Motivational Tutorials

Are You Living in the Dream of Starting a Company?

I decided to start the business because when I got tired of hearing myself say that……. And I felt, Why do I………….I am in my late 20? Why do………..? I mean, if I had to do it over, I could do it now. …….So I said, “Then quit saying that and go do it.” And so I did it .



How Do You Define Entrepreneurship?

I don't view myself as an entrepreneur because I don't take enough risk. There's a lot of chicken and egg things, an example is should I put it on employees because I know if I put on employees I can do more syrup and process more syrup and sell more syrup. I should have a sales rep out pounding the roads, I can sell more syrup. An entrepreneurship yet, I've got faith in it, we're going to take the risks, I don't know where we're going to find the customers but, I know the customers are there and an entrepreneur would do that. And I would tend not to do that so, I'm the egg, you know, I would say, "Hmm, let's wait for the business to show up and then we'll put the sales rep on the road". So, I think that's the basic difference between myself and an entrepreneur. So, it's a little of risk taking but, we do take risk, that's a little risk taking.

Why Domain Name to Motifindia.com?

Motif is an alternate spelling of motive, and may refer to these possible items:In creative work:Motif (narrative), any recurring element in a story that has symbolic significance Motif (textile arts), a recurring element or fragment that, when joined together, creates a larger work Motif (visual arts), a repeating theme or pattern In biochemistry:Sequence motif, a sequence pattern of nucleotides in a DNA sequence or amino acids in a protein Structural motif, a pattern in a protein structure formed by the spatial arrangement of amino acids Network motif, patterns (sub-graphs) that recur within a network much more often than expected at random In music:Motif (music), a perceivable or salient recurring fragment or succession of notes Yamaha Motif, a music workstation In computing:Motif (widget toolkit), a raphical user interface toolkit used in software development Aston Motif, a range of character generators manufactured by Aston Broadcast Systems Motif (chess composition), an element of a move in the consideration of why the piece moves and how it supports the fulfillment of the problem stipulation

So versatile is it?worth to secured the domain motifindia.com B’coz it had to do all with design creation beauty ….much bigger definition and then have all this redirect to motifindia oh and we so lucky …. Read more

Changing Your Domain Name?

We're changing it 'cause we secured the domain playlist.com and that was ... I mean we're saying that we keep the name Project Playlist and then have playlist.com redirect to it or ... playlist.com is kind of ... it's much bigger. It's a much ... project playlist seems kind of underground, didn't seem like anything that can really catch on and be kind of category killer and we really want to become you know, the place you go online to make playlists and share playlists and so what better place then playlist.com to do that and it's a category ... it's just a much broader vision I think we have right now for playlist.com but it was... I mean I was the last one to hold on to ... in fact when I was negotiating with our marketing team, we hired the CMO from MySpace who is the CMO for Playlist.com now, and he was like, you know, Jeremy, you've got to do this... you know, MySpace, you'd get... this is... playlist.com, I mean Project Playlist, I mean it's just so much and so I convinced him to in the interim to agree that the logo playlist.com really big and the smallest little project. So it still reads for some of the people that you know, like the old way. It still reads project... we're going to get rid of the project eventually but I couldn't completely let go. So re-branding is a whole other ball wax. I don't want to get into ... but it's interesting.


How to Achieve Your Goals?

What do you want to accomplish? It’s hard to hit a target if you don’t know what the target is. So first determine the goal. Now break the goal into smaller, more manageable goals. For example, if you want to get promoted, perhaps you need to first learn a few new skills. Once you know what these smaller goals are, then you can determine the activity you need to achieve the goal. Perhaps it’s to find some courses on leadership and management if the promotion is your goal. Next you have to sign up for the program and then make the time for the classes. You can increase the possibility of achieving your goals. Tell other people. When other people know your goals, it helps to keep accountable.
Another way to motivate you to achieve your goals is to celebrate as you achieve milestones along the way to your goal. Also make sure you’re including goals for yourself like scheduling time for relaxation and enjoyment.
Goals are much easier to achieve when you break them down into smaller components, get others to help you achieve them, and celebrate when you have smaller accomplishments. Good luck achieving your goals. ….Says Fleming

How New Ideas for Business Work ?

Serious Creativity: New Ideas for Business that Work

Good business professionals know how to generate new ideas for business. They are creative. If you want to be more creative, it starts by having the belief that you can be creative. Here are some ideas for you so that you can be more creative.
Avoid judging yourself. Killer phrases are one way we judge ourselves. Saying things like “That won’t work” as soon as an idea comes out or “It’s too expensive” or “It’s too cheap” are judging. Avoid judging. There is a time to judge your ideas but it’s not at the beginning of the creative process. Judge at the end when you have lots of ideas to pick.

Another creative strategy is to look to other areas to apply ideas to yours. Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers looked to bat and bird wings to design their flying machines. George De Mestel got the idea of Velcro when burrs stuck to his sock after he went hiking.

To enhance your creativity, write your ideas down. Don’t think you’ll remember them. All creative people write their ideas down.
So if you want to be more creative, enhance the creative process. Avoid judging, look to other areas for ideas, and write your ideas down. You’ll have more great ideas t choose from and you’ll be more successful in business.
Fleming, All Business's Women in Business Advisor

Improve Your Credibility at Work

One way to increase your effectiveness at work is to increase your credibility. What makes you more effective is that critical people are more persuasive. Here are some ideas to increase your credibility….

Use the impact of authority. People in positions of authority have more credibility. You can increase your perceived authority by dressing the part. Casual attire commands less authority than formal attire. A sports shirt commands less authority than a long-sleeved Oxford shirt. Blue is the color of trust. It commands authority.
Use your credentials to enhance your authority. How? Make sure people know your credentials. Incorporate any certifications into your e-mail signature and on your business card. At meetings, have other people introduce you and mention your credentials. You can improve your credibility by positioning yourself as an authority. Look the part and make sure that people know your qualifications. When you enhance your credibility, you will find that people pay attention to you at work.

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING

What is The Right Way to Advertise ?

The Right Way to Advertise

There’s two ways to look at advertising. You can look at advertising as an expense, or you can look at advertising as an investment in your future. And if you look at advertising as an investment in your future, you are creating the image that is going to either make or break your business.

The first years of your business the most important thing to invest in is getting your name known. Once you are the name they know, you know, you can then cut back on your advertising because you’ve got a momentum built up.
Know Your Target Market

If you know who you are trying to reach, and you know the type of magazines or newspapers or what channels of TV they watch, and things of that sort, that is going to be critical, I think, for your business to work.
To identify your good target market is a mix of several things. It’s a gut feeling, first, okay, because you are coming up with a product you think people are going to need. The second thing you need to do is look at, okay, if this is what people need, who are the people that typically would buy that. Okay, in our case, they are people that care for their home, and they want to protect it or make it look better, in that area. So we start looking at who are people that have that kind of money, to invest in their home, to keep it looking nice or make it better. So that quickly starts moving you to certain levels of income, you do have to do some research, some marketing research, as to looking at who are the people that have enough money to spend to make houses look better and all that, that kind of target. Part of our mistakes in learning how to market correctly is that we initially were trying to leverage one hand to tell everything we did.

How to Have a Focused Ad Campaign?

So we were trying to advertise to the world that we’re here to sell concrete. And concrete is something they want in garages, basements and driveways. And sidewalks. You find concrete every place. Well, it’s very hard in a small segment radio ad, to explain that to the rest of the world. So the result of poor advertising came out to be that we got a lot of calls from all kinds of people that had problems that we could not address. Now, the magazine ad worked very well because we were able to focus it into one sure thing and that’s driveways. We said let’s take driveways, let’s take a nice picture of a driveway that you have done service, and let’s highlight maybe six points of that driveway, what the benefits are, and that’s what that was—very simple and focused and to-the-point, customers could read it, they understood what we did, and we started getting phone calls.

You can’t go out there and advertise for two weeks and go “Oh, the phone never rang, I quit.” You have to make a commitment to it. Even if it’s a minor commitment, say for example you decide to do a thousand dollars a month on TV. As long as you have a really good rep who is going to put you in a spot pretty consistently, and then do it consistently for two or three months, you’ll begin to see results. We signed our biggest contract a month and a half ago because of an ad on the TV. It was with a school district—we did 76,000 square feet of concrete for this school district, and I just talked to the guy today from the school district and he said, “I want you to know, your TV ad is so effective, that’s the reason you got our contract.” So I really believe that the TV has been our greatest success story.

One of the things I should have done earlier would be advertise on TV. Probably as soon as we advertised in a magazine we should have started advertising on TV. We wanted to position our company as a large company, not just as a one-man start-up shop in that area. Because the perception of the customer it’s the confidence factor and the dollars you can ask for your company are based on what the consumer feels you are worth. If the consumer has a good comfortable feeling, he thinks that you are a large corporation or a large company, they are willing to pay a higher price for your services. If they think that you are a one-man shop and you do everything, then they consider that there’s only a certain price a month that they would be willing to pay for you for that. TV does things for you. Advertising on TV does two things: TV brings credibility that you are a large company, because everybody in the world perceives that TV is very expensive, so if you’re on TV, you’re a big company, automatically. It’s an assumption that people make, and that brought a lot of credibility in that area. The magazine also brought credibility because we were doing very nice ads in the magazine, and it brought credibility that we were a high quality company doing the work.

We doubled our business when we started advertising in the magazine, and we are going to double if not triple, with the television advertising. It just opens opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise. People come to our trade show now—and in the beginning they used to come up and they’d say, “Who are you? What do you do?”—now they come up and they say, “Hey, I saw your ads on TV, Boy that ad in Spaces magazine was great!” They feel like they know us. We are not the new kids on the block, although relatively speaking, we still are. They perceive us as a known commodity….. CONNIE HERNANDEZ

What Are The Challenges and Ethics? :PR and Television:

PR and Television: The Challenges and Ethics

PR professionals Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio, authors of The Girl's Guide to Starting Your Own Business, discuss the ethics and challenges of using television for public relations efforts.

There's a certain amount of competitiveness amongst all the shows that you have to balance and its really tricky because if you... R: You can't all be at...you can't all be on the same morning...we couldn't be...we could only be on one morning show for our book and that's true of everything. So, O: Right, and Regis won't call the third hour of the Today Show so you have to get them to guarantee the second hour and if they don't guarantee the second hour then you still put them on Regis, which is what happened to me and I said, well they're going to make every effort to get us in the second hour. They're telling me its in the second hour but we really went on at 9:04 and then Regis postdated something that they couldn't use so they were angry. So its not really like, huge ethical issues but it is... R: Just a lot of delicate negotiations. O: There's a lot of very delicate juggling because again with these producers also, like your clients, if you're not straight with them, they will not work with you again and again that's sort of our stock in trade. So if we... R: And their jobs on the line too. O: Right, they get fired; you know...why did I see them on the Today Show. Oh my god, did this really matter why you saw them on the Today Show. And of course, I want to say, well I'm sorry but Tom Cruise has done the Today Show, the Tonight Show, Letterman, lalalala...but he's Tom Cruise and the worlds are completely different from him. R: Right. O: Again with product we have this issue all the time. Like how much is our...for example, books you can go on and plug your book but let's say you have a line of pots and pans, you're not allowed to go on and plug your line of pots and pans and as a matter of fact they don't want you to even use their pots and pans on the shows. Well not only do they have contractual obligations to use their own stuff on the shows, they have a vested interest in using their own stuff on the show so how do you negotiate what they're going to be able to do...is a very delicate negotiation. Because again you have...I mean, a negotiation assumes that you have some leverage and when you're working with people who aren't the Tom Cruise's and Nicole Kidman's and Jennifer Aniston's of the world, you have no leverage. R: Right...just mean... O: They don't care if you don't come on. R: Right. O: And they don't care if you won't do the show...they don't care. Goodbye well get 165 other people who are waiting for your thing. So you have to then communicate to the talent what they need to do to do a good segment, to be invited back, to not ruffle any feathers and it's a very sensitive operation. R: Luckily ethics don't really come into it.

Why the Web Is the New Media Kit

A media kit generally is designed to define the messaging and positioning and identity of a brand or company. Quite frankly a media kit is, probably is becoming, to some extent, an anachronism, because the web has taken over as a search vehicle for people figuring out what the brand or the company stands for. And the details, once you go to someone’s home page, of messaging, of positioning, of mission statements, of all those things, of objectives, and products, and values, is very well-defined by most people’s homepage. So, I think the web has sort of taken, to a large extent, has taken the place of the media kit. I happen to think to some extent that it’s still valuable to have something hard to hand somebody when they come to meet you, because what basically you are doing is you are separating yourself from the noise. That is, everybody has a homepage that defines them, but not everybody has something to hand somebody that they can take back and slip in their briefcase, so I’m probably taking a maverick point of view, that to some extent, an element, or pieces of what historically people call a media kit might still be valuable in defining a small or middle-sized company’s brand.

How To Increase Sales with a Good Public Relations Strategy ?

Increase Sales with a Good Public Relations Strategy

Do you have a PR strategy to build awareness with small/medium businesses? Because if you don’t, even as a seller, you should. First, recognize that you are an expert at what you do. You know your clients. You know their business problems. You know how they’ve solved them and you know the results that they got. Write in published articles electronically one or two per quarter are plenty. Write about what you know, how the clients have solved the problems. What the problems were that they had, the results that they saw. Quote your clients. It’ll make them feel fabulous and it’ll give you credibility. Write like you would a case study but don’t include all that technical detail about how the whole problem was solved. Leave your reader wanting to talk with you. Speak at events that your prospects regularly attend. Those chamber meetings are a great example, association meetings are another one. Five times a year and you’re going to have more leads than you know what to do with and you may find yourself actually backing off. Speak on those exact same topics that you wrote about. The business challenges your clients have, the results that they achieve, maybe a little insight into how they did it. Leverage your PR in every one of your lead generation activities. Offer an article at an upcoming event and send an email that highlights an article that’s now available. When your SMB clients have a need then they’ll know about you and you’ll be the first person that they call.

Interview with Kendra Lee, president of KLA Group and author of Selling Against the Goal.


How To Pick a PR Point Person

First of all, I think one of the secrets to a small business generating publicity is assigning that responsibility to someone in the business. It generally is a function that requires at least an awareness of finding opportunities 24/7. And to think that the leader or CEO of a small business is going to that is probably foolhardy. So the notion of finding someone in the organization that has a sense of what publicity is and has their radar screen on all the time is an interesting first step. The second thing I would say is that whatever the small business, everybody in the press is interested in innovation and bringing the thinking forward. So, if a small business, no matter what kinds of businesses they do, are involved in innovation, are involved in making things better, are involved in helping people in their target audience improve their lives, that’s certainly a technique that can be effective.

What a PR Agency Can Give You ?


The question of what a PR firm, the value of what a PR firm adds, is really one that’s probably the most important question that a small business can ask, and it’s not just about publicity. The successful engagement of a small business with a PR agency involves a strategic collaboration in which the PR firm is acting as a business partner. And the most successful engagements and long term relationships accrue when that PR firm takes an aggressive interest in the success of that business. So it is more than just producing publicity, it is more than just supporting a small business at a trade show, it is essentially immersing oneself in the very bowels of a small business and caring day to day about the success of that client who owns a small business . MICHAEL GREECE



How Do You Shift to a Sales 2.0 Culture?

Keith: Stu, what suggestions would you have for those companies trying to make this fundamental shift to a Sales 2.0 culture?
So start with your sales process. This is…it’s a big change so the first thing is don’t throw out everything. Don’t just assume you can do this massive. If you’re heavily embedded in Sales 1.0 and you’ve got a bunch of people who do the majority of their calls face-to-face, don’t try to do a massive change overnight. Take a look at your sales process, identify those areas within your sales process where a WebTouch or Sales 2.0 approach would be a good candidate and then introduce them one at a time from an impact perspective. So understand where you’re going to get the biggest impact, what’s going to make the biggest change to your productivity and then introduce those changes one at a time. Making a massive change is you got to make a plan, right? You can never…the quote is not going away. So introduce them a step at a time, and also focus on your A players, by the way. Your A players want to be A+ players. They want to be at 125 percent or 150 percent of quota or 200 percent of quota. You show them a way to get there; they’re going to buy in. When your A players buy in, the rest are to follow.

All Business.com’s Sales Advisor Keith Rosen interviews Stu Schmidt, vice president at Cisco WebEx.

Sales and Marketing: The Keystone to Success
Jeff Parker, an entrepreneur with extensive experience in the financial services sector, discusses why sales and marketing are the keystone to success.

You know, at the end of the day I like to think of myself as a salesman. And I really believe that's where I have the most fun, talking to the customer. Now, people would say, well I also like the product development and the creativity. I do, but I really like being out in the field, on the battlefield, actually selling the product. And so my businesses have all been very heavily sales and marketing oriented. Because my belief is that companies don't go out of business because they can't control their expenses. They go out of business because they can't get revenue. And so, I think, I think we have a little bit of a tendency, as we've been educated, to spend too much time on the product. You know, you get a good idea - everybody has a good idea - but why don't they work? Well, they don't work because people don't execute on the idea, and they don't get to the customer fast enough. So, they have to go back to raise more money or the run out of cash, and the business stops. So, you've got a great new product to where you think it'll work, and then you've got to put a sales team together, and you've got to get that sales team out in the field, and you've got to understand how long that cycle takes to sell a product. Once you understand that, then let your salespeople make as much money as they possibly can, because what does that mean? The more money their making, the more revenues you have in the company, the better the company is. So, I would actually get up in my Monday morning meetings and if we'd had a big sales week or something, I would call that salesperson up and pat him on the back and, you know, shake his hand. I would say to my folks, I would say, you know, being a salesman is the most important thing we have in this company, and it's the toughest job, because these people get turned down all the time. They have periods when they're not selling, so they're in a funk. They have highs and lows of their own feelings about how life's going that they have to manage, but they're the reason we're in business. So, I would tell ... I would my technical people, "No, don't take that the wrong way. You're important too, but the business won't survive without them." And so I would turn the whole company into really appreciating the sales and marketing as being in a sense the keystone to success. And often many companies have a tendency to sort of play down the sales and marketing. Sales and marketing or being a salesperson is not, is not good enough. It's the best. Being a salesperson is the best, and it's really why companies make it or don't make it.
Sales Techniques: How to Leave a Voice Message That Works
KEITH ROSEN: Many salespeople feel that leaving a voice mail is a waste of time. It’s just not generating the callbacks that they expect, so instead of leaving a voice mail they just put the phone down and hang up, expecting to catch that prospect at a later time. However, maybe it’s really the voice mail itself that’s not working. For example, if I gave you a spoon and said to go out and dig a 10 foot hole, would you learn the lesson, “Well gee I guess I can’t dig holes very well,” or maybe it’s more about the tools and resources that would help me do this a lot more effectively. So here’s several things that you can do right now to boost the impact of your voice mails that’s going to generate more return calls for you.
(voiceover continues)
Voice Mail That Works:
-Don’t Exceed 30 to 45 seconds
Number one: make sure your voicemails don’t exceed, well, 30 to 45 seconds max. The reason why is, number one, it’s going to prevent you from rambling on. Secondly, it’s going to force you to laser in on the compelling message you need to leave that’s going to generate that return call and interest from your prospect.
(voiceover continues)
Voice Mail That Works:
-Don’t Exceed 30 to 45 seconds
-Give a Compelling Reason to Return Your Call
Number two: each message you leave must give them a compelling reason to return your call. After all, when you’re making a cold call and you actually get a live person on the other end, it’s hard enough to enroll them to listen to what you have to say. Now, you want to leave a message, have that person go to their voice mail, retrieve that voice mail, write your number down, and take their time out of their busy day to return your call. So it’s imperative that you give them a reason to return your call. What value proposition do you have that they’re interested in?
(voiceover continues)
Voice Mail That Works:
-Don’t Exceed 30 to 45 seconds
-Give a Compelling Reason to Return Your Call
-Don’t Give Too Much Information
Number three: don’t give away the farm. After all, if you give them all the information that you’re going to tell them when you finally connect with them, then what’s going to be their reason to return your call in the first place?
(voiceover continues)
Voice Mail That Works:
-Don’t Exceed 30 to 45 seconds
-Give a Compelling Reason to Return Your Call
-Don’t Give Too Much Information
-Create Five Unique Voicemail Messages
Number four: create 5 unique voicemail messages. Now this accomplishes a few things—I believe in taking the shotgun approach rather than the rifle approach when leaving voicemails and here’s why—at this point you don’t really know what that prospect’s hot button is. If you keep leaving the same old voicemail messages every week, well, the fact is you can actually be reinforcing the wrong message. So, instead of doing it that way, create five unique voicemail messages. This way, if voicemail one doesn’t resonate with them, maybe voicemails two and three will, and that’s finally going to give you the opportunity to stimulate that return call.
(voiceover continues)
Voice Mail That Works:
-Don’t Exceed 30 to 45 seconds
-Give a Compelling Reason to Return Your Call
-Don’t Give Too Much Information
-Create Five Unique Voicemail Messages
-Practice Each Message 25 Times
And finally, make sure you practice every voicemail a minimum of 25 times. Now not just reading it, I’m saying out loud. Hear yourself say it. Actually practice maybe with a friend or a co-worker leaving some messages that they could then critique you on. This will give you an opportunity that when you are finally leaving a voicemail message, it’s not going to come across as canned or scripted, but more of a natural conversation.
Interview with Keith Rosen, All Business.com's sales advisor.

How To Sharpen your sales skills?

Aggressively waiting for the phone to ring doesn’t work. Neither does doing the same things with double the energy. But there are things you should do, and there are things you should not do, in times like this. You’ll find that guidance in these whitepapers. Before you gain access to over 20 valuable whitepapers to help you sell through this challenging economy, please tell us a little about you.


Sales Management: Ask Solution Questions

Now if you look on the other side here, solution-oriented questions. These are the questions that create new possibilities and opportunities. Opportunities and possibilities that you may not have ever seen before and that’s the point. We don’t have to have all the answers, folks. We need to tap into their wisdom. These questions allow you to do that. Asking questions like, “Well what’s the lesson here? What needs to change? What’s needed to succeed here the next time? What part of your over-all selling strategy needs to be refined?” These are the questions that create a new solution that didn’t exist before. It is the question which will empower your people to learn and grow on their own.
AllBusiness.com's Sales Advisor Keith Rosen offers examples of the kinds of questions that sales managers can use to coach salespeople.



How to Close the Sale with Permission?

One of the biggest myths when it comes to selling is that you need to be a great closer to close the sale. Well, the challenge with this is that when speaking with salespeople, a lot of times ……
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Sales Techniques: How to Close the Sale with Permission

One of the biggest myths when it comes to selling is that you need to be a great closer to close the sale. Well, the challenge with this is that when speaking with salespeople, a lot of times they associate closing the sale with using manipulation, force, pressure, or some type of cohesion in order to get that client to buy from you. Well, what if we looked at this from a different perspective? You’d never have to close another sale again. Why do I say that? Here’s why. The greatest salespeople I know are not strong closers, they’re great openers. In other words, they open up a dialogue to create a new possibility in order to move that sales process forward. What I’m really referring to here is permission-based closing. What if you actually got permission from the prospect to close the sale? In order to get permission to close the sale, I’m suggesting three steps that will allow you to do this effortlessly without ever having to apply pressure on a prospect.
(voiceover continues)
Permission-Based Closing:
-Isolate the Objection
Step one: isolate the objection. Now let’s say you’re dealing with a prospect that’s saying they don’t have any money. Well let’s make sure you’re not dealing with a smokescreen and you’ve isolated that objection down to it’s very core, in other words, the one thing that’s holding them back from buying from you. Here’s one question that will allow you to do so: “Mr., Prospect, if I’m hearing you right, it really comes down to not having the budget that you’ve allocated in order to make this purchase. Is that accurate?”
(voiceover continues)
Permission-Based Closing:
-Isolate the Objection
-Get Permission for a Dialogue
Step two: gain permission to have a dialogue. Here’s what that could sound like: “So, Mr., Prospect, if in fact you did have that budget allocated, we would then be able to discuss the next steps of moving this process forward. Is that accurate? What if I can share with you some ways that will allow you to make this incredibly affordable while honoring the limited budget you have? Would you be open to discussing that in more detail?”

(voiceover continues)
Permission-Based Closing:
-Isolate the Objection
-Get Permission for a Dialogue
-Offer a Solution

Step three: offer the solution. Now’s the opportunity for you to offer that next possibility or solution that you didn’t discuss yet or that you haven’t seen that you’ve now created as a result of your dialogue with that prospect. Using these three steps will allow you to close in on every prospect, get that objection out of the way, and open up that dialogue, which is going to move you closer to more sales.
Interview with Keith Rosen, AllBusiness.com's Sales Advisor
How To Deal with Sales Objections by Changing Your Message?
If you’re sick of hearing, “We’re not interested” or “We’re already working with some other vendor,” you probably want to know how to handle those objections and I’m going to tell you something right that you’re not going to want to hear…..for more info

Deal with Sales Objections by Changing Your Message

If you’re sick of hearing, “We’re not interested” or “We’re already working with some other vendor,” you probably want to know how to handle those objections and I’m going to tell you something right that you’re not going to want to hear. The truth is that you’re actually creating the objection that you’re hearing because of the wording of your message to clients. Let me give you an example. If I call up a VP of sales and want to sell him sales training, I might say, “Hi Bob, this is Jill Konrath calling. I’m with Leapfrog Strategies and we specialize in sales training for the complex sale. We offer a full range of training services for all your needs.” And Bob’s reaction, guaranteed is, “We don’t need any sales training.” “We’re not interested right now.” Or “We’re already working with another company.” That is his normal human reaction because he knows that you’re trying to sell him something. It doesn’t work so you need to eliminate the message in and change it entirely if you want to catch that person’s attention. Again, here’s what you might say, if you change your message to say, “Hi Bob, Jill Konrath calling. I know that your company is really focused on sales in the fourth quarter and that it’s a number one priority in terms of cracking it into land larger corporate accounts. I’ve got some ideas on how you could shrink time to revenue on some of those new product introductions. Let’s set up a time to talk about that.” Now Bob at that point is not going to say, “We’re already working with another vendor, Jill.” Nor is he going to say, “We’re not interested.” Because what could he not be interested in and I didn’t tell him anything about my product and service, I simply said I know that he’s trying to increase sales and it’s a focus for fourth quarter of this year and I’ve got some ideas on how he can shrink time to revenue on new product introductions. You change your messaging. You eliminate the objections entirely. Get rid of that old self-serving verbiage that tells all about my company, we specialize in it, we offer a full range of products and services and you won’t get the objections. If you’re creating them, get rid of them. You have the power to do that too.


Interview with Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and founder of SellingtoBigCompanies.com.