sales help

Can you recite your mission statement? My bet is you can’t. Mission statements are prominently displayed on most websites and within company literature, but rarely used by the people they were designed for.

I am sick of goals and goal experts. You know, the people that spam you around the first of the year proclaiming they are the ones who can “help you” get to the next level. They have the magic “goal achievement formula.”

“Jeffrey, what’s the BEST way to make a sale?” When I’m asked this question (I’m asked it all the time), what the salesperson’s really asking is, “What’s the EASIEST way to make a sale?”

I was walking in the parking lot of my local Starbucks with Gabrielle, my 2-year-old daughter, in my arms, when a guy came over and started to talk to me. He told me he’d seen me give two different seminars several years ago and asked, “Hey, do you still do seminars?”

Sometimes sales go wrong. And when they do, salespeople blame someone or something. “He wouldn’t return my call,” “he took the lowest bid,” “he bought from the competition,” “he said my price was too high”… BLAME.

For some reason, over the past 60 days, the word “objection” has been the prime topic of my email buzz and my customer’s requests.

Since a very small percentage of salespeople and business people in the country are taking total advantage of business social media, I’m assuming you fall into the chicken category. And I’m not just talking corporations and lawyers here. I’m talking you, the salesperson, are a chicken.

Next year will be better than the last few. All kinds of opportunities to cash in on. My recipe for 2012 has already been posted, but you can add to the list, and make your resolutions in February

Lyrics from the song “Kids,” from the Broadway play Bye Bye Birdie, written by Lee Adams. And while you may think they were written about today’s generation of kids, the song was written in 1959 – more than 50 years ago. In 1959 there was no computers, cell phones, Internet, Super Mario, cable TV, or fax machines – and of course no iPods

We are in the year 2011 and it’s amazing to me that people are still cold calling, leaving voicemails, asking for appointments, and, in general, trying to pull out their Felix the Cat tricks that were dead and gone the moment the Internet reached awareness. (No offense, Felix.)