How to steal business from the Competition

How to Steal
From Your Competition!

A sales and marketing survival guide
The business model that teaches managers how to steal and get away with it.

In today’s slower economy, there are three
ways to improve profits:

1. Find
   new things to sell. You can try to expand your markets by acquiring new
   products and services. If you have deep pockets and gambler’s instincts,
   this is the high-risk, high reward model. Exciting and challenging.
2. If
   resources are tight, you can cut expenses to the bone, shrink down until
   better times. Sometimes this works, as you preserve cash. Other times,
   unfortunately, this may merely prolongs the inevitable in a slow and
   painful way.
3. You can stop whining about the state of the economy and recognize that, even in the worst downturns, most companies and individuals are still buying and growing. In order to grow you business when the overall market is shrinking, start stealing from the competition.

How? Well, for starters, figure out WHO is staying
Where.  Get good valid contact
information so more dollars available to you, instead of standing by and
watching as your more aggressive competitors do it first.

Face it. The main reason for your shrinking
sales in a slowing economy is that your competitors are building their sales by
cutting into your turf.

The law of survival is that, when there is
less to eat, the more aggressive jungle animals take more from the weaker ones.
The choice is either to get mean, or get lean.

So, want to succeed, no matter what the
economy is doing? Get your mean act together. Here’s our outline to successfully
stealing from the competition. Follow this outline and you will be the one
saying that this is your best year ever:

So, how
you can increase sales at higher margins in a shrinking economy?

Your
Recessionary strategy:

In spite of press reports, not everyone suffers from a worldwide economic
downturn.

• Many
  companies will thrive and will enjoy record sales and earnings.
• Many
  more will see their stock reach new highs.
• Many
  sales people will punch through last year’s “personal best” and
  will continue to live the good life.

 

What makes some companies
successful, while others not? This:

• Knowledge.
• Strategic
  marketing planning.
• Program
  and execution.
• Training.

This isn’t rocket science, but don’t be
afraid to get help if you need it. Then use your industry knowledge to
partner with clients to establish and meet attainable goals. Create entire
sales and marketing programs and train your sales and marketing people to
thrive in hard times.

What you learn is not always new, but we find
that it is often reinterpreted in new ways, which is always profitable. Focus
on the key points for you to thrive while everyone around you is struggling
just to stay afloat.

Four keys
to technology selling success:

1. Redefine
   complex technology. Make it simple so sales people can explain it to mom.
2. Create
   structure for every sales call.
3. Focus
   away from tech-speak and onto key fact-finding to better communicate and
   close more.
4. Guide
   the sales process toward problem solving and away from classic feature
   wars, ending with greater customer benefits and, thus, higher dealer
   margins.

Top 10
ways to teach your staff how to overrun the competition

1. Make
   very sure you have a better trained sales army than they have at the
   competition. We use our own exclusive “Stealth Sales Training (c)
   program.” It doesn’t require us to take everyone out of the field to
   attend class.
• If you don’t have a better trained army,
  competition will destroy you.
• But, if you do, you will destroy them, which is
  always the more preferred choice.
2. Make
   sure you only sell the most terrific products in your market segment.
• If you don’t have the best product in your
  space, strategize to find a better product.
• Or, if that isn’t an option, strategize to move
  you to a more appropriate market space. Either way, you win.
• You do not always have the means to switch
  products mid-cycle, but it’s a rush to find out that changing the market
  focus often works better, faster and cheaper.
3. Listen
   to your customers. You’ve heard it before, but it is still the best way to
   meet needs.
• Sell what they need, not what you have.
• Even when you have what they need, many sales
  people sell from the wrong prospective (It does this. It does that. It
  does this. It does that).
• Teach your staff how to return to
  “empathy” and tell what the customer needs to hear.
• Teach how to really find customer
  problems and then solve them.
4. Find
   better, more aggressive sales people, or train existing ones to be more aggressive.
5. Spend
   more time identifying prospects most likely to need what you have, before
   you make the sales call. This saves time that would usually be wasted and
   concentrates sales talent on more likely sales. We employ a unique
   copyrighted process called “Prospect Profiling, (c)” which
   identifies those prospects most likely to make our sales people
   successful.
6. Shorten
   your sales cycle by simplifying the sales proposal process
7. Customize
   and then standardize your proposal into a generic template that is very
   customer-centric, yet quick and easy to prepare. This frees sales people
   for more time prospecting for opportunities.
8. Teach
   your sales people how to work as a team and share successes (yes, and
   failures) effectively, to improve the “learning from mistakes”
   yield and shorten time-to-market of new training.
9. Improve
   sales management’s ability to fill the prospect sales funnel by combining
   the best of traditional and non-traditional thinking.
10. Practice
    “top down” aggressive management. Specialize in growing sales in
    shrinking markets by keeping the energy level very high at the highest
    levels of management. We never stop teaching how to aggressively improve
    share of the market by the process we call “steal from the
    competition.”

World’s
shortest guide to great web success

Here’s what works for our
clients and what doesn’t. We follow this simple guide so that your web site
will increase your business.

Click here to World’s shortest guide to great web
success page

4 rules
to fast-track improve your marketing results

1. Always
   have a written strategy, even if you often have to change it.
2. Always
   has a marketing mission statement that every department can live with
   (otherwise you are just kidding yourself).
3. For
   every product you sell, identify target markets where your product:
• Provides exceptional value.
• Is clearly superior.
• Captures the imagination.
• Establishes an emotional connection with the       customer.
4. Remember,
   branding is never about the building. It’s always about the relationship

Heritage-Hotel-Consulting-LLC

 

Are your hotel sales effort effective

ARE YOU DOING AND ASKING THESE QUESTIONS OF YOUR SALES
EFFORT:

 

When I  review the sales notes of my DOS; I review overall content
and assess good or bad detail.  In reviewing this data I make sure to check the following questions:

 

1)
How do track
content from report to report? If your sales person calls one of my top
accounts (Daimler Chrysler) today and should call back in 3 weeks for proper
follow up how do you “connect the dots” and verify that this has indeed
happened? How do you review his/her efforts to see how frequently he/she is
contacting your top accounts?

2)
If I find the effort is inconsistent. Some days your sales person is contacting 4 people,others 6 some 9 etc etc. Over time your sales person has to contact a MINIMUM of 10 customers per day IN AN ORGANIZED FASHION. Follow-up if the key to success. By now you have realized if I say I will call you/ contact you, you
receive a telephone call and / or e-mail, which has a direct impact on how you
think of me and whether or not you think I am organized – your clients do
EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

3)
If there is no indication of total dollar volume on accounts – if your sales person is not ascribing a dollar value to an account how is he/she going to manage his/her
schedule to concentrate on the accounts that produce the most business?

4)
There are no decision dates anywhere??? Do I need to say any more with this?

5)
When my DOS says they are doing blitz “Massive mailing to Motor coach Tour Groups” is it really impacting my hotel: “Will be contacting next week to see if they received my information” – if it’s “massive” then the follow up will be poor – even if your sales person called 400 motor coach groups in a week in and of itself it doesn’t achieve anything.  The effort must be measured and consistent to have an impact. NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE

6)
How is my DOS spending there time? “Other Misc” it shows “spent time calling travel agencies this morning who currently use us” this sounds good and is, however
who SPECIFICALLY did your sales person call, when is your sales person going to
follow up, who are they going to follow up with and why are they following up? If
I cannot see this to understand there direction then I DO NOT KNOW WHAT
THEY ARE DOING.

7)
Is my DOS giving me too little detail…just generic terms???
– “Mailings and In-side calls, lots of appts!!!” – Again nothing in this
is QUANTIFIABLE there is no way to measure or plan the attack for follow up.

8)
There are
numerous references to “love the executive package”:  Unfortunately I have never seen this line item on a P & L and if the customers love the package so much, how much business is it spinning off when and at what rate????

 

Overall you think you have a busy sales person who is doing
some of the right things but they are not organized which is the proverbial
“kiss of death” to sales effort everywhere.
The best way to impress a client is to follow through on commitments and
meet set deadlines – if I told you “I’ll call you tomorrow” and I call back 3
weeks later would we still be talking?

 

If you look at JYI & HHC we can verify this through the
ACT! Notes and you’ll see time stamps, pertinent content (decision date, hot
buttons, who the competition is, where else the customer is looking, what rates
they have paid, how much volume they have etc etc).  Cross reference that with the DWM and you’ll see HARD NUMBERS indicating what the DOLLAR VALUE OF THE BUSINESS IS.

 

From what we have seen with most sales people is that they
are not afraid of the phone, or dealing with clients: – they need direction and
to be held accountable.  Bottom line,
long on comments short (in fact non-existent) on specifics and showing what has
ACTUALLY BEEN PRODUCED.

 

Using JYI & HHC format and tools I can tell you
conclusively within 14 days of being on site whether or not your sales person
should be replaced, trained or given fundamental guidance to maximize your
ROI/NOI of the project.

 

And that is what you should always be asking yourself when
it comes to your sales productivity.

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