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Paul McCord,
author of Bust Your Slump |
Best-selling author, speaker, and leading authority on lead generation and personal marketing, Paul has been training, coaching and mentoring salespeople for over 20 years and managing and consulting with companies for over 15 years.
1) Paul, let's begin by talking about your book, Bust Your Slump. What's the idea behind the book? Why did you write it?
The economy has really played havoc on a great many seller’s pipelines. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a tremendous number of people have to leave selling and many more are limping along, just barely hanging on.
I’ve investigated thousands of sellers in slumps and have found they all have many things in common such as the obvious decrease in activity and negative mental attitude, but also that they lose faith in the prospecting methods they have used in the past and that most do not have a solid, proven sales process.
I wrote Bust Your Slump to address these issues, but in particular to present a number of very successful and proven strategies that will increase sales very quickly. None of the dozen strategies are new or revolutionary. In fact, they all have a long history of great success. You could say that the strategies are going back to the basics.
These strategies include things such as generating referrals, networking, cold calling, mining one’s client base, working orphan files, and the like. The difference is that instead of just asking for referrals, the book presents a very detailed strategy how a seller can get 30, 40, maybe even 50 high quality referrals to prospects the seller knows they want to get referred to in a very short period of time—within a month. Another strategy details the single most enjoyable prospecting method there is and how to use that method to generate a pipeline full of business in month.
They key to using the book is to understand that the strategies presented are short-term strategies. They are by their very nature limited in how long they can work. For instance, one of the strategies concerns mining the orphan files that might be in the file cabinets in your office. There is a huge amount of untapped business in orphan files. The problem is how long will orphan files last? If you’re in a very large office that has been established for years, you might be able to generate a great deal of business consistently for months, maybe even a year. But what happens after the orphans run out?
While you’re getting your pipeline and bank account pumped up with these short-term strategies, you also have to be learning and instituting the long-term strategies that will keep you from sliding back into the slump once you’ve milked the short-strategies.
2) In a short sentence, who should read your book? What kind of advice should they be looking for?
The book is aimed at sellers--whether salespeople, professionals, or business owners—who are hurting for business and need to pump up their business quickly, and sales managers who have sellers in a slump. The book lays out the four steps they must take to bust their slump—realign their thinking, find new prospecting strategies that they can enthusiastically put into practice, increase their activity, and learn new long-term strategies.
The book concentrates on second step—those strategies they can institute that will quickly increase their sales, and give direction where to find help in realigning their thinking and learning the long-term strategies they must acquire to prevent sliding back into a slump.
3) On the other hand, who shouldn’t? What will readers NOT find in your book?
The book does not present nor does it pretend to present long-term business development strategies. The book is designed to do one thing—help you bust out of your sales slump, period.
4) What's the first thing someone should do after reading your book?
The book is an easy, quick read. A reader should read all 12 strategies, then pick the one or two, three at the very most, strategies that best fit their market and personality and get to work. This is an action book. No theory. No what if’s. Action. Not all of the strategies will be appropriate for any one reader. There are strategies that work B2B, others B2C. Some work for commodity type situations, others for more sophisticated, relationship driven environments.
About your preferences:
This is tough simply because there are so many really fine websites and blogs. But let me give a few that have a broad range of expert contributions:
6) What are your preferred sales/business books?
Again, very tough. I’ll give just a few:
About you:
7) How did you get started in sales?
I was working on a doctorate in philosophy when I came to the realization that all the fuss, all the arguing, all the “research” was nothing but BS. Nothing was ever going to get done. Theory was great fun to argue but ultimately it meant nothing.
I decided I wanted to contribute something of intrinsic value, not sit in the clouds looking down upon great unwashed. Heck, I wanted to be one of the unwashed.
I left the university and started looking for job. The offer was to sell cabinets and millwork to builders and general contractors. I knew nothing about selling but liked the idea—and hey, it came with a salary and company car to boot.
I’ve been in sales ever since. I moved from millwork to financial services. Discovered that commissioned sales was far more lucrative than salaried sales. Eventually realized I couldn’t rely on the company I was working for to provide for my training and education.
Over the past 30 years I’ve learned a great deal—and yet have so much more to learn myself. Sales, I believe, really is the cutting edge of business. We pretty much see everything first and we’re the ones who really have to figure out how to overcome the market changes, the increased competition, the increasing sophistication of prospects.
8) Most memorable sale?
Actually my most memorable sale took place with my first sales job. Again, I sold cabinets and millwork to builders. I had worked diligently to sell the cabinets and all of the millwork for a large, almost 300 unit apartment complex in Dallas.
When it came time to negotiate the contract, since I was pretty new, the VP of Finance went with me. He got stuck on a relatively minor point and the deal fell through. I was furious, but decided I’d continue to build my relationship with the builder.
About a quarter ways through the project the builder was fed up with company who they had signed a contract with after mine fell through. I sat down with the builder once more and worked out a deal for us to pick up the project and finish it. I was very gratified to have regained a contract I had lost and especially to have successfully negotiated a contract that had been lost by our VP of Finance.
That one experience taught me the power of relationships—and that you never know what might happen even after you’ve lost the deal.
9) Most disastrous sale (or funny situation)?
The most disastrous—and one of the funniest--was when I was wholesaling investments to NASD broker-dealer firms. There are two sales you have to make when you wholesale investments—the first is to the firm, but the real sale is to the financial advisors to get them to use the product with their clients.
I was in New York meeting with a pair of Senior VP’s for one of the major wirehouses and had taken them to lunch. After lunch we were to have a half day introductory session with their major producers. They had brought in several dozen big producers for the day and had set up closed circuit TV in many of the offices around the county. They’d invested a great deal of time and money for this kickoff presentation.
Unfortunately while at lunch the bank next door was robbed and the bank robbers had run through the restaurant we were dining in to escape. The police held all of us in the restaurant until we had been interviewed to make sure that we weren’t one of the bank robbers trying to blend into the crowd.
Needless to say, we didn’t make it back to the office for the presentation. When we did get back, almost three hours late, I found one of the mutual fund product specialists trying to do an introductory presentation on a product he knew very little about.
I took over for the last half hour but the damage was done. We never had an opportunity to reschedule the launch. It took months to finally get the product really up and running. We lost huge sales, as did the broker-dealer. An absolute mess, all due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
About your work as a sales expert:
10) What is the biggest mistake you see as a sales expert?
Ingrained, unimaginative, hard headed thinking. The world is changing. Prospects are changing the way they respond to our attempts to connect with them. Yet so many salespeople and companies are resistant to the idea that there might be better ways to find and connect with quality prospects than the way they’ve been doing things.
Instead of looking to find better, more effective strategies, they resort to trying to do more of what isn’t working; thinking that if you do more of what isn’t working it will work. That’s, as we all know, one of the pop definitions of crazy—doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
11) What is the best sales advice you have ever received?
Sales are built on relationships founded on honesty and a sincere desire to find a quality solution to the prospect’s issues, not on price or trickery. That advice has served me well. Yes, I’ve lost some sales based on price or to a seller who was willing to say and/or do anything to get a sale. But I’ve sold far more and at good margin based on developing relationships whose foundation was honesty and mutual respect.
12) What advice would you give to someone just starting out in sales?
Be proud of your profession. So many sellers try to hide what they do. They create all kinds of titles for themselves to hide the fact they sell. Selling is the foundation of society. No one would have anything if it weren’t for us sellers. We are the ones who give the scientist working on a cure for cancer to have the time and resources to do his research; we are the ones that provide the dollars for teachers. If it weren’t for us there wouldn’t be a single home, car, medicine, loaf of bread, or anything else.
Don’t be ashamed of what you do. You truly are the engine of the world’s commerce.
13) What are you working on right now that makes you feel energized? What's your next big project?
I’m doing a great deal of work with companies, as well as individual sellers and business owners, helping them get their sales teams back on track using the strategies contained in Bust Your Slump.
But I’m also working on constructing a comprehensive format to help sellers develop their own public image and reputation through the use of traditional PR strategies, social media, and traditional media. Certainly there are a number of resources that discuss these resources, but there really isn’t anything that not only combines them all, but that really gives detailed actionable guidance on how to use the resources and how to move from a local to a regional then national format.
It’s a big project that meshes prospecting, personal marketing, PR, marketing, and technology into a single, highly focused message.
***
, Gary Vaynerchuk
, Jeffrey Gitomer
, Jill Konrath
(you can read Jill's interview to SalesGiants blog here: http://salesgiantsblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-jill-konrath-author-of.html), Zig Ziglar
, Neil Rackham
, Tom Hopkins
, Keith Rosen
, Brian Tracy
, Dale Carnegie
, Napoleon Hill.
