Chris Daltorio from New Velocity joins me today to discuss sales. New Velocity is a sales and leadership development firm. They work with companies of all sizes. Chris likes to help companies grow by helping people become the superstar version of themselves.
As a small business owner, your passion alone is not enough. Having sales skills will be crucial to your success. Chris talks about working with NCIdea, an organization that provides grants to small businesses. By speaking with budding business owners, he found that even if they have an excellent product, it will not sell itself.
You can look at growing your sales skills or even outsource some of your sales efforts to help get your product to market. I mention a phrase that I heard from Lori Bruhns, “do what you do best, and delegate the rest”. Learn to outsource what you can even though you may feel that you can or need to do it yourself.
I mention a recent workshop that I did at the RTP Frontier where I spoke to small business owners about email marketing. Out of the 40 people that attended, about 30 have not started using email marketing yet, which made my presentation that much more important.
Question: How much time should be dedicated to sales for a small business owner?
Chris went over to his really cool light board to provide some great information. Make sure to check out the video version on Youtube.
Imagine a 5×5 grid with 5 time slots for Monday through Friday. This means that you have twenty-five 90 minute chunks to focus on high yield activities. They can be used for a variety of things, not just sales. Make sure to focus on your important activities. Take a look at your “chunks” and if you are not using enough of them correctly, you are wasting time. Business owners spend around 7 hours a week focused on sales. If that is you, make it count.
Chirs also created a visual with 4 quadrants, which he calls the Eisenhower Principle since he came up with it. It can also be called the urgent/important matrix.
- Quadrant 1 is what is urgent and important. These tasks take up the most of our time since they are important.
- Quadrant 2 are things that are not urgent but are important. For a small business owner, this would include sales, prospecting, and focusing on referrals.
- Quadrant 3 are items that are urgent, but not important. This would include handling deliveries, software glitches, and pop up meetings.
- Quadrant 4 items are neither urgent or important. This could include checking social media, fantasy sports. These are things that are not getting us closer to our goals.
When you say you do not have time, you should take a look at and reduce the amount of quadrant 3 and 4 items you work on. Make sure to work in chunks without distractions and also spend time working on more quadrant 1 and 2 items.
We move to changing habits to be able to work in 90-minute chunks. Chris says to start with one and then work up from there. He talks about M.I.T. (Most Important Tasks), where you should plan the 5 most important things at the end of the day that you need to do the next day. I talk about thinking about and brainstorming on tasks right before you go to bed. If you try to plan the same day, you will have too many influences and distractions injected into your planning.
As a small business owner, what does it mean to provide value?
Chris said that value is an overused term. He uses the example of Sharktank and the feedback that is provided on the show. Chris tells us that we need to look at our product or service through your customer’s lens. You need to really hone your message to provide value to the recipient rather than what you are proud of or think is valuable. Your customer will determine value.
Chris goes over his “value grid” that can be used for sales conversations. The grid has 4 components: mitigate risk, make money, cut costs, or escalate efficiencies. How would your offering align to one of those categories? Define content for one or more of those items.
Buy buttons were discussed next. There are three of them. They are; That it makes a business case, invokes emotion (makes sense) and contrast (before and after).
Chris provides some last minute thoughts. If you are not talented as sales, try to outsource it. Also, you should work on your weaknesses by reading books with topics in where you are weak to make improvements. learn more and enhance your skills. If you do the same thing over and over, you cannot say that you have x amount of years experience. It is one year of experience repeated over x years. Diversify yourself and your results.
Chris urges people to reach out to New Velocity to have a discussion about sales.
Website: www.mynewvelocity.com
[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry3zsveDZu8[/youtube]
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