What to do at those critical moments of doubt

Every salesperson at any moment can run into a wall of doubt on any sales call.  Even the most experienced have moments of doubt.  Don’t let bravado or stoic expressions fool you.  We all have it.

Confidence does not necessarily eliminate doubt.  Confidence can mean that you know your products.  You know how to recommend them or sell them.  You know your market and your customers.  So, you may feel confident at any stage of your sales career.  Yet, doubt is always just a moment or thought away.  Why?  More importantly, how do I reduce those moments of doubt when selling?

It’s like riding a bike.  Most of us are fairly confident at riding a bike.  I’m on my bike for four or more hours a week.  Confidence in my ability to ride is very high.  Yet, I take turns in the rain and remember all the times I fell in the rain on slick roads.  I remember a deer jumping out of a tree line and just barely missing it at 20 mph. (FYI, that feels fast on a bike).  I remember getting a flat on a particular road and hitting the ground.  And too often, I remember cars that drive too close or fail to yield at an intersection – realizing that right or wrong, I lose every interaction with a car or train.

So, yes, you might have confidence in you, your products, and your ability to sell them, but here are a few moments of sales doubt:

Doubt on a sales call:

Click below to listen in as we help you embrace your moments of doubt!

Do the Sales Two-Step to get there

Anyone can build their sales territory into a great empire of profitability for themselves, their company, and their customers.  In my early days of sales, I sometimes needed to repeat the mantra, “Build the empire one step at a time” or simply, Build it”. 

Starting out in sales can seem an impossible journey.  You see accomplished veteran salespeople in your company who seem to have it all:  big sales numbers, customers who love them, and they look like they are not even working hard.  You, on the other hand, have none of those……. yet.  That “yet” is a very important qualifier.

Step one is to start.  Get started today.  Start with the smallest step possible.  Make it as easy to get started as you can.

Click below to listen in and learn how to get started and stay on track to your ultimate sales objective.

How to go from Warm Selling to Cold Calling

For too many salespeople, there is a constant struggle that goes on in their mind.  That struggle is between spending their time in the rewarding world of warm selling versus the unknown world of cold calling/prospecting. 

Warm selling means meeting customers who are happy to see us and want our help.

Cold calling is rolling up on a farm and meeting someone who is busy and doesn’t want another salesperson calling on them.

Listen in as we go over five perspectives on prospecting to help you jump into the cold calling unknown

 to help navigate your sales process

When calling on a prospect, most salespeople make one small error.  They know exactly what they want to accomplish on that sales call.  It usually includes introducing themselves to the prospect, telling them about their company, and the products they sell.

While there is nothing wrong with that sales call strategy, there is one missing piece of information.  It’s like going on a road trip and setting your GPS for the destination

Your GPS needs to know where to start.  It needs to know your location to give you an accurate and most efficient route to your destination.

A sales call on a prospect is no different.  We want to take this prospect on a sales journey from the products they are currently buying to our products (sales destination).  The mistake most salespeople make is not establishing where they are.  I emphasize “they” because a sales call is the prospect’s journey, not ours.  We’re just the tour guide. 

Listen in as we cover the 5 GPS-style questions to uncover where your prospect is in their decision-making on your products!

How to deliver a believable and convincing presentation

Before you deliver any sales presentation, you need to own it first.  And by own it, I mean make it yours.  When we deliver a sales presentation to a customer, we want them to believe it and be convinced to take action after we are done.  Usually, that action is to buy from us. 

To believe, customers must see that you believe in both the presentation and the data.  Otherwise, your customers(audience) will not trust your presentation.  If they don’t trust your presentation, then they won’t believe it.  This frequently happens when we present someone else’s presentation.  Often, we receive a PowerPoint presentation from our marketing department or one of our vendors.

Click below to listen in as we cover a few ways for you to own every presentation you give!

How to navigate the risks and opportunities

when selling to farmers and Ag buyers

Volatility is great for Ag salespeople,

Volatility is bad for Ag salespeople,

As salespeople, we love selling into a booming market.  However, in 35 years in agribusiness, there may have been maybe six years of this type of booming Ag economy.  The rest of those years, I would consider to be “volatile”.  Odds are high that you will spend the majority of your agribusiness career selling to customers who are having difficult times. 

That’s why you need to look at volatility through a different lens than your customers and, more importantly, differently than your competition. 

Listen in as we discuss how you can learn to look at volatility differently and become more effective for your customers.

No salesperson or company is too good

to ignore competition

To sell into a crowded market, you must study your competition.  All competition. Even those competitors who seem too distant to ever become a real threat.

In sales training sessions, I promote the idea that both a company and each individual salesperson must keep an eye on their competition.  Most agree, but once in a while, this concept touches a nerve.

There is normally one or more people in the workshop who disagree.  They claim that they just go out and do their best to serve customers and let the customer decide who to buy from.    And maybe they are right.  Maybe that’s good enough for their sales goals.

However, the problem with this thought process is that it’s thinking like a salesperson and not like their customer.

Listen in to gain insight into how and why each salesperson needs to study their competition!

Recently, in a sales training workshop, we were working on a cold call/prospecting role play.  Walking around and listening to the salespeople’s intro/rapport-building discussions, I kept hearing a similar comment from them. 

In almost every role-play group, the person in the farmer role would complain about the weather, Ag politics, or profitability.  The salesperson would reply with, “I know what you mean” or something similar.  It made me wonder.  How do they “know what the producer means?”  Do they really know, or is that just their quick way to connect with the farmer?  Their response did not seem genuine or confident to me.  In other words, they didn’t seem old enough or experienced enough to really know what the farmer was actually going through. 

Listen in as we discuss how oversharing your farm experience may actually be a negative or neutral rapport-building discussion

I spend a lot of time training salespeople on how to ask questions.  Good questions, great questions, high-value questions, open-ended questions, and so on.

It is the top-selling skill needed to accomplish everything when selling, when cold calling, to determine a customer’s needs, to close a sale, to develop relationships, to solve customer problems, etc. 
 
However, I have failed to spend enough time on the selling skill of answering questions.  When your prospect or customer asks a question, all of your senses should set off an alarm.  That alarm should be telling you to stop thinking of whatever it is you are thinking about.  Focus all your attention on the question that you were asked. 

Listen in as we dig deeper into a planned approach to several critical questions your customers might ask!

Part 3

How to build Emotion Value

An old sales adage says, “Every purchase is an emotional decision justified with logic”.  It implies that humans are emotional and are driven to purchase based on their emotions.  They want to feel like they are making the most rational decision based on financial/business factors.  However, emotions are the underlying factor in their purchases.

In parts 1 and 2 of “Selling Value in agribusiness”, we discussed the financial and time value that we bring to our customers.  I guess that most often, you sell on these two value factors.  More specifically, you focus on the financial value that you bring.  That is, until a competitor comes along with a lower price.  My experience tells me a competitor will always come along with a better price.

That’s when the experienced salesperson brings in the emotional value of their products, services, and most importantly, the emotional value of buying specifically from them as their salesperson.

The struggle is that money and time values can be quantified much more easily than emotional value.  Don’t misunderstand today’s discussion on emotional value.  Time and money are essential values that have to be met.  They keep the business running. 

However, the emotional values are always there in the minds of our customers.  They lie just under the surface of every decision they make.  With so many different emotions that influence customers, we have to narrow them down to effectively sell based on them.

In sales training workshops, I get some skepticism on the topic of selling on emotion.  That is, until I put the list of basic emotions up on the screen:

Basic Emotions

Then I ask them to think about their customers.  In crop and livestock production, which emotions do their customers have a lot of?  Which emotion dominates every sales discussion?  If you are out there building relationships, you should know which emotion is most commonly expressed by producers.

When training salespeople to sell on emotional value, it’s important for them to establish a priority of which emotions to work on.  In today’s agribusiness market, fear and trust seem to be the most important emotions in the sales relationship. 

Fear – Trust Connection

Without hesitation, most audiences mention “Fear”.  And on the other side of fear, they realize it is “Trust”.  Trust is the counter emotion to fear.  Trust in products and services.  Maybe more importantly, trust in you as their salesperson becomes a big part of their decision process. 

Think about their business model.  They are affected greatly by local basis prices for supplies and selling their crops/livestock.  These prices are set by someone else in the commodity market.  Those local markets are all affected by national and international events.  These events change on a daily basis.  This brings a tremendous amount of volatility and fear to our customers.  To reduce that fear, producers are looking to do business with companies and people they can trust. 

Digging deeper, we need to understand more about what they fear and how trusted suppliers help reduce that fear.  Then, as their salesperson, understand what that is worth to them.

What do they fear?

These are some of the most common fears I have heard from producers and heard from sales teams in training workshops.  Let’s switch gears to our sales approach in light of these fears.  How do we establish trust in some of these areas?  Then, how do we use that trust?  By that, I mean, do we charge more for it?  Do we view certain customers differently based on their trust in us? 

How do we build trust?

One of the most interesting moments in a sales training session is when I ask two questions of the sales audience.  First, I ask, “Do you feel like trust is important in your selling process?” “Yes!” is the quick and unanimous response.  My second question is then, “If I asked you to go out tomorrow and build trust in your market with customers and prospects, what would you do?”

The room typically goes quiet as they think about my question.  If no one responds, then I ask, “What specific action would you take…. what would you physically do or say to build trust?”  Slowly, with lower levels of confidence, the group will come up with some answers. 

Let’s answer this question in the three components of trust:

Credibility action steps: 

Reliability action steps:

Your customer’s best interest action steps:

Now, what do you do with emotional value?

Do you charge more for it?  Do you expect a higher level of loyalty from those customers who you have built more emotional value?  Is this emotional value something you provide to every customer or just for your top customers? Or only the loyal customers?

For example.  Suppose you are a great communicator and provide instant support for your products.  Day or night, weekday or weekend, you are right there to support your customers.  This is something your competition does not do so well.  What happens if you find out one of your medium-large customers switched to your competitor for a moderately lower price?  Maybe it was $5/ton on feed, $15/ton on fertilizer, or $2500 on a tractor.

Now you are doubting your value as a salesperson.  Am I not worth these small price differences?  Don’t I provide far more value than these dollar amounts?  Should I continue to provide my higher level of value to this customer to win them back, or did they just show their true colors?

The answers to those questions have no exact answer.  It depends on many factors.  I’ll discuss the answers a bit further in the podcast version of this article.  Feel free to click on the link or look it up on Apple or Spotify to listen.