Screen your prospects...get it?

Let’s talk selling.

Everyone wants to know the secret for making more sales with less effort.

Well, what if selling involved less persuasion, more trust-building?

What if you could screen prospects in or out quickly by asking unemotional, straightforward, questions that pinpoint whether they’re currently in the market for your solution.

Dan Collins posted some great thoughts on this. What’s important to note about the company he runs is that they’re in an extremely competitive space — selling to the promotional products industry — where sifting through real prospects matters greatly. They have little time to waste on people who are kicking tires, because there are plenty enough who are open to a conversation right now. So his points are credible.

Mike Sigers talked about working more with prospects, not just suspects a couple years back. Prospects are those who are known to be able to afford your product, need your product, and who could buy your product. Suspects are just, well, out there as possible customers…some day.

At Buzztime, our seasoned and professional sales reps have a system for qualifying incoming leads so that we’re only working with people who meet certain criteria.

Spending time with qualified prospects is the only way to go. Working overtime to convince the others that they want something they really don’t is a waste of your time and shows no real concern for the welfare of your employer.

If you want to enjoy your sales career, or build a business, with a high degree of self-confidence, achievement, income and personal fulfillment, work only with highly qualified sales prospects. In fact, here’s an overly simplified process you can go through to make sure you’re on track to work exclusively with qualified prospects.

1. Start with Knowing Your Ideal Customer
It starts with knowing what your ideal customer looks like. What are the B2B or B2C demographics? Why would they be in the market for your product or service in the first place — what problem do they want to solve? How much money are they accustomed to spending to solve the problem? Who usually makes the decision? There are a variety of questions you can ask yourself to pinpoint this.

2. Prepare a List of Introductory Questions
Then you need to figure out what you need to efficiently ask your leads or suspects up front, to screen them in or out. What initial questions get to the heart of the matter right off the bat, so you can decide with them if it even makes sense to dive deeper.

3. Hold Fast to Your Qualification Criteria
No matter what, stick to your criteria for selling to them. Don’t lower the bar to hit a number. You’re not doing yourself, or your account management team, any favors by squeezing a square peg into a round hole.

4. Then, and Only Then, Start Selling
Then you can start “selling.” By that, I mean start sharing relevant features and benefits of your product or service in a way that matters to the client’s needs and wants. Don’t run roughshod over them. Don’t interrupt them. Don’t monologue. Have a back-and-forth dialogue.

And if there’s a point at which the product doesn’t make sense. Don’t cram it down their throats. You’re not only wasting your time, you’re setting your team up for failure.

But you already know all this…right?

There are plenty of talented folks doing amazing things with technology to change how we interact with the world — helping us communicate better and in different ways, solve medical riddles, purify drinking water, provide new sources of energy, all that good stuff.

But how far are people challenging the status quo and pushing the limits in your company? You might not be saving the world, but are you allowing or encouraging people to stretch?

Just wondering.

Photo by Surat Lozowick.

Despite a fair amount of Googling, I’ve not found a single, go-to resource on the multitude of ways a company can generate topline sales. So I’ve decided to start one.

A couple books stand out from my MBA program that thoroughly cover marketing and business models/revenue streams, but even those resources lack a quick list of tactics for generating topline revenue. Small business owners need such a list. An exhaustive one.

I do this primarily as an exercise for small business owners looking for new ideas to drive sales and profits beyond their current sources in these challenging times. You may be putting all your eggs in one basket, while neglecting some tried and true forms of sales generation.

I’ll start you off with 42, but this post will be a living document. You can add to it via the comments and I’ll update it as more ways cross my mind.

(If you’d like to contribute to this fledgling project, complete my contact form with “revenue” in the subject line. We’ll connect off-the-clock.)

More importantly, the goal is to identify, then breakdown through examples and case studies in future posts, each of the relatively simple means by which companies can generate revenue, with pros and cons.

One last note: the reality is, your market may not bear implementing these fees or revenue sources, however excited you may be about them. Keep that in mind. And I share these knowing full well that the buyer in each of us hates paying some of these additional fees, as they really represent an unmeasured form of inflation. Nevertheless…

The inital 42:

1. Buy a tangible product, mark it up, sell it.
2. Sell your own tangible product direct to customers.
3. Sell your tangible products through distributors/resellers.
4. Rent or lease your product to customers, instead of selling it.
5. Sell add-on, premium features to your existing base product.
6. Sell digital information via CD or DVD.
7. Sell digital information via PDF.
8. Sell digital information via MP3 (audio) or MP4 (video).
9. Add a setup or installation fee.
10. Sell certification training on using your product correctly.
11. Sell certification training to create an army of independent support consultants.
12. Sell your product only after a low-cost trial or sampling period.
13. Sell training on others’ products related to yours.
14. Sell your product or service as a weekly, monthly, or annual subscription.
15. Sell premium website access on a monthly, recurring subscription basis.
16. Sell services related to your products on a billable-hour basis.
17. Package similar products into a kit or bundle.
18. Turn your expertise into a kit for other licensed partners to sell.
19. Package individual products into bulk form.
20. Break items often sold in bulk into individual units.
21. Add a service charge.
22. Sell an extended warranty.
23. Assess restocking fees on returns.
24. Add a below-the-minimum charge.
25. Sell imperfect versions of your product at a discount.
26. Sell old versions of your product.
27. If you sell a web service, make it available for installation on customers’ servers.
28. Sell membership to an elite club of your product users.
29. Sell sponsored versions of your product at a lower price.
30. Sell an upgrade to existing product users.
31. Write and sell a book about your area of expertise.
32. Sell your product or service via giant sites such as Amazon or eBay.
33. Change your product to a service.
34. Sell advertising space on or in your product.
35. Sell advertising space on your company website, blog, or email newsletter.
36. Sell replacement parts to your product.
37. Sell training workshops to teach people how to select the right product in your industry.
38. Sell advanced training on your product.
39. Sell and host webinars on information or legislation tied to your product or industry.
40. Add freight charges.
41. Sell your employees’ skills on sites like elance.com.
42. Add handling charges.

There are more. We’ll add them over time. This will get you brainstorming on your own. And follow-up posts will break each of these down with specific how-tos and examples of who has succeeded with this model.

Lose isn't spelled "loose." That is all.

For those of you keeping score at home or the office, you already know that I try to provide value in a number of ways here at BrandonHull.com.

Business advice. Career advice.

Spelling advice, however, has even farther-reaching dimensions.

The rants on the spelling of “lose” (rhymes with “booze”) as “loose” (rhymes with “moose”) range from locations as diverse as Denver Broncos fan forum posts…to Amazon.com customer discussions…to health website conversations…to deep, pondering questions seeking Yahoo! Answers advice.

No one really knows why we have such trouble spelling “lose.” Maybe it’s that can-do American spirit crying out:

“If I can’t spell lose, I never will lose.”

Or maybe you think it’s inconsequential.

But for the record: “loose” doesn’t equal “lose.”

What if Facebook moved away?

What if you knew that Facebook was being shutdown at midnight tonight?

Would your life change for the better or the worse?

On a personal note, which relationships would utterly dry up? Which might get a boost from more face-to-face or phone calls?

On the business side, would an important marketing channel die for you, or just a casual one?

If you’re pretty much headed in the right direction, moving quickly, that’s a good thing that produces great results. But if you’re moving slowly, who cares if you’re dead-on, 100% accurate with your direction? You’ll never gain momentum. You’ll never get to the destination.

Something's always next. What's after real-time?

Compared to radio, television, and even the Internet itself, we all ran like banshees to Facebook and Twitter. (And trust me, banshees can SERIOUSLY run.)

Their growth (Facebook’s and Twitter’s, not the banshees’) has been meteoric and they represent the biggest players not just in “social networking,” but the real-time web.

There’s an outstanding analysis of this real-time web by Robin Good, so we’re not going to do that here. In that article, Robin reminds us of the “immediacy” of Twitter and the inability of the traditional news outlets to get news in our laps with the same speed. It’s a great read, so go do that after reading this.

But the thing is, there will come a day when the real-time web isn’t enough for us.

And given our Western civilization’s attention deficit disorder pandemic, the real-time web won’t be “enough” for us sooner, rather than later.

Just like reading the headlines in the next morning’s paper, or seeing them on the evening news wasn’t enough for us 10 years ago. Even commenting on stories found at sites like CNN, MSNBC, Foxnews, and writing our own blogs hasn’t been enough for us. Reading updates as they’re published on Twitter, being able to participate in instant, citizen journalism, seeing photos tweeted from stirring, right-now events, those will all be almost good enough some day.

We’ll want the next thing.

Now, when you talk about the “next thing,” some focus on the technology. Some say niche communities will take center stage. And some just wonder how much shorter the messages can get. Then you’ve got the search engines, led by Google and some smaller others, aggressively pursuing real-time search.

But I’m not talking about these things. I’m talking about the day that will come where finding out about things as they happen won’t be good enough for us. The next thing we’ll want is knowing about things before they happen.

Don’t worry, I’m not going all Minority Report on you (although there are very recent reports of pre-crime technology being developed and tested). But I can’t help but imagine that we will at some point crave “news” that’s about to happen, possibly so we can dig right in with jumping to our own conclusions.

And I’m sure there will be a free web app for all that.

If not, what’s next after real-time? And will you jump onboard that bandwagon, too?

Face it. There's too much to remember. Write it down.

You can, of course, try to remember every lesson you learn. Or you can write things down.

A few years ago, I started keeping a business journal. I’m glad I did this.

I’ve made some good, bad, and ugly business decisions in my life. My goal in starting this journal was to create my own “voice from the past” that guides me to make better business decisions. I follow that advice, for similar reasons, in my personal life as well. I find if I write these lessons learned down, I learn from them. And I’m less likely to make the same mistakes again.

Take, for instance, an event that should have been a blip on my decision-making record from 16 years ago. I was a new manager. Although I was hard-working and conscientious, I was also shortsighted.

I ran a small office for what later became a subsidiary of the giant Cintas Corporation. At the time, we were part of a smaller holding company that had a stake in several small companies across the United States. I did my best to push for new sales, expansion of our business with existing clients, and the development of a small sales team in San Diego, while also minding the P&L. One other manager worked for me.

My relations with this other manager, who was actually a 20% owner in the small San Diego operation, were strained. It started before I got there: I was being relocated to San Diego to supplant him as the General Manager, while he slid back to focus largely on new business development and leading two of the salespeople. I was 24 years old, he was 43. He had been a part of the company getting started several years previous to my coming. I was unproven in his eyes.

The decision that stands out in my development as a leader with this other manager may seem a minor one to you, but I remember it to this day. It was summer. I had been on the job for seven months. It was 95 degrees in the Rancho Bernardo community of San Diego, where our office was. We ran the office air conditioner during the day, but I made a practice of turning it off before I left each night. Here’s why that last tidbit matters:

On one occasion, when I knew this other manager would be dropping by after-hours, I left a quick note: “Don’t forget to turn the A/C off as you leave.” Straightforward, to the point, right? No harm?

When I arrived at the office the next day, the note had been altered and left on my desk. It now read: “Dan, Please Ddon’t forget to the turn the A/C off as you leave. Thanks, Brandon.”

Lesson learned.

You can be as take-charge as you want. You can make bold moves and sweeping changes and lightning-fast decisions. And you can make a quick name for yourself by getting big results within days or weeks of taking on a new role. But sometimes it’s the way you do things that determine whether you’ll ultimately be successful as a leader or not.

While I’ve also posted that sometimes you’ve got to be willing to make people uncomfortable to get things done. I also said in that post that that alone isn’t a license to be a jerk.

This note went in my business journal. It was my first entry. It’s still there. The bold, the sweeping, the lightning-fast, and the subtle (but noteworthy) decisions go in that journal.

Do you keep one?

There’s a Mr. Boxer store at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.

Who discovers they need either of these while shuttling to or from a plane? What’s the scenario?

I don’t get the male accessory known as the messenger bag. That’s a lot of stuff to be carrying around. Any guys out there who are passionate about their messenger bags?