How often do you hear...

"It's Not In The Budget."

...from prospects?

Depending on what you sell, you may hear "It's Not In The Budget" a lot. For example, at The Brooks Group, we get called when a CEO or sales executive realizes that they have a sales force that is under-performing or are in need of help generating sales. That's almost always something that wasn't planned for…or at least not budgeted for.

The result? You guessed it. We hear: “It’s not something we budgeted for this year.” The real, final result? “I’m glad we looked into it. We’ll consider it for next year’s budget.” The bottom-line to salespeople? A lost sale, wasted time, no income and, at best, a prospect for next year.

Let’s look at some strategies that can help you deal with this all too common scenario. Here they are:

• Enter accounts at the most senior levels only. That's the level where budget revisions or additions occur. It's the level where
  strategy is developed and emergency purchases made for products or services that fall into areas that have been unforeseen. Entering at a lower level only means that these people will generally have to go to a senior level person to have the funds approved anyway. So, go there first. And go there yourself!
• Conduct sufficient due diligence in your pre-call planning activity. Discover what items are – and are not – usually included in budgets. In reality, you should know, based on what you sell, if your type of product or service is usually budgeted for.  You should also know the budget cycle, planning times, policy for disposing of excess funds, who controls what parts of the budget process and more.
• Become adept at asking questions that will illuminate budget issues very early in the sales process. Asking the following types of questions is often very helpful:

“How much have you set aside for this?”

“How do you normally handle this type of purchase at this time of the year?”

“Who else, other than you, has to approve this type of expenditure?”

The answers to these questions will help you a great deal to craft – and deliver - your presentation in such a way that you will know precisely how to proceed.

While I'm at it, here are six tactical ways to deal with the objection.

• Ask, "How have you found ways to fund this type of project before?"
• Or suggest, “We encounter this quite often due to the nature of our product. Let me suggest how other organizations have found ways to handle it...”
• Or ask, “What are some other budget areas that support this endeavor…let’s examine some ways we could work with them to help fund this activity.”
• Or ask, “How much money have you set aside that looks like it may not be used…are there ways we could access those funds to start this project?”
• Or suggest, “Let’s look at a way we could get started and let’s take a look at some ways we can arrange for full payment to be made from next year’s budget.”
• Or say, “Let’s examine next year’s budget and see if there is a way we could either (a) borrow against it this year or (b) be sure it is properly budgeted for next year so this doesn’t happen again."
• Or suggest, “Are there ways we can access next year’s budget now?”

All of this aside, the initial advice is still the best. Enter each account at the very highest level possible. Always remember, the more senior level you are dealing with, issues like funding, budget revision and allocation are secondary to the value of your offering. At lower levels, tactical issues and political realities sometimes override the long-term gains that can be obtained through acquiring your product or service.

Always remember, if selling was easy everyone would be successful at it. Guaranteeing that your prospect has the funds to pay for your product or service is one way to ensure you’ll be successful too. Sales is all about service – but it’s also all about being paid for what you deliver.

@JebBrooks

Here's a magic formula:

> as trust in you and
> confidence in the value of what you're offering rises,
> fear of buying disappears.

I'd like to say a few things about building confidence in the value of what you're offering...

Price objections occur when you haven't built enough value for what you're offering in the minds of your prospects. However, that shouldn't be a problem because YOU can always make your product or service more valuable. Here are 9 ways to differentiate your offering in order to defeat price objections...

1. Providing expert advice and a high level of professionalism. Lots of consulting organizations, accounting firms, and medical professionals are paid a tidy sum for the level of advice that they provide. However, for you as a sales professional, to provide value, you need to understand that you have to provide a level of advice that is significantly higher, more sophisticated and more valuable than that of your competition. That means you've got to develop a higher level of sophistication, wisdom, and understanding about what you do.
2. Bundling and packaging.  This extends beyond the way your product or service looks. It's also about building desirable packages or purchasing levels. You might even offer a series of added benefits that are significant in value. In fact these "added benefits" might be a whole lot more valuable than the product by itself.
3. Service levels. Is it possible for you to differentiate yourself by adding different levels of service based on someone’s size, frequency, or amount of purchase? For example, you may want to have gold, platinum, or silver levels of service that people qualify for (or are willing to pay for).
4. Transition and education. As new customers come on stream with your organization, you may want to provide action or transition teams to help them to be better able to use the products or services you've sold them. By the same token, the more education they have related to those products or services the more capable they’ll be at using them. What does that mean? Happy, satisfied customers who eagerly buy more.
5. Recognition and reward levels. This is different than "frequent buyer programs" in that, with this concept, you actually recognize clients or customers for their ability to use your product or service. I'm sure you've got some customers who are maximizing the potential of your offering. Why not recognize them for being outstanding customers? Several years ago, we incorporated a "Hall of Fame" into our newsletter. We used it to recognize some of our best clients. We literally had people calling to find out how they could be recognized! It's a fantastic way to utilize good relationships and good will.
6. Qualitative preference. Based upon someone’s level of purchase, involvement or interaction, you provide higher quality of product, perhaps a more sophisticated level of service, dedicated personnel, dedicated phone lines, fax lines, or the like, that gives them a greater opportunity to be treated better than a run-of-the-mill customer.
7. Dedicated personnel. This works particularly well if you have a technical product or service or one that requires extensive support. It is not difficult to understand that the more someone is familiar with another customer’s account, products, machinery, equipment or way of doing business, the easier it is to do business with them. In this scenario, you can simply assign dedicated account people to handle your customer’s accounts personally.
8. Speed of service or delivery. One of the ways to differentiate yourself is to guarantee some sort of on time or faster delivery. It is very well known that on time delivery is a key component for charging full or maximum pricing. It is also a component as it relates to providing value-added services and products.
   
9. Insider information. This is very common when people are selling information related to technical products, new and innovative products, or anything related to information or time specific data. Utilizing this process you may want to consider a regular newsletter (electronic or printed) that updates customers on a regular basis as it relates to very key and important information that they need to have.

Add value to your day-to-day sales activity with these nine ideas. They require creativity, innovation and a willingness to out-work your competition. But they'll pay off!

We have been training salespeople on dealing with objections for more than thirty years. We continue that tradition in all of our sales training programs.

For more articles like this, sign up for our free monthly newsletter:

What keeps sales managers, executives and business owners up at night? Bennett Zucker seems to have a pretty good idea:

1. Unsold and undersold inventory.
2. Sales productivity.
3. Operational inefficiency.

Zucker's expertise is in the advertising industry but that list of woes is probably universal. His prescription for the advertising community is also one that applies to nearly every business:

We need better sales training in the basics, that's for sure: Are there tools that can help us uncover the value, bring more potential buyers to the table, and get them on board easily?

The most obvious tool that springs to mind is questions. Questions are a powerful way to uncover value. They can also help you bring potential buyers to the table and get them on board. Questions are vital at every stage of the sale -- from prospecting all the way to negotiation. One of the smartest things you can do as a sales manager is teach your team to rely on thoughtful questioning as their chief selling strategy.

This month's free email IMPACT Newsletter offers some specific suggestions for using three types of questions to get to the heart of what your prospect wants.

Thanks for participating!

Bill talks about how you can benefit from the changing behaviors of today's customers.

Download audio file (053-Benefit_Changing.mp3)
Click the green play button above to play the audio

This and other podcasts are available to download at itunes to help your selling career. If you have never used itunes and need help to download and install it click here for a tutorial.

You can click the "itunes" icon on the sidebar to take you directly to our podcast site.

[ratings]

Bill Brooks, founder and CEO of The Brooks Group speaks about how to handle price pressure from prospects and offers some proven strategies that will help you sell value and get out of the deadly price-cutting race for good. This presentation was held at the historic Carolina Theater located in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina on December 5th, 2003.

We've taken the principles of this presentation and built a training seminar designed to teach you the specific techniques that you need to stand firm and get your price without losing the sale -- even when you're facing intense price pressure. Gain the skills and the knowledge that will make full-price / full-margin selling a reality at your organization. Click here to learn more about this practical seminar on June 15th Or contact us for more information about getting a customized version of this program for your sales team.

[ratings]

When you build a national or international business over a 25 year period, you travel a lot. Millions of frequent flyer miles, thousands of flights, hundreds of lost bags and endless hours of delays are part of the story – and your life.

But the bright side of that experience for me was sitting beside such well-known people as Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, John Unitas, Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, professional wrestlers, bull riders and everything in between. Music, film and other related celebrities were there too – Paul Newman, Red Buttons, Loretta Swit, Rod Steiger, Dave Robertson, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Patti LaBelle – the list goes on and on.

What did I learn? People are people – no matter who they are. The best way to have someone be interested in you is for you to be interested in them. Period.

The real lesson? If you do something often enough (like fly), you’ll see lots and lots of things if you keep your eyes open. Here’s the real story. Stay the course and build a business requiring travel you need to have:

• Physical stamina
• An understanding spouse or significant other
• Resiliency to rebound from setbacks, delays and problems
• Patience to deal with travel problems
• A tactical mind that enables you to switch plans, planes and priorities on a dime
• The capacity to deal with stress (and time zones)

Plus…the ability to identify the rich and famous without bothering them. It’s kind of like dealing with high level prospects, isn’t it?

Submitted by:
[ratings]

Bill takes you step by step to create you own zero resistance selling.

Download audio file (034-8_Steps_Zero_Resistance_Selling.mp3)
Click the green play button above to play the audio

This and other podcasts are available to download at itunes to help your selling career. If you have never used itunes and need help to download and install it click here for a tutorial.

You can click the "itunes" icon on the sidebar to take you directly to our podcast site.

Learn how to use these tips to help manage your time more effectively.

Download audio file (026-Overcoming_Objections.mp3)
Click the green play button above to play the audio

This and other podcasts are available to download at itunes to help your selling career. If you have never used itunes and need help to download and install it click here for a tutorial.

You can click the "itunes" icon on the sidebar to take you directly to our podcast site.