Consultant of the Month 

 

Carol Perdue -  Bloomington, IL

Carol has been with us just since mid-February of this year.  We are so happy to have you and your "go get'm" spirit as part of the team!

 

 

I have always been a "tomboy" in the true sense of that word where this company is concerned. From the time I was small I would follow my Dad around to do household repairs and always wanted to learn how to fix things. He could tell you that over the years the one thing I taught my Dad was to read the directions first! He would laugh if he read that because it is so true! Anyway, when I came across this company on the Internet by the grace of God, I knew it was for me. After attending a party at Sharon's (Storbeck), I signed up. I was motivated to get active as soon as possible so I could get referrals from corporate knowing the NBC Nightly News spot would air soon. With the help of some really good friends I was able to get three parties held in literally 2 days! It can be done I'm living proof!

Thank you, Tomboys and I hope this is a fun journey that can earn me some extra money, a lot of great tools and some new friends.

--Carol

 

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14 Tips to Double your Business in 2007

 

• Focus on the art of selling
  • Asking quality questions to determine your customer’s needs. Start with ‘open questions’: Who, what, where, why, when and how.
  • Your questions are brief and clear “Tell me what you want to achieve with this?” “What are some of the key factors that will influence your decision?”
  • Effective questions encourage the other person to share more information and become more involved in the sales process.
• Pre-empting objections
  • The key is to identify what objections you hear most frequently and then plan what you will say to pre-empt them.
• Selling and sales training
  • Use the phone for getting a commitment from the other party to meet – not for selling your product or service. Telling isn’t selling. Don’t talk too much about the technical details of your product or service.
  • Ask qualifying questions to determine which benefits of your product are hot buttons for people. Once you know what turns them on about your product, you then persuade them that you can show them exactly what they want in person.
• You are actually selling your self image
  • Make a conscious decision to modify your self-image and make it more consistent with the results you want rather than the results that you are getting.
  • Two quick things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action. First begin to see yourself the way you want to be. See yourself as strong, confident, competent and professional in every way. The person you see is the person you will be. Second, identify an area of selling where your own ideas about yourself and the situation are holding you back. You always perform on the outside the way you see yourself on the inside.
  • The moment you see yourself differently, you behave differently as well, and because you are behaving differently, you get different results.
• Prospecting and communicating through the internet
  • Use emails to warm up potential customers. When creating your email use an “innovative” subject line, keep emails short and sweet, provide a reference for credibility and ask to meet face to face. You can also use the latest technology to dazzle them with animation or something that’s particularly pertinent to the business operation.
• Selling through the internet – how to make an impersonal medium more personal
  • The Internet now enables prospects to evaluate you and your business, other competing vendors and educate themselves on your product.
  • Create a favorable virtual first impression. Consider your website appearance and its rankings, from the moment your name appears in a web browser to the moment it loads.
  • Be findable – If your business is invisible beneath your competitors in search engines, improve your online find ability by distributing useful, educational content on the Internet.
  • Make your website a resource for your industry and frequently update it to provide articles, links, downloadable reports and resources and anything else helpful to your target market.
  • Practice online marketing – Offer articles about your business to web sites that reach your target market. Network in online communities.
  • Forward to a friend - Word of mouth increases sales. Tailored direct response sales messages, coupons, newsletters and service alerts create a dialog. Insert a forward to a friend link and let your customers refer new prospects to your busines
• Use Blogs to generate sales and build credibility and connect to customers
  • Blogging is a combination of teaching, speaking and consulting and its one of the best ways to build credibility and connect to potential customers on a global scale.
  • Be sure your content is informative and concise. Blogs that drag on with hard to find information bore and frustrate readers. It is important to provide fresh content to keep your customers interested and will ultimately increase your website traffic.
  • Link to others – Obscure resources can provide an interesting and new perspective. Link to other well-known bloggers. Whenever there’s an opportunity to post a comment, do so and it’s likely the blogger will return the favor and mention you somewhere in his or her blog, thereby broadening your exposure.

For Blogging resources, try these:

http://wordpress.com/

http://www.blogger.com/start

http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/writing/blogging.html

•  Obtain and evaluate sales prospects
  • A challenge that many sales professionals, self-employed business owners and independent consultants face is keeping their pipelines full. To achieve long-term success, financial stability and growth in our business we must constantly market and promote our business and prospect for new opportunities. The key is to dedicate a specific amount of time to prospecting each week.
  • The bottom line - don’t fall into the trap of believing that you do not need to prospect. Every successful organization needs new business and constantly seeks out new opportunities.
  • Treat prospecting as the life blood of your sales career - 
    • Focus on quality - It is the only way you can spend most of your prime time with qualified prospects.
    • Focus on quantity - Your success depends on having enough solid sales leads.
    • Focus on consistency – A steady supply of qualified prospects can enable you to avoid slumps and plateaus, eliminate call reluctance and procrastination and keep you from pressuring current customers.
•  Develop a Structured Sales Process
  • To find more customers and increase sales, you should follow an organized progression using what I call the PACER processâ. First ask yourself if your company is focused on its best and highest use, if your products are optimally bundled into a compelling offer and if you are organized to deliver this offer profitably? Next examine and define who specifically are your best target customers. Do you deeply understand their culture, goals, how and why they make purchases and their expectations? Then choose the best ways to find customers using the acquisition funnel that systemizes the activities that turns one-time buyers into those customers who make multiple or sustained purchases. Finally create the scoring tools to quantify and codify the results and guide your plan for finding, keeping and growing customers. This framework will help you re-focus and grow your business to ensure a continued growth in its sales.
•   Ensure customer satisfaction as part of the selling process
  • Listening to complaints improves sales – Listen to what the complaint is and then ask yourself “What am I going to do to make this situation right?” Make it easy for your customer to give you feedback and listen carefully to what they say
  • Reward your customers’ input in little, yet meaningful ways such as discounts or preferential treatments. When you do act on a complaint, be sure to let your customer know that you’ve done so. By validating and fixing the problem it can almost be guaranteed that your customer will be back to buy from you.
• The difference between networking and selling
  • For many people, networking is their primary source of business. Yet most people get very little benefit from their efforts. They attend networking events and collect dozens of business cards from people who are not qualified prospects. Although this may feel like progress, unless these contacts are likely to become prospects it’s pretty much a waste of time.
  • To network effectively you have to fish where the fish are. Where are you likely to meet prospects for your business? What do you want them to do? Once you know the answers to these questions, focus your attention on venues where you can find people who can move you toward your goals.
  • When you find people you want to do business with, you had better not network with them, instead, this is the time to start selling. If you confuse networking with selling you will almost certainly end up earning less than you should.
• Sell through publicity
  • Seek opportunities to offer your knowledge; write a column, serve on a panel at a conference and give talks at local or national gatherings. As for becoming a source, every time you see an article or television story on your subject, contact the reporter and let that person know that you’re available as a resource on the topic. If you do this enough, you’ll eventually get callbacks.
• Voice Mail that sells
  • Make sure that your message is easy to understand. Slow down your rate of speech. Enunciate your words clearly. State your telephone slowly so that it can be recorded without replaying the message. Lastly, keep it brief. If you ramble on, your message will probably be deleted without being completely heard.
• Make use of contact management, computer-based software to manage sales
  • Use a Prospect Management System  - The second a visitor clicks on any page within your website you can be notified and instantly swing into action with immediate follow up. This system enables the user to enter the prospect’s name, email address, telephone number, appointment time and comments.

  

* Information condensed from the Article “Super Size Your Sales” – Home Business Magazine – February 2007