Over my 25 year career I’ve been fortunate to be the recipient of great sales and business training.  My library has over 60 books written by the best business experts, consultants and trainers.  Even though I’ve read them all, I consistently re-read those that pertain to specific disciplines I’m involved with in helping my clients.

One of the best is “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business”, written by Ram Charan.  Ram has written or co-authored 7 books and I’ve read several.  In “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business”, Ram outlines 10 tools of profitable revenue growth.  “Growth is a creative act, but it is also a social process that is disciplined and links together the moving parts of an organization to achieve a consistent increase in revenues.”

The tools for growth beg a thought process that requires commitment, dedication and a desire to win.

What are you doing to help your customer?
In every customer interaction, how well do your people extract information about customer needs?
How does that information get shared internally?
Is your focus on cost cutting at the expense of revenue growth?
Are you focused solely on one big idea or multiple small ideas?
Can you improve productivity and increase revenue at the same time?

Ten Tools
1.  Is revenue growth part of everyone’s business every day?
2.  Work to hit more singles and doubles, not just home runs.
3.  Seek good growth and avoid bad growth.
4.  Dispel the myths that inhibit both people and organizations from growing.
5.  Turn the idea of productivity on its head by increasing revenue productivity.
6.  Develop and implement a growth budget.
7.  Beef up upstream marketing.
8.  Understand how to do effective cross-selling (or value/solutions selling).
9.  Create a social engine to accelerate revenue growth.
10.  Operationalize innovation by converting ideas into revenue growth.

The implications in Ram’s Ten Tools clearly indicate the need for an open company culture, the importance of teamwork, communications and the overall need for training.

The chapters in “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business” are filled with practical, easy to understand perspectives on how you can create your own high performance customer development strategy.

From time to time, we’re struck by the loss of someone close to us.  Yesterday a friend of mine passed into eternal life.  Gregg and I got to know each other through business and became friends.  That’s the kind of guy Gregg was.  He had great vision, great dreams and was a true entrepreneur.  He had great energy, an unending smile and great spirit, always.  I never saw him down, even when he faced challenges.

He was a never-ending positive force.  He cared for people, literally in his volunteer work as an EMT.  He loved golf and the freedom that being an entrepreneur provides.

He was a maverick.  Stepping up, making big decisions and forging relationships that required guts.   I’ll miss Gregg.  I’ll also keep his spirit alive.  I’ll take what I learned from him and I’ll internalize his spirit and I’ll share the things I know made Gregg one of the greatest men I’ve known.  This is what I call the Circle of Life.

So today I share with you Gregg’s finest qualities.  Take inventory of his greatness and make these qualities part of your life and share them with others.

Gregg was a great family man.
Gregg was a great husband and father.
Gregg was a vibrant and positive spirit always.
Gregg always had a smile.
Gregg lived his life to help others always.
Gregg was a visionary.
Gregg was fair.
Gregg was trusting.
Gregg appreciated quality and knew quality when he saw it.
Gregg was fun.
Gregg lived life with passion.

I will miss Gregg in person, but I will keep his spirit alive and share his greatness with others.  Celebrate Gregg’s life by helping others capture the quality that Gregg lived every day.  Here’s to you Gregg!

Maintaining high levels of communication with your team is essential to creating the energy necessary to achieve momentum through innovation.  Company information needs to flow from person to person and top to bottom across all internal company operations.  From financial updates to in-field sales reports and market observations, a steady flow of information in real time creates the opportunity for adapting and shifting of products and service offerings based on market demand and conditions.  This open communications creates conversations between employees on new actions that need to be taken to support the various company functions and meet client needs.  The actions that result create momentum and innovation.

Sooner or later in the life of every salesperson the infamous price objection will rear its ugly head.  The reality is that buyers want to spend as little as possible.  Salespeople want to maintain high maintained margin and don’t want to be viewed as a commodity for which there is no customer loyalty.

So how can you differentiate yourself from the competition and sell your products and services at higher prices?  The answer is:  Add value and service. But before that you have to:

Do your homework. Make sure that you know your product, your market, your competition and the needs of your prospect

That means asking your prospects open ended questions and listening to their responses.  Develop a list of 10-15 questions to get to the root of their needs.  While, on the surface, price may be an objection, it may be overcome by a cast iron guarantee or value added services and support options.

For example, you sell apples for 79 cents each and the store (vendor) down the road sells them for 75 cents. The only difference aside from the price of the apples is that you have a return policy.  If the customer buys an apple from the store down the road to save a couple of pennies and gets a rotten apple, they’re stuck with it.  If they buy the apple from you they can get a new one.  It’s a matter of developing a comfort level.

When selling higher-margin products, you need to educate prospects about what they’re getting for their money and why it’s in their best interest to do business with you.

An additional way to overcome a price objection is to surround the account and become a consultative salesperson.  In other words if a customer has needs that are beyond your capacity to deliver, have the courage to go the extra mile and partner with outside non-competitive sources that can help you get the job done for them.

Remember:  Customers don’t care how much you know until you show them how much you care.

William F. Kendy – TBS