As of late, I’ve been playing a rogue in World of Warcraft (subtlety PvP for those who play), which is an interesting damage-dealing class. Rogues use stealth, hard-hitting attacks, and all sorts of counterattacks to make themselves highly effective against other players.

One of the interesting things about the rogue class is that they spend a lot of time positioning, watching, observing, and looking for opportune moments to strike. This is largely because unlike other classes, rogues have a very limited pool of resources on which their attacks depend. In combat, they remain stealthed, waiting for the right opportunity and then unleash a strong opening attack that consumes their immediate resources (energy). Assuming the attack is successful, they gain additional resources (combo points) with which to either counter the opponent’s defenses or finish them off.

Sound familiar? This is effectively what a skilled salesperson does. Let’s compare:

1. Extensive observation. If you’re good at sales, you spend a lot of time looking for the right opportunity, instead of just rushing headlong onto the battlefield and hoping things go your way. You let others make all the noise and attract all the attention, while you look and listen for opportunities to make the biggest difference possible.

2. Strong opener. Rogues and salespeople both share the common worldview that in many cases, you only get one shot. You don’t open weak or with your least effective materials. Having watched carefully and understood what the opportunity is, you open strong. Sometimes, if the opportunity is aligned well enough and the need is great enough by your prospect, you win on the opening move.

3. Rewarded success. Every minor yes, every objection successfully handled, every step forward is an additional minor win that helps you stack up resources for the finisher. Sometimes the pace of the sale means you use recuperative abilities to catch your breath and reinforce your own position. Sometimes the pace of the sale means you get a few moments to reposition. Whatever the case is, successes give you more leverage for closing.

4. The finisher. Like rogues, the good salesperson closes strong, using their finishing moves appropriately to end the sale.

It’s telling that for a good rogue, 99% of the fight is spent in stealth, watching the battlefield, waiting for the right opportunity, prospecting for resources to take or objectives to capture and for opponents to let down their guard. A well-played rogue is rarely visible, rarely heard from, rarely noticed until it’s far too late to do anything about them.

The same is true for a really good salesperson. They spend most of their time doing research, understanding the situation, maybe having quiet conversations, slowly positioning and getting ready to bring out exactly what’s needed at the right moment. 99% of the time, they’re not selling in the traditional, used-car salesman sense – and when they are selling, if they’re doing it right, you won’t really notice until after it’s over and you own the goods.

Obviously, there are some subtle differences between rogues and salespeople – generally speaking, a good rogue leaves their opponents dead, stabbed multiple times with poisoned knives while a good salesperson creates an enduring relationship that follows their client from company to company and job to job. But the similarities on good technique, positioning, tons of observation, and pursuing the right opportunities at the right times are universally applicable.

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I’m about to reveal to you a sales technique that will make you more money, close you more deals, and bring you more sales opportunities than any other sales technique that I know of. If you master its usage and can bring the emotional and mental discipline to bear to use it, you will profit. It’s that simple.

Ready?

Shut up.

Yes, that’s the technique. Shut up. I have seen more salespeople lose deals or carve themselves into unprofitability from nervous speech than from any other sales technique failure. Marketers are especially bad at not shutting up. Once you’ve shared some information that should provoke a reaction, learn to keep your speech turned off  (and I say that because it includes text chat, email chains in your inbox, replies on Facebook, and conversations on the phone and in person) and wait for the reaction.

Why shut up? Because people think and process at different speeds. I’ve sat through sales presentations of mediocre salespeople that are literal 25 minute marathons of speech, uninterrupted. No chances for questions, conversation, or thinking, just a long run and a hope that by the end, the prospect is ready to buy. Rarely ever works out that way.

Why do we do this to ourselves? One of our failures as content generators, as content creators is the mistaken belief that we need to be providing speech as content all the time to keep a prospect engaged. Nothing could be further from the truth, but constant content seem like something we should be doing because of our online culture. Sometimes it’s from nervousness or a sense of awkwardness, but more often I think it’s from a sense that we should be constantly providing content as speech.

Here’s the even more secret flip side: if you master the ability to shut up and wait for the other person to say something, chances are their own nervousness at uncomfortable silence will provoke them into saying something first, and then it’s your game.

So how do you shut up? How do you subdue that sense of awkwardness, anxiety, and discomfort that comes from silence in a world that is anything but? Everyone will have their own methods that work best with them. My favorite that I picked up from my sales training days is to have an earworm stuck in your brain that you can invoke when needed. This song and video will buy you 5 minutes, 7 seconds of silence, more than enough to win any deal. Just replay it in your head:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bonus of something funny like this video is that it will put a smile on your face as you replay it and enjoy it. Instead of playing a virtual or real staring game with sweat pouring down your face, you can mentally relax yourself in the middle of a meeting and reset any anxiety you’ve built up.

Learn the power of shutting up, and you’ll have an advantage that very few people are prepared to deal with.

And with that, I’ll shut up and let you talk in the comments.

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Sales master trainer Tom Hopkins has a mantra that he encourages all salespeople to recite many times a day. It’s a mantra that, if you obey it to the letter, all but guarantees your success.

I must do the most productive thing possible at all times.

Back when I was doing sales, we lived by this mantra. It was taped to our desks, on doors, all over the place. Meetings started and ended with it. Yet a surprising number of us, myself included, struggled with it as a work formula for two reasons.

First, especially in sales, the most productive thing possible is very often neither fun nor interesting. In order to make huge money, you have to spend an insane amount of time on preparation and groundwork, from culling databases to dialing for dollars. Activities like going to networking events were far more interesting and entertaining than going through the Boston Business Journal every week with a red pen and pulling out the job listings to see which companies were in transition. (I was a technical recruiter, so culling job listings from local papers was standard fare)

Second, the most productive thing possible isn’t always obvious. One of the most critical mistakes we all made in sales back in the day was doing very tactical, day to day stuff to advance our short term goals (sales), but we ignored long term and long investment tasks (skills & tools to make more sales). Had we dedicated, say, 5% of our work week towards learning new sales techniques or learning how to leverage our tools better, we would have trimmed down that list of tactical activities by 50%, giving us 50% more time to sell. I wish back then that I’d had my line of sight framework that I do now, since it makes it much easier to judge the overall value of an activity. Nowadays I can point to an activity and either show that it traces back to net income in the short or long term, or I have to put the activity on the back burner.

This, by the way, is why I answer no about 90% of the time when someone asks if I’m going to be at an event like CES, SxSW, Blogworld, etc. As much fun as those events are, and as well run as they are, they’re still not the most productive thing possible for me. When I do show up or speak at a conference, it’s because it’s a productive use of my time, even if it’s not a big show name. The events I show up at deliver the best possible value for me, personally and professionally. Want to see where I’ll be soon? Check the events page.

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Are you attracted to the idea of having at least one other source of income?

Are you wondering how to get started with affiliate marketing?

Lots has been written on the subject by nearly every Internet marketer out there. Affiliate marketing, if you’re unfamiliar with the topic, is pure commission-based sales. You sign up for an affiliate program with one or more companies or networks and refer people to them. In exchange for your efforts, you receive a percentage (usually small) of any transactions that occur.

How do you get started? Affiliate marketing, since it’s more or less a form of lead generation, follows the same principles as any sales and marketing organization. You need a receptive audience to sell to and products or services to be sold.

For the purposes of this quick article, I will assume you have an audience of some kind that’s focused on your area of expertise or personality. If you don’t, you need to build that first. Even more has been written on how to build an audience. I recommend reading Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation and CC Chapman’s Content Rules as starting points for this.

The first important point about affiliate marketing is to find products or services that you’re happy to recommend, happy to talk about, things you talk about already for free. It’s fairly easy to make compelling content about a product or service if you’ve already been a paying customer of it and like it. The products I recommend on this blog (at the bottom of the post) are products I use and paid for originally before signing up as an affiliate. When I say I recommend them, I really do.

Look at the bottom of the websites of products and services you like. Look for links to affiliate programs, partner programs, etc. as ways to get started. Join an affiliate network like Shareasale or a store like Amazon Associates. There are three things to look out for:

1. An affiliate program manager. Most companies, especially those working with networks like Commission Junction or Shareasale, have a dedicated affiliate manager who can address questions or concerns (like “where’s my money?”).

2. The program rules and terms. Some programs restrict which marketing channels you may use. Failure to comply will result in you giving the company free business, since they won’t pay you. Email especially is excluded from a lot of programs because of the danger of spam. The terms also dictate when and how you’ll get paid, so make sure you understand those clearly.

3. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Every time.

Once you’ve found a few programs that you can like and recommend, use your channels and audience to make your recommendation. Two things are important, one of which is legally required.

1. You must disclose your affiliation. Read the disclosures page here for one example. It’s generally good practice to disclose globally and note where you can that something contains affiliate links.

2. Try not to hard sell. It’s fine to be excited about a product or service you’re recommending, but don’t market crap to people who trust you just because there’s a fat commission on the other end. If the phrase monetizing trust ever creeps into your mind, just go apply at your local used car dealership for a career there instead. Everyone will be happier and know what to expect.

Finally, speaking of expectations, unless you have a gigantic audience to begin with, you should expect beer money performance to begin with. A few dollars here, a few dollars there – it will add up as you continue to grow your audience and your affiliate relationships, but start with small expectations.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a good place to start. If you want to read up on more about how to do affiliate marketing well, I recommend digging into the work of Jim Kukral. A fellow USF professor, he’s my go-to guy for affiliate marketing information and is one of the best folks in the field to know. His book, Attention: This Book Will Make You Money, is also a good starter read.

Disclosure: every link in this post that can be is an affiliate link. It’d be irony and fail if it were otherwise.

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Every time you write a cover letter, every time you send a resume, every time you get on the phone for an interview, you are selling. You are working in a sales job with the most important product in the world to you: your talent. While it might seem obvious to you why you’re the perfect fit for a job, chances are the person on the other end probably isn’t aware of that. Your job is to guide them into that decision, and to do that, you need to learn how to sell.

Here’s one of the biggest, most obvious, most blatant missed opportunities for a shot at a job: the closing sentences of a cover letter/email. I’ve lost track of how many cover letters end with this stupid statement (or variations thereof):

I look forward to discussing the opportunity with you at your earliest convenience.

This is epic failure, because as a hiring manager who has other crap to do, it’s never convenient to talk to you, the candidate, and therefore you won’t get a call back.

The antidote to this failure is the alternate advance close, a simple close in which you provide two options, both of which result in a win for you.

Christopher, I’d love to discuss the opportunity with you. Which is better for you, a phone call on Thursday at 2 PM ET or a phone call on Friday at 11 AM ET?

Either answer results in getting the appointment set up, which is the goal!

Suppose the hiring manager says, “neither is good for me”? I’ve seen people stop the conversation dead at this point and lose – they stammer out a “uhhh, okay, well, whenever is good for you…” which is equivalent to saying, “don’t ever call me back”. The right way to respond is the porcupine technique (in which you toss back the question immediately, as if someone had thrown a porcupine at you): “I understand. When is good for you?”

Be politely persistent with your selling. Keep tossing out alternate advances and porcupine responses until you’ve got your shot in the spotlight for the interview – and then keep selling in the interview. Sell in your followup call and email. I’ll leave you with this YouTube clip from the Boiler Room of a high pressure, super hard sell.

Should you sell like that? That’s up to you and your style, but let me leave you with this thought: if you’re talking about putting food on the table for yourself and for anyone you have responsibility to care for, how determined would you be to learn how to sell, in order to buy them the future they look to you to provide?

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The amazing windup salesperson!

I had the pleasure and privilege to speak at Multifamily Pros’ Optimization Summit this past week and talk about email marketing in the modern age (click here to watch the recorded version). One thing that hasn’t modernized, however, is that new sales folks still aren’t getting trained to be effective sales people.

What do I mean?

As part of shows like this, I enjoy walking the expo floor, seeing what new and innovative things people have come up with in their industries. I stopped at probably 30 different booths to see what was new and next. Amazingly, out of those 30 booths, a stunning 57% of sales folks never once asked me what I did.

It was almost comedy – wind up the sales person and hear the pitch come out like a child’s toy. They never qualified me by asking question (they would have quickly realized I had no need for their services) and they made the assumption that I was there as a multifamily building manager/owner like everyone else. There were two people who I was amazed managed to get to the end of a fairly lengthy pitch while breathing only once. They probably thought I wasn’t listening, but I was looking for the defibrillator in case they passed out from hypoxia.

Of the 13 vendors who were trained to actually let prospective customers talk, most made a “what do you do” question within the first couple of minutes. Some people led with that, which is one of the easiest and best strategies for building rapport and trust. As a sales person, one of the best things you can do is get the prospect talking about themselves early and often so you can gather information.

Here’s a simple test: If you’re a sales person, record yourself selling, then watch the video or listen to the recording and see how long it takes you to get to “so, what do you do?”.

Want to see how this applies to your marketing online? Jason Falls recommends checking out WeWe Calculator to see how much of any given web page’s language is centered around you the company instead of me the customer. It’s illuminating to see that most corporate web pages get so wrapped up in boasting about the company that they never give prospective customers the opportunity to mentally engage with copy that is customer-centric. Try it out and see how your content and company score.

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Ever stop to think about rain and how it works? Probably not until you’re in a drought and wondering where the rain is.

Here’s the short version: rain is water. It evaporates from the ground. The tiniest little drops of water in the air float around and by chance bump into each other. Every time they do, they get a little bigger, eventually forming clouds. At a certain point, the water has coalesced so much that it’s too heavy to remain floating in the air and it falls to the ground as a raindrop.

In sales and marketing, we often talk about high performing salespeople as rainmakers, people who are exceptionally skilled at bringing in new business. They are the water droplet bumping into all the other droplets, bringing rain out of the sky. In the past, the bumping into other droplets part was exceptionally difficult, requiring a lot of cold calling, a lot of door to door and face to face time.

The social web changes all of that. It’s never been a better time to be a rainmaker. You have the chance to bump into people all the time now in the social web. The air is literally swollen with droplets ready to become rain, and plenty that are still too small to fall out of the sky with a bump. For those that are ready, they just need that bump from you to fall out of the cloud. That means, however, you can’t be sitting on the ground, waiting for rain to fall on you by chance. You have to be out there in the cloud with the droplets to find them, bump into them, and bring them to the farms and fields that need the rain – your company.

For those that are not ready, they will be eventually. They need to bump and grow more first, but if you forget about them, then when they’re ready, they’ll bump and fall to the ground with someone else.

Want to make your business grow? Want more rain on your fields? Use the social web and the relationships you build to stay in touch with all the droplets you encounter. Stay present of mind by offering legitimate value to them consistently, and when they’ve grown enough and are just ready to fall out of the sky, you’ll be ready to bring them to your fields.

In part 2, we’ll talk about what to do when there aren’t enough water droplets in the air that are ready to make rain. There’s a social answer for that as well.

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5 old sales tricks made new again

Anyone ever take one of the old sales trainings from back in the day – Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, etc.? There were tons of interesting tips and tricks for sales folks from a time when sales people had to work insanely hard with terrible tools (or no tools at all) and still make their numbers. No Salesforce.com or Zoho CRM to remind you who you forgot to call, no social media or SEO to bring prospects to your door, nothing but your leather binder, day planner, telephone, and a suit & tie.

Some of the tricks from those old trainings can be modernized, though, and some can be brought back as huge differentiators in the digital world. Here’s a few:

1. Thank you cards. This is something Ziglar was absolutely punishing on. You had to send thank you cards. No surprise, in the age of electronic automation of everything, a handwritten thank you card to a closed sale makes a huge impression because it’s so out of the ordinary.

2. Thinking about you. Want to know a really silly simple trick to stay top of mind with someone you’re trying to win over? Set up a Google alert for their top SEO term (check their web site, and if it looks like they have no SEO, take your best guess) and then when news articles and alerts pop up in Alerts, check them for quality and forward them. Back in the day, Hopkins would recommend taking the local newspaper and sending clippings to prospects. Google Alerts and Google Reader make that much, much simpler.

3. Thinking about you part 2. “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” -Dale Carnegie. Monitor your best prospects and their company names and send them stuff about them as you can. There are actually paid services that do nothing but clip stuff out of papers and magazines and try to resell it to you at obscene prices, especially after you’ve won an award. “Wouldn’t you like a nicely framed version of your article?” crap. Do it yourself for your best prospects. If there’s someone you want to blow away, frame it yourself and send it over for free. For everyone else, send them at least an electronic “clipping”.

4. Fedex to the door. Email gets filtered. Postal mail gets shredded. Shipped boxes tend to get delivered and opened in case there’s something important inside. Got someone (Fortune 500 CEO, etc.) that you absolutely positively have to reach? Pay the $10 or so to ship a letter, CD, DVD, etc. via Fedex. Obviously, you’d only do this for a shot at a huge deal, but what a shot it makes.

5. Flip cam, iPhone cam, webcam. Back in the day, Hopkins would recommend trying to record yourself on the phone in a very awkward manner by holding a giant tape recorder (does anyone even remember those) up while you spoke so that you could listen to yourself on a call. These days, recording technology is incredible. Make use of it. Set up a little Flip cam, phone camera, whatever you’ve got that can record audio and video, then watch and listen to yourself on the phone. This is killer for public speakers too – don’t record just yourself! If budget and venue permit, record your audience and watch how they react. If you call using services and software like Skype, you can record both sides of the conversation (make sure you notify the person you’re talking to as it’s illegal to do so otherwise in some states).

There’s no shortage of old ideas that can be made new again if you’re willing to do some creative thinking and apply them to the best practices of yesteryear for results today. As my teacher Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center says, “on ko chi shin” – study something old to learn something new.

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One of my absolute favorite sales closes is the how much too much close. It’s a recession. Times are tough, budgets are tight, resources are constrained. We get that. I’m sure you get that many, many times a day from everyone you talk to who’s a potential customer. The trick with objections over price is amortization of the price.

Let’s say you’re a web designer. You make beautiful web designs that cost $1,500 and perform very well for your clients. You know that a client with a good internal sales process can make that back in weeks, if not days, with a design that converts visitors to qualified leads.

One day, you’re pitching a potential new client. You’ve established your credibility and demonstrated that you’ve got the chops to do what they want to do. There’s no question that they believe you can handle the work, and there’s no question in your mind either. It’s a home run…

… until the first thing out of their mouth at the proposal stage is a price objection. “It’s too expensive” or a variant of that phrase. Rather than cutting your prices immediately (which is the most common tactic for a rookie salesperson), get specific.

Mr. Penn, how much too much is the design? Are we a dollar over your budget? Help me understand where you are.

The object of this close is to get them to name a number: it’s $500 too expensive for me. It’s $100 too expensive for me. Whatever the number is, that’s what you need to get out of them. Once you have the number, go to work. In this example, let’s say the site is $500 too expensive. You’d amortize that at a daily rate over a year (500/365=1.37), then you might say something like:

Mr. Penn, I understand how you feel. We’ve agreed that a new web site design could do wonders for your business, haven’t we? We’ve agreed that if it brings in even 1 new customer a month, your business will grow beyond your current plans and expectations, right? Think of your web site as an employee who never sleeps, who never calls in sick, who is always working for you day and night.

Mr. Penn, do you have $1.37 right now? Yes, on you at this moment. Mr. Penn, that’s how much a day too much you’ve said your new web site is. Tell me, Mr. Penn, is $1.37 a day too much to pay for such an incredible employee?

Then shut up and wait to see what they say.

Is this close guaranteed to work? Of course not. No sales close ever is, despite the marketing materials of the sales trainers out there. But as a tactic to help you sniff out whether price is the true objection and how far off the mark your proposal is, the how much too much close is invaluable. For green sales staff and freelance consultants with no sales training at all (like many, many folks I’ve seen consulting in social media), this close saves you from the gut instinct of cutting your worth (price) right off the bat – a useful tactic that could save you and your company thousands or even millions of dollars over time.

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Take a look at the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor!

It’s amazing – it’s got the ability to transform any free state element into crystallized elements! Cloud of fog? No problem – the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor will convert it into incredibly handy Crystallized Air. Steam cloud? Crystallized Water and Crystallized Fire are just a button’s press away! Contact a local 305+ engineer to buy yours today!

What do you mean you don’t want one?

This is the greatest dilemma of innovation – when you’ve got something that is authentically new and innovative, you will have incredible difficulty helping people to understand even what it is, much less why they want one. Most of the things we call innovative are spins on existing things, and for good reason – it’s easier to sell someone on an idea they understand already.

• Email was innovative for its delivery speed and cost, but the idea of sending a message to someone else in the written word was not new, and thus it was adopted with relative speed because everyone understood what it did.
• A DSLR camera is exactly the same conceptual device as a film camera, minus the film part.
• The iPad isn’t innovative at all, which is what makes it sell so well – it’s a very large iPod Touch, and anyone who has used the iPhone OS immediately understands and gets it.

True innovation requires your brain to first comprehend what something is, figure out if it’s useful to you, and only then finally decide whether or not you’re going to purchase it.

If you’re a marketer who is trying to market something that is legitimately innovative, this is one of the few times that I’ll strongly recommend a case study, or multiple case studies, so that you can get over the first two hurdles with a prospective customer as quickly as possible. Without those examples of how something innovative can be used, you’re leaving it up to the mind and imagination of the prospect to create value for themselves, and your sales will deeply suffer as a result.

That said, if you can create something truly innovative and valuable, the landscape is yours for as long as you can hold onto it.

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