Tesco

When our local Tesco in Sevenoaks closed for 4 days recently for a refit, interesting things happened. Sainsburys ran out of food as Tesconian refugees swamped the store like locusts. Where was Sainsbury's planning? Everyone in our area knew about the Tesco closing apart from them seemingly - biggest news to hit Sevenoaks since the trees were blown down last century. Sainsburys underlined their No.2 position by failing to cope with the rush, and with no effort to capitalise and steal newcomers longer term with a campaign aimed at Tesconians. Then Tesco re-opened and the carpark was so rammed that shoppers were abandoning their cars just South of Watford and walking barefoot to the shrine. Tesco reported record revenues as prodigal shoppers returned brandishing Sainsbutys carrier bags at the checkout. All is well again. Normal service has been resumed.

Feature-Push selling alive and well at Specsavers!

Imagine my surprise when I was offered contact lenses for my squash and tennis just 4 minutes after entering Specsavers in Sevenoaks. I was only there for a first time eyesight test for reading glasses. Basic background is that after about 7pm I can’t read small print. My arms simply aren’t long enough to hold my book far enough away from my face.

Enter the dragon. Eliminating the need for forensic questioning, mature sales lady Lynne goes in for the kill with her ‘Lifestyle Questionnaire’. Here is the genius of her technique. But don’t try it at home without adult supervision:

Lynne: Mr McKechnie, before I test your eyesight for reading glasses, can I ask you some questions about your lifestyle?

Me: Please go right ahead. (Just how personal is this going to get....)

Lynne: Do you play any sport?

Me: Uh huh, tennis and squash.

Lynne: Well, have you ever considered contact lenses? A lot people come in here and get them just for tennis and squash because it helps them see the ball.

Me: Hmm. Well no, I haven’t considered them. But Lynne, I think you may be confusing me with someone who can’t see the ball?

Lynne: Sorry, just thought I would mention it. Actually, they’re only £20.00 a month which really surprises some people...

Me: That sounds great, but what else are you going to try and sell me before I do the eye test? I’m only here for reading glasses.

Lynne: Shall we look at some frames together? The 2 racks for men are here and here.

Me: Well yes, soon probably, but shall we see if I need them first – you know, the eye test...

Lynne: Yes, fine and the great thing about our reading glasses is our 2 for 1 offer - you know how you keep losing them and leaving them around and you can’t find them when you need to...

Me: Not really, I’ve never had reading glasses before so I don’t know. (Bored look starting to happen...)

Lynne: Well take it from me Ian, It happens all the time! You put them down one minute and next OMG where are they blah blah blah.....

Result: Yes I bought some. But not the lenses. Yet.

'What I do' in 1 minute video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAFvGRGwfg4&feature=related

Are you making ‘distractions’ the centrepiece of your life?

My cautionary tale of building a log cabin garden office

Imagine the scene, if you will. Two men frozen in a back garden, staring in total consternation at a piece of wood. It looks like a lintel for a door, or maybe a window, but where does it fit in? The instruction leaflet is requested once again (by my co-builder Andy) but it doesn’t help. No mention of this ‘rogue’ item. But surely we can’t simply discard it? I found it in one of the two enormous piles of timber, unloaded off the lorry the day before, so it MUST have an important function.

The beginnings of a magnificent log cabin ‘garden office’ rises behind us at a height of almost 1m. The vision in the brochure, with happy wife and children admiring the verandah, is a little way off yet. Building has commenced, but there are still around 420 lengths of wood waiting patiently in 2 long piles. We just can’t go any further until we have identified where this bit goes.

After some hours, Andy suggests ‘making it’ the door lintel, which will involve his carpentry skills to make it fit the doorway at the threshold. Surely this can’t be necessary. Why would they send something so important the wrong length? To do what he suggests would mean making this mystery length of wood the centrepiece of the entire cabin, so everything else would have to fit around it.

I took a picture of the piece of wood, emailed it to the manufacturer and waited. Fully two days later – during which time no further building work could be even attempted – an answer came back. Two words: Packing Timber.

We went very quiet for a moment, as if in a coma, then the realisation, the relief, the craziness of it all! We burst out laughing, shouting obscenities into the sky! PACKING TIMBERS for **** sake! Instantly we discarded the (no longer) mystery item and got building with renewed vigour. Round and round we went, hammering down the logs, hardly pausing until the walls were higher than we were. We almost finished the shed that day, still shaking our heads at the ridiculous way we had put our progress on hold until we had discarded the fantasy that a worthless distraction might be so important.

And then, whilst we were up on the roof, nailing in the shingles, the sun came out. We started on about what other ‘packing timbers’ may be affecting our lives. Things which feel important at the time, but really are not worth fretting about. We came up with 6 or 7 between us, and I’ll share just one with you.

My no.1 ‘packing timber’ was my obsession with wanting to keep our house tidy when 3 boys are messing it up the whole time with their stuff! I realised my dull orders for them to tidy up had become the centrepiece of our communication and that real houses don’t look like the vision in the brochure. So I’m throwing that packing timber away and getting on with what’s important. Whatever that is! Which one are you going to discard?

Don’t sell the Ding, sell the Kerching!

Helping clients buy your services

A few days ago I was sitting in the corner of a hotel bar in Brussels, half reading a terrific beer menu, and half mulling over a conversation I’d been having with my good friend Mike. He’s a loyal Nokia phone user but was grabbed by some of the special applications on my iphone, such as the spirit level and the decibel meter. Yes really.

He liked them so much he now wants to upgrade, but there’s a money issue. My monthly charges are higher than what his firm pays for the Nokia and he would struggle to justify the iphone story to his boss. After all, who actually needs a decibel meter in their work unless they work for the noise abatement society? Who needs a spirit level on their phone unless perhaps they make cabinets for a living? In any case, Mike’s real need is neither of these things. His biggest bugbear - and it significantly hampers new business development - is networking. He is an engineer by background and feels very uncomfortable striking up conversations with complete strangers, especially at conferences. Unless having an iphone was going to make him a more confident networker, no chance of an upgrade.

This train of thought had come about because the very next day I was booked to deliver sales training to a large company. My subject was going to be ‘value’, and what people really buy when they buy your service. Sales people at this particular firm were selling a good product, but were still finding it hard to create propositions strong enough to convince cost-conscious clients to part with cash. This problem felt similar to Mike’s dilemma and it got me thinking.

It is well documented that salespeople tend towards selling ‘features’ of a service rather than value to the customer. They gurgle on like a broken drain about interesting features nobody wants or needs. The result is very few sales, because people DON’T CARE how excited you are about what your service does, or how it does it. They DO CARE about how it can make them richer, more attractive, save on cost or make their businesses run faster. I imagined Mike trying to ‘feature sell’ his iphone upgrade story to his blank-faced boss, missing the target with excited talk about spirit levels and decibel meters. As I sat there, watching rain drip steadily from a tattered canopy outside the window, my reverie was broken by a loud...Ding!

Two Belgian men were stood at the bar, shaking with mirth and pointing at their iphones. The barman approached – summoned by the ding - and joined in the joke. Now all three surrounded the ‘Service bell’ application on the iphone, pressing it repeatedly. Ding, ding, ding! Only men together could get excited about something as pointless as a ‘ding’. I instantly wanted the ‘ding’ app on my iphone of course, walked up to the bar and flashed my iphone to prove club membership. They told me how to get it, I downloaded it instantly, pressed the screen and got the Ding!

Then they asked what iphone apps were popular in the UK, so I tested the bar with my spirit level and monitored their laughter on my decibel meter. Beers were ordered and the conversation turned to what I was doing in Brussels. Sales training, I told them. ‘Very interesting’, they said, ‘we may be able to use your services in the future. Let us have your contact details’. We bumped iphones to swap ‘business cards’ and off they went.

It suddenly occurred to me that my iphone had served as a rather unique iternational networking tool that could potentially lead to valuable business. How else could I have approached strangers in a foreign bar. Legally. That little Ding could lead to a valuable Kerching. I was quick to relate this story to delegates next day in the training workshop. They started seeing their own services afresh, as if through x-ray specs - looking beyond features to customer value. Meanwhile I'm working on Mike back home to become the firm's best networker.

So now they want you to sell as well!

The sales transformation of Yves the engineer

You weren’t hired as a salesperson and yet here you are with a target for goodness sake. They didn’t tell you about this when you were taking your engineering degree. Sales ability wasn’t tested in the laboratory when you were analyzing spores through a microscope. The ‘sales mindset’ was probably furthest from your mind when you were sitting your accountancy exams. And yet today everyone like you, remotely client-facing, is expected to have the ability to scope out new sales opportunities and contribute to revenue generation – it’s hardly fair. However, there is help at hand, and once you get to know what selling really is, you might become rather good at it and – take a deep breath – get to enjoy it.

A very pleasant, softly spoken Frenchman, Yves, approached me recently at the end of a technical sales workshop I was giving in Paris. He smiled, shook my hand, and asked if I remembered him. He had attended a 2 day consultative selling skills course I had given the previous year. I told him I did recall the special effort he had made and asked how the selling was coming along. He told me that he was now selling better and more consistently than anyone else in the firm. He was rated No.1 in the office. This was a fabulous gift for me as trainer, as well as for him. Was this the same Yves, that typically modest engineer thrust into selling against his wishes? Back then things were not going too well for him, and his manager had sent him on my course to gain the skills, knowledge and mindset to succeed.

It had evidently worked, but how I asked – had he really changed? No, he said, as truthfully as ever. He still didn’t have the ‘gift of the gab’, but instead he was employing far more precious and natural qualities possessed by many technical, scientific and professional people. He was diligently honing and practising his ability to listen and ask good questions. These would draw out the client’s needs and encourage them to discuss how his firm might help them. That was it in a nutshell. No hard selling, no metamorphosis. Through effort and daily practise Yves had made the subtle transformation from engineer into someone that sells engineering services. And he was enjoying it!

Let’s wind back to that 2 day workshop. Yves stood out, amongst the 12 delegates on the course, not because he was gifted at selling, but rather he had a mindset for continuous improvement. At the end of the first day I remarked on how hard he had tried in the sales exercises – asking good questions, showing genuine curiosity, listening to the customer, resisting the temptation to talk about his services until he had ‘earned the right’. Yves sprung to his own defence, of course, highly analytical and critical of his weaknesses and lack of confidence. However, at the end of those 2 days he made a pledge to practise what he had learned, however uncomfortable it felt. For him it would probably feel like wearing his watch on the other wrist.

Wind forward again and here he stood, shaking my hand, smiling, steady eye contact, standing tall with an easy confidence. He thanked me for setting him on the road to successful selling. For him it had all begun on that 2 day course, when he saw the role of selling in a new way that made sense to him.