HOW REJECTION CAN BE YOUR MOST EFFICIENT SALES TOOL

Yes, Its true. Sales Rejection, if handled right, can be one of the most potent selling tools, provided of course, that your boss is not the younger (or elder) brother of Hari Sadu (of the Naukri.com TV ad fame).

Why's that? That is because it is only by rejection that one learns. I remember once in my first visit to the man who will be placing the order, as I shook his hand and I handed over my card, Mr. Customer was just looking at my company name and logo and then he asked me " Do you deal with XYZ's products? " and incidentally XYZ was our main competitor-the No 1 in the country with us at No.2. I stared at him, taken aback and told him that they were our competitor. The small room was full of nervous energy and the funny point struck both of us. We smiled and the tension was broken. I told him that I am there to sell my company's products and that I did not have a clue as to how to do that, so I would be obliged if he gives me some advise as to how I can convince him to give us a try-out. That was the start of an excellent relationship and I'm happy to say that after three years, I had replaced most of XYZ's products by ours.Anybody can sell new products to a new factory but phasing out your competitor is not easy, let me tell you. 

Whenever you read success stories of people, do you really think that this person , who has written a book on sales, succeeded every time he pushed. Nope-that is impossible.  Rejection is as much a part of the sales rep's official experience as acceptance is. In fact the average sales rep is more at home with rejection than acceptance.What you need to do is after each rejection, you need to list down and find what went wrong. 

SELLING BY RESEARCH: The Concept of SBR

This blog is proud to say that the phrase "SBR " which stands for  'Selling by Research"was first coined here and the SBR techniques which have been lightly touched here is ORIGINAL to this blog. The idea first germinated here in the form of the written word.

Many Sales/Business Development Managers/General Managers/even VP's think that the more prospects, a salesperson visits, the better. Never mind, if it lays emphasis on quantity rather than quality. The Manager has the data to justify his sales forecasts for the next quarter. And at the month end, when the CEO is surprised to see that the sales person has visited the highest number of potential customers but has flopped in actual selling, the same manager will tell him “there is something wrong here, you lack application, you lack communication skills” the newbie can hardly say that the strategy was devised by the manager himself.  "Gee!! that’s not fair" you may say but trust me, these kinds of managers do exist and they are in the majority.

                  In industrial plants and manufacturing organizations, decision makers have no time to entertain sales-people on fishing expeditions. In Industrial Marketing, which comprises of selling of high or medium value systems, “cold-calls” can backfire on you. Before the net, cold calls were a must. Information is power.Cold calling in industrial marketing was done for collection of market information. Having information gave a party an immense advantage over its competitors. Today, the internet can help your sales-people to collect all information about prospects, making cold-calls redundant.

     " We live today in tumultuous times. In the future, people will think us as the most lucky people for never before has a generation witnessed such sweeping technical and socioeconomic changes within such a short time. If you want to survive, you need to adapt, to change with the times unless you want to be extinct. "

The Internet as an Information Source

          How do you collect information from the internet? Check websites of service providers usually involved in projects.  A few website types, where information is available free are as below. (This is only a partial list and you can find many more classes if you are interested)

(1)B2B trading portals and Business Directories: These contain all information and all you have to do is collection and compiling. 

Screen Shot of site. Look at the projects link at the lower right

(An example is http://www.processregister.com  which has a section on projects, which gives the location, value, status and the promoter. The website even has the projects classified sector wise. What else do you need?)

 Different types of projects classified typewise

 

(2) Job Portals: These give out information in the form of “Project Managers required for…” or “We require for our new project…”

(3) Websites of Consultants: Consultants often give out details of new consulting jobs they are working on, or have bagged.

If you think that you will get full details of a project from tapping into the above or similar resources, you will be disappointed. What you will get is “leads”. You will get all your detail information then by doing some web research on these leads.

Industrial Marketing &Selling initiated by researching the web, has been named SBR (Selling by Research)-by yours truly because it appears that I am the first person to discuss about this site in public, for which unfortunately processregister.com is not paying me anything. 

THE SUPERIORITY OF NUMBERS AND OTHER IRRELEVANT CONTENT

The United States of America.
Custer's last stand : The battle  of Little Bighorn 25th June 1876.

As the buffalo became scarcer, Indian tribes lives became hard. The Indians have had enough of being pushed into reservations too, the final straw being the US violation of  the treaty of Black Hills, and the unstoppable incursion of white Americans,
 as rumors circulated that gold (as in California) was there for the taking in the Black Hills. General George Armstrong Custer, a potential future US president, by nature headstrong, fought against forces led by the Indian Medicine Man and Chief "Sitting Bull" and Chief " Crazy Horse".
        Custer disregarded his scout's information that the Indian camps were enormous in size, and estimated about a thousand braves whereas, actually there was 2000-4000 Sioux braves. As was obvious, Custer and the US 7th Cavalry were wiped out, the only living being remaining being ironically Custer's horse 'Commanche'. Custer only had about 700 troopers  and then further proceeded to divide them into three units.

     No guys, you are still at the same site. I just started off in a different tack this time. Remember all the feedback you had to provide about competition including the market share variance if any and the order value of the competitors in the last quarter etc. Let's admit it this kind of data is impossible to give if you are selling capital equipment and your market is vast. I had often found myself as the sole person of my company in charge of everything of a state ( area  not less the entire UK). These forms were frustrating for so often you were required to give break-ups and they were huge waste of time. Moreover, it is quite probable that these forms were used as rough paper -no one ever read them-What do you do?-you collect market data or do you sell? I believe that the objective is served if your boss tells you what information he needs any time (when his boss calls him) and what he needs some time. You than satisfy his need by a mail/letter/fax whatever.
Simple, isn't it? The Indian mentality is to see if you have given the info in the form..Gee! Another example of why western sound marketing principles will not work in South East Asia, unless you tailor make them so as to suit the natural conditions.Coming back, the competition often had offices having three-four officers while I had to operate from my house, and they ruled.(I finally started targeting big customers and making my brand superior in numbers.and I kept my job that way)

          The point I want to make is FORGET all those things you may have heard about the quality of our sales people vs. theirs. These even out in the long run. What matters is how many players you have compared to the opposition. In an organizational perspective, it is the financial muscle you have.

  In this post,I want to continue my take (through Ries and Trout)on Karl Von Clausewitz's ideas and an important one is " Always keep your forces concentrated in an overpowering mass"-in other words' attack with all your resources at the decisive battle because history shows us that the army which is larger in size always wins. In WWII, had the US not joined the allies-giving them a huge superiority in numbers-the English and the French were being outfought and would have lost.   If you are American, than maybe your national anthem would have been "Dixie" if General Robert E. Lee had 25,000 more men. I did not know that either but the fact is that in Gettysburg ,1863 General Lee had 75,000 men while General Meade of the Union had 88,000 men.