Reasons for NOT buying

You and your salespeople can come up with lots of reasons your prospect should buy your stuff pretty easily – that’s what you talk about all day, and tell about in your marketing.  But what you also need to be great at is identifying the customers’ reasons for NOT buying and address them.  

There are common reasons they would not buy, and these should be addressed in your marketing and sales materials, with financing, in R&D by changing your offering, and with sales training.  

There are a thousand “custom” reasons for not buying, too; it seems each individual customer has a new one.  These can only be uncovered and addressed with a skilled salesperson who is looking and listening for them, and asking the right questions to bring them out, so they may be skillfully addressed.  Canned presentations can miss them.

How good are your salespeople at uncovering “reasons for NOT buying” and dealing with them?  My guess is that if they weren’t very good, you don’t know it because you aren’t out there with them on sales calls – and that’s a problem.

Help you to help me

Entrepreneurs make the world a better place by pursuing their own interests.  They learn that to be successful you must help other people with their interests.  When people voluntarily do business with you, they aren’t trying to help you, they are helping themselves.

By learning how and doing what you must to build a successful business, we are all better off.

Thank you.

Leadership Expert Bias

If a leader is from the production side of things, they will focus heavily on production when they become leader of it all.  If they are from the sales or marketing or R&D or accounting side of things, they will focus more on that which they know best – and even avoid functions that are foreign to them.  

What function is the MOST important key area for your company to grow?  No matter what area you are from, take it on. Become an expert – a real expert in that area.  Once you know what you are doing, then you can build a team and lead it to success in that area – which means success of the overall organization.

You may be an expert.  It’s time to become the right kind of expert.

Leading by example

Your people are watching you SHOW your commitment.  

What do they see?

Leadership Solvent, or Glue?

Teams of people contain a lot of different personalities.  These personalities may jive, clash, grind, work, not work, be compatible or incompatible in different situations and in different combinations.  It’s just what happens when you put a bunch of egotistical people together; and we are all egotistic.

I know some companies that are always losing people.  I know others where high performance people and their supporters stay for a long time – even forever.  Why?  It’s the leader.  The leader needs to be the glue that holds it all together by not treating people all the same – but by treating them the way they NEED and WANT to be treated to stay happy.  Listening, fairness, firmness, honesty, and compromise in the face of human manufactured emotional drama is what’s needed.

Are you the glue, or the solvent?

The courage to be profitable

Knowing where your company’s money is going and why it’s all getting spent before it hits the bottom line is one thing.  A must.  But then having the guts to do what is necessary so you can make a profit – including stepping out of your comfort zone is another.

Do you have the courage to make a profit?

Your biggest problem

What is your biggest problem?  If we accept the fact that we caused everything in our business to happen, then we can move forward and make it better.

Albert Einstein said “you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it”.  You must think different about your biggest problem; and if you can’t, get someone else can do that different thinking for you.

What do your customers think?

You need to know this.  You will be a misguided leader to the degree that there is a difference in what you think your customers think and what they really think.

So, what do they really think?

Find out.

“I didn’t deserve to be successful”

I have lots of businesses now.  With seasonal challenges in some, they are all doing well now.  But it wasn’t always that way.  I have started businesses over the last 30 years that failed.  The ones I have now, I struggled with at first.  I could have quit – and maybe many would have when faced with the challenges I had.  Heck, I did wisely quit some years ago in favor of something else.

Looking back at the various levels of success in various businesses at various times in their history, and thinkiing about when I was struggling – I can tell you that I wasn’t successful at that business at that time because I didn’t deserve to be.  At that time -I just wasn’t that good at it – and neither was my team.  We were getting what we deserved at the time from the marketplace. 

When we got better, our results did too.  

I’d expect it’s about the same with you and your business.

“Total Owner Compensation”

If you add up your salary, any bonuses, profit left over at the end of the year, the value of your car, the value of stuff emplyees did for you personally, your family cars or cell phones – all that – how much is your total owner compensation?  

What percentage of your total annual business income is that?