Welcome to CFF-U Business Series!
In chapter 12, we’re going to talk briefly about killer sales behaviors. What are traits that the best salespeople that killers do best? And I’m just going to go down the list and hopefully you can take a few of these and begin to see number one, does your sales team do this? Do you, if you’re the salesperson do this and if not take some of these and change, the first is research, research and research.
Do Your Research!
You have to do background information checks on your customers. What’s the name of the company? Where is the company? What do they do best? What’s their website look like? Did you connect with them on LinkedIn? Did you look them up on social media? What are their habits? What are their hobbies? What’s their family situation like what’s their educational system. Like what’s their experience look like? Where have they worked in the past? What are they best at? What awards have they won? If you can get this information so readily available that we can today. LinkedIn, Google a website. By the way, when I started selling the services, the financial services of commercial fleet 26 years ago, the only research I had was that yellow pages. Now, for those of us who remember what a yellow pages Is, there’s almost no information in it.
Use Your Resources
You get a company name, you would go through the yellow pages and go to trucking and you would see a trucking services. And then you might see AA trucking services because AA wanted to rank higher than AA. So they changed the name of the company. So they rank higher in the yellow pages. The yellow pages was actually Google before there was Google. The downside is it. Didn’t give you the contact information. It didn’t give you the decision-maker information. All it really did was give you the name of a company, an address, and a phone number. Those were tough introduction, phone calls today through LinkedIn, you can figure out exactly who the CEO of the trucking company in Dallas, Texas is. You can connect with them on LinkedIn. That gives you their work experience. It gives you their recommendations. It gives you their schooling, maybe where they went to the companies that used to work with the people they’re connected with.
Encourage Salespeople To Do Research
It changes the game when it comes to research. So encourage your salespeople to do more research before they just start dialing for dollars on that note, your salespeople have to most likely be more active. Like they’ve got to make a lot of phone calls. They got to knock on a lot of doors. They got to quote a lot of deals, like lots of deals. They need to work an eight hour day. Most salespeople in the transportation industry are not working hard enough to go out and find more business. So when we do a lot of research on a prospect, and then we put a lot of activity to it, miraculously, we make more sales.
Everybody Has To Provide More Value
The third piece is Everybody’s got to provide more value. It’s not good just to kind of be in a business that they’re in or maybe they want your customer has a need. Your job is to fill that need. And therefore, if you aren’t leading with value propositions, Mr. Jones, the reason for my phone call today is because I have Dennis identified you as the perfect trucking company to fit our financing programs. If you’re in the market to buy a piece of equipment, we’d love to finance it, right?
Mr. Jones, you manufacture steel pipe. Our company is the best steel pipe, flatbed trucking company in the country. We run from Dallas to Houston, three times a day, six days a week. Nobody can get your steel pipe. That’s manufactured in Dallas to Houston, better than we can. What’s the value proposition that your salespeople are selling with. Number four, which is the previous chapter. You got to know your audience, the buyer persona, you got to make it personal. When you talk to them, you know, businesses, everybody says it’s just business. I really don’t believe that. You know, I really believe business is a personal relationship.
Develop Relationships
A common thread outside of business to develop a relationship. The next one is shut up and listen, salespeople talk too much. There is one reason why our creator gave us a mouth and two ears. We should listen more and talk less, right? What’s the pain point that our customers have? How can my value proposition solve The pain point? You have To sell results to, you know, Mr. Jones, we have a higher on-time delivery rate than anybody else in the steel pipe delivery business customers want results. It’s great that you’re nice. And it’s great that you’re polite and it’s great that you’ve been in business a long time, but if you don’t bring results to the client, the results that matter to them, it’s not going to be a great business relationship. So lead sell with real results, by the way, that connects to your market leader content.
If you have something that actually proves that you’re as good as you say, you are lead with that, send that article to the customer and says, you know what matters most to us is on time delivery. I’m so glad you said that we were just highlighted in, in a fleet owner magazine talking about our online delivery percentage, boom market leader, content, finding the pain point, knowing your buyer persona, and then delivering a result to them that matters.
Move Faster!
I think we have to move faster. I think salespeople in general are just a little too slow, right? Well, I, I followed up with him, uh, last week. That’s not enough. Sometimes you got to follow up a couple of times a day. People are busy on the other end of the phone or on the other end of the email or whatever the communication tool is that you’re using. So don’t be afraid to follow up more faster, never leave a meeting without a clear, defined next meeting. So Mr. Jones, I’m going to go ahead and provide you with this quote Is Tuesday At two. O’clock the best time for me to call you or Wednesday at 9:00 AM, never finish a call without setting the next action Step.
Use Metrics – Recap
And lastly, You have to have metrics. I need to know how many calls do I need to make, which will create this number of quotes to a potential customer. And from this number of quotes, I typically get this many sales and this many sales are needed for me to hit my monthly, weekly, daily, quarterly goals. You got to re work the math back, and we’ll talk about that in one of the segments here in CFF university. So chapter 12 is killer sales behaviors. How do we take some basic common sense long, uh, used old school methodology and reintroduce it into our organizations to get our sales, to start to scale. We’ll see in the next chapter.
About Commercial Fleet Financing, Inc.:
At Commercial Fleet Financing (CFF), our pros have given smart advice to fleet owners and owner-operators in the transportation, moving, towing or construction industries for more than two decades. With CFF, finding the right financing solutions is a phone call away and most borrowers secure commercial vehicle financing with ease. To talk directly with one of our finance pros and get started with credit approval in as little as two hours, CFF’s phone number is (469) 281-2962.
