I don’t want to get political on this blog but I have been struck by the remarkable surge in support for Nick Clegg of the Social Democrat Party in the election campaign and the lessons therein for us all.

Depending on which poll you look at, the Liberal Democrats in many cases have gone from third to first in what was supposed to be a “two-horse race”. All as a direct result of Mr Clegg’s appearance on the televised leaders’ debate last week.

Was this transformation in fortunes as a result of WHAT Clegg said? I have asked plenty of intelligent people and most still have trouble distinguishing the policies of all three front-runners. So that can’t be it.

Was it HOW he said it? Certainly his manner, confidence and Teflon attitude to the jibes of Cameron and Brown have not hurt his image.

I actually think it was the mere fact of his appearance that was sufficient to apparently sway the millions of voters. I was more surprised than most by the explosion in popularity because I have followed with interest Clegg’s rise and rise. I have read, listened and watched several interviews with him and he is clearly intelligent and able to capture the mood of the nation. But the absence until now of exposure for him compared to the other two party leaders has been striking.

Now that millions of people feel they know Mr Clegg almost as well as Mr Brown and Mr Cameron, this familiarity makes them more comfortable considering the Liberal Democrats as a serious contender in the election. Previously they had not, in my view. It is almost as if they were looking for a “proper” party to vote for that was not Labour or Conservative and now they have it.

This is why the most successful salespeople make sure they build their personal brand. They allow people to get to know them easily. They appear “ubiquitous”. They may be that ever-present networker, that seems to waste so much time on their blogging and tweeting and does the pointless videos. But it is that very individual that is breeding familiarity with their cheerleaders and prospects.

People buy from people they like. If they don’t know you, the can’t know to like you. If they don’t know you, it is almost irrelevant how good is your product or service.

Learn from Mr Clegg and get yourself seen in the same light and environment as your larger competitors. From that exposure,you have a springboard to sell your wares.

Trendwatching.com has spotted what it believes to be a new trend – that of ‘sellsumers’. In essence, consumers are increasingly starting to sell or rent various skills, services and assets. From making money in their spare time via Google adverts to renting out parking spaces, people are becoming every more enterprising.

In essence, most of these novel services have become possible as a result of the Internet. We can now reach out many more people, at negligible cost and do it instantaneously. Plus the new services allow us to be found via sophisticated search mechanisms.

Part of me was a little annoyed to see the term in the first paragraph include the word “sell”. Because the various services outlined are marketing, not selling.

To me the difference between selling is this: you put up a stall in the market, you put up great signs, you get the pricing right, you choose your pitch and decide what to sell: that is marketing. Spotting casual browsers, engaging people who squeeze your product, chatting with punters that were going to walk by and charming people into parting with their money: that is selling.

But I guess “marketsumers” does not work quite so well as a term.

And then I realised that the sellsumer term at least makes the concept of selling more palatable, at least in the UK.

I may have spotted another trend: a lot of marketing is increasingly being called selling. If that is the case, and the general population are getting less squeamish about the concept of selling, then I am all for it.

For more about sellsumers, have a look at http://bit.ly/a4VZkW

We have been speaking to a number of clients and progress that have a simple answer when we ask them: “Who is your ideal client?”. “Anyone that spends money with us” is the often serious and considered responses.

I attend several business groups where we train our fellow members on what to look for when seeking leads to pass to us. The mantra at all of them is “be specific”.

Time and time again you see a handful of attendees at these meetings complain that they don’t get any quality referrals. And they are consistently the same people who are never specific. When asked what business they want leads into, this group of underper-formers begins their pitch with “Anyone that…” or “You already know what we do..”. Conversely, those that seem to get the most business (not, I don’t say leads but actually refer to clients won) are those that seem almost super-specific.

I believe the reason that most of these under-achievers are not specific, is because they have never taken the time to analyse where their best business comes from. They are not ignorant people and they are not lazy. I think they have just never been convinced of the need to analyse and articulate their best customers.

Imagine your company was to conduct an advertising campaign. Would you not think firstly in which magazines you might book the ads? And then, would you not say things in that advert that appealed to its readers? But how do you get to this position first? You analyse what customers you want to attract, of course!

Have a look at the customers that:
- spend the most with you
- are the least trouble to manage
- tell you how much they appreciate your business
- refer you to other clients
- generate the best net margin

And you can start to narrow down your ideal clients. Flesh out this description, make it real. Then work out where they are all hiding and focus your selling attention on these prospects.

I have been in property investment for some years now as well as running the training company and have watched as the market lurched from boom to bust. And I have marvelled how this sector seems to foster the best and worst in sales techniques.

I was struck by the recent news that 40 of the biggest house building companies in the UK have been fined nearly £130m for rigging the market. In effect, whenever one of them bid on a contract, they discussed the price with the others in order to push up how much the buyer paid.

Anyone who has had to deal with local builders will know that familiar sound of air being sucked between teeth and the inevitable comments about a job costing more than they thought! So, frankly, Balfour Beatty and the others were simply doing this on a huge scale.

Now contrast that with the concept of buying houses using back-to-back (or sandwich) lease options. Now I don’t intend to turn this into a property seminar so it is enough to say that this is a new way of helping sellers to get the price they want for a house, letting a buyer get a house and to make money as an intermediary. Everybody wins. The exact opposite of the house builders’ game of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’ as described above.

We all know the market is tight for a lot of products and services. This can be the mother of invention for new ways for you to sell your company and its wares. Alongside improving your existing routes to market, why not explore other ways you can help buyers to buy?

If yours is a high value capital good, maybe buyers just can’t get the cash to buy it. But they desperately want it. So could you find some way of letting them borrow it and pay for it over time? Maybe let them share with you a proportion of the cost saving or revenue generated? Alternatively, can you bring two different customers together and your product or service sits in the middle?

Try a little lateral thinking, in the style of Edward de Bono. Remember the saying “If you do what everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets”.

Using some imagination costs nothing. Taking a risk might, but then again you might unearth another way to sell that will tide you through the recession and beyond. Build on what you have got and you might find the foundation of more stable sales.

One of my favourite idioms is “a rising tide raises all ships”. Together we can achieve so much more than alone. However, a lot of sales people tend to be less instinctively collaborative and are more likely to be self-motivated and self-absorbed.

When times get tough, the salesman will tend to be even more inward-looking. But this is the very time to summon the reserve troops, to look to additional ways of finding leads and to building partnerships. After all, a lot of sales people have fewer leads to chase and more time to develop the pipeline.

The wise sales organisation is building partnerships now that will gradually yield business during the quiet times and be a springboard when the recover comes.

Strategic
You need to start working with what is left of your marketing department and be thinking of ways to attract the right types of prospects.

Maybe you could even be collaborating with companies that in the past used to be competitors. Recent episode of Nature’s Great Events showed dolphins and sharks working together to round up a school of tasty fish. Normally the sharks would be eating the dolphins not working with them. But tough times demand different solutions.

Tactical
Almost all my contacts are reporting that prospects are becoming increasingly difficult to contact. They are less likely to take your call and more likely to be rude if they do. So we need to sprinkle crumbs on the lake to attract the ducks, not throw great loaves.

If you contact lapsed or past customers then make sure you have a clear reason to do so. A reason that benefits them. This may be looking for articles in your contacts’ trade magazines and forwarding these to them. Or maybe you have learnt some useful technical tips that can enhance their business. Don’t worry about whether you can sell to them just yet.

Possibly you can go to your marketing specialists and come up with ideas and offer your time to them. You could organise a seminar on a hot topic, a roadshow or find an exhibition you can attend. There is a host of creative ways you can generate leads, rather than just doing more regular prospecting and trying to close harder.

A recent report by consultancy DDI interviewed 2700 corporate buyers and employees and came up with one statistic that jumped out for me: 72 percent of buyers rated the internet as their first source of information. However, the conclusion of the report was as controversial as the statistic is unsurprising – that the internet allows buyers to “cut out the middleman”.

The presumption is that the salesperson is the middleman. Simply dead weight, a third wheel, a chocolate teapot. Frankly, if that is all the salesperson is being regarded as, then they SHOULD be cut out.

The salesperson’s role is often seen as redundant and unnecessary by so many buyers. And sometimes they are right – bad salespeople should be eliminated from the marketing process and order-taking should be left to someone else.

STRATEGIC
What value are your sales team adding to the transaction? Are they order takers with additional responsibilities, but they are not fulfilling that extra obligation? Or are they “trusted third parties” to prospects and buyers: valued consultants that make sure buyers get the right product each time.

Sales people who believe their role is simply to “close” the deal are order takers. Great salespeople welcome the internet as a tool to educate and empower prospects.

It means that thesedays buyers have a lot of information at their finger tips. But few consumers are able to make the comparisons and come up with the right decision with all this ammunition. The great salesperson can guide them to the right purchase and hopefully this is to buy THEIR product. Or not to buy the product this time if it is not right for prospect.

TACTICAL
One of the most powerful ways a salesperson can build trust is correctly and honestly to tell the prospect that the salesperson’s product is not the right one. At this time. But it may be in the future.

Right now I am looking to upgrade my mobile phone. John represents the 3 network asked the right questions, displayed his knowledge and understanding and concluded that the current handset range did not provide what my company wanted. In so doing, he recommended Jane from a totally different company that COULD provide an appropriate Windows Mobile handset. And Jane is being equally as helpful as John.

We may never know what John’s sales manager thinks of this but one thing is for sure: I have kept John’s details and know I will recommend him as a scrupulous and professional mobile phone contact. He did not make the sale this time but spread £1000s of goodwill. And who knows how much money he might make in the future because he DIDN’T force the sale this time.

Are you building up a bank account of goodwill by being a dependable and honest consultant? Avoid the pressure for the quick sell and you will build up a loyal customer base PLUS you will go a little way to helping lend the lie to the DDI consultancy report conclusions and salespeople being just middlemen.

We have had some great feedback about our blog and I have been surprised how many people dip into it. As a result of some of the comments, I realised that we are trying to be all things to all people. That we have as many senior sales managers and directors/business owners that read it as executive sales people. And your needs are different. So, from now on, we will have each blog in two sections Strategic (for those managing people) and Tactical (for those selling). Please let me know what you think about the change! And now to the subject of today’s article…

I recent spent 3 days with a client on an exhibition stand up at the NEC in Birmingham and was struck by the differences in the way we were using the space and the way that our neighbours were spending their investment.

STRATEGIC
If I had £1 for every time a contact told me that selling at exhibitions was a waste of time I would be a millionaire…I often think. Time and again, this belief stems from a simple deficiency – lack of preparation.

I will assume, albeit dangerously, that you have researched the market and decided on the “right” event. You know the right prospects will be there and you have decided that, instead of attending in order to build brand awareness, you are there to get customers.

Everyone on the stand needs to be focussed on one thing: finding prospects. Note that I do not say “selling”. Visitors to business exhibitions are rarely ready to be sold to. They are just “tyre kicking”; researching.

For this reason, you need to first engage as many people as possible to sift out the serious contacts. It is a numbers game. So the stand needs to have a competition, pretty people, images and logos that grab attention and is manned by tenacious energetic staff that will engage passers by.

And then you need to make sure you have the forms and questions that lead the attendee to either reveal their need, or reveal to you whether they are a prospect.

After that, it is all about your follow up. You have captured their details, your team has set aside time in your diaries for when you get back. You will then devote a couple of days to decide who you want to contact and then you contact them. Sounds simple. But why were so many of our neighbours at the recent event NOT doing it?

TACTICAL
Spending time at exhibitions is a great way to fill your pipeline. Or it can be a fantastic and exhausting waste of time. You can choose.

The temptation is to have nice chats with visitors, relax with a cup of coffee, get very drunk in the evenings and chat/flirt with other exhibitors. This attitude can seriously damage your wealth.

Firstly, it is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to look after your body. Don’t drink coffee or tea at all, because it dehydrates you. Do have a bottle of water handy (kept out of view) and sip regularly. This stops your breath smelling (don’t be surprised if you can’t retain visitors on your stand as a result!) and keeps your energy up. Have a light breakfast and lunch and graze throughout the day on non-sugary foods.

And resist the urge to have more than a couple of evening alcoholic drinks if you are on the stand the next day. Difficult as such temperance might be, you will look better for it and your stamina for standing for six hours will be massively increased. Any time you are off the stand recovering, or on the stand looking like a dogs breakfast you won’t be generating leads for yourself!

I recently received a reminder how great brands stay great with a story about an Apple experience. No, not a trip to the greengrocer but the producer of iconic Mac computers, iPod and iPhone.

The point is very much how customer service quality reinforces consumers’ demand for a brand. Companies that we work with so often see customer service in isolation from sales, which we at A&P believe to be wrong.

To know how wrong is this stance, you need only speak to any frustrated salesperson that might recognise this scenario: poor sales support has led to a demand for a refund that in turn leads to a claw-back on commission.

We call it congruence – brand, service, design, sales, product, etc all sharing the same values.

With Apple it is about quality of delivery. Mac, iPhones, iPods are nowhere near the cheapest in their respective markets. So it is not about price. Instead customers always rave about how easy they are to use, how well designed they are and how excellent is the overall “user experience”.

In recent years Apple has opened large retail stores in landmark locations. And it would have been easy to let these just be another Currys or Wal-Mart and attempt to push volume. But that is not the Apple approach. They remain congruent.

The presenter I watched, Phil Parr of design consultancy TwentyFive described how he needed a £10 adaptor for his projector. His first reaction upon entering the store was concern that there we no bulging shelves that might stock his dongle. There were just glass cabinets and shelves with working samples. So he approached one of the many clearly-uniformed staff.

The sales assistant was immediately reassuring, led Phil to the accessories area, fetched the item (knowing immediately what was required and where it was stocked) and handed it to him with a smile.

Rather than then directing Phil to a queue of people at a checkout, he was able to take the credit card and use a wireless handheld card scanner (can you see the congruency with the Apple brand here?!) to accept the payment. And then - icing on the cake - the assistant asked if the customer was a “member” (which they were) and then arranged for the receipt to be EMAILED to the customer. Now THAT is what I call customer service!

Of course, this is all well and good but does it really make a difference to sales? Overlooking the glowing praise for Apple that 20 people in the audience observed, Phil was explicit: “I will definitely now go back to that store to see what else they sell”, he said. And he is relatively new to the Apple brand. Certainly got me thinking about what I do when I replace my office PCs…..

If new is so scary, why do we crave it? We all want to go and see the latest film, know the latest management techniques, test-drive the latest Audi model or meet our friend’s new partner. But when it comes to doing things differently in our jobs, we seem to run a mile.

I noticed this contrast when in the same week I was training a group of managers and a few days later I attended a half day conference on innovation. Notably three of the 12 in the training group really welcomed all the new ideas we covered. But the remainder ranged from cool to plain obstructive when it came to looking at new ways of working.

A business associate of mine calls it TtWhADI (“twaddy”) – ‘That’s the way we have always done it’. As the old aphorism goes, if you always do what you have always done then you will always get what you have always got.

From observation, those hungry for new sales techniques are the ones that often are the best salespeople. They understand that a new way of working may not necessarily be BETTER than the old way. But it is certainly worth a try. They certainly do not subscribe to TtWhADI.

Conversely, the delegates that want to stick to the old ways, and the businesses that do not seek new ways of doing things – constantly – are the ones that atrophy. Gradually the energetic, curious and hungry individuals and businesses will overtake the dinosaurs. They surpass those that fail to evolve. A business Darwinism, if you will.

New sales ideas are everywhere. We can find them:
Reading trade magazines
Attending conferences in our sector and associated sectors
Brainstorming with other businesspeople at networking events
Reading bulletin boards and online forums
Watching current affairs programmes
Having lunch with people in our sector that we respect

The reality is that the majority of sales ideas are like celluloid. There is a lot more film on the cutting room floor after a movie has been edited than is in the final reel. But you need all that waste to find the quality result.

I have just had an invoice from another business group of which we are members and I am being force to make hard decisions on renewal by my accountant. A few months ago he said to me “what are all these memberships you are paying for? Do you ever get any business from them?”. What a stupid question I thought, of course I do.

Hang on a minute I thought. Am I REALLY getting business from this membership or that membership? Am I being fooled into thinking that all that activity is the same as results? In fact, this is what I frequently tell delegates – “don’t mistake action for results”.

So I won’t be renewing that membership. In fact, what I have decided to do is to devote more time to more informal networks. For I have discovered it is THESE that are generating money for me.

So why not evaluate your memberships of networking groups if you have several? Analyse them to see which actually generated money. If they did not, consider leaving them. Better to devote time to cold calling or setting up your own group or having lunch with a symbiotic contact. Not only will you feel less obliged, your accountant might not ask you any difficult questions about the membership fees!