OOH Sales Blog

When to Put Your Consultant’s Hat On

We’ve all been there, you’ve done everything you possibly can, your techniques have been right on target, but your prospect still won’t buy. I was talking the other day with one of our long time OOH clients, great sales guy, very experienced. He was telling me about a long-time client of his that over the years he had grown from one board to a multi board buy year in and year out. Great high traffic locations, great creative, great results. Of course, the client’s business had grown over those years as a result.

Then he got the call for the meeting. The owner had been approached by a marketing agency that had convinced him that while he had done well, with their help, he could have growth like he has never seen before. Trust me, let me share with you some of the results we have achieved for our clients they said. Owner was buying it…hook, line and sinker! No matter what techniques our man employed to try and “stay in the game”, that multi board buy was going to need to be cancelled. Can’t afford to keep your boards and do what the agency is telling me I need to do.

Here's a suggestion for you should you find yourself in a similar situation. Ask, “Can I take my OOH salesman hat off for a minute and put on my consultant hat?” Ask permission to ask some candid, consultant type questions so we can look at this with all factors being considered to ensure you have confidence it’s the right decision for your business.
• You had a very successful business when we first met. What was your revenue when we started working together? What is it now? % of growth?
• The results from others the agency shared with you. Was their business successful when they first engaged? Stagnant? On the decline? Success/revenue can be a relative thing depending on the state of the business when the engagement began.
• The agency is proposing you try a very different marketing strategy. One that you have enjoyed success employing over the last several years. In the hope that it will reap even greater returns. What if it doesn’t work and your business stops growing or even declines? Is that a concern?
• My consultant hat tells me that I see someone who has had their money (business) in CDs, certificate of deposits. Good solid returns month after month, year after year without the risk of any potential loss. Compounding growth.

The agency is suggesting that you pull all of your money (business) out of those CDs and put it in the stock market for the chance that you may get an even greater return. Now of course it is possible that it won’t work and the stock market will go down and you can lose your money…but surely that couldn’t happen, could it? Are you comfortable with that risk?

Human behavior is a funny thing in that it tends to be very predictable. For instance, people tend to buy based on the emotion of the moment and then justify their decision intellectually. Almost all of us repeat this cycle over and over again when we are buying most things. When we are in the scenario above, we also must remember this about human behavior as well and use it to our advantage. For most people, fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.

Need help with sales skills or coaching to take your out of home company to the next level. Learn more about OOH Sales Mastery at oohmastery.com or Contact Dan Nausley at dan.nausley@sandler.com, 423.702.5579.

_{____
Lisa & Dan Nausley of Sandler Chattanooga have developed the OOH Sales Mastery Program after more than a decade of training/coaching scores of OOH Operators across the country in sales, leadership, and executive coaching.}

Read more Outdoor Sales Mastery Blogs

OOH Leadership

Five Best Practices for Leading High-Performance Salespeople

One of the mistakes that we see often with leaders of OOH sales teams is that they spend an inordinate amount of their time working with the team members that are not performing at an acceptable level. Sometimes spending as much as 75% of their time on the weakest performing salespeople. Trying desperately to raise the bar on their performance, often they will by in large neglect interactions with the high performers on the team.‍It may sound counterintuitive to not focus all your efforts trying to improve the reps who have the most opportunity for improvement. However, think of it this way. If you have to lose a salesperson, who would you rather see go? The high performer or the one that never seems to come close to reaching the minimum level of production you expect. The most valuable investment you can make in your salespeople is your time, your attention, your guidance and your coaching. ‍While we are not suggesting that you shouldn’t work with and spend time with the under performing reps, we must avoid at all costs the perception that the only way to get your attention is to under perform.

OOH Sales

Qualify Hard, Close Easy

In OOH Sales Mastery, we teach and relentlessly reinforce a simple principle, an impossible-to-forget idea that carries massive implications for optimal revenue production: qualify hard, close easy. One of the big problems we see, though, is that people sometimes imagine they’re qualifying hard, but aren’t. Why not? Because they aren’t completing a non-negotiable element of qualification: qualifying the potential buyer’s Pain, (or in layman’s terms…their problems, issues or concerns). If we haven’t done that, we have no place making any formal recommendation or presentation to the buyer. And, as a result, we can’t expect to close easily. When we qualify effectively their Pain, what are we doing? We’re clarifying, in emotional, practical terms that resonate for the buyer, exactly what all the potential costs are for not taking action on a problem that’s keeping them from getting where they need to go next in their world. One of our most famous tools for clarifying the emotional impact of those costs is known as the Pain Funnel. It’s a powerful series of questions that is designed to allow the prospect to self-discover not just what is happening but why it is happening and most importantly, how does that issue affect the bottom line.