Recently I was having a conversation with a fellow sales trainer about why some people find selling such a challenge. One reason we agreed on was that the words “sales” and “selling” have a ton of unhelpful mental baggage associated with them.

Just test this out for yourself right now. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down or draw all the associations that spring to mind when you think of the words sales or selling.

• What words come to mind?
• What images pop unbidden into your minds eye?

I’ll make a confident prediction that some, if not all of the following ideas appear in your list;

• Sharp suit,
• Flash car,
• Smooth talker,
• Used cars,
• Market traders,
• Foot in door,
• High pressure,
• Sales pitch,
• Con man,
• Pushy,
• Dishonest.

Was I right?

The problem is that all these concepts are negative, unhelpful and frankly out-dated so perhaps we need to update our sales vocabulary.

So what other more positive words would I personally associate with sales? What phrases better represent an effective buyer-seller relationship?

• Buying facilitator,
• Trusted advisor,
• Consultant,
• Expert,
• Listener,
• Questioner,
• Understanding,
• Helpful,
• Decision support,
• Honest & ethical.

Is it possible to change the public’s perception of sales?   I believe so. After all, if Skoda can go from being the butt of all bad car jokes to an award winning and highly sought after brand then the mental associations linked to selling can surely be changed too. It’s up to all of us to demonstrate the value of sales through our actions.

What do you think?

There is one thing that is absolutely essential to any effective communicator.   The ability to be fully present in the moment.   By present I mean to have one’s awareness fully engaged in each moment of the conversation or presentation rather than being “away” somewhere else thinking about the past or the future.

This seems like such an obvious thing to say but when you recall a past conversation, how much of the time was spent fully “present”.

Here is an example.  I was just typing this post when my wife Lyn called into the office and asked me to check an email she had written.   In that moment, my consciousness jumped out of the present and went to the future and I imagined myself doing her job rather than finishing this post.  Immediately I felt a little frustrated and annoyed.   Thankfully, because I was aware of what was happening, I was able to take a breath and bring my awareness back into my body in the moment.  Immediately my frustration disappeared and I was able to continue writing this post, having agreed to take a look at her email when I was finished.

Another example might be in the middle a presentation on a familiar subject when you find yourself thinking about what you have to do later that afternoon.   Your body is in the room but your mind is jumping ahead.

Being present has a number of benefits:

• Allows us to make better decisions in the moment
• Allows us to notice our emotional triggers and choose a better response
• Allows us to easily and quickly dissolve nervous tension.  Most of our fears come only when we are thinking about the future.  Bring yourself back into the moment and this evaporate like the morning mist on the fields
• Improves our listening skills – When we are fully present we can take in all relevant information before responding

Being present is an extremely simple concept, but it isn’t easy.

How do you increase your ability to be present?

• Awareness:  If you are not consciously aware of a behaviour you cannot change it.
• Acceptance: becoming aware of an unwanted behaviour can trigger a self criticism reflex.  Instead, praise yourself for noticing.
• Adjust: Take a deep breath and bring your attention back to the here and now

Practice this simple skill and it will transform your communication and your life!

Gavin Meikle

The Presentation Doctor

It’s my experience, from networking with hundreds of businesses here in Hampshire, that most people rely on telephone and 1:1 face to face selling to close new business.

Now that’s fine and dandy but 1:1 selling can be expensive, specially in terms of time. You have the time to get to the client, then you have the meeting time, then the travel time back and then the time to write a proposal.

Imagine the benefits of being able to reduce all these costs and sell to more people at the same time. If you could get 10, 20, or even 200 interested people in the room at the same time wouldn’t you have a much greater chance of generating at least 10 times more business for the same initial time outlay.

That’s what we call seminar selling. Putting on an event and inviting your warm leads to attend.
What better way to demonstrate your expertise than in front of the group? If you are a coaching you could do a demonstration of a coaching session. If you are a financial planner you could showcase examples of how you have helped your existing clients. If you are a web expert you could present a few of your top tips for web design or search engine optimisation.

In short seminar presentations are a very time efficient way to demonstrate your expertise in your specialist area.

So why don’t more people put on events?
Here are the most common excuses!

• I don’t have time to organise them
• My product or service isn’t interesting enough
• People are too busy to attend
• I can’t afford it
• I am afraid of making a fool of myself
• I don’t know what to say

Do any of this reasons resonate with you?

Yes?

I thought so. That’s why I am planning a series of no-nonsense weekly articles to answer each of these specific questions and show you how and why you can’t afford to ignore this important new business channel. If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to this blog to receive these valuable reports automatically.

Gavin Meikle
The sales presentation doctor

In my book, presentation skills and selling skills go hand and hand.   The principles of effective selling will help you to produce powerful persuasive presentation and the principles of great presenting will help you sell much better face to face.

Almost every type of presentation is about persuasion.   You want your audience to do something as a result of your presentation.  So to do this you need to consider the same sort of things you do when planning a sales call.

1. What is your outcome
2. Who is your customer(audience)
3. What are their needs and wants?
4. What is there initial attitude to your message (product)
5. What features of your product or message can you turn into relevant benefits for the audience
6. What are the potential pitfalls of staying with their existing behaviour or supplier and how can you use these to “disturb” the status quo?

The answers to these questions will allow you to develop an effective and tailored sales proposition for your audience which you can then bring to life with great presentation skills.

Remember most of the skills needed to be a great presenter or speaker work whether you are speaking to 1 person or 1000!

1. Establish rapport through mirroring non-verbal signals, tonality, volume and vocabulary
2. Engage with confident eye contact
3. Vary your vocal delivery to maintain interest and build enthusiasm
4. Ensure that your body language and gestures are congruent with your message
5. Use silence effectively to allow your audience time to process your proposals

So if you are just a good salesman, polish your presentation skills and you will become great!

And if you are just a confident presenter, learn how to use the techniques of selling and influencing to supercharge your presentations.

Update:  if you want to read more great articles on this topic visit the Angela DeFinis’s blogcarnival

Last night I attended a meeting of a new public speaking club called Hamwic Speakers- Southampton.  Hamwic have only been going since March but are doing extremely well.   At last nights meeting I was entranced by a wonderful speech by a young man called Rich Watts, who talked about “A trip to grandma’s“.

On the face of it, not the most exciting of topics but Rich delivered a most entertaining and excellent speech in which, by describing in vivid detail, what it was like to visit his grandmothers, from the perspective of his five year old self, he evoked powerful memories and emotions in all of us.

I was particularly impressed with the way Rich matched his energy and pace of delivery to the story he was telling.  At the start his pace was slow and measured as he described the rather boring car journey where he was too small to see much out of the car window but clouds.  Then, when he arrived at his gran’s the pace picked up dramatically as he described zooming into her house (an Aladdin’s cave for a five year old boy!) with his arms outstretched behind him pretending to be a plane.

The pace stayed high as he described how he explored and played and then slowed a little as he started to describe the other family members present.   The pace slowed further as he brought us up to the present day and how things had changed.  How his granny wasn’t as energetic as she had been, how the food wasn’t as home cooked as it had been and so on.   This “gear change”change of pace brought a poignancy and a sense of reflection to this speech that worked beautifully and lead us up nicely to Rich’s take away message.

Rich finished with two key messages, about remembering the importance of Granny and perhaps even more important, remembering (& not losing) the sense of wonder and playfulness we had when we were younger.

I hope this short article has captured the importance of being able to change gear in any speech or presentation in order to be a more effectie story teller and influencer.

I choose not to buy into all the doom and gloom that is going the rounds but I do accept that right now, the prevailing economic conditions are tough. That’s why it’s more important than ever to evaluate our sales pitches to see if they are still good enough.

Ask yourself these questions and then make some small changes based on the results:

• When was the last time you reviewed the performance of your sales pitch (written or verbal)?
• Are your closing ratios really good enough?
• Calculate your average order value per sale and then work out how much extra revenue a 10% improvement in closing ratio would make in a month, in a quarter, over the whole year?
• How many of your existing customers have you re-sold in the last three months? Is your follow up pitch still effective?
• How many sales enquiries did you fail to follow up on within 7 days?
• If a friend owned your business and you were advising them on how to improve their sales, what advice would you give them?

If you want any help with this process then please give me a call or drop me an email, It’s amazing how effective a fresh pair of eyes and ears can be!

I do a lot of networking and one thing I have noticed recently is how  many small businesses are starting to expect the worst from the current economic situation.  Their heads are going down and they are in danger of creating a self fulfilling prophecy.

We can’t avoid it given the amount of negativity around in the media but we can do something about it.   And I don;t just mean stopping buying doom laden newspapers and listening to less news (although that is not a bad start and is a philosophy I practice myself).  One of the great things about being human is the gift of free will that allows us to choose our response to a given stimuli.

Jim Rohn, the American personal development guru once said that the most important lesson he learned when he was a young struggling buisnessman was that it was not the economy that was holding him back it was his philosophy!

Our thinking patterns and approach are the key to our survival in these challenging times.   The good news is that you can do something about them.   It’s a simpler three step process!

Step 1:  Notice when you are thoughts are holding you back

Step 2:  Re-tune your mental radio to a different, more empowering station.

Step 3: Take action from this more resourceful mindeset.

It is that simple but I didn’t say it was easy!   It takes time and effort but it can be done.   I guess the question is do you want to put in the effort and take control of the wheel or are you happy to followthe masses.  I know what I am going to do and I invite you to join me.

I spent some time in George Best International airport in Belfast recently coming back from a fundraising workshop with the charity Concern Worldwide UK

When I entered the airport departure lounge I saw the usual television screens with departure and arrival information but I also saw something I had never seen before…

Normally, when your flight has not been called, the screens show the message “Please wait in lounge”  but in Belfast airport thy had a different message!   Somebody had clearly thought about the impact of words and had harnessed their knowledge to see if they could increase the amount of money people spend whilst waiting for their flight.

Can you guess what they did?

They changed the message from “Please wait in the lounge” to “Relax and shop”

To me this is a classic example of how changing the words people read can have a major impact on their behaviour.   If you want your audience to do something, then tell them what it is you want them to do!

How could you use this simple lesson to become more persuasive and influential

I’d love to hear your examples or comments!

Today I was phoned by a guy who I have met on a couple of occasions at local networking events.  he works for a company called the disc directory, a local on-line business directory covering Portsmouth and Southampton.

Now I’m pretty hard on tele-sales people but his approach was so refreshing that I just had to post on it.   He called me up, started by saying something like ” Remember the good looking guy who’s been bumping into  you around the local networking scene regularly> – Well that’s not me!  I’m the ugly one and I promised to call you”  – So far so good, he made me laugh and his tone and delivery were congruent.

Then he said”   I’m going to be really direct, it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve got my targets to hit  so I am prepared to offer you a great deal.  Three categories for half price?  How does that sound?”

I paused and he said ” I know you are just wondering which of my arms you are going to bite off to take this great deal.  Well I can tell you that they are both equally tender so it doesn’t have to be difficult.  What do you say?”

Again he made me laugh and I was hooked and after a bit more discussion I agreed.

Now I am not saying that this irreverent and cheeky approach is the one to use all the time but it has it’s place.  He had ready my right and decided to give it ago and it paid off!

What’s the cheekiest sales pitch you have used or had used on you that has worked?