It used to be people totally disconnected from their business lives during their summer vacation. No conference calls. No faxes. No email. No texts. Removed. Unplugged.

You have to disconnect and cool your jets to effectively recharge. We all need time to sit back, relax, and forget about our business world… for a bit. The thing is, the sales cycle doesn’t take a summer vacation. And this is a problem if you’re in sales.

Business development is an everyday, ongoing sales activity. Salespeople often ask me, “Joanne, when will the phone ring off the hook so I can stop prospecting?”

My answer: “When you find out, let me know.” Sales doesn’t take vacation .

I’m headed to the Jersey Shore for the best vacation imaginable—putting my toes in the sand and walking along the water’s edge in bare feet.

The Salesperson’s Summer Vacation: A Perfect Prospecting Combination

The beach. The sand. The subs—I’ll be eating more subs than I should. If you don’t know about “subs,” that’s short for submarine sandwich, and even though other locations try, nothing beats the taste of subs in Philadelphia or Jersey. (They say it’s the bread.)

I don’t envision spending my vacation talking business, but I meet people everywhere. Airplane conversations are either enlightening or boring. You have a captive audience for hours (or, worst case, you’re the captive). You meet people waiting for your luggage, at the rental car counter, in restaurants, eating a sub, and yes, on the beach.

Bottom line: Business development opportunities are everywhere, in the everyday path of our lives. Even on summer vacation. Everyone is part of your sales force.

Genuine Wins the Game. Still.

One of the best things about summer is that when we meet people, we are more relaxed; we’re our authentic selves. We talk to people with ease. And people, in general, are more receptive than when they’re not fussed up in a dress or suit, or in shoes that aren’t flip-flops.

There’s a lot of talk about how the world of sales has changed. Pundits rant about the “new normal,” “new realities,” “web 2.0,” etc. Truth? Nothing’s changed. People buy from people. Real salespeople remain experts, committed to their customers’ success. Real salespeople:

• Are authentic—they are comfortable in their own style
• Learn what the customer requires to boost his business
• Ask question after question until they uncover the real issues
• Contribute innovative ideas and engage in an exchange of information
• Propose a reliable solution to impact the client’s business
• Are willing to walk away if there is not a fit
• Readily refer other resources—even if it’s their competition

Business Development Never Stops

Whether this August newsletter finds you on holiday or diligently working in your office, your responsibility is to continually prospect for sales. If you’re not prospecting, your sales pipeline dries up. Top salespeople prospect continually. They don’t wait for the phone to ring with that perfect sales prospect.

So talk to everyone, learn about others, and share ideas—wherever you go. You never know, the person next to you might just be your next referral source or even your new client.

Claim 1: Social Media Has Changed Everything

Balderdash. Yes, we’ve got shiny new tools, and consumers can give more public, vocal feedback on your products and services. However, leads still need to be generated, sales need to be closed and invoices need to be sent; no business survives otherwise.

Furthermore, networking didn’t start with LinkedIn. Before there was social networking there was real-world networking. And you know what? It came with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, so it wasn’t all that bad.”  Read more…

It’s the sales mantra and referral drum I’ve been pounding for years. Sales are built on relationships. Our role as salespeople is to build relationships. Bottom line: People do business with people, not with technology. For more on building your business through relationships, read “How to Attract Sales Prospects in a Tech-Focused World.”

Let me know what you think.

The Great Cold Calling Approach

I recently received an email that provided tips on a great cold calling phone approach: write your script word-for-word, memorize it, practice, and master answers to common sales objections. Oh, and be upbeat and enthusiastic when we ask for the appointment.

Seriously? Empty promises for a no-win sales strategy. And, just plain stupid and a waste of your sales time.

Referrals: The Sales Approach that Works

Consider a sales strategy that works: Referrals. Think about it. When you receive a referral there’s no script, no interrupting people, no overcoming objections. The person knows you and expects your call. Plus you are pre-sold, you earn trust and credibility, shorten your sales process, gain a sales partner, and convert a sales prospect to a client more than 50 percent of the time.

Why would you waste your sales time cold calling?

Bottom line: We need to proactively talk to our clients and ask them to make the introduction. That is when referrals happen.

> Watch the Video

Here’s the conversation:

Paul: “You know Joanne, I always thought that if I do good work for a customer, they would just mention me to other people. It just never occurred to me that I actually should be asking for a referral.”

Joanne: “Well that’s it, we think we have done great work and of course our clients will refer us. Sometimes they do but they will in passing tell someone else about you. They don’t pick up the phone and call. I have more people say, did you hear from so and so I gave them your name. No, I never heard from them. We need to proactively talk to our clients and ask them to make the introduction. That is when referrals happen.”

CanDoGo™ is a sales productivity tool that helps salespeople close more sales–and close them faster. By receiving timely advice from world-renowned experts, CanDoGo™ users work smarter, faster and more efficiently.

Making Cold Calls? People Would Rather Give Up Sex.

“The prospect of making cold calls for a week as a salesperson is more unappealing than giving up sex for a month, a survey showed this week. “Only getting a root canal was deemed worse than making sales calls to businesses people did not know, said the survey of 1,226 respondents…”

Read the full article and learn once again why cold calling is an un-productive business-development activity and a waste of your sales time. http://yhoo.it/auaQ5Zcoldcallsandsex

When I ask salespeople how I can help them with prospecting—who they’re looking for—they begin with “Anyone who…” “Anyone?” I’m confused. I don’t know who “anyone” is.

Every salesperson recognizes their Ideal Clients. You know who they are. Don’t you love it when you work with your Ideal Client? They value what you offer, communicate well, are forward thinking, reasonable, have a good sense of humor, and give you the time, money, and resources to make any project successful. Your task is to clone your Ideal Clients into more and more great sales.

When we work with our Ideal Client, our sales time collapses, productivity soars, deals are larger, and these clients refer us to other Ideal Clients.

Find Your Ideal Client

The best way to locate your Ideal Client is to ask your current clients to refer you. (Yes, you want someone just like them.) The second best way is to ask your network to refer you.  In either case, you must be specific. The more specifically you describe your Ideal Client, the easier it is for your Referral Source—current client or network—to think of and identify the perfect referral for you.

Think: Specific

Being specific is counter-intuitive. Many of my clients believe the wider the net they cast, the more clients they reel in. The exact opposite is true.

Think of yourself as a sketch artist: the more color, lines, and detail you present, the easier it becomes for others to envision, recognize, and identify your Ideal Client and refer them to you.

Think of a time when you looked at paintings in a museum. (With no judgment about modern vs. classic art or artist, I offer the following thought.) Perhaps you viewed, the “blue wall”—the modern painting, all one color, and mused about how you could paint the exact same thing. Perhaps you pondered what the “blue wall” meant. The artist’s “blue wall” is open to a wide and varied interpretation. Then, perhaps, you viewed a more specifically representative painting, a Rembrandt or a Vermeer. The artist’s intention was defined. You knew exactly what you were looking at, with very little interpretation. You identified people, what they were doing, and perhaps what they were feeling.

Art is often interpretive. In order for referrals to work, you need to do the interpreting for your Referral Source. You need to be specific, and to tell the story yourself.

Create the Profile

For some salespeople, being super-specific in describing their Ideal Client feels confining. It’s as if they’re leaving good business on the table. Sales pros often think that if you don’t mention everything you offer you’ll miss a sale. The opposite is true.

The more specifically you describe your Ideal Client, the easier it becomes to receive a perfect referral. As you consider your business-development strategies, review these categories:

• Industry: In what industries is your expertise? Where do you have a track record? In what vertical do you want to expand?
• Geography: Where is your ideal geography? (Regions within the United States, North America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, or Africa, for example.)
• Company Size: What size company is the best fit for you sales offerings?
• Business Unit or Function: What group of people within the company are your ideal prospects-CEOs, CIOs, COOs, HR employees, or sales or marketing teams?
• Type of Person: Identify the personality traits of your Ideal Client.
• Situation/Need: What specific business problem do you address?

…you get the idea.

As an example, it’s too broad to say you want to meet VPs of Sales. In my case, I want to meet VPs of Sales with a technology company, software specifically, who have a re-seller channel, headquartered in Northern California, and hold sales meetings for their reseller partners. I can get even more granular if I stated the names of companies where I want an introduction.

Guess who I meet? You got it. Exactly those people. It’s not difficult to find my Ideal Client, and they know others just like themselves. Referrals to your Ideal Client are within your reach.

We get what we ask for, so ask for exactly what you want and get amazing referrals!

One less thing to stress out about is your sales forecast. When you actively work your referral-selling business, you engage in business-development activities every single day. And a daily activity is far more likely to be accomplished on time than a larger, looming one.

Why is this so important? Because when we’re really busy, when we work on client projects, and travel extensively, we forget to prospect. We’re so busy being in the business that we’re not building it. The bad news? We have no sales pipeline.

Sales teams are taxed to the limit. The pressure is on to quickly build that sales forecast. But how? This “out of nowhere” sales approach presents an inherent problem—creating a sales forecast with unqualified sales prospects and “smoke and mirrors” deals. I know. I managed sales teams that had plenty of those.

When you consistently ask for referrals, you build a qualified, robust sales pipeline with a close ratio of over 50 percent. Build your business as you work your business and get tangible and measurable results. Do it daily, and get un-taxed about business development and sales forecasting.

Nothing to tax about here. One less thing to worry about on April 15th.

There’s nothing like getting the gang together. Salespeople have great combined power and energy when they gather in person and share successes, ideas and information. At conferences, they learn as much through conversations with peers in the hallways as in their sessions. But there’s no “hallway” on the World Wide Web.

Make the Live Connection

The digital world – as great as it is – threatens personal connections. Humans need face-to-face contact with others. Even with whisper-light computing power and immediate, 140-character Twitter posts, we are a face-to-face species, one that thrives on interpersonal communication and being in the presence of like-minded individuals working together to accomplish results. E-mail, texting, social networking – none of that takes the place of an in-person connection.

So if you want to get ahead in your career – and especially if you want to sell – put down the mouse and step away from the computer. Come out from behind the cloak of technology and learn to speak to people, whatever their language.

In an era when companies are canceling sales meetings because they believe webcasts and videoconferences are just as effective, they actually need to do the opposite – schedule more. Since the start of the recession, many companies have slashed business travel budgets by 20 to 40 percent, viewing it as expense rather than what it really is – an investment.  Face-to-face meetings aren’t luxuries. Even in our technology-driven world, nothing replaces a handshake and in-person interactions for both building and maintaining business relationships. In fact, 95 percent of business people agree they’re the key to building long-term relationships, according to a Harvard Business Review Reader Poll. And a 13-year study of American businesses by Oxford Economics (released last year) shows that for every dollar spent on business travel, organizations report around $12.50 in increased revenue and $3.80 in new profits.

Win the Numbers Game

Now more than ever, as businesses seek to operate more effectively and efficiently, they are depending on analytics in order to thrive and survive. Firms that recognize the relationship between business travel investments and increased sales, and then act on that knowledge, will see a big impact on the bottom lines.

One of my clients shared with me about a potential deal she was trying to work with a major prospect, but she couldn’t get the decision-makers on the phone. I strongly recommended that she schedule an in-person visit. Fast-forward two months. She not only met with potential buyers, but also got the opportunity to present to 60 people (who were notified the day before) and now has four strategic projects in the pipeline. She called me (elated) to say thank you. The personal visit, she said, sealed the deal.

Last summer I tacked a 60-mile drive onto the end of a vacation to meet with a prospect. That business-development visit resulted in two speaking engagements, which never would have occurred had I not taken the time to visit and build a new, mutually respectful relationship.

You don’t have to hop on an airplane. Drive your car; get on a bus; take a train. Just meet face-to-face with every major client and prospect. You will accelerate your sales process by at least 30 percent, spend less time prospecting (who wouldn’t want that?) and attract more quality clients.

Face-to-face contact will give you the edge over your competitors every time. You make the effort, you win.

Think about it: How have in-person, live connections impacted your sales business? Join the conversation, in the comments below.

Mark read my book, No More Cold Calling(TM): The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust, and “almost immediately stopped doing cold calls.” He prepared materials for his network–and started asking for referrals. “It took me a week-plus to rearrange the way I work, and my results changed,” he recently wrote to me. Over the course of six weeks in December and January, he arranged 18 meetings–five of them through referrals–and got two new (“very promising”) customers. And he has another four in progress. Asking for referrals has become an inherent part of his job. The process works.

Game-changing year for this reader? You bet. For you? It absolutely could be! No matter where you are in our increasingly connected world, referrals rock!

In fact, in a recent webinar survey I conducted, attendees identified the two biggest sales challenges they face:

• Getting the meeting at the level that counts (58%)
• Converting prospects to customers (47%)

But when they receive a qualified referral, they report securing a new client more than 50 percent of the time. In fact:

• 31 percent said more than 50 percent of the time;
• 30 percent said more than 70 percent of the time; and
• 23 percent said more than 90 percent of the time.

Wow, they made my case: Referrals address the two largest sales challenges–big time.

Yet, 85 percent don’t have a targeted referral strategy with a written referral sales plan, weekly written goals and methods to track and measure them. Imagine the results if they would only fully leverage the only sales method that produces this type of numbers.

In addition to this great data, salespeople uniformly tell me that when they receive a referral, they:

• Are pre-sold (the sales prospect expects and wants to take their calls),
• Have instant credibility and the prospects’ trust,
• Enjoy shortened sales processes,
• Ace out the competition, and
• Incur no “hard costs.”

These results all hinge on my definition of a “qualified sales referral”: You have the introduction from someone your prospect trusts who’s willing to give you a great recommendation—by phone, e-mail or in person. If you just get a name and contact information, it’s a cold call. The sales prospect doesn’t know you and is not expecting your call. Don’t fool yourself.  That sales call is cold, arctic … freezing. The only definition of a qualified referral is a personal introduction. Period.

Stop wasting your valuable sales time on less than stellar sales results. Remember: “150 phone calls and five agreed-upon meetings (three completed, two forgotten). Customers acquired: None.” You wouldn’t settle for such inferior results for your clients, would you? Set the same high standards for yourself.

Get your referral checklist with my new Referral I.Q. Quiz, and make 2010 your game-changing selling year!

Malcolm Gladwell, (Canadian journalist and author) said, “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, he references a study by Ericsson (K. Anders Ericsson, Florida State University) “The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. The work much, much harder… .”

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.” Yikes!

Reality check: Mastery, becoming a world-class expert, takes 10,000 hours of practice–because it takes the brain that long to assimilate everything it needs to know for mastery. The rest of us (real people) don’t need 10,000 hours of practice to be top of our sales game. But we do need practice. And I’m willing to bet that you need more practice than you’re currently committing to.

Salespeople Want It N-O-W

I sell. You sell. Real salespeople are focused. We are energized by our business, driven to provide top-notch products and services to our clients, and we are always moving. Learning, developing expertise, and asking questions. We are on the move.

We are not a patient people, sales pros. We want information-relevant information-now, not tomorrow or the next day. We want it quickly and magically. We’d prefer to put the iPod (loaded with critical sales training and wisdom) under the pillow and awaken with the essential sales content embedded in our brain. Osmosis would be such a low-impact, low-energy, easy way to master new sales skills…

…Snap out of it. That’s not how it works, and we know it. The only way to increase essential sales skills and impact our sales productivity is to practice. Yes, I mean hands-on, upright, out-loud practice. I know what you’re thinking, “No. Don’t want to do it.”

Commit to Mastery

Children practice all the time–without fear. Remember learning to ride a bike? You watched other kids. You may have started with a tricycle (very safe), then got your two-wheeler with training wheels (safe), and then dropped the training wheels for a solo free ride (not so safe). You fell, skinned your knees and got back on. You fell off again and got back on. You were committed to learning how to ride that bike. Your confidence improved, and you rode downhill and over and around bumps and obstacles. You got good, really good. But it didn’t happen overnight.

The Proof Is In the Practice

But we resist practice, even with proof right in front of us. Why? I believe that salespeople resist practice because adults and contributing employees don’t get paid to practice. You get paid to sell. You receive compensation to do your job correctly the first time. Practice time is on your dime. And who has extra time just floating around?

I took piano lessons as a young girl. Many times I forgot to practice, and I thought my teacher wouldn’t notice. She always noticed. I never got away without practicing. As adults, we can’t get away without practicing, either. Believe it, your clients and prospects notice.

Practice Makes Permanent

Salespeople in the top 10 percent operate differently. They determine the critical, deal-breaking, skills they need for their sales success, and they deep dive into those skills. These supersales achievers narrow their focus and relentlessly learn and apply new sales skills by committing to daily practice. Yes, daily practice.

I use the example of the gym: If you just walk by, look at people in the window, and watch them working out, not much changes for you, but lots changes for them. Daily workouts build muscles, improve physical wellbeing, and strengthen the most critical muscle in our bodies-the heart.

Where is the heart of your sales career? Commitment to a daily routine and practice separates you from every other salesperson out there. Many anecdotes and quotes exist about practice. I grew up hearing “Practice makes perfect.” I don’t believe in perfection. Perfection is boring. I believe in striving for the best. One of my clients says: “Practice makes permanent.” Yes!

So much sales information bombards us today, and we struggle to quickly locate relevant data to boost our sales. We find information fast, but we frequently lack the discipline to apply what we learn effectively. Why? We neglect practice.

The Practice Payoff

Success isn’t handed to us. Fortune magazine’s senior-editor-at-large, Geoffrey Colvin wrote an article on this topic (October 19, 2006), What It Takes to Be Great: Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.

Colvin states that the best do what researchers call “deliberate practice.” He quotes Ericsson: “Deliberate practice is activity explicitly intended to improve performance, reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results, and involves high levels of repetition.

Example from the sports world: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80% of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours everyday, that is deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial.”

Everyone can access greatness. Focus on specific selling skills and practice, practice, practice. Practice becomes your game-changing, compelling, sales event. Practice is your future. You don’t need 10,000 hours of practice. Just practice one sales skill every day. Practice makes permanent.