The following shortcuts will save you a lot of time and stress while sitting at the keyboard. This is a go to table to help you memorise these important shortcuts.

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Here are four tips to help you achieve a successful outcome with your next sales pitch

1. Strong opening
   If you’re pitching a $500,000 contract and have only 10 minutes, ‘good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having us here’ just cost you over $8,300 by wasting 10 seconds.
   Open differently and strongly. Paint a picture. Take them into the future. Describe how they’re benefiting from the clever decision they made years ago working with you. Decision makers want to benefit the company, they also want personally to be sure they are taking the right action. So highlight how they’ll be remembered for doing the right thing by using your company (not too much of a butter up though)
2. Answer questions up front,
   What do they want to know from you? How can you help them? If you’re more expensive, will take longer, are the underdog – do not ignore the fact. They’re thinking it. Come straight out early into the presentation with a “I know what you’re thinking’ statement, then answer their objections.
3. Premise
   Build your pitch around the structure of how they will benefit from what you are asking them to do. ‘You will save $2’ million dollars by using our software’, ‘You will cut maintenance expenditure by 20% ‘.  Phrase it so they say to themselves ‘how?’  Which you then answer in a logical and structured way.
4. Strong Close
   Refer back to your opening story or bring all the elements together describing how they’ll benefit.  If you didn’t use the looking into the future in your opening, you can use it in the closing. “picture yourself in two years’ time. It’s the gala dinner. Award night. Everyone is abuzz because the success of the new software system you approved and installed the year before. Five different staff have come to you through out the evening – all award winners from their significant leap in productivity….

Let me introduce you to one of the best kept secrets and most underutilised assets in Outlook Contacts. And that’s Categories.

What are categories?

A category is a keyword or phrase that you can assign to a Contact (email, appointment, task.) You can assign one or as many categories as you like to each item.

Why are Categories so utterly brilliant? 4 Reasons:

1. Categorise and Target
   By what is important to you (or, more wisely to them). You can create categories by industry, by company size, by their nature of business with you.
2. Organisation
   Helps you easily find, sort, filter, or group contacts.
3. Track related but different items
   For example all the meetings, contacts, and emails for a baseball committee you’re on or any business project. Create a category (Baseball or New Project) and assign items to it.
4. Minimises folder requirements.
   For example, you can keep business and personal tasks in the same task list and use the Business and Personal categories to view the tasks separately.

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1. Never let a viable prospect go

You spent time and money through networking, good customer service, advertising and website development to get prospective customers to your figurative door. Don’t waste your money or time spent. Establish a communication stream to keep in contact until they are ready to do business or refer/

2. Excel is Magic

It doesn’t matter what database software you use to store your information because it’s simple to bring it into Excel to then manipulate, clean, de-duplicate and add to it in seconds flat.

3. Plan for the future today

If targeting improves success – do you have enough information to do so? Have you ever stopped to contemplate what new products, services, customer service initiatives you’d like to do over the next few years? A new branch or store?

What about additional staff? Will you ever need to know or monitor their productivity or their contribution to business? If so how will you measure it? What fields would you need? Phone numbers.  Are you consistently collecting mobile phone numbers so you can do sms messaging in the future?

4. Categories not columns
The last thing you want to do is work with an endless line up of columns. Don’t set up separate columns for clients, prospects, old clients, suppliers. Instead have one column called client type and have different Categories (or variables) you enter into the one column, being client, old client, prospect, supplier.

5. Treat your business referrers well
Do you have a distinct communication, thank you and reward plan for those business colleagues that refer business your way? Why not? A suggestion to help them could be a tip newsletter about how to improve their business success. Why not create a recurring reminder to prompt you every few months to telephone for a chat.

The more thought you put into developing and using your database, the more you’ll be rewarded.

How’s Your Memory?

Do you ever forget to follow up on important outgoing emails (answers required, proposals, quotes?)

Need a memory prompt for bills to pay or people to contact?

Throw away those scraps of paper and let me introduce you to Tasks – your new memory prompter. Once you start using Tasks – you’ll wonder how you lived without this function before!

How to create a Task

1. Go to your Tasks Folder, click the New button  or
2. While you’re anywhere in Outlook go to the File menu, point to New and Click Task.
3. In the Subject box, type a Taskname.
4. Complete any other boxes on the Task and Details tabs for information you want to record for the Task.

To make the Task recur (for bill payments, events, birthdays) click Recurrence, click the frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly) at which you want the task to recur.

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Are you becoming increasingly stymied trying to get your foot in the door? If so, have you reviewed your communication mode lately?

If you’re simply emailing a prospect or trying – repeatedly to get them on the phone or get past their gatekeeper, you probably need another strategy.

Here’s a simple one that should work well for you. Of course over time you will have received some great testimonials. Why not create single (or several different) testimonial postcards that you can use to send to prospective clients as a door opener? You know having others speak well of you works much better than trying to toot your own horn. Plus if you can put problem/solutions specific or industry related testimonials together – all the better.

Even better, you don’t have to fork out a fortune and print hundreds or thousands at a time. You can get cards batch photocopied or print them on your computer on card grade paper. By creating a folding card, you can send it without an envelope. I’m sure you’ve read that handwritten and stamped post are more likely to be opened and read than others.

You’d be surprised, you’re about three times more likely to get an appointment with your prospect after sending the testimonial card, then when you just call and use a referral source’s name.

The card is simple to prepare, positions you as a professional and differentiates you from others.

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When does one and one equal much, much more than two? When you develop the synergy of working with other likeminded businesses. Call it developing working alliances; strategic partnerships; networking; joint marketing. Call it what you want – but I can’t stress the importance of it enough.

Take a look at what you do and find a non-competitive partner whose services or products have an affinity with, or complement yours. Meet like-minded people with big email lists. Both of you can win by getting your names in front of a whole new audience. This would not only ring-fence both sets of clients from other competition, it also adds value and service to them. Not to mention the potential to significantly increase your income earning abilitly from this new alliance.

Thinking inside the square: • Financial services = Fire/general + Risk + Investments + Accounting • Marketing = Advertising + Printer + Web development + Direct Marketing Companies + Copywriters • Gifts = Flowers + Chocolates • Computers = Hardware + Software + Consultants Do think outside the square: • Think about your kids’ school. Many of the parents will be professionals. • Real estate agents – think of their contacts for insurance, architects, investors, etc. • Probus clubs • Clubs (RSA’s). Bowls. Tennis clubs. A language school. A local university with night classes. Speciality clothing stores. Sports clubs.

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In the current environment of slashed budgets preparing a superior proposal is more important than ever.

Here are two strategies that should significantly increase your success.

1. Them. Not You

Almost every piece of marketing material, proposal, sales presentation that I see has the wrong I/You ratio.  Your prospects care solely about themselves. Yet most marketing material focuses on how wonderful ‘we’ are. How great we do. Send this chest thumping guerrilla marketing philosophy packing. Replace it with a customer focused what’s in it for them strategy. How will it make them more successful? How will it make them happier? How will it make them more money?

2. Quantify.

Money talks. Fluff walks.

Put a dollar value on how they’ll benefit. Measure their rate of return.

This exercise is easier than you might think. Will your product/service save them time? Put a value on it by estimating how much time it will save per annum multiplied by the value of that person’s time (their wage per hour, salary). You can reduce stress? Does that lead to happier employees which helps increase turnover? You can quantify the recruitment costs saved along with the productivity continuum.

Help them make more sales or increase turnover?  Take the average value of one sale (you can even factor in the life time value of that one new client) multiplied by the number of new ones expected.

You can get the base information any number of ways. Research on the Internet. Their Competitors. Annual reports. Talk to HR professionals about salary levels. Colleagues in that industry. Allies within that company.

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Here’s the opening line from the main paragraph a marketing mailer with a CD enclosed “we’ve sent you our corporate profile on a CD as an illustration of how we put information on CD’s….”

Then these 6 bullet points of info on the printed mailer:

1. Learn more about ‘xxx’ and our culture
2. See what we do for our clients and what they think about us
3. Understand the thinking behind the company
4. Hear what our staff have to say about ‘xxx’
5. Connect to hot links that take you to the quick quotes
6. Discover what makes ‘xxx’ so different.

Whoever put this together for them, along with whoever approved it should be shot! The thing is I, the potential customer, really don’t care about their culture, thinking, staff patting themselves on the back. I have very little spare time so the only inducement that would get me to view it is what’s it to me and my problems they can solve.  Where is the how I’ll save time, how I’ll save money, how I’ll impress my clients…….

Please, before you print anything over the next few months, before you write your next newsletter, before you send anything out – put your customers shoes on.

1. Have you eliminated the I’s, we’s?
2. Is it chock full of benefits to them?
3. Is it of interest to them?
4. Is it glorifying you and if so will they care?

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Your customers have learned that 98% of all surprises in business are bad. Help them avoid being surprised by bad news by keeping them informed.

Follow-up on problems
It takes thought, time and effort to keep your customers informed about your progress but it is well worth it. That phone call, email or brief note lets them know you care. They will appreciate that and reward you with extra business and perhaps even referrals.

When taking the customer’s order or booking in their job, ask them when they would like to hear from you. Have a place set up in your diary to record this information. But make sure you get back to them when you say you will.

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