Selling in the Comfort Zone: How to Grow Your Business Without the Rejection and Stress of Traditional Selling

Copyright 2006 Neil Godin.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

United States Copyright Office, Library of Congress

Registration TXu1-219-279 January 28, 2005

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ISBN: 978-1-4251-0225-8

ISBN: 978-1-4269-4108-5 (ebook)

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Contents

Preface

Introduction and Background   The Story behind the Book

Module 1   Work with Your Fear of Rejection, Not against It

Module 2   Grow Your Sales Organically

Module 3   Switch from Selling to Attraction Marketing

Module 4   Increase Sales to Present Customers

Module 5   Compose Telephoneand Email Messages That Work!

Module 6   Switch from Cold Calling to Warm Calling

Module 7   Prepare for Objections

Module 8   Close with Confidence

Module 9   Move to the Inside When Tendering

Module 10   Make Marketing and Sales Your Hobby that Pays

Preface

While this book is intended to help anyone involved in sales and marketing, I want to mention that I have a special interest in supporting independent business people. I envision a world in which most of us are successfully self-employed. Where we are economically independent and interdependent—and no longer dependent on employers, bosses and paychecks. Where we run our own lives, for better or worse—rather than having our thinking done, and our choices made, by people above us at work.

I believe in free enterprise, self-employment and sustainable independent/ interdependent business, because I believe that self-responsibility drives human development and responsible citizenship. I believe that as more and more of us evolve out of employment and into independent business, we will be compelled to develop our thinking abilities to much higher levels—in order to survive and thrive in a fiercely competitive business environment. And as we develop the higher order thinking skills; the self-determination and self-responsibility; the interpersonal skills, and the initiative required to succeed in business, I believe that these abilities will help us become more effective in other ways as well. People who are able to think about—and do something about—the cause and effect implications of their actions in business, are also capable of thinking about—and doing something about—larger challenges like the degradation of the planet. On the other hand, employees who are conditioned to letting others do the big thinking for them, tend to suffer from a learned helplessness that can make major challenges seem imponderable and unsolvable.

One reason for writing this book is a desire to help reduce the failure rate among independent businesses—so that more employees are encouraged to leave the nest of dependency, and turn their bright ideas or burning passions into a self-supporting business of their own. I have spent the last 22 years working as a consultant and coach to small and mid-size businesses in crisis—and in doing this work, I have learned that the vast majority of failed businesses could easily have succeeded. Why do most businesses fail? Conventional wisdom says that it’s all about money. But in my experience, businesses don’t fail because they were underfinanced. They fail because their owners and operators didn’t know how to market—and didn’t knowhow to sell. Money is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. When I’m working with a company facing bankruptcy, there is never any money. There is no money, no credit, no time—and no sympathy. All we have to work with is the people who remain. If they can learn (overnight) to work together as never before; to manage their own work and eliminate supervision (in order to become super-productive and efficient); to treat customers so well they become sales ambassadors; to brainstorm and implement creative, cost-free turn-around marketing strategies—and find safe approaches to selling—so everyone can become an informal sales representative—they will survive. After working with more than 150 of these turn-around cases, I can still count on just one hand those that didn’t make it. The rest are beyond surviving—they’re thriving, and it was creative marketing and sales (and service)—not money—that made it happen. There are a number of stories from my turn-around work in the pages ahead, and I hope that the principles and practices you read about will help you in your business.

If you are a business owner-operator, a commission salesperson, a professional marketing your own services, a freelance contract worker, a network marketer, or a member of a business cooperative or partnership, this book is dedicated to your personal success. I hope that the insights, ideas and strategies in these pages will help you achieve a real break-through in building your business, and in gaining a greater sense of control over your business life.

If you have feedback—particularly on the results you achieve by using an idea from the book—I would love to hear from you. Please email your feedback to: ng@neilgodin.com. Thank you, and enjoy.

Neil Godin

Introduction and Background

The Story behind the Book

You know the feeling. It’s near month end, and you’ve got to make some sales. You shuffle lists of prospects. You sort them into groups of good, better, best, and think about how to approach the very best of them. Reluctantly, you reach for the telephone. As you do a colleague signals that they have a question. And you turn your attention away from the telephone. Again.

Why are most of us hesitant to pick up the telephone and make sales calls? We need the sales. Our prospects need what we offer. Why can’t we just connect? Why do we have to go through this junior prom process of targeting a prospective dance partner, then working up the courage to approach? There must be an easier way. Couldn’t we somehow find a way to build business and make sales without, well, selling?

My answer is a resounding yes! And in the pages ahead, I will share ten key strategies (and a number of supporting strategies) for generating sales without old fashioned selling. Without making cold calls. Without trying to overcome objections. Without trying to convince prospects to buy. Without clever closing tricks. Without creating fear of being sold to among our prospects—and without creating fear of selling in ourselves.

I want to start by saying, "welcome," and thank you for joining me in this business building adventure. Here in the introduction, I am going to share some of my own history and philosophy as a sales trainer, so you and I can begin to connect as we explore the story behind this book. Then we’ll move into the ten strategies and how you could apply them in your own business. Let’s open by examining the role that fear plays in selling.

Fact: Fear of rejection is healthy and normal

First, let’s be very clear. If you are reluctant to make sales calls because you fear being rejected, you are healthy and normal. One of our strongest human needs is the need for acceptance and approval. And one of our greatest fears is fear of rejection. Rather than trying to get over our fear of rejection, we need to acknowledge and respect that fear, then go to work with it, rather than try to fight against it.

Fear of rejection comes from being rejected

Fear of rejection in selling comes from experiencing rejection in selling. When you call on a prospect and he or she says, "not interested," before hearing your offer, you experience rejection. You experience rejection when your sales calls are not returned, and when a person who screens your prospects’ calls won’t let you through.

When prospects reject you in these ways they do so as an act of self defense. Why? Because old fashioned selling can be invasive, inconveniencing, offensive, manipulative, adversarial, even hostile and aggressive. In cold calling, for example, we call prospects out of the blue—people who don’t know us and owe us nothing, not even courtesy or the time of day—and for some reason we expect (hope?) they will give us their time and attention, make an appointment to see us, and buy something from us. Incredible. What a set-up for rejection and failure. Yet some salespeople can do it. They can withstand the rejection they suffer from most of the people they call—and hang in there to connect with the few who accept their pitch and move on toward a sale. This numbers game approach has produced some enduring and very negative mythology about selling. Many people believe the myth that a salesperson has to be aggressive, tenacious, pushy, and thick-skinned, so that he or she can withstand rejection. At my seminars, when I ask audiences of ordinary business people what comes to mind when I say the word salesman, they reply used cars, "telemarketing, pushy, aggressive" and so on, showing how well our negative stereotypes are established. These misconceptions keep most people from wanting to sell anything. Yet everyone is involved in selling—whether they are starting their own business, promoting an idea, raising funds for a charity, or tryingto make their voice heard at work (or at home). And while this book focuses on alternatives to old fashioned selling that are designed to keep everyone in the comfort zone, the truth is that we still have to sell—we still have to meet and greet; we still have to present; we still have to prepare for and respond to objections, and we still have to close sales. So it’s important that we understand what selling really is, and that we learn how to sell effectively.

To set the record straight, selling is not an aggressive act that only the tough can perform. In fact, how many of us buy from pushy people? When aggressive people call to sell us something most of us say no (politely or otherwise), and hang up the telephone. Really effective salespeople don’t push, they show empathy, respect and interest. They care. They want to help. They ask questions and listen hard, in order to help us determine what we really want and need.

They don’t try to sell us anything we don’t need because they know we won’t be satisfied, and while they might make an immediate sale, they would lose our repeat and referral business—our lifetime value as a customer—and could even see us return the product they persuaded us to buy.

While it helps to have an outgoing personality and a sincere interest in meeting and talking to people, being thick-skinned and aggressive is definitely not a formula for success in selling today. Instead we need to be service-oriented. Thoughtful. Considerate. Even sensitive. And this is true whether we are male or female, more extroverted than introverted in style, or more aggressive than passive in nature.

Question: Are you selling, or bothering people?

The truth is that when we use invasive approaches, we know we’re doing something inherently wrong. We don’t want to bother people but we know

Notes and Action Plans

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that when we call people out of the blue (i.e. when we make cold calls) we are bothering them—we are invading their privacy—even when we’re calling other businesses rather than people at home. Yet we keep doing it. This lack of integrity can produce what psychologists call self-alienation, a condition that arises when we ignore the voice of our conscience, and continue to do something unhealthy. With this coping mechanism we may create a kind of separate self—a false persona called the salesperson—who continues to bother people with cold calls, while we (the good self) ignore what is going on. Many people who get involved with old fashioned selling can’t tolerate this lack of integrity and authenticity (along with the rejection they experience), and leave the field—often with a distaste for selling that lasts a lifetime. We all know people who have held short term (often part time) selling positions during periods when they were unable to find real jobs. For many if not most, attempting to sell things was an unhappy experience. Whether they sold products or services via telemarketing or in stores, or via network marketing, most felt the sting of rejection—then quit and have shunned selling ever since. To put it in a single word, the idea of selling provokes fear in most people—fear of bothering people, fear of imposing, fear of rejection, and fear of failure.

You know you’re bothering people when…

• Call screeners are keeping you from reaching your prospects.

• Prospects are not returning your calls.

• Prospects are not responding to your letters or email messages.

• Prospects who spoke with you and seemed interested don’t return your follow-up calls.

• Prospects are deflecting or stalling you by asking for more information, quotes, or proposals that don’t lead to sales.

You know you are feeling the effects of bothering people when.

• You avoid making prospecting calls.

• You put off making follow-up calls.

• You make excuses about being too busy with other things.

• You offer discounts without being asked.

• You offer extras without being asked.

• You feel uncomfortable when meeting prospects for the first time.

• You feel intimidated by prospects.

• You worry about being credible/trustworthy in the prospect’s mind.

• You feel that your integrity is at risk.

• You readily agree to provide quotes or proposals or more information when you haven’t fully qualified the prospect or haven’t done a needs assessment.

• You over-promise for fear of losing a sale.

• You blame cut-price competitors; the economy; your own company’s pricing or production policies, etc., for not being able to make sales.

• You exaggerate the volume of sales in the pipeline.

• As a salesperson you may feel like a lesser person (one of my clients describes old fashioned selling as professional begging).

• You experience feelings of despondency and tend to go through the motions.

• You may experience feelings of low self esteem, anxiety, stress, even depression.

• If you are a salesperson you may feel alienated from your sales manager or whoever you report to.

• If you are a business owner you may withdraw from other owners, or find yourself complaining to them in a bid for sympathy.

Death of the salesman

The old fashioned salesman was a tough guy. He experienced all these feelings but soldiered on. He fought to make each sale. He hounded prospects until he got an appointment. Mounted an assault with his presentation. Fought hard to overcome objections. And, finally, used a clever closing technique to nail down the order. Hard work. Not for the faint hearted. But rewarding when it worked. Once he closed that first sale, and delivered the goods, he could usually count on the new customer’s loyalty as long as he made the right number of coffee calls to keep the relationship alive. (I use the term coffee calls to describe calls that aren’t really meant to sell, but just to stay in touch, take orders, and keep competitors at bay.)

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This old fashioned adversarial approach to selling—followed by an old boy method of retaining customers—no longer works. The world of business is far too complex. Customers often don’t know what they really need. But they know they can’t afford to get pushed into buying something they don’t need. So we are now seeing the demise of the old fashioned salesman. In his place rises the technical sales professional—more and more often an industry expert who loves to work directly with customers. There is also a place for the learner/researcher, a professional salesperson without a lot of industry knowledge or experience, who is so completely committed to serving prospects and customers that he or she comes to be regarded as a trusted source even though they may be new to the field. Either way, today’s effective salesperson has to become:

• A walking encyclopedia of industry knowledge and market intelligence.

• A curious and capable researcher.

• A walking Who’s Who of contacts and resources that can assist them in identifying and meeting their customers’ deepest needs.

• An active and effective networker who can connect customers with other sources of help.

• A great communicator, team player, problem solver, facilitator, negotiator, mediator and go-fer.

• A change-ready professional who anticipates and responds to continuously changing conditions.

San Diego company hit hard by change

Being change-ready—as individuals and as companies—is becoming more and more important as the pace of change accelerates. For example, I did some training work with a company in San Diego that supplies fasteners (rivets, nuts and bolts, etc.) to the US Navy. They told me how shocked they were to learn that a navy procurement officer had cancelled a huge order from them, explaining that they had just bought a shipload of fasteners that were made in Poland, from an offshore broker. This happened just months after the fall of the former Soviet Empire. Suddenly, Poland had shifted from being part of an enemy bloc, to being a Western nation (and later a member of NATO, of course), supplying the US Navy! To survive this shift, my client suddenly had to become a global player, sourcing product wherever quality and price were most competitive. My, how things change, and how quickly.

Good-bye cold calling, hello Introduction Selling

Old fashioned salespeople made (and still make) old fashioned cold calls. But I urge my clients to replace cold calling with what I call Introduction Selling—which means asking our current customers, and others, for referrals—and then asking that they call these prospects to introduce us, before we contact them. We’ll explore the how-to’s of introduction selling in Module Two, but for now the key is to note that when we’ve been introduced, we can now make warm calls instead of cold calls. A warm call, of course, is a call that will be warmly received.

When we must call on people who don’t know us (perhaps when we’re opening a brand new market), we must target them very carefully to ensure they can really benefit from what we offer, and will be as receptive as possible to our calls. We do this by researching their needs in advance, and by developing introductory messages so compelling that prospects are sure to respond positively. Our sales letters, and our voice mail and email messages have to have the same kind of power, or we waste leads and again fall into the trap of bothering prospects instead of helping them.

The new breed of salesperson is all about the customer, rather than all about themselves, their product, and their company. And that makes the difference. They earn appointments because prospects can tell from their messages that the salesperson knows something or has something that will really help them—help them make more sales, or reduce costs, or solve a serious problem, or take advantage of a significant opportunity. Dynamite presentations (which are still essential, obviously) are more and more often accompanied by in-depth interviewing and dialogue (two-way discussion more than one-way presentation) to identify all the various ways in which the two parties could work together to maximize the benefit of whatever the salesperson offers. And team selling—involving people in our organizations

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who will play key roles in fulfilling what we sell—is replacing the old one-on-one approach that pitted individual salespeople against individual buyers. Overcoming objections is replaced by empathy, interviewing and listening skills, and a strong desire to understand and resolve a prospect’s concerns, rather than overcome them. Closing gimmicks and tricks are more and more often replaced by a process in which the prospect (rather than the salesperson) concludes (closes) the sale, by asking questions like, "when could we get started?" rather than the salesman asking for the order in the old fashioned way. This new approach is described in a number of ways, including:

• Solution Selling

• Service Selling

• Relationship Selling

• Partnership Selling

• Consultative Selling

• Collaborative Selling

I particularly like the term service selling because I describe today’s salesperson as someone who works in the helping professions—like someone in counseling, health care, or some other important human service. The term consultative selling works for me as well. Because like many other business and sales trainers, I believe that we need to position ourselves as trusted advisors (very high level consultants) to our clients, not just as people who provide a supporting service. The term collaborative selling also works for me. The meaning of collaborate is to co-labor or to work together, and for me that is the essence of selling today. No matter what we call the process, if we want to be successful we need to let go of the old fashioned approaches and make sure that we position ourselves as trusted advisors who work with our clients to provide valuable products and services that they want and/or need to buy from us.

A bit of background.

In the pages ahead, I am going to introduce you to a radically different way of thinking about marketing and sales. To help you understand the philosophy behind this approach I am going to start by sharing some of my own history with you. During the early 1980’s North America (and the rest ofthe industrialized world) suffered the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. As the recession deepened, a government agency asked me and a colleague, Bill Gibson, if we would develop and perform a traveling seminar on How to Recession-proof Your Business. Yes, we would, we said, and we did. And we traveled that seminar show across the continent for almost three years—telling business owners how to use guerrilla marketing to drum up business; how to use cutting edge selling skills to close the business they drummed up—and how to use bleeding edge customer service to keep those customers coming back, and get them referring others. We did the seminar using stand-up comedy—doing really funny role plays on how not to handle customer price inquiries on the telephone, for example, and how to get everybody in the business selling, by enabling everyone to act as informal members of the company’s extended sales and marketing team.

We encouraged service and support people to act as sales ambassadors, looking for and acting on opportunities to mention new possibilities to established customers—and acting on business opportunities that turn up when meeting people socially. We had a ball. It was show biz. We packed people into legion halls and fairgrounds and local theatres and got rave reviews from the media. And our show was effective. We received hundreds of phone calls from participants telling us how they used ideas we presented to make an immediate difference in their business. Often, as we settled into our seats on a flight to the next city, we would look at each other and say, Imagine getting paid to do this. Wow.

But there was a serious side to the story. Right from the start people would come out of the audience and ask if we worked with companies in trouble (and during this recession there were a lot of companies in trouble). No, neither of us had ever worked with a business facing bankruptcy. Bill had a background in broadcast sales; I had a background in newspaper journalism and we both served clients as marketing and communications consultants.

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Our clients at that time were mainly Fortune 500-level organizations—well known, large and strong companies (as well as many small, lesser known companies) that were all doing well despite the recession. Then the next question: Would you visit our store (or dental office, small factory or computer sales and service business, etc.), before leaving town, and give us some ideas? Our answer: Of course. And we did this again and again, at no charge, as a way of delivering added value in the cities and towns we visited. Because we were objective (and our heads were full of creative ideas thanks to the recession-proofing seminar), we were able to help many of these companies achieve an almost instant turn-around—just by peppering them with ideas in a one-hour tour of their business. I loved it. It was exhilarating to think we could be that helpful that easily.

Then things turned serious. One of the banks we were working with asked if we would go in and have a look at one of their clients—a real estate development company that was going under. The bank planned to call their loans and shut them down, but the vice president we were dealing with thought it would demonstrate good corporate citizenship if they sent us in first, just to see if there was anything we could do to help. Here is what happened.

Case: The home builders’ story.

Situation: The client was a company headed by three builders. They had 120 building lots to sell, and their plan was to build homes on the lots they sold. But they hadn’t sold a lot or home in months. We met them in the living room of their show home. It was all doom and gloom, but they were wide open to ideas. This is what I love about turn-around work. Because they’re in crisis, turn-around clients are open to ideas, open to change, and open to doing new things now. They have no choice. They know that if they continue with the status quo they will go under. The owners will lose their investment and their years of work, and their employees will lose their jobs. So they pay attention; they participate in brainstorming strategy, and with a lot of coaching in commitment management,