Twitter #Followfriday recommendations for July 3rd 2009

This morning I read another interesting blog post by Nikki Pilkington on the possibility of being seen to be spamming when sending out numerous #followfriday recommendations.

Like Nikki I still believe it is important to continue to send out genuine follow recommendations for people that continually add value to the Twitter community and so I am adopting the same approach of doing this via. a weekly blog post.

So here goes with my Twitter #followfriday recommendations for this week:

Firstly where else can I start than with @nikkipilkington herself? Nikki continues to be an innovative opinion leader on the use of social media as a business tool and having recently interviewed her over the telephone she certainly knows her stuff. That telephone interview, by the way, will shortly be available as a download…watch this space!

Secondly, @nigel_morgan who I have got to know through the 4Networking community although we have yet to meet face-to-face (such is the power of social media I guess). Nigel is a true PR expert and well worth following.

Next up is Mike Morrison @rapidbi who continues to post excellent tweets on learning and development and can also be relied upon to tweet an inspiring quotation just when you need it. Mike is a good guy and thoroughly deserves a follow.

Lastly for this week is @duncanbrodie who is a great contributor to Twitterland and regularly posts links to excellent articles on leadership and team development. A really nice guy as well with a fantastic willingness to share.

Those are my #followfriday recommendations for this week. More coming next Friday.

If you have any suggestions of your own leave them in the comments box and I’ll check them out.

The customer needs to feel the pain!

In previous postings we have looked at the importance of asking open questions. These are questions normally beginning with the words who, what, when, why, where or how and are generally used in order to understand more about the customers situation.

However without a clear end goal in mind these questions can easily become vague and unstructured. We need to help the customer understand the pain or inconvenience they will suffer if they don’t buy (or put off buying) our proposed solution. If we can agitate the issue sufficiently they are more likely to buy our proposed solution in order to avoid future pain. We can do this by using a funnelling approach in our questions.

A funnelling approach has five elements:

*A background question to understand more about the customer’s specific situation.

*A problem question to understand what issues are caused by the current situation.

*An implication question to understand the impact of the issues.

*An agitation question to help the customer understand what could happen should the situation continue. (This is the crucial one..the customer needs to feel the ‘pain’ of not doing something)

*A need question to help the customer understand how you could help them resolve the issue and take away the ‘pain’.

The best way to illustrate this is by sharing an example with you:

If we imagine we are the supplier to a printing company a typical sales conversation might be as follows:

Seller: “How many corporate brochures do you print each year?” (background question)
Customer: “At least a dozen or so main ones I guess”

Seller: “Does the volume of corporate brochure work cause you any problems?” (problem question)
Customer: “Well it can get pretty hectic at the peak times”

Seller: “How does that affect quality?” (implication question)
Customer: “It sometimes means that some brochures have to be more basic to leave us free to concentrate on the design of the more complicated ones”

Seller: “What might happen if this were to continue?” (agitation question)
Customer: “Well I guess we might start losing customers who are not happy at receiving just a basic brochure”

Seller: “If we could find a way of working with you to reduce the workload yet still make sure all the brochures are of a good standard, would that help”? (need question)
Customer: “Well anything that helped us manage the problem would be welcome”

We are then into our presentation emphasising the benefits of our products to the customer. By agitating the problem they are more likely to buy the solution.

Are you funnelling your questions? Are you agitating the problem- making the customer appreciate the pain – if they don’t take action?

Why not try this approach on your next sales visit and let me know how it goes?

Twitter for Business E-Book : Mark Shaw

Following on from my previous posting on the benefits of using Twitter to grow your business, Mark Shaw has just published a fantastic resource on using Twitter for business.

Mark has managed to pack so much information,so many hints,tips,insights, and recommendations into one e-book it’s staggering and far too good to keep under wraps.

You can download your own copy at http://www.markshaw.biz/wp-content/Twitter-for-Business-ebook.pdf

Secrets of Selling for Small Business Owners

I had an interesting chat with one of my business contacts , Garry Mumford of Insight Associates, the other day who set me a business challenge.

Having been a business owner for some 17 years now Garry confessed that he’d never had any formal training in selling. I put to him “Ah well that’s obviously not held you back as you’re clearly successful at sales otherwise you wouldn’t have been around all this time”. At that he said an interesting thing:

“Yes but as business owners we think we know it all ..but we don’t. We can always learn how to do things better and I think you could help all business owners, whether new start ups or experienced ones like me, to sell more effectively. Think you can come up with something that will help us?”

Well I love a challenge! So..I came up with this one day workshop called “Secrets of Selling for Small Business Owners” and it launches in early June.

Are you a small business owner with little or no sales training, having to learn as you go along? Are you usually successful but feel that you could get even more business if you grasped all the other sales opportunities that come your way?

If so …take a look here and join us for the day.

PS. If you book in today you’ll get the ‘early bird’ discounted rate of £97 saving you £50 on the full price!

Guest posting on the power of Twitter

I don't usually post many guest entries but an update from Chris Slay recently caught my eye.

Chris is the owner of Skills Provision Ltd and has really worked tirelessly to,first of all, understand Twitter and ,secondly, to make it work productively for his business.

His story is typically honest and a great example of the benefits of keeping an open mind when it comes to marketing a business.

I'll let Chris take up the story:

Having never heard of Twitter until late 2008 I decided in 2009 to find out about it on the basis that you never know what part of the marketing mix will work.

I didn't have a clue what I was doing but followed the 80/20 social/business guideline suggested by others and for those of you who know me banal chit chat isn't my way.

I've adopted a couple of tools to help but almost drowned in the plethora of applications that have arisen on Twitter.

If there is a better example of KISS I don't know it but it took Gary Gorman telling me that for me to accept you could ignore much of the background buzz

It was great fun when we had the snow when the traffic was 99% social but I slowly edged the business content up and it is probably now 40% social which I twitter through the home page or Tweekdeck as I don't believe other mediums are interested in what I had for breakfast but all the business ones are now sent through www.ping.fm an absolutely fantastic tool where one message gets sent to all the networking sites you care to subscribe to.

As I said a while back I would give it a couple of months , measure and reevaluate - so here's the verdict from 4N's resident Luddite.

It's a bit of fun on the social side if that is your bag. By choosing your group you can be as infantile as you wish or largely side step it.

On the business side , the discovery of ping has enabled me to raise my game considerably and I will be continuing with this aspect as very much a pump primer much in the way that I use email newsletters to create customer awareness.

I will be stripping out people who bore me in terms of people I follow but will add others in substitution. My current numbers are only around 100 and there is no way I could or would follow 1000's as it would take too much time.

I have also evolved a pattern of using Twitter - first thing in the morning for 20 minutes, a couple of dips in the day of 5 mins ( usually as a little reward to myself for completing some boring task) and then 20 minutes in the evening.

I used to read up other peoples tweets but now cherry pick and this is one of the reasons for dumping people.

I don't believe I'm using Twitter as proactively as I could but hope to improve my performance in that respect in the months to come

Will it be a passing fad?......

In January I was an aethiest, by end of Feb an agnostic, I'm still a way from being a believer but am drifting that way. Where's TwChurch!

Twitter for business

Yesterday I was interviewed by Mark Shaw about how I use Twitter to grow business. In case you missed the original article when I posted it to Twitter I've reproduced it here.

Twitter Business Interviews - Gary Gorman

Carrying on My Twitter For Business Interviews Here are 20 Twitter Questions answered by Gary Gorman of Paradigm Training. They work with sales teams to improve their business performance and help them negotiate better deals.

1-Full name –Gary Gorman

2 -Business Name - Paradigm Training Ltd

3- Twitter Name - garygorman

4 -Website URL or Blog URL - http://www.paradigmtraining.co.uk/ http://www.garygorman.blogspot.com/

5-How long have you been using Twitter? - almost four months now

6-How many followers do you have? - right now I have 580

7-Which Twitter 3rd Party Apps are your favourites? - I use Tweetdeck constantly and also tweetlater to pre-post a few of my Tweets

8-Do you monitor your Success with Twitter?– If so How? Not particularly. I don’t view success as the number of followers I have. I would rather offer quality tweets and develop quality relationships with my followers.

9-How has Twitter impacted your business? - It’s opened my eyes to the power of social marketing, it’s enabled me to share knowledge very quickly, it’s opened up a number of joint venture opportunities. Oh…and it’s enabled me to clinch a five figure training contract out of nowhere!

10-Why are you using Twitter? - Because it’s fun, it’s immediate, it’s free (although I guess that might change) it raises my profile and it’s enabling me to help more people grow sales.

11- Favourite likes about Twitter? - It’s quick and simple and the search facility is a great advantage over Facebook.

12- Dislikes about Twitter? - Spammers, people who tweet ‘me,me,me’ all the time

13 – Do you use an Auto Welcome Message? - I do but I am reviewing this at the moment to make it more personal to the follower.

14 – How much time per day do you spend on Twitter related activities? - Depends what else I’ve got on but I guess it averages an hour each day.

15 – What other social media sites do you use? - Facebook and LinkedIn (if you can describe that as ‘social’)

16 – Have you offered any special prices / offers/ deals to your followers? - Yes I have but I make sure that these are of the same value –no more, no less- than that I give to subscribers to my monthly newsletter “Sales Solutions”

17 – What do you Tweet about? - I try to tweet about things that will be of interest to my followers –sales tips, Twitter tips, sales articles etc. I also try to show my human face too by tweeting what I’m up to- I think it’s important that followers can relate to you. That said I try to avoid the ‘me,me,me’ syndrome I mentioned earlier.

18 - How often do you Tweet? - Probably too often but about 20 per day. Some of these are pre-loaded via. Tweetlater.

19 – Do you have a business strategy with Twitter? - I use Twitter as part of my social networking strategy to help and attract new clients to my business. I also use it as part of my own self development by following interesting people whose insights can benefit my business.

20 – Favourite person you are following? - I must admit I don’t follow any of the celebs on Twitter. I find both candocanbe and nikkipilkington post excellent stuff along with, of course markshaw

View the original article

Five Top Tips to Grow Sales

A lot of new start-up businesses often struggle to grow their sales and frequently I find this is down to two things.

Firstly, their attitude is wrong, they have a misconception about sales and are reluctant to appear to be seen as ‘pushy’. However, I think that, with a little mental repositioning away from ‘selling to people’ and towards ‘helping people to buy’, this reticence- which actually is totally unnecessary- can be conquered.

Secondly, they may not be sure what to do to help people to buy and need just a few simple pointers to help them on their way.

If this is you here are my top 5 sales tips to help you grow your sales more easily.

1. It’s not about you it’s about them

Customers don’t buy from us because they understand what we do..they buy because they feel we understand what they need.

Most purchases in life are driven by two things: the need to gain something (money, status, a better life etc) or avoid something (debt, poor health, low self esteem etc) and if we can demonstrate that we understand the underlying need then the customer is more likely to buy.

How do we identify the underlying need? Well we…

2. Ask Questions

We do this in order to identify what problem they are trying to solve. How urgent is the need? What have they tried so far? How did that work?

The more effective questions we ask the more easily we can identify how closely our product matches with what they need.

Of course it’s not all about firing of several questions it’s also about demonstrating that we….

3. Listen

It is a fallacy to say that in order to be an effective sales person we need ‘the gift of the gab’. In fact the most effective sales people are those that keep very quiet and intently listen to not only what the customer is saying but how they are saying it.

By concentrating intently on what the customer needs we can then more effectively…

4. Sell the benefits not the features

Customers are only ever interested in what a product will do for them-how it will make their life easier or help them gain or avoid something. They are rarely enthused by product features, in other words a too detailed ‘nuts and bolts’ description of what it is.

If we have successfully matched the benefits of our product or service with the specific needs of the customer we can…

5. Ask for the order and close the sale

Research from the Institute of Purchasing shows that only 20% of customers ever volunteer an order. The rest we have to ask, perhaps using words like “So..I’ll wrap that up for you now” or “Which suits you best..delivery next Tuesday or Thursday?” (In sales training these are called ‘closes’ and are the ‘confident close’ and the ‘alternative close’ respectively)

Again taking this approach can often seem to the hesitant sales person to be too pushy but in reality it is the next obvious step to take if we have successfully identified how we can help the customer and found solutions to their situation.

Get a more detailed report on "How to Sell Almost Anything To Almost Anybody"