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Strategies Of The Highly Effective
We all see them, those highly motivated and successful salespeople. Ever wonder what makes them tick? How they make it all seem so easy? What tactics make a salesperson successful? What makes these stars standout, and why do they shine?
This week, Promotional Consultant Today will look at the seven strategies of highly effective salespeople. Today we'll look at new ideas, and helping customers.

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TOP SHELF TIP NO. 224
"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1874-1965

Embrace New Ideas
     Effective salespeople embrace new ideas. We might say embracing new ideas is the norm. In We Are Smarter Than Me, Barry Libert and Jon Spector tells of A.G. Lafley's arrival as chairman and CEO at Proctor & Gamble in 2000. "He stunned his prideful researchers," all 9,000 of them in research and development when he said that they were not producing enough winners to meet the company's growth goals. Then he shocked this vaunted group when he told them that "by the end of the decade, fully half of all new P&G products and technologies would have to come from outside the company."
     Lafley set into motion a system of sharing information, leveraging retired scientists and engineers, and tapping into InnoCentive, the network of more than 100,000 technical people from nearly 200 countries who receive cash awards if their ideas pay off.
     According to one report, fully 35 percent of P&G's ideas were coming from outsiders by 2006. Equally important, the company's research and development productivity zoomed up 60 percent and 80 percent of the company's new product launches are successful, compared to the 30 percent industry average.
     The point: salespeople don't burn out; rather, they make themselves irrelevant by failing to see change as opportunity.

Helping Customers
     Effective salespeople focus on helping. Customers today know when they are being hustled by the salesperson whose sole objective is to walk away with an order.
     Toward the end of the year, a business owner received a call from a business equipment company salesperson indicating that the cost of color copier supplies would be nearly tripling within a few weeks. "If you want to order at the current price, we have a supply in inventory," he said.
     Whatever the facts, how did the message sound? Candidly, like someone who was trying to make his numbers by year's end. There were no explanations, no options, and no suggestions. There was no effort to be helpful.
     Helping is the overarching strategy, the hallmark, of the effective salesperson.

     Source: John R. Graham is president of Graham Communications, a marketing services and sales consulting firm. He is the author of The New Magnet Marketing and Break the Rules Selling. He writes for a variety of business publications, and speaks on business, marketing and sales topics.

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