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.

Listen in as we discuss how to build emotional value and what to do with it!

Time Value

Have you ever heard: “Time is money”?

Do you believe it?  Have you ever stopped to consider how much your time is worth in real dollars?  What about your customer?  What dollar value do they put on their time?

Well, if you haven’t thought about these questions before, you might be missing out on an untapped value that you and your products provide to customers.

Listen in as we discuss how you can uncover the time value that you, your products, and your services bring to your customer!

The three components of value in every sale:

Dollars-Time-Emotion

Have you ever had someone tell you to: “Quit selling on price and sell the value of our products!”

As salespeople, we’ve all heard this advice from sales managers, sales trainers, product managers, or social media sales gurus.  It’s so easy to flip that comment out there, but much more challenging to get into the details with a salesperson on how to actually do that.

But what does that actually mean to “Go sell the value of our products?” 

Listen in to this week as we cover the first component of selling value – Money Value