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Sticky Learning Lunches #20: Part 4 of The Cunning 4 Stage Sales Plan
The Cunning 4 Stage Sales Plan by Geoff Burch – Part #4. What would you do to improve your performance? Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Really glad to see you again. We’re just waiting for the last few people to come into the room. We’ve hit one o’clock, so we’re gonna give it 30 seconds. Just while we’re starting to do this, let’s make sure we’re setting ourselves up for success. I’m just making sure I can see everyone as they’re arriving. First things first, making sure you’ve got a drink, herbal, tea, water, whatever it is. So you are, you, you can maximize the attention you’re giving to this session. Second thing is, as always, mobile phones.
Nathan Simmonds:
This is a reminder for me as, as much for you making sure that they’re on flight mode. So you give, you are giving yourself a hundred percent attention to get the best out of this session. What else do we need to be thinking about? Clean sheet of paper, notebooks at the ready pen, lid off, ready to go on that paper. Uh, and nice fresh sheet with keepers written at the top to get those things down. You wanna remember? ’cause keepers are the things, the the memory tests, um, the items of memory that you wanna bring yourself back to when you read the notes.
Nathan Simmonds:
And it brings up those new thoughts, those new ideas from what you are learning today. Here we go. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning lunchtime. Myself, Nathan Simmons, senior coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning, and also the Delectable, Jeff Birch. This is Team GB and it’s finest right now to today we’re covering part four of the coming four part sales strategy and plan. And this is about making it better.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s the wrapup date. It’s about taking the stuff that we learned from Jeff on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, bringing it all together. And from what I’ve talked about, making those 1% improvements, making those one degree shifts so you can deliver even better in the next conversation based on what you learned from this conversation. Over to you, Jeff. The stage is yours. My good man.
Jeff:
Oh, hello. Yes, I drifted off then. I was in another place entirely. I was, I was drifting. Anyway, let’s just have a little review at, um, I, it’s the, the cunning four stage plan that we’ve not stuck to one iota for the entire week. That was your fault. Yeah, it was entirely my fault. I I, I do tend to drift. I do tend to drift. Now, did, did I achieve my objective? That was the first thing.
Jeff:
And that, that is because most people don’t have any idea why they’re going to see people. I mean, again, I’ve seen people do telephone canvassing and fuck, which is terrifying. I hate it. Absolutely terrifying. But if you are gonna do it, why are you doing it? What is it you’re trying to get? Are you actually trying to achieve a sale over the phone, which I would say is virtually impossible?
Jeff:
Or are you trying to set up appointments? What, what, what is it? What is it your objective? And, and of, again, in, in my book, resistance is useless. The, the, the key to the whole book with this idea that, of me meeting people, like, like the, at the lovely attendees that we’ve got today. And, and, and again, a lot of people have got small businesses, you know, and, and, and I, I would go round the room.
Jeff:
I would go round the room and say, what are you planning to do? Oh, I’m gonna be a consultant. And I think, no doomed. What are you gonna do? Oh, consultant doomed. You know, what are you gonna do? I’m going to open a tea shop in the Cotswolds. And I go, ah, let me see. Oh, the voices. I can read your mind. You are gonna call it the Mad Hatter.
Jeff:
Oh my God, how did you know? And I think, yeah, because I had a good idea. Doomed. Yeah. And then you get to this one person with a really, really great idea. Yeah, there’s this, there was this woman and she was a cake cake sculptor. I I, they weren’t just, they were fantastic. She could build a footballer with a footballer at his feet. Fantastic, fantastic.
Jeff:
And I thought, well, I said, success, a hundred percent guaranteed success. And then about three months later, I saw her work in Sainsbury’s at the checkout. And I said, well, what, what happened? Oh, nobody bought them. Nobody bought, bought all those molds and stuff like you told me. And I spent loads of money and nobody bought them. And I I just don’t understand you not understand that. Just don’t understand it.
Jeff:
And then I realized what she was telling me was that nobody had climbed over the abandoned car in her front garden, had fought off her son’s Rottweiler to get into her kitchen and say, yeah, you don’t make cakes, do you? I mean that, the fact was that she hadn’t got a clear idea of what her proposition was and who she would be making it to. And she had this fabulous product.
Jeff:
And from that I found that loads and loads of people in sales are demoralized by because they can’t sell whatever it is. They’re flogging. I mean, I’m sure a lot of the people listening to us today are saying, well, life would just be so much easier if people would just pay me to do what I’m brilliant at. I’m quite certain the people listening to this are brilliant at what they do. But how do you get people to buy it?
Jeff:
And I had this big argument with a telesales girl who said, the trouble is people don’t want insurance. They don’t want double glazing. They don’t want any of the things I sell. And I said, alright, let’s find the thing they do want. Let’s find a product that people really want. And I chose to, to actually pick a tank, a battle tank, a huge great big tank with a massive gun on the front. People love them.
Jeff:
Who would we sell it to? Well, list of prospects would be what? Painters and Nana, blood Thirsty dictators, you know, general Galtieri Mussy. And we ended up with, with Genis Kane, right? So gen, I mean, I’m, he’s a 13th century warlord. What he wouldn’t do with a tank. And people listening to this now have got the, the equivalent of that their product will solve their customer’s problems. Their product will make their technology. Everybody listening to this today, whatever it is they’re selling, is gonna bring huge benefit to their customers.
Jeff:
So we are hired this imaginary phone call to Genghis, you know, you have to call him on the mobile ’cause he is back in the 13th century. And he is sitting, he’s sitting in his tent watching the rain dripping on his discarded shield. He’s depressed ’cause he is just had a kicking off the Visigoths. And you ring him card what you want. Now what do you say? Go on then, Nathan, what you say to him?
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, hello Mr.
Jeff:
What you want?
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, I’ve got a proposition for you. I’ve got an item that might help you take over more of the country.
Jeff:
Kinda right? You say kinda right? Because it doesn’t, the number of times in, in a seminar I’ve said to people and they go, do you want a tank? And they like, well, first of all, he is never heard of a tank. But here’s the key to it. Before we spend our entire 20 minutes trying to sell this tank to Genghis car, and that’s another whole seminar, the important thing I say to my audience, what am I selling? What am I selling, Nathan?
Nathan Simmonds:
Uh, I wanna say a tank, but I know it’s the wrong answer.
Jeff:
And also I use, I go into this big diatribe, rivers of blood, Mac, Mr. Kahan. We are talking rivers of blood, bloody slaughter on a scale even you couldn’t imagine, you know, . But you know, and, and, and we go out, we sell him what it can do. We sell what the tank it, we sell the benefits of the tank. The fact that it give him world domination. That’s what he wants, right? So then I say, what am I selling him?
Jeff:
And they go, oh, you are selling him world domination, bloody slaughter, mountains of skulls, rivers of blood. And I go, no. And they go, well, you just told us that Jeff. And I said, no, you cannot sell a complicated piece of technology on the telephone. My single objective for this call is to get an appointment face-to-face with Genisis.
Nathan Simmonds:
Sell the conversation. Mr.
Jeff:
Kahan. Yeah, Mr. Kahan. I wanna, I, yeah, yeah, yeah. Send me the details. I’ve got a, I’m busy, I’ve got a water fight. I understand that Mr. Kaan. But you just see this, just gimme two minutes. You will be No, no, no. You are not another bloody spear salesman, are you? No. Really? You’d love it? No. Send me the details. No, honestly, you’ve gotta No, send me the details. Okay, Mr. Ka, where are you? I’m an outer Mongolia, outer mon, bloody out. That’s on my way home. Look, I’ve got a trans, I’ve got a tank on a transporter I could whizz by on my way home.
Jeff:
And you can have a look. That’s what I want. That’s my sale today. That’s my how to eat an elephant. One bite at a time. My sale today is not to sell a tank to Mr. Khan. We often make this mistake of going into our wholesale, giving our brochures, doing whatever it is. The first step is to get somewhere quiet, get a nice, get Mr. Khan nice and comfortable. And then part two, three, and four is we then flog him the tank. But not until he is actually seen what it can do.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. But I, I’m conscious, well in sales, they say now you need almost eight points of contact to build the relationship before you can close the deal. And it’s gonna get bigger with the, the way the internet’s working. I’m just checking the clock load, Jeff. ’cause I’m concerned ’cause I want to make sure that we get to share the story about your mum growing marijuana before we get to the end of the session.
Jeff:
Alright, we about right. So anyway, that was the first, our first thing is objective. So let’s be clear what we wanna do. And that might be as simple as just get to see the person. Then we, we, we, you know, then we ask ourselves, what information are we gaining from our client that’s moving this forward? So we talked about questions then what, even when we’ve done it, what information can we get to the client that’s gonna lead us to future jobs elsewhere? You know, they, they’re in the same business.
Jeff:
Can they introduce us to other people? What information is going in the market? How are our competitors doing? All of that kind of thing. So we can get in there like a wrap up a pipe, I think the expression is. And then finally we get to part four, which is, if we did it again, we’d be able to do it better. In other words, we have a review. And it doesn’t matter how successful we’ve been, we still could do that little bit better. Um, appraisals. It’s, we apprais, if we’re single people, we’re self-employed, we would appraise ourselves. But if we have people with us, we have, I hate appraisals anybody out there who is in a big company and has appraisals, I hate them. Why Nathan? Why do people have appraisals?
Nathan Simmonds:
Because at the end of the year, it’s more to do with whether or not they’ve shown their worth. And are we gonna give ’em a pay rise based on what we think they, you know, someone else thinks of them?
Jeff:
There’s two problems for that. One is imagine we, we have, we have our life partner, our beloved, the love of our life. And, uh, my, my my beloved says to me, we’ve been married a long time and it’s our anniversary. And because I love you so much, I’m gonna cook for you the meal of your dreams. This is a fantasy actually. ’cause my wife’s cooking so bad, she won’t lick her own fingers. But we, um, she, I said, oh, I’d love roast duck. Um, little, little green peas, orange sauce, and little roasty potatoes. You know, that’s what I’d love.
Jeff:
Duck roast. Lovely. So when you get home, my beloved, this will be waiting for you. So I come and this, this plate of food is put in front of me, this duckling anything. And she says, well, there we are. My sweet, my love my darling. And I go and I pull out a clipboard and I go, okay, peas not met. Yeah, orange source, adequate. You know, if I’m not wearing that meal 10 seconds later, I’d be amazed. So first of all, they could be very demoralizing.
Jeff:
Secondly, I dunno if any of you listening to me today have got the lane departure thing on their cars. Do you know the thing? I mean, you know this thing that if you, if you wander out of the fast lane, it gives you a little nudge back in again, right? Imagine it was, it was designed by an HR manager, so it doesn’t do anything and you, you barely miss a lorry or you don’t miss the lorre, in which case there’s no discussion after that. And then when you get back to the, your home, it says, well, let’s talk about this journey. How did you feel you did with missing that lorry?
Jeff:
It’s like beating up the dog that poos on the carpet a week later. You know, your reviews, first of all should be like a coach who, you know, coaches will pull you up. But they pull you up in a way that’s encouraging. You know, it, it has to be praise with praise with discussion on agreed paths to improvement. But it has to be done at the time. You can’t do it after. ’cause there’s, what’s the point? So we need, we need to just beat ourselves up a bit ourselves just so we can judge how we did. And one of the things we don’t do is sell enough. We miss the opportunity to sell more.
Jeff:
And again, I I I, I do these presentations and I, I would rather be casual if possible, but because I’m an old biker, casual to me usually means that hotels don’t actually let me in through the door. So where I, I wear, I, I’m, because I have corporate clients, I wear a suit and tie. And in a video, somebody described Jeff Birch as the archetypal salesman, a stocky guy in a type fitting suit. I actually got really insulted about that. ’cause people hate that.
Jeff:
They don’t wanna, they, they run businesses. They listen to these presentations of us. They don’t want to become salespeople. They feel uncomfortable about selling more. There’s two things I wanna say about that. The first of it is you are letting the customer down. Uh, I mean, in the old days when there were shoe shops, every high street had about 27 shoe shops.
Jeff:
The shoe companies made terrific money. Their majority of their profit didn’t come from selling the shoes. It came from f flogging the polish. So they, they would always flog you the polish. And they, in fact, they took to hiding a tinner polish in the shoebox. And you had to be on your guard for that. They’d say, oh, are they used the shoes? You aren’t Ted madam. You go, yeah, you can take the bloody polish out though. Oh, bucker. Yeah.
Jeff:
And, and, and everybody learned that the add-on sale was intrusive and unwanted. All the electrical shop tried tolog, you dodgy guarantees. Would you like protection for 27 years on your toe clippers or whatever it is, a mere 27 quid a month. You know? And, and everybody felt got put off by that. But it, it’s, I I, I’ve absolutely, I’m not, I’m, I’m a professional.
Jeff:
I’m a superstar. So I don’t do add-on selling either. And then I was in a curry restaurant, a local curry restaurant to us, and the owner was there and he, he was watching somebody really enjoying one of his curries. And he said, are you enjoying that? He asked God, it’s fantastic. They said, do you know what would make it nicer? Nothing. This is the most delicious curry I’ve ever eaten. No, seriously, do you know what would really make it nicer?
Jeff:
And he said, well, well what? He said, A glass of cobra lager. That hot curry and the cobra, you’ll be in heaven. I’ll go on get. And he drank this glass of lagar. Oh God, that’s fantastic. Oh, that’s beautiful. Would you like another? Yeah, yeah. And I watched him. I thought, God, he is now flogging a lot of lager. And then, then I thought, no, I tell you what he’s doing.
Jeff:
He knows his curry better than his customer and he’s anticipating the customer’s needs. That’s what he is doing. Anticipating need. He’s not flogging the polish. He’s anticipating need. You go into a garden center and you see people buying grow bags and tomato plants. Where’s the cane? Where’s the tomato food? If, if you are at the till? And the till operator just notices, oh, do you want some cane? I see you’ve got some tomato plants.
Jeff:
Do you want the canes with them? And a, you know, there’s ba we’ve got some bottles of baby bio makes the tomato the size of footballs. Yeah. That is actually gonna make the customer happier. You know, if you go into that curry restaurant and have the vindaloo surprise, the, the, the owner of the restaurant tells you gently that he’s popped some toilet rolls in the fridge for you for later, you know, he’s, he’s anticipating, he’s anticipating your need.
Jeff:
You know, you’ll have a bottom, like the Japanese flag, but you understand that he, he actually knows his carriers better than you do. Okay, . But, but, but the point is that people are uncomfortable with this. And as we talked yesterday, I mentioned these weird kids that worked in the garden centers, the shrub boys, the ones with the bumping knuckles. But they were the customer facing people. They were the key. That’s the other thing with this thing we’ve talked about this week time and time again.
Jeff:
Um, you know about people who are, everybody’s in sales. It’s about moving people. It’s this. But I’ve also realized that salespeople with the big badge on their head, say in sales, frightens people off. If you, if you really want your business to do well, you want your service engineers. I I, the most expensive washing machine I’ve ever bought in my life, I bought from a service engineer, ah, who told me that the company he worked for made crap washing machines.
Jeff:
I said, what’s, what’s wrong with my washing machine? They’re crap. I said, um, well, what have you got? And he said, I’ve got a meal. He didn’t work for millet. He said, they’re fantastic. I have to sell one of my kids in a kidney. But I’ve, I’ve never looked back the best washing machine I’ve ever had. And I, we bought the millet and like 20 years later, it finally expired.
Jeff:
The engineer came to test it, put the thing, and he said, do you know this Russian machine’s done 50,000 hours? I said, my God. I said, can you fix it? He said, I can. He said, I’ve got brown. One new one on the van. He said, why don’t you just pop that in? He said, you’ll find the new ones even better than the old one. You, that’s not a salesman. That’s not a salesman.
Jeff:
That’s the point. And because I trust him, ’cause he’s an engineer. I take it on the chin, you know, bought, done 800 Quis with a washing machine off a service engineer that, think about that because whoever’s doing that, make sure their engineers are in a position to sign the customers up for a new deal. He doesn’t say, well, I’ll send a salesman around to talk to you. He does it there.
Jeff:
And then, so p non-sale people anyway, the shrub boys, the kids that carried your bags out to the car, the kids that gave you the wheelbarrow to go round and get your bed implants. They were the people that had customer contact. And if we could only teach them some simple selling skills, we’d be in. So ask questions. Anticipate need hierarchies of need. And I realized there’s just a little silver thread of drool hanging off their chins.
Jeff:
You know, they’ve been mutual grooming. And, and I think, oh my god. You know, so we, we tried the anticipating need first. What do you Ladd sell? Trees. Trees. They’re bouncing around trees. I said, anyone who buys a tree anticipate their need. They’re gonna need that wooden steak that supports the tree, don’t they? Yeah. Sell steak. Sell steak. Sell sell steak. This is where we’d overdone things.
Jeff:
That’s where we’d overdone things. ’cause, ’cause ’cause if you go to this garden center, the minute you’ve touch, touch a tree out, jumps this thing with a sharp wooden stick. Buy steak. Buy steak, buy snake. Ah, look, we, we are sort, there’s cues of people or with stakes and no trees. The sails of stakes exceeded the sails as trees in the end. But to make them feel relaxed, we, uh, we said they didn’t wanna be pushy. We couldn’t explain about asking questions and parts to the sales. So I did this very simple thing and we can all do it.
Jeff:
Imagine it was your mum. Imagine that new customer is your mum. What would you say to her? Uh, hello mum. Hello Barry. Then what would you say, uh, what you doing here? There? Good, good question. What are you doing? We don’t conduct sales like that. The customer says, I want a gear lever. We never say why. Or that’s strange. Why on earth do you want one on that? We never ever question. We just give me a, give me a price for a new roof. Oh, well now if you want it in tiles, it’ll be 743 quid.
Jeff:
Do you think, why does this guy want a roof? What, why? And can we offer a different solution than a new roof? You might not need a new roof. You might, you know, whatever. Never take the customer’s work. You know, what are you doing here? That is a great line. Obviously we could make it more polite. How can we help you today? What is it we can help you with?
Jeff:
You know, whatever it is. But what are you doing here? That’s good. I, I allow Barry Yes, you, I I want, I want grow bags. Yeah. All right mum. We sell grow bags. Yes. How many do you want? That’s a good line. How many do you want? We never ask our customers. Normally I want some grow bags. They’re over there. But because it’s it Mum, how many do you want? 463. Then the next question, bloody Alma, what do you want 463 grow bags for? Because your father and I have decided to start growing marriage in the loft.
Jeff:
Well, if you wanna grow marriage mum, you don’t want just grow bags. You want them special cane orders. You want high canes. ’cause you know how IIC grow. Not that I would know, but you know how IIC grows and to really bring it on. You want the lights, you want really strong ultraviolet light and you need the hydroponic for, hang on, hang on a minute. Your mum came in to spend about 500 quid on grow bags. You’ve got her to about six grand already with the light. Well, well it’s this.
Jeff:
No, she isn’t gonna get any good crop without the lights and the hydroponics. Well, are you forcing your mum to do something she doesn’t wanna do? Well, she don’t wanna spend the money, but there’s no point in just buying grow bags. You’ll get nothing other, you know? So if you wouldn’t treat your mum like that, you know the customer, if you imagine the customers like your mum and they’re not buying the right thing or they’re not buying enough or they’re not buying the correct accessories.
Jeff:
Like the storeman that plunks the cylinder head on the counter and somebody buys it and then he turns to his mate and goes, I’m surprised he didn’t buy the gasket set. He’s gonna be in trouble. When he tries to fit that. You think, Hey look.
Nathan Simmonds:
Exactly. But for me, especially in the retail environment, it’s, it is this one upmanship. It’s like, well he’s gonna get home and he is gonna be really miserable. Well actually you’ve missed out the sale. You’ve made the person really unhappy. They now think you’re an idiot. They’re not coming back to your shop to buy any other product. ’cause you just think you are getting one up on them secretly from behind your counter.
Jeff:
Yeah. And also too, anybody watching this, uh, having the misfortune to hear my ade, anybody watching this, maybe they’re a painter and decorator. Maybe they do office cleaning, maybe they do computer servicing or whatever it is. They’re delighted when somebody says, can you come and gimme a price to paint my sitting room? That happens maybe 50,000 people in your area have decided they need their house decorated.
Jeff:
And you get this one phone call. So that’s one in 50,000. It’s your lucky day. And then you convince them that you are hardworking, that you’ve showed them all of the testimonials from other customers and so on. So it’s all a lot. You are putting a bit of effort in there and the customer agrees to your price on the sitting room. Now you’d give your right teeth for another job like that and you’d come and ask me about marketing and mailers and online presence. What you didn’t bloody well do was ask if you could paint the dining room while you were there. It’s just doubled your work.
Jeff:
You know, we always just do the work we’re given or the job we’re asked to do. And we fail. We fail to ask, you know, well, oh not ask. But now we’ve got the trust of the customer. We suggest in a pleasant way that whilst you are here and all the thing you did notice that the front door could do with a lick of paint. And you’d do a lovely job of that as well. ’cause once somebody’s over that hurdle of agreeing, they wanna do business with you, selling the, the rest is just a dole. It’s a walk in the park.
Nathan Simmonds:
As long as we’re anticipating it because we don’t wanna let the customer down. And if we do miss it on that first time round, that actually we make, we do that continuous self-improvement and think, you know what, how can I make this better next time to improve the relationship and the sale? What comes after?
Jeff:
See, I am very reluctant to be pushy. You know, I’m very reluctant to be pushy. But there is a But if here’s a, here’s a typical scenario. Nervous sales person new to the job, goes to see a customer and shows him the product, this, this, this, this, this and this. And the customer goes Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite like that. Yeah. Well I can show it to my team. I think they’ll be impressed as well. I think you can expect an order.
Jeff:
Oh, thank you for that. No, very nice, very pleasant to have seen. You gets back to the sales manager. Hello out John. Oh they very, very nice. They, they enjoyed the new product. Uh, I spoke to the actual buyer himself and he’s gonna introduce the team to our new beans or whatever it is. Oh good. Good. Alright, well nice one son.
Jeff:
Nice one. Good start. Ladd, give us a ring. Give us a ring when you hear anything. Yeah. Alright. So two weeks later, did you hear from those people you left the beam sample with? No, I haven’t, not yet. Well, do us a favor son. Give him a ring. Give him a ring. Um, well the guy said that he’d rather be left until he No, no, no, no. You don’t. You don’t wanna leave a customer son. Don’t leave us out.
Jeff:
Give a ring. Give a ring. Um, hello. Hello, Mr. Jane. Hello. Do you remember I left those bit? Yes, I did tell you I’d ring you back. Yeah, I, I did know but my boss has been. Yeah, yeah. I told you I’d ring you back and they pass on. Yeah. The thing is now we’re starting to annoy the customer. If I at the first instance say the guy ring me back.
Jeff:
Well, I’ll tell you what. Have you got your diary here at that first ever meeting? Have you got your diary here? Yeah. Can I just set a date for a follow-up call then? Well, I, I didn’t really, no, I do need to do this ’cause I’m very, I, he might feel he’s under a little pressure on that first meeting. I might feel uncomfortable putting it on, but not half as uncomfortable as I’m gonna feel to try and chase him for week after week until it finally tells me to sort off.
Jeff:
’cause I’m being a nuisance. You know, how many times have we expressed an interest in some crappy product and then the salesman lock a rat up a pipe, as I said, and just keep ringing and ringing and ringing and can be more and more annoying. Why has that happened? ’cause he cocked up the first meeting and didn’t set an agenda for follow ups meetings further. Most my team will, um, I’ll show this to my team actually.
Jeff:
We have got a demonstration team ourselves. If you’ve got your diary, if you can get your people together, I’ll get our cooks up there and we’ll do a little bean sample feast and then you can, we, we, we are very happy to organize that. Shall I set it up for next week or would the week after be better for you? That’s the, that’s the, uh, that’s the alternative close as you know, . Yep.
Nathan Simmonds:
But, but this is like, you know, if you think of a boxer as an analogy, a boxer doesn’t walk in the ring and throw one punch and then get out and expect to have done. No, he, he throws one punch and he is got several dozens sitting behind it ready to go at the same time because it is gonna take, you know, several touches to get to where you need to be. Super book Jeff. It’s half past one. We’ve already done that. So look, I’m amazed that we got all the points in that we talked about earlier. Um, and I think we’ve ticked all the boxes and we’re done.
Jeff:
Tick boxes we have. So look, oh, by the way, before you, there it is. Why of the dog found it? They are,
Nathan Simmonds:
We talked about that yesterday. Why of the dog . All about sales. All about sales. So what we covered
Jeff:
This week, a fairy story about sales,
Nathan Simmonds:
A fairy story about what we’ve covered this week. We’ve talked about having an objective, making sure as a sales manager, a leader, or even as the salesperson, that there is a clear objective what info. So finding out, you know, through questions. What is it you need to be achieving? Where are you going getting more information from the people? What’s happening in their world?
Nathan Simmonds:
So once you’ve got info about, um, the individual and what they’re doing, actually what’s happening in their world, how can you spread out from that? How can you get more information? How can you get referrals? More contacts? And then finally, can you make it better? Can you review what’s going on, make your 1% improvement and keep moving forward to get to the next objective in that conversation. What are we Jeff? My
Jeff:
Only, my only comment is we could make it a hundred percent better.
Nathan Simmonds:
Always.
Jeff:
Always. I mean, they said that, that my, my mom who was the, I learned all my business skills from she, she would always just put that little bit extra on. Um, I don’t think we’ve done that. I don’t think I mentioned my mum’s tomato. Have I? Um, when I was a kid, when I was a kid, my mum would buy businesses, build them up and then flog them.
Jeff:
And quite often they were grocery businesses and somebody come in, ask for tomatoes, she’d put the bag on the scales. How many do you want? Love? ’cause she was a cockney. How many do you want? Love? Oh, half a pound, Mrs. Birch. And she’d get a handful of tomatoes like this and she’d put them in plop, plot, plot, plot, plot. But she always had another tomato just held in her little finger here, just one more.
Jeff:
And they’d go, oh, that’s it. Yeah, one in six. And she’d show them her hand and they’d see that to her. Oh yeah, right? She’d dropped that in and I’d say, why’d you do that mum? She said, that’s our holiday that, how’d you work? That she said, I’ll do five grands with her tomatoes a year. She said, that’s 10%, that’s 500 quid for no extra work. No extra effort, no extra nothing. That’s 500 quid a bun straight in there just for that. When she did the, when she did the bacon slicer, she would wind the andel one, slice, two slice it, three slices. That’s about it. LA Yeah.
Jeff:
One more turn every time. That’s a every time that little bit extra if you can without any effort at all. Here’s a, here’s a figure to bogle your mind. If you don’t invest any extra money, buy any extra stock, do extra, any, anything other than just listen to us. To looney’s advice, you can increase sales by 5%. That increases profit by a hundred percent. Agreed. In most companies, a 5% cost free increase in sales increases profit by a hundred percent. So anybody who’s misfortune to watch us might be twice as rich this time next year.
Nathan Simmonds:
And the thing is, I can guarantee in any business, whatever it is you’re doing, there is an element of that that you can add, which has no extra cost, very little effort and makes a massive difference to what you are doing. Whether it’s a job interview or promotion, the service you’re delivering, whatever it is, you can do that if you look for it. And I’m the looney, he’s the handsome one. This has been team GB for our lunchtime learnings this week. But actually before we go look, I know we’re over time.
Nathan Simmonds:
What questions have you got? If you’ve got any, let’s share them now. We’ve got a couple of minutes. We can do this now. If you’re still with us. Any questions that you’ve got for Jeff or me right now from the content of this week, um, or, uh, from today. If not, you know, I’m, I’m happy with that also. I’ve had a lot of fun doing this. I know Jeff has, um, telling us how to grow marijuana, to be honest. to make sure you’re doing it with solar panels because I’m in the belief that most people get caught on the electricity bill. So if you’re not looking for the upsell on that one, um, you could be sending ’em some nice Tesla batteries.
Jeff:
My my son is a criminal barrister and he had one client who was involved in that and they act, I’m a cooling fan on the electricity meter ’cause they were nicking so much electricity. It’s overheated .
Nathan Simmonds:
Little dis was spinning around so fast it took off like a helicopter. No,
Jeff:
I think they’ve got about 16 years each. So I don’t recommend it as a career to be honest.
Nathan Simmonds:
Look, I think that’s it. We haven’t got any questions coming in. I’m, I’ve had a lot of Jeff, huge thank you for this week. Really appreciate your time. Where can people find you if they wanna come and find out when you are speaking, when you get back to speaking?
Jeff:
Oh right. Well I think speaking’s gonna be very different. We, I think we’re gonna have to have some nice socially distanced, cozy little events. So that’s gonna be really nice. So nice little small audiences and a bag of chips and me talking rubbish. That’s gonna happen. Um, jeff birch.com if you wanna find me and I’m love, love to chat with anybody. So I mean, anybody goes to jeff birch.com just remember it is B-U-R-C-H though.
Jeff:
Because there’s, there’s all sorts of birches but not A-B-U-R-C-H. Jeff with a g come to jeff birch.com. See some more videos. See me on YouTube, get in touch. Say hello LinkedIn. I love to hear from people at LinkedIn. That’s my favorite social media. I’m a LinkedIn fan, so so you LinkedIn with me. Uh, that’s, that’s all you need to do really. I’m very jolly
Nathan Simmonds:
Amazing. We’ve got, you know, Tamlin, Lin’s been with us most of the, all the week I think. And she says, thank you so much guys. Thank you everyone, everybody have a lovely for those in the uk. Have a lovely long weekend. We’ve got Friday, Saturday, Sunday to play with anyone else that you haven’t seen the previous sessions, they’re on YouTube, they’re on the go-to uh, website for us as well. Plug into them, see what you like. And also, almost forgot next week we are covering, uh, mental health.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’re talking about our mind model for coaching and supporting leaders to have stronger mental health conversations with their people. So if you are not already registered for next week, now is the time in the chat box. Um, and that’s just popped up to me. So we just need to make sure we get that out to everybody. Um, please make sure that you are registered for next week’s session with myself talking through mental health and I look forward to seeing you then. Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you very much.
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