Improve Your Sales of Building Products

We are about to embark onto a new adventure and augment our services to our clients.
Watch this space in the New Year for a new identity and an extended list of services we intent to provide to SMEs that cannot, or do not want to, have their own Architectural Sales Force.
We will endeavour to outline this expanded business in a new website, and introduce a new name and corporate identity for it.
So, stay tuned and in the meantime, all the best for 2012.
Enjoy the Festive Season!

Once more, we are teaming up with CEDIA for another instalment of our "Unleash Your Specification sales" one-day seminar.

It will be held at the CEDIA Headquarters in Mascot on July 5th, 2011

We have only 14 seats available so register quickly to reserve your place:

http://www.cedia.com.au/index.cfm/page/UYSS

Hope to see you there!If you need more information, see our "Products" page here, or email me:

info@forwardcoachingsolutions.com

or give me a call on 040 41 070 42 

Here is our next article, a little late for February with my apologies...

Lifetime Value of a Client: the 7 Ingredients of your Success
 
I have had an intuitive understanding of this concept early on in my sales career.
However, until recently, I didn’t have a conscious and documented understanding of this extraordinary sales tool.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a Jay Abraham “boot camp” about three years ago.
For those of you that may not know him, he is an US-based marketing guru and the inventor of the “loss leader” concept, or at least the first to document it properly.
From there, he went to document the concept of “up-selling” and “cross-selling”.

What an eye opener!  Suddenly all my gut feelings on how to treat a client to keep him or her for as long as possible (ideally for a lifetime...) were now up in the open, dissected, documented and ready to use in a more structured manner.

Basically, one needs to recognise the time, effort and money involved in acquiring a new customer in the first place...

Once you realise the true cost of this exercise and you compare it with the cost of keeping a customer happy and returning to buy more products or services from you, then you are going to gear your organisation to behave in such a way that, not only this client will return for more, but also, will tell everybody around that you are the person or organisation to go to for such a product or service.

Examples of “loss leader” unconscious activity abounds in the traditional markets where farmers will happily give you over a kilo of tomatoes for the price of a kilo, or give you parsley and lemon for free with your fish, or as it used to be the tradition in France, you would get “treize a la douzaine”, meaning 13 oysters for the price of 12 at your local fishmonger...

I have vivid memories of going shopping with my mum at the butcher, and once she had order the Sunday roast, I would get a few slices of saucisson  for free, a wicked lateral “loss leader”!

In this context, cross-selling with the now famous fast food expression “would you like fries with that” was second nature to food providores around the world, or up-selling to a more expensive fish under the pretence that it was “just off the boat”...

So, how can we translate these practices that have been around for thousands of years into our current environment of consultative or specifications sales?

One of the most successful “techniques” is “free advice”. Obviously, giving advice seems to be a very widely spread activity. After all, one could say that I am just doing this as I am writing this article...

But the value is in providing real advice that is not biased towards your own bottom line, but rather towards helping your client finding the best outcome for his/her project.

In  a Specification Sales environment, you want to consider your client as in the Architect or Interior Designer you are talking to for a specific project, but also taking into account his/her client’s requirements. In other words, you have to keep in mind the client of your client: if understood properly, this is a very powerful tool in the successful retention of your Specifiers.

It can take an interesting turn, when the good advice is actually to point your client towards a competitor’s product for this particular application. I can guarantee you that the next time you recommend one of your own products to that same client, it will be a breeze to get that client on your side...

In terms of cross-selling, one thing that every ironmonger is taught on the first day in the job is to remind the specifier or the client that it is a good idea to have a door stop for every door on the project. In terms of up-selling, the Export Manager of an English manufacturer I used to work with was to sell better hinges on each door, with the promise (and the delivery...) of a 25-year warranty.

This particular manufacturer got to supply all the door hardware of the still relatively new Hong Kong airport for 5000 doors with an all encompassing 7-year warranty. This could have been the ultimate loss leader, but the company was so confident in the quality of their products that they didn’t think of it as a loss leader, and they were right, as they had no claim at all during this warranty period! That’s a serious achievement for any product or any organisation!

So, to summarise, here are the ingredients to help you keep a client for life:

·         Keep giving sound advice to your clients

·         Think of the client of your client

·         It might be OK to lose some money on the first project to ensure long-term loyalty

·         Always think laterally to cross sell and up sell

·        If a dispute arises, resolve it promptly in the view of the long term value of the client

·         Ensure that happy clients spread the word around them

·         If a client stops or reduces his/her dealings with you, go and ask why and fix it!

I would be happy to develop these concepts with you at one of our seminars:

I will try to post an article a month on topics related to our trade.
Here is the first instalment for January.

The four "P"s of Consultative Selling

Most of you would be familiar with the four "P" of Marketing:

Product
Price
Promotion
Placement

What if we were trying to identify the four "P" attributes of a successsful consultative sales person?

This idea has been distillating itself in my head for some time and I recently came up with these four attributes that I am now ready to share with you.

I believe that, although useful in any sales situation, and probably in any situation in life, these qualities are particular important in a consultative, long sales process, as found in the Building Industry, which has been my specialty for the last 20 years or so.

Here they are:

Proactivity
Persistence
Performance
Proficiency

Let's develop each of them now.

Proactivity

Well, you will agree with me that most business doesn't come to you on a platter...
If you are lucky enough to be in this situation, then move right away to the next 3 "P"!
So, you need to look for projects and clients rather than waiting for them to come knocking on your door.

You hear people saying (specially during and after the GFC...) "there is not enough business out there", "where can I find new projects when nobody is building anything", "how can I find new clients when we have no money for advertising", and so on...
Let me tell you a true story:
I was hosting the President of one of my American supplier in Paris, whilst France was in the middle of a fairly strong depression in the mid 90s.
We were discussing this and he said to me: "When the economy is down 20%, there is still 80% of the business out there, you just have to go and find these 80%".
That is one of the most eye opening things that anybody has said to me.
And for sure, if you go looking, and you know the adequation of your products or services to a particular slice of the market, then suddenly doors than were hidden to you before suddenly become wide open and you find new business even in a slow economy.
My father, who recently passed away, used to say to me: "Il n'est pas necessaire d'esperer pour entreprendre, ni de reussir pour perseverer" which loosely translate as: "It is not necessary to be hopeful in order to try, nor to be successful in order to persevere" - This has been a great help for me throughout my life.
Which gives a nice transition to our next attribute:

Persistence

By the time somebody has the idea of creating a new building, and the time this building is finally ready for occupation, it can easily take five or six years.
Let me outline the process to you:
You need to organise the finance,  buy the land, maybe demolish the existing building(s) on the site - and get approval for it - engage an Architect to prepare the design and get development
approval, then fine tune the design, appoint a builder and then start pouring concrete...
Even if you are selling concrete or brick or structural steel, it may 2 or 3 years before you are going to see any money moving into your pocket.
If you are in lighting, door hardware, signs, tiles and carpets or bathroom fittings, you will have to wait another 12 to 24 months.
So, if you are the type of person that needs instant gratification, then get into a retail business where money comes in everyday.
If not you will need a good dose of patience and good humour to keep going!
And you will need some tools to help you follow up these opportunities throughout this process.
By the way, this is what we teach at our "Unleash Your Specifications Sales" seminar.

Performance

Now, after all this hard work and this time, you finally got the job.
Well, you are not finished yet: you need to deliver!
You need to deliver a quality product, at the right price, on time and make sure that whoever is going to install your product on site will do it according to your and your client's expectations of quality.
As we say in the industry: "You are as good as your last job"
Architects and specifiers, builders and subcontractors will come back to you over and over if you help them along the way getting their project off the ground with the minimum amout of hassles and dramas.
Let other people and suppliers screw up!
Make sure your delivery is at the same level as the quality of the effort you put in to get your product specified in the first place.
If you do this consistently then you will reach the next level in the game and attain:

Proficiency

Here is a definition of the term from thesaurus.com

Main Entry:   proficiency 
Part of Speech:  noun 
Definition:   ability, skillfulness 
Synonyms:   accomplishment, advance, advancement, aptitude, competence, dexterity, efficiency, expertise, expertness, facility, formula,  headway, knack, know-how, knowledge, learning, mastery, progress, savvy, skill, talent, what it takes 
Antonyms:   clumsiness, inability, incompetence, ineptness 

So, it is like a well maintained motor. I remember one of my clients near Paris was making diesel engines for boats, from very small to very big ones, in fact some so big that they were assembled in this huge hangar, fully tested for days or weeks (with the HP equipment I was selling them, obviously...) and then once satisfied the motor was working perfectly, it was dismantled, packed in crates, sent to the shipyard and reassembled in the ship it was destined for.
And guess what: these motors run 24/7 for many years in all the container ships and cargos criss-crossing the oceans.
That is proficiency!

So, when a consultative or specification sales person reach that level, it means he or she will have mastered the previous attributes of proactivity, persistence and performance.
I have met a few people over the years that had an innate ability to perform at that level, but I have also seen a lot more people, like you and me, embarking on this journey and mastering this process through training and coaching.
I have been fortunate to be taught these ropes along the way, and I have been lucky enough to be in the position to coach people to achieve their best performance.
I would welcome the opportunity to walk you and/or members of your sales team through this exhalirating journey.
Contact us via the form here, or email me, or phone me on + 61 40 41 070 42.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Happy New Year to all our clients, existing or prospects.
We wish you all the best in your endeavours for this new year and sincerely hope we can help you reaching your goals.
A special thought goes to all of you that have been affected by the recent floods in Queensland and Northern New South Wales.