Then there was poor me. I worked my tail off to get new business and produced enough to be valued. I cold called like mad, set appointments and made pitches day after day. It was a constant struggle to sustain business growth as it ebbed and flowed in spite of my mighty selling efforts. But Richard just sat there on the phone discussing business and taking big, fat orders. Either that or he would meet his clients at the plant and entertain them as they brought him more projects.

Richard’s cup runneth over while mine was either half full or half empty, depending on my attitude.

The real kicker about Richard was this. Most of the new business inquiries calling in would ask for him even though he didn’t spend time prospecting. What did he have that the rest of us didn’t?

Never Compromise Quality

Richard understood quality and he never cut corners. While I was trying to figure out ways to lower costs or match competitive price quotes to “win” an order, Richard could smoothly negotiate price increases making sure to add value to the total package.

The primary value that Richard added was quality-assurance. Richard’s clients knew that if they worked with him, they would get the best quality products available. No shortcuts, no surprises; just predictable high quality at a fair, negotiated price.

I assumed price meant everything and I was wrong.

When Richard sensed cheapness or price challenge from a new business prospect, he would usually refer them to competing manufacturers whom he knew would cut profits to keep their machines running. Better they get the difficult clients.

Quality Fuels Word of Mouth

If you’re looking for more qualified sales leads, focus more on delivering premium quality to all your customers every single time you do business. Word of mouth referrals are the best inbound leads. Quality reputations can only be earned, and if you’ve earned yours, then go ahead and promote it!

Promote the one thing that separates your quality from the rest. If a prospect happens to see your company promotion and call you after also getting a referral, the sale is yours! And that was Richard’s secret to easygoing sales success. He promoted quality assurance and all his customers backed him up.

Best-in-class quality is the goal. Your marketing and sales efforts will work better as the quality seekers in your market find what they’re looking for in your brand.

The post Quality Promotes! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

My recent experience with a few service related businesses is that making a massive shift away from traditional kinds of sales work over to inbound marketing and marketing automation does not always pay off. Too sudden of a change and too much change is not only time consuming, but also detrimental to sales. There is just too much anecdotal, yet reliable evidence of this issue for me to ignore it.

Double the Irony

Very ironically, I just got off the phone with a persistent, cold calling sales rep for a… marketing automation company!

After her 5th or 6th call, I made an appointment with her to learn a few things about how their product could be useful to my clients and my business. I never received one email solicitation and never saw nor clicked a single ad for this company. Yet, their sales rep found my website and cold called me on the phone – several times.

Now here’s a marketing automation company using cold calling as its number one prospecting tactic! The other half of the double irony is that she called me as I was composing the first paragraph of this article! It was Mariah’s spoken words, not a strategic bombardment of digital messages, that was my call to action.

In the beginning I was slightly annoyed by Mariah’s call interruptions but she never gave up asking for another chance to try at a better time. With that I kept the door open. By the end of today’s unexpected phone call, Mariah and I connected as human beings and we chatted briefly about a couple of unrelated things. Her company is now top of mind in an important service sector for my business. Nothing but the telephone made it happen. Of course I will thoroughly examine their website – which better be damn good!

Thanks Mariah, for your persistence and the extra article fodder! 🙂

By the way, just before posting this on my blog, I got a cold call from an email marketing company directly competing with Constant Contact. I didn’t have time for the call and asked him to put my email on their mailing list. “We don’t have one…” was the reply. I am telling you the truth!

Trying and Failing

One of my clients, after about 3 years of building an inbound marketing program with fully integrated website, landing pages, social media channels, email, auto-response feedback, etc., is shifting back to traditional selling. They are having fine results working with a sales trainer on targeted sales calls. Unfortunately, the significant investment in their robust inbound marketing program proved to show little or no return.

If you examine your current customer list, perhaps you’ll find as I did that the majority of your business originated from word-of-mouth, a previous sales call or business networking – all live human interactions. In my case I discovered that about 70% of sales came from those traditional selling approaches and 30% came from this newsletter combined with social media marketing.

Of course every business will get different results from inbound marketing programs and some are better able to harness it than others.

In general, if your business is service intensive, you need to talk with prospects – a lot. You need to have a 2-way conversation from the very beginning and that often means actually calling them up. Too much focus on the program can take valuable time away from the people whom you need to be talking with today.

The post People sell better than programs appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.