Author Archives: ensonsales

The “Gift” of Gab

       Every once in a while, I meet a salesperson who proudly proclaims, “I’ve got the gift of gab.” In sales, that “gift” is more aptly described as “the curse of chatter”.

        Successful sales professionals know that sales is really more about listening than it is about talking.

        Those with the curse more often engage in product or feature-speak than they do in providing customer-focused solutions or opportunities.

        Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care….and caring is demonstrated by listening.

        Listening is by far the most important and difficult skill a sales professional can learn and practice. The salespeople who annoy and alienate prospects the most are those who claim to be good listeners but follow every customer objection with a “yah, but….”

        There is no room for the word “but” in a good listener’s vocabulary.

To be a professional listener you need to:

1.) Earn the right to ask questions by learning something about the prospect’s business before you make a call.

2.) Prepare with open-ended questions that encourage the prospect to express their views and feelings.

3.) Demonstrate you are listening by taking notes. (Always ask permission to take notes. “Your input is important to me; do you mind if I take a few notes?”)

4.) Paraphrase and summarize what you hear. Don’t start a debate.

5.) Use the language and needs you hear the customer express when you make your presentation.

6.) Make certain that every benefit you present relates to a need you heard the prospect express.

       There is a lot more money to be made being interested than there is in being interesting. So why not shut up and make some money!

Are You Ready for Your Tomorrow, Today?

     Preparation is the key to success, right?  Abraham Lincoln understood the value of being prepared when he said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”  Will you be ready for your tomorrow before you leave the building tonight?

     Most of you reading this are in media management or sales, and if not, the rule of being prepared equally applies to everyone regardless of your profession. We certainly hope if we’re having a medical procedure tomorrow that the doctor is reviewing your charts and preparing today. The construction worker that knows what their tasks are tomorrow can order their materials and organize their tools before they leave tonight so they can hit the ground running in the morning. To be an effective manager or high performer in sales, you must be organized with better than average time management skills.

     How and when do you plan your tomorrow, or better yet, your next week?  Your Monday and Tuesday should be pretty clear before you leave the building on Friday.   If there are gaps, fill them in with prospecting or use that time to plan the rest of your week, sharpen your ax, so to speak.

     You can plan your week first thing on Monday morning or your Tuesday on Tuesday morning, but the mind is a funny thing.  If you plan it, write it down, and think about it, your brain will actually help you prepare in advance!

     Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

     Make it a habit, start preparing to plan your days and weeks…in advance! Never leave today, until you are prepared for tomorrow!  It’s a GOOD plan.

P.S.  If you are preparing to look for ways to grow your revenue in 2018 and beyond. ENS Media would honor the opportunity to visit with you about our programs that not only generate revenue but help train your sales team well into the future. It’s a good plan!

Click here if you would like to learn more about these amazing revenue-generating systems.

Quit Calling It “Direct Mail”

You’ve probably seen the latest BIA Kelsey data that radio is the sixth-highest used advertising platform today, with “direct mail” being the number one advertising platform in terms of advertising expenditures.

In telling radio’s story, we have to educate advertisers about the miss-use of the term “direct mail”.

Direct mail is mail that is addressed and sent “directly” to a known person’s address.

The advertising that is delivered to households indiscriminately is better defined as “mass mail” or is commonly referred to as “junk mail”.

The reasons radio account executives need to make that distinction are many.

First, your advertisers and prospects are hearing at their trade conferences and reading in their trade magazines about the “success” of direct mail. And it’s true, direct mail by nature works because it’s sent directly to a prequalified known prospect.  Smart radio account executives encourage their clients to use real direct mail in the media mix because today, it’s FREE.

In the old days, advertisers had to compensate printing shops, paper mills, delivery trucks or the post office to produce and deliver their direct mail.

Today, direct mail is literally free via permission-based email….no envelopes, no printing presses, no postage stamps.

Don’t let your advertisers return from their conferences all hyped up about direct mail only to end up sending what’s really junk mail…sent via indiscriminate household “flooding”.

Click here to arrange an on-line demo of how our local TOMA surveys and SoundADvice radio e-marketing system are helping radio station account executives prove the ineffectiveness of junk mail, and the effectiveness of a broadcast and permission-based e-mail campaign.

How to Walk In Your Customer’s Shoes

Most coaching and sales training programs highlight the importance of empathy in establishing solid customer relationships. Empathy is defined as “the capacity to participate in the thoughts or feelings of another”, or put more simply, “the ability to walk in another person’s shoes”.

But management guru Peter Drucker says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  So how do you measure your empathy in an effort to take it to a higher level?

We recommend you use the Empathy Index to measure and improve your empathy.

Quite simply, review every oral or written presentation or communication to calculate your Empathy Index. Count the number of words or phrases that talk about your customer, and divide that figure by the number of times you’ve talked about yourself or your stations.

The figure is your Empathy Index, and your Empathy Index goals should be a minimum 1.5. In other words, you should be talking about your prospects a minimum of one and one-half times for every time you talk about how great you or your products are.

Don’t be discouraged if your first few attempts reveal a negative Empathy Index. It’s normal for salespeople who are excited about what they’re selling to talk too much about themselves, their ideas, and their products.

Improving your Empathy Index over time will strengthen your advertiser relationships in a world where your competitors continue to babble on about themselves and their offerings without empathy.

How Did You Do It?

If you are a sales manager, you probably started in this business as a sales rep, and it was all about the math of selling. The number of cold calls and the number of “packages” you presented became part of your success formula.

Now as a sales manager, with probably very little management training, you’re expected to train the troops. Your idea of “training” might go something like this; “When I was on the street I …”.

          Stop it!   No one cares how you did it “in the old days”.

You know there have been dramatic changes in the world; changing technologies, changing station ownership, changing economies, changing, changing, changing.

What is it that makes you think the marketing and sales arena is the only thing that hasn’t changed from “When I was on the street”? Let’s look at old world cold calling as an example.

How do you feel when a telemarketer interrupts your dinner to sell you something you haven’t felt a need for? How do you think your prospects feel when your reps embark upon a door to door cold-call campaign to sell them a one-size-fits-all package of the week? Most salespeople don’t like making cold calls, and certainly, most clients view these interruptions to doing business as rude! So why do we do it?

 We’ve focused on cold calls because traditionally, that’s the beginning of the sales process.  Every step in modern strategic selling has changed today, and sales training has changed as well. Training is no longer a manager’s “show and tell”.

Like with all other aspects of your business, you can either embrace the changing world of sales and sales training or continue doing the same thing over and over. I’m sure you’ve heard what Einstein has called doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…that was his definition of insanity.

In the new media world, there is a better way of training and selling. It involves creating warm calls rather than cold calls, using technology to build stronger customer relationships, and it’s been proven to grow your long-term revenues.

Business guru Jack Welch says, “There is always a better way. Find it!”

 Click here if you would like to discuss implementing our “better way” for 2018 and 2019.