At my organization we are planning a new year workshop to help the sales team plan for 2012. Its important to help your team and your department focus on whats important. No matter how many books you have read or how many seminars you have been to; we all need reminders and time to “sharpen the saw.”

The outline below is an adaptation of Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as it may apply to media sales. Use this outline and adapt it for your industry and business.

Habit 1: Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Vision

1. The first step in creating strong income is pro-activity.
2. Create a lifestyle that helps you meet new leads. Make calling on new leads a top priority.
3. Identifying potential conflicts or issues that will slow you down and addressing them with potential solutions to management.
4. Take accountability for your results. You are the factor of your success or failure.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Leadership

1. Deciding early on what your objectives are. What do you truly wish to accomplish in your job?
2. Creating a mission statement that reflects your goals as a sales professional.
3. Beginning each event, activity, or meeting knowing what you want to get out of it.
4. Foreseeing possible problems with retention, discouragement, accounting, traffic, etc.
5. Taking the proper steps to prepare to be an effective sales person and marketing consultant.

Habit 3: Put First Things First: Principles of Personal Management

1. Understanding the four quadrants of effective production and knowing how to apply that to our business. Focusing on Revenue Producing Activities!
2. Creating habits of time management and effective planning.
3. Reserving time for all your roles in life, so as not to neglect anything.
4. Setting time aside each week for Prospecting, Service, and Production, and Education/Training.

Habit 4: Think Win/Win: Principles of Interpersonal Leadership

1. Commit yourself to Win/Win or no deal. Agree to sell clients who you need as clients and who need your stations.
2. You must listen first. Discover who the client is and what problems they have in their business. Look for the solutions in your stations.
3. Each part of the media buying experience has to be a new win. Show the client how accounting, production, and reporting is a win for them.
4. Train the client to respect your time and learn to respect theirs.
5. Understand how to create win win situations with other departments in the company.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood

1. Seek to understand the situation of each client. Find out what they want out of the advertising and what has brought them far enough to listen to you.
2. Practice active listening skills. Truly listen to your clients and your team members to best understand their desires.
3. Continue building a relationship with your clients to develop trust and credibility through listening to, and understanding them.
4. Only when the client trusts you and believes you understand them, and have their best interests in mind, will they follow you.

Habit 6: Synergize Principles of Creative Communication

1. Create environments of synergy with traffic, production, promotion, and accounting.
2. Practice habits 4 & 5 in making synergistic moments happen.
3. Synergize with each client individually to get full buy in.
4. Seek out potential synergistic activities, such as creative meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc.
5. Understand the unique abilities/responsibilities that each of our departments have, and think of how best to utilize them.
6. Seek out the very best training in the industry and in your company from the top leaders.

Habit 7 Sharpen the Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

1. Set aside Monthly, Weekly, and Daily planning and evaluation sessions.
2. Renew your commitments and covenants in all aspects of life through sincere evaluation.
3. Evaluate the best and less effective practices that you have been using in prospecting, retaining, and up selling your clients.
4. Review this and other handouts and notes that will increase your effectiveness in prospecting, retaining, and up selling your clients.

I’ll never forget an old manager of mine who once told me “What can be measured, can be improved.” I have always felt strongly about the importance of keeping track of results in order to improve. In high school I charted all of my race times for Cross Country and Track and Field into a spreadsheet for 4 years. I used charts to measure my improvement over time during a season and to closely compare improvement on the same tracks or courses. I know I was a freak back then, but this methodical nature has paid me back 10 fold.

If you have ever read any book about goal setting you know that goals must be written down. They must be specific and measurable. If you can’t track it you can’t achieve it. My sales team understand the importance of this. Every day when they come into my office they see a list of all of my personal and business 2011 goals written on my wall. Next to each goal is either a check-mark or a % of completion. On Mondays or Fridays I update each of my reports (mostly in Excel) to illustrate progress or regression.

Keeping track of the numbers is the very last thing that anyone wants to do. Its time consuming, boring, and hard to justify when a pile of urgent tasks cover your desk and email inbox. Never forget the long term necessity and importance of keeping track of the numbers. Numbers are an important part of every aspect of every business. If you are in advertising you need to keep track of your response in correlation with your advertising spend. If you are in sales you need to keep track of each activity in your sales cycle to track what is effective and what is not, in addition to defining when you are trending high or low in activity. If you are a web programmer, keep track of which activities take the most time so that you can accuratly manage your boss’s or client’s expectations.

Being methodical about watching the numbers will impress your superiors and your boss. If you are the boss then you know that a large part of your day needs to be engaged in analyzing the numbers. Without a range of measurement you will never be able to make wise decisions to increase productivity or return on investment.

What parts of your business are you measuring well or poorly? Are your tracking methods effective and consistent? Where does your data come from and are you taking the time to read it?

In this modern world it doesn’t take a geek like me to convince local businesses and advertisers that they need to utilize the internet to interact with their customers. Small businesses across America who don’t have the resources to hire experts struggle each day to keep up with the best practices in online advertising; but what about the sales people? 14.5 Million Americans work in sales. In this fast as light (or Facebook) world how should sales reps be using these online tools to build their client list, customer retention, and generally increase productivity and reach? Today I want to outline a clear strategy for today’s modern sales person.

The Three Sales Objectives:

1. The first objective is to increase the total number of customers. Building your prospect funnel to eventually increase your client base will always be one of the strongest ways to increase your check.
2. Secondly we need to increase retention. Maintaining the customers you have in their current buy is crucial to your overall efforts. It doesn’t take very long in the sales profession before you realize that keeping customers is easier than getting new ones but the littlest neglect can lose you customers very quickly.
3. Your third objective is to increase the buy per customer. Driving each of your customers to give you a greater part of their total budget/buy is sales 101. Up sale the customer to the next promotion, the next product, or the next product category and you will increase your total billing without too much more effort.

The Four Online Activities:

1. Build an online presence. At a minimum expense you could obtain a complete website. In a society where high school students are trained to build websites it may cost you a lot less than you think to have a professional presence online. Build the website in blog form allowing you to post new information on a regular basis. If you are too cheap to pay for a website I suggest you turn to a free blogging platform such as Blogspot or WordPress.
2. Create valuable content. Ask yourself what type of content your current and potential customers need. What expertise do you have to share that would both educate your customer and drive them to buy more of your product? If you want to create a loyal following you must develop high quality content. This is where the blogging begins. Share success stories from current clients that are designed to give your client ideas and encourage them to do more business with you. It’s ok to recycle articles, news, etc. If you have access to industry updates, news, etc you can just share that information with your readers/clients. No need to rewrite everything. Just post your opinion about the information and give credit to the original source. Remember that your goal is to create high leverage online activities. The less man hours you have to put into it the better.
3. Build a list. On your site create an “opt-in” form that allows site visitors to choose to receive your newsletters. Also ask your existing customers permission to add them to your e-newsletters. Newsletters should be sent less frequently than blog posts. If you blog once per week you may send a newsletter every month. If you blog monthly you might send a newsletter every quarter. Utilize the newsletter to share industry news or share your insight into the market changes. This is your opportunity to show your expertise and create a raving fan that will always turn to you when they have a need within your product/service industry. Ask around about different economic email marketing services you can utilize to serve the emails. See resources below.
4. Syndicate Your Content. There is no need to spend all your time sending links and messages on Facebook and Twitter. This is NOT a productive activity. If you want to connect with clients and potential clients on the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that’s ok but don’t add the time burden to your day. Since you are already writing content on your blog make sure to automatically feed your blog posts into Facebook, Twitter, and whatever other social networks you feel would be beneficial. Share news stories, industry research, etc on the social networks as well. Utilize a service such as Hootsuite.com or Ping.fm to post to all your networks at once. Both of these services also offer mobile solutions to allow you to share on the go from your phone.

The Five Rules:

1. How often you blog isn’t nearly as important as how consistently you blog. Start out slow, maybe posting a new blog once per month; slowly increase as you become more comfortable. Get in a groove so that your audience can come to expect a certain type of content and frequency.
2. Online marketing is a long term, low cost investment. Don’t expect to get fast results. Be consistent over time and only commit to a plan that you are willing to execute over time.
3. If your audience grows large enough you will be able to monetize your online presence. You will be able to sell ad space on both the site and on your e-newsletters.
4. Be personable. Nobody wants to do business with a robot. Your online content needs to reflect both professionalism and personality.
5. Get the help of an expert and continue your online education. Subscribe to my blog and the blogs of other internet marketing gurus. Reading the blogs of internet marketers provides free ongoing training.

Resources:

• The three most popular online email marketing systems are iContact, ConstantContact, and Aweber. They each charge based on the size of your contact list. The links in this article will give you a free trial of any of them. There are two reasons why you use software like this in place of just a contact group in Outlook. Firstly because it will facilitate automatic signups from your website and secondly because it will track which people open your email, when they open it, and what links within the email they click on.

I come from a sales background. I started out doing outside sales for Verizon, T-Mobile, and Nextel and not too long after I was going door to door arcross the country selling satellite tv. When I would train newly hired sales reps I also went through a list of the industry sales people cuss-words.

What am I talking about? In any industry of sales there are always a series of words and phrases that trigger potential buyers into saying no or becoming defensive. These words tend to be the most common phrases that your customers are accustomed to hearing from your fellow sales reps.

The most effective salesman are able to get past the baricades that potential customers put up instinctively when they think they are being sold. This is the single most important skill perhaps even with the skill of closing. Telling your customer about features and benefits isn’t difficult if you can put them in a situation where they are truly listening to you.

Consider if you will what some of the cuss words might be in your industry. Telemarketers have a distinctive different set of cuss words than do kiosk in the mall sales people.

Please feel free to share your favorite industry sales cuss words below.