SBTV.com - Arm Your Sales People with Competitive Advantages to Differentiate Yourself From the Competition
Jaynie L. Smith sat down with SBTV.com to discuss why it is so important for companies to uncover and incorporate their competitive advantages within their marketing and sales messaging - A matter of staying ahead of the competition.
Commentator: Hello and welcome to SBTV.com. I’m Susan Wilson Solovik. Joining us today is Jaynie Smith, the author of Creating Competitive Advantage. She’s also the President of Smart Advantage, a marketing and management consulting firm. Her clients include mid-size and fortune 500 companies and she works with CEOs all around the world.
Jaynie, thank you so much for being here today.
Jaynie: Thank you for having me.
Commentator: One of the biggest challenges I think small businesses have is finding qualified sales people who can really get out there and sell their products or services. What advice would you share with us?
Jaynie: I had an interesting experience recently that made me really focus on this. I’m going to talk about a big company first in my experience, and then I’m going to relate it back to small companies. I bought one of these new fangled telephones and I say that because it has more features on it than I’ll ever use in this life time.
Commentator: Oh, they’re smarter than we are. Yes, absolutely.
Jaynie: Yes, it’s unbelievable. But I couldn’t get the thing to work and I thought well I know I’m not real smart about this, so it must be me. So I took it into the place I bought it and I’ve spent, I have to date spent probably 12 to 14 hours with this young man behind the counter, trying to get this thing working. The first one was a lemon. The second one, he didn’t know how to set it up any more than I did. And there were all kinds of glitches in it.
And it was so interesting to me because he said to me; I got in trouble the last time you were in here by my manager. She doesn’t want me helping customers. And I said really? He said, yeah. So come in when she’s not here, so I can finish helping you. And I thought whoa, that’s very interesting. He said you know my brother – I have a twin brother – my brother works for a competitor of this company and he gets in trouble if he doesn’t help the customers. And I thought whoa, that’s a competitive advantage. I mean he clearly has one and you don’t. He said, yeah, tell me about it.
I said, so let me ask you something. How long ago have you written your Resume if you’re looking for another job? And he said well how did you know? I said because I know, you’re good. You showed me that you’re bright, you’re good, you know what needs to be done with a customer. But you won’t stay in an organization that doesn’t support doing the right thing, and the right thing is helping the customer. He said, of course it is. If I don’t help you, you turn the phone back in, I don’t win, the company doesn’t win, and the customer doesn’t win, how silly is that. I said, I got it.
So I thought about this, and I thought smart sales people can smell a company that supports them in the sales process. Supporting in the sales process means having competitive advantages, supporting the sales people and doing what’s right for the customer, and having enough competitive advantages that makes the company sound. Smart sales people don’t want to work for a company in a nose dive. They want to work for healthy companies. What keeps the company healthy? Good margins. What keeps good margins? The ability to sell not based on price and so all of those things when you can do that and you can articulate it to candidates coming in the door, if you’re trying to hire for sales, the more you can build the case, hey we’re a sound company, here’s our competitive advantages. See here’s what we’ll do to support you so you can do your job right, they’ll come and they’ll stay, but they don’t stay when your eye is not on the ball of delivering competitive advantages and the customer.
Commentator: That’s very interesting. Another thing I’m curious about though is sales people who seem to be good outwardly, they can schmooze, they can develop those relationships, I think you talk about Jack Lemon in your book, but they just can’t seem to close the deal. Why is that? And what can they do?
Jaynie: Because those slick salesmen who are really good at that --
Commentator: They’re good at sales --
Jaynie: Right, they depend way too much on the schmoozing and guess what; the schmoozing is not working any more. People want – I mean it does to some people to some extent, you know, I take you to play golf, I take you out to dinner, we do that with all our clients, take you on my boat, and oh, that’s great, until what? Until the competitor offers me a lower price, and then it’s sorry, you’re a business person, I’m a business person, you’d understand, you’d do the same thing, right?
Commentator: It’s just business.
Jaynie: It’s just business. So I say your sales people are knocking on the competitors’ door everyday. The competitor’s sales people are knocking on your customers’ door everyday. When you can answer, why us in a compelling way, and that’s like – for every company, you must be able to answer why us. That has nothing to do with price. One of the reasons I should do business with you and not the competition, and when sales people are armed with that, they will do much better, then the slick sales person who will get away with that for a while --
Commentator: Sure.
Jaynie: But don’t we all see through that in a very short time?
Commentator: Absolutely. Well, you also talk about an example in your book about a restaurant that was very, very busy, but had a long waiting schedule, and people would walk out the door. And that was actually the impetus for an invention. So --
Jaynie: Yes.
Commentator: And how did that work? What happened?
Jaynie: That’s such a wonderful story. It was one of my early clients. The company is called JTEC. These guys had a restaurant on the intercostals in Florida. People were walking away; they couldn’t stand watching customers walk away. So they were also techno junkies and they created the first pager, you go into the restaurant, here’s your coaster pager, it will light up when your table’s ready, we’ve all had them. Well anyway JTEC invented this many years ago to keep their customers from walking away.
Much to their surprise other restaurants wanted it, hospitals wanted it, all kinds of organizations wanted it, and churches wanted it for the nursery to beep the person when the child was acting up and so on. And then all of a sudden they were out of the restaurant business, we’re in the manufacturing business. They started manufacturing these wonderful beepers. Well, what was so interesting was in those days Motorola was one the companies that was the original beeper people. Remember when we didn’t have cell phones --
Commentator: Right. Well, I don’t really remember, I heard about that --
Jaynie: Anyway they saw the Motorola folks as the beeper people and they came into the market and they said, hey, we should be manufacturing that. So JTEC called my company and said what are we going to do?
So we did one of these drill down sessions I do, and we came up with the most interesting competitive advantage in the form of a competitive positioning statement. It turns out they could say, their sales people were then armed with this statement: “Of the 50 major restaurant chains in America, 100% use JTEC pagers.” Very simple, it was true, it was measurable, it positioned them as leaders and it says hey you want to go try that one just rolling off the manufacturing floor of ours, it’s been out there and endorsed by all these major restaurant chains. And it kept the competitor at bay and it allowed them to keep their margins and keep healthy. That company since has been sold twice to venture capitalists who just brought it to the next level and next level.
Commentator: That’s a great story. What about the old proverbial question, are sales people born or made? How would you answer that?
Jaynie: You know that’s a tough one. I think that they’re made. And I’ll tell you why I think that. In my book I give three anecdotal stories of companies that I worked with. One case they’re CPAs, and forgive me for the CPAs out there, but they’re not notoriously the best salesmen; interior designers, who are great at design, but they don’t like selling, in fact the CEO called us in because they wouldn’t sell; and the third one was nurses for home healthcare agency.
In all three cases, none of them are slick sales people. None of them are born to be salesmen. We simply armed them with competitive advantage statements, went out there and said yes, leave this on a card, leave it behind this message, discuss it point by point. You don’t need to be slick and going through all the motions, just tell them what differentiates you, answer the question, why us.
And in each case the nurses 40% increased in revenue, that company the home healthcare agency; 30% for the interior designers and the CPAs I forget what the percentage was, but it was a staggering increase in – management, for a management business. And in every case, they weren’t born salesmen, we just armed them. So I don’t know how to answer the question. I think you can make them by giving them the right tools.
Commentator: Interesting. Actually my husband and I were in Mexico and we went on a timeshare tour. And before we went, my husband said, Susan, there is no way we’re buying a timeshare. But the sales person was so knowledgeable and well-equipped with presenting a picture that showed a real advantage and benefits for us, that guess what, we bought the timeshare.
Jaynie: You have to be careful --
Commentator: Absolutely. But we love it.
Jaynie: That’s the thing. If they can make the case and I just see so many companies where sales people are not making the case, they’re relying too much on cliché, and they’re letting price be the differentiator. I know the CEOs I work with are constantly telling me, if one more sales person comes to me and says lower the price, I’m going to scream. And they hear it all the time.
Commentator: Another point you make about the sales process is, that there’s a CEO that says I’ve never heard of you, I don’t know anything about you, why should I bother to see you. It’s so important that you’re able to establish that awareness in the marketplace.
Jaynie: Yes, and another thing around the communication on that, if you have a website, in my mind, that first page it shouldn’t be products and services, it should definitely not be about our story, nobody cares, I hate to tell you. It should why us. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. And that’s --
Commentator: I see that a lot with real estate agents. They want to tell you all about themselves, where I’m interesting in what’s your closing rate, how long does it take you sell, and that’s a good example.
Jaynie: Those are the why us. Those are the quantifiable – I actually had a real estate client in an audience that I spoke to, and she said hearing this talk changed the nature of her business, because she got real crystal clear on that, tripled her business in kind of a soft market, and she got very focused on that.
Commentator: Very interesting. Well, these are some great tips. And I’m sure that everybody wants to increase their sales ratio and so it’s all in here Creating Competitive Advantage. And Jaynie I appreciate you being here.
Jaynie: Thank you for having me.
Commentator: Thanks, and thanks to all of you for watching us here on SBTV.com. Remember small business is our only business.
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