How To Stop Struggling In Business
Do people ask to "pick your brain" for an hour, tell you you're a great person, and then disappear and never buy?
Do prospects demand your quotation and then come back to fight for you to give more, or to lower your price?
Do you feel proud of the fact that you can produce and send a detailed quote in a relatively short time, but also a sinking feeling in the pit in your stomach because almost nobody ever responds?
These are all symptoms of why you're struggling in business.
Having worked with thousands of business owners and consultants, I can share with you the ONE ultimate cause of their struggling to make ends meet from month to month. And that's why I wrote this report. It's on Kindle but you get it for free as my thanks for visiting SalesTactics.org.
Absorb it. The single change is not difficult to make. You will have to watch your own behavior, though, to make sure you don't slip back into old habits--but more about that inside.
Before we look at the report, I want to share with you a story from my past. It's about sales effectiveness--or should I say "sales INeffectiveness".
In 1997 I graduated from college and went to work putting together a sales and marketing program for a worldwide distribution network for large power generation equipment. Our power plants cost anywhere from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars. I put together a beautiful set of binders containing everything a distributor would want: specifications, warranties, terms and conditions, and things I don't even remember anymore because it's been such a long time since. And I made a cost/price database that together with the revised quoting process I devised resulted in quotations that had taken 40 hours now taking 8.
In other words, what had taken a week to do could now be done in a day. Our very pretty, very correct quotation and bid document could now be on the way to the prospect by international courier the day it was received.
I was pretty darn proud of myself (I think I was 22 or 23 at the time). Look at how much time I had saved!
And you know what we did?
Produced a lot of paper. A LOT.
Spent a lot of money on courier fees.
No orders, though.
Sure, you might get a dozen in a lifetime for million-dollar-plus industrial gas turbine gensets. But still...we weren't even getting close. And after all the clean-up work I had done with those equipment specs!
We were spinning our wheels.
Being proud of the speed I could turn out a quotation was stupid. That's clear to me now.
But back then, I thought I was doing great work.
Can you see what's missing here?
All we were doing was responding to Requests for Quotation from information-seeking prospects. And we cheerfully, speedily provided them with their answers--for FREE!
After all, that's how you had to play the game (right?).
We didn't know any different.
Neither did our competitors.
So what do you think the prospects were doing when they received all this free information from the many providers who jumped on submitting a detailed quote with a smile?
And us?
We were filling filing cabinets with bid documents that went nowhere.
Knowing then what I know now, if I went back in time (though I confess I don't want to--I like it here) I would be a lot tougher. I would not give out my precious information so readily. I would try to find out hidden needs the prospect had before ever thinking about maybe providing a quote. I would qualify first.
And I would produce a lot fewer quotes. Much less paper. Far less work.
I would free up my time to concentrate on the small number of 'real' projects that I knew some differentiating factor I could stand out with.
That's what we're going to discuss inside...
The Small Business Sales Effectiveness Report
Can you see why this report is so badly needed by each and every business owner and consultant?
Are you frustrated and upset about:
- Disappearing prospects
- Chasing prospects
- Fighting on price
- Putting in so much time interviewing prospects only to have them vanish
- Writing up detailed quotations that don't get acted upon?
Then you need to read this key report RIGHT NOW. Don't do anything else until you've finished it and understand what it has to say. Click on the image to open it as a pdf. No opt-in required.
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