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Join us for our free Webinar April 7, and explore the type of relationship building methods that reduce defensiveness and encourage the growth of powerful “Cheerleader” relationships that can dramatically increase the growth of your business.
Every restorer has a couple of these relationships now. Wouldn’t you like to understand how to create them at will? This Webinar can get you started!
Click here to register for this free Webinar Thursday, April 7, at 9 a.m. Central Time.
Why Most Restorers Are Not Driving the Growth of Their Business
Thursday, March 24, 9 a.m. Central Time
Click here to register!
Restoration salespeople should be consistently conducting activities that generate new business. Most aren’t, but it’s really not their fault! Why?
If these issues sound familiar, join us Thursday, March 24, at 9 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!
And don’t miss these upcoming Webinars:
Lowering the Drawbridge
Thursday April 7 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!
The Strategy and Tactics of Marketing
Tuesday April 19 at 9:00 a.m. Central Time. Click here to register!
We spend a lot of time during Sales Mastery for Restorers on role playing. It’s the best way to get comfortable with the sales techniques we teach and get immediate feedback on your presentation skills.
But what role playing can’t do is let you listen to yourself, to hear for yourself what you sound like when you make a sales call. But that’s easy enough to do.
Just take your camcorder (most digital cameras and smart phones have one) and record a bit of your pitch.
Then listen and watch yourself. Are you engaging with the “prospect”? Are you looking right into their “eyes”? Do you sound friendly and interested or pushy and hard sell?
It’s just like the old technique of practicing in front of a mirror, except with the camcorder you can go back and see and hear what the prospect does.
We all have some special business relationships that become more than just business. Maybe you aren’t the closest of friends, but “friends” wouldn’t be an inappropriate description.
The bond is stronger than a simple buyer-seller relationship. There’s a lot of business and profit, but there’s also a lot of satisfaction on both sides.
You might think those relationships just happen. After all, since we all have them, and we didn’t do anything special to build them, they must just happen, right?
Wrong. If you confuse coincidence and causation, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity. Yes, those types of business relationships do “just happen,” but they also can be developed, nurtured and maintained, just like any other relationship.
The key is to understand that your prospects know you are there to “sell” and therefore set up defenses – barriers – to your efforts. You can break down those barriers by not “selling.” Rather, you consult; you learn about the prospect, ask what they want and why they want it – all before you start telling them about yourself.
That’s the cornerstone of the consultative selling process. And it all starts with understanding that people don’t buy from vendors or salespeople or any “thing.”
People buy from people.
We have two free webinars coming up Thursday, January 6, that can help jumpstart a successful 2011.
At 10 a.m. is “The Strategy and Tactics of Marketing.” This Webinar helps you understand what makes your company different and better and how to create a brand and a message provide compelling reasons for targets to work with your company. Tactical Marketing Programs will also be discussed, illustrating ways to create programs to help your targets get what they need by using your company. Register here.
At 11 a.m. is “A Winning Process for Commercial Sales.” This webinar defines the commercial market and a winning sales process that will make penetrating this market easier, more efficient, more effective and less stressful than any of your other sales activities. Register here.
These Webinars are an excellent opportunity to get a feel for the types of things we’ll be covering at our Sales Mastery for Restorers and Weathering the Storm Commercial Marketing seminar programs. And there’s still time to register for the upcoming Atlanta sessions the week of January 24. Visit the BDA Web site for more information on either or both programs.
You can sell as hard as you can, follow-up just the right number of times, answer all your prospects objections, take them to football games, buy them dinners, but you still won’t close if you don’t communicate value.
It’s not just a matter of showing how you’re different and better. It’s not a question of how you communicate that. It’s how that relates to the needs of your prospect.
That comes down to identifying the prospects pains and demonstrating how what you offer will relieve them. That’s the value you offer, and if you don’t find the pain, you won’t have the “translator” to communicate your value.
Anything new, any type of change, always implies risk. It may be as simple as whether to change brands of soup, or as complicated as choosing a supplier for property restoration. As different as those two situations seem, the decision for both comes down to answering one simple question: Is the reward worth the risk?
The key to understanding how people change is understanding that change most often happens only when the risk of doing nothing (leaving things the same) is GREATER than the risk of change.
For restorers trying to sign new customers, it doesn’t matter how great your drying equipment is, or how many certified techs you have on staff, or how many satisfied customers you serve. Until you actually make the sale and deliver on your promise, you’re an unknown. That is, you’re a risk.
So what reward do you offer that makes the risk or doing nothing greater than the risk of change? What pain does your prospect have that you can relieve?
If you find that, understand that and speak to that, you’ll close.
Why Most Restorers Are Not Driving the Growth of Their Business and What to Do About It!
Thursday, December 16, 10 a.m. Central Time – Click here to register.
Your sales department should be able to consistently go out and conduct activities that can reliably generate new business – but most don’t! This Webinar helps you understand why they don’t and what you can do about it.
Reserve your place today. Register here.
If you can’t make it to this Webinar, additional Sales Mastery for Restorers Webinars are scheduled for Thursday, December 30, and Thursday, January 6. Click here for more information on the upcoming Webinars.
Why is it that the most obvious strategies are so easy to miss? You can thank DryAdvise President and industry legend Dan Bernazzani for this one!
On every loss, train your estimator or lead techs or whoever responds and gets the job signed to make sure they also get the name and phone number of the policyholder’s insurance agent.
Get this information to your salesperson for follow up ASAP. Same day is ideal (depending on when the loss comes in) but make sure to do it no later than the next day.
Tell the agent that you are calling to let them know that you are working on a loss at one of their policyholder’s homes, and that you wanted to let them know about the loss and what was being done.
You will often find that the agent had no idea about the loss and that they really appreciate the heads-up to the opportunity to contact their customer. Ask for their e-mail address and tell them that you will upload pictures and keep them apprised of progress on the loss.
When the loss is completed, call to set up an appointment to review the project. Meeting with them face to face is the perfect opportunity (shameless self-promotion alert) to use a consultative sales process* to find out what headaches they may have that your company can solve.
But even if you don’t have this process at your company, it remains a fantastic opportunity to follow-up on the relationship you started, develop rapport and tell your story.
Oh, and if you get static from the adjuster, you can often just call the agent (now that you have the beginnings of a relationship) and ask questions like, “I thought the Smiths had coverage for this.” Get the idea?
This one is a no-brainer. Thanks Dan!
*What? You don’t have such a process in place? Contact us to find out about Sales Mastery for Restorers.
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