to demonstrate to the customer, “I care about you and I am here to do business. This is not a social call.” Bringing the appropriate Energy, Attitude and Appearance into each sales call is an integral part of your mental preparation for your solution development, which is critical to your success.

A business casual environment does not translate to “Casual Business.” The passion and energy that you bring to customer relationships is the very starting point for accomplishment. Without energy and focus, a sales call can have the characteristics and sound that the Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore, might display: “It’s not much of a sales call, but it’s all I know and I’m sort of attached to it…”

Eeyore: “Hey Frank, how’s it going? Is there anything new happening at Worldwide Wallyball Incorporated? (and the classic) You don’t need anything, do you?”

Customer: “NO.”

Unfortunately, sales professionals don’t know they slipped into a rut with the customer by becoming too casual. Create your Image of Difference and avoid Casual Business by checking your Energy, Attitude and Appearance. These practices will extend your position with your customers and help you to create valuable interpersonal relationships based on trust, credibility and rapport.

Decide to Be Great!!!

saleslife — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:27:45 +0000

For some people, it’s always winter—dark, cloudy, and mostly dismal. Here we are in the emergence of Spring and regrettably, winter carries over into their Spring, Summer and Fall in every effort of life, work, passion and even the human condition. They spend more time worrying about what will go wrong in their lives. We have all had experiences in our lives of turning every silver lined cloud into a black cloud of DOOM! rather than focusing on what they can do to ensure that everything goes right. We are thinking about all that can go wrong and people are quick to remind us of just that phenomenon.
In this frame of mind, they we see ourselves as unwelcome guests inside our own lives and this carries over to our belief that we view everyone as an adversary waiting to pounce on us at every turn in the road. If this is the way you view yourself, count on acting out these perceptions. It will be very difficult to feel one way and act another way.
Your attitudes are built and maintained by the messages you send yourself. Tell yourself, “I am confident, competent, prepared, and ready to make an outstanding contribution. I see myself as being helpful and capable of bringing unique value to my relationships. I am going to be great today.” These attitudes activate a different sense of being that makes you the first and only choice.

Greatness is not a random act by the forces or nature, but a conscious choice of success. So as great friend of mine Geoff Packwood once said: “Don’t let the bastards get you down”. Go be great, and we will all enjoy the glow of your success. Please check out more about our top notch custom sales training or fill out the poll questions below.

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Are We Ants Marching?

saleslife — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:41:29 +0000

By Jeff Seeley, CEO – Carew International

I recently did my annual 1300 mile corn tour from Cincinnati to Denver and was listening to an old Dave Matthews Band tune. “We wake up in the morning, do our teeth, bite to eat and we’re rolling… never changes a thing. The week ends, the week begins.” (Dave Matthews, Ants Marching lyrics) It hit me that as sales professionals, we can find ourselves in a dangerously uncomplicated routine.

Particularly during these recent economic woes, we have often put ourselves in the defensive mode, sticking to the safest route, and creating a routine that repeats itself day in and day out. After all, it is tough to be creative and innovative when we’re struggling to keep our heads above water (keeping sales up, trying to meet customer demands) while keeping our heads below the firing line (making sure that we did not risk our position). This approach can quickly become a dangerous habit… taking fewer chances, putting aside exciting ideas until better times or the right moment.

At one point in my journey, I found myself stranded at a BP station in the middle of Illinois. During the 90 minutes I was stationed next to a gas pump, there was never a word exchanged between the other patrons and me; each person coming and going, doing the same thing, the same way and moving on. Again, I recognized life imitating business. As sales professionals, we can fall into this trap of putting our heads down and dutifully marching forward — doing the same things, the same way, same time, same words, same solutions and on and on without ever realizing we become almost robotic in our sales calls.

But if we do nothing more than sit on the fence trying to be in the right place, but more importantly, trying NOT to be a problem or create issues, we become more of a target than a valued provider. And while this approach is not very inspiring for our customers, it plays right into the hands of our competitors.

We need to shake off the routine and add some excitement to our game. The reality is that we cannot over indulge our customers in terms of the innovation and value we bring to them. More and more evidence is coming forth that, while we are not quite out of the woods from the September ‘08 economic meltdown, we are moving closer to the upward trend. Understanding that the bruises of recent economic troubles are disappearing, but not forgotten, there couldn’t be a better time to get customers focused on the positive. It’s time to take some chances and explore what might be possible, and do so with a re-engaged energy, enthusiasm and love of the art of sales. You can start by checking out our information about sales management training and the other popular training solutions that we have available.

Jeff Seeley is CEO 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.