Are You On A Healthy Sales Diet?

What is a Healthy Sales Diet?

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It takes discipline, a lot for some of us, to have a good diet. For that matter, good habits are usually things that we train ourselves to do. They seldom come without sacrifice but we learn to do them because the long term results make them worthwhile. It takes a modicum of wisdom to realize that pleasure and happiness are not one and the same. Sometimes it takes discipline to achieve true happiness, and sometimes the short term thinking involved in pleasure has a hefty personal price tag. Diets aren’t always fun but the rewards can make you happy. 

So a “sales diet?” What is that? It is a word picture calling attention to the flavor of your sales activities. This article looks at the ingredients that you apply to your sales recipe. 

Have you ever thought of your sales activities as an investment in your well being? Have you ever thought about how the ingredients you apply affect your long term sales health? Too much of anything is abuse, but a balanced diet tends to give your body the right amounts of all the nutrients it needs to be healthy and function well. A sales diet is no different; for that matter, neither is a marketing diet. The recipe for success is “just enough”, but not too much of anything, the right amount of this and that. A recipe for sales success is a combination of the activities you need to perform to achieve being the best version of your sales-self. Unfortunately, not enough sales professionals examine the balance needed :for short AND long term success. To draw an analogy: they are more concerned with pleasure and the low hanging fruit than long term sustainability and happiness. It is a psychological trap the entire marketing and sales universe falls prey to. The rush of the immediate kill often sabotages the long term strategy of businesses and sales individuals. The remedy? Balance.

A healthy sales activity balance looks like a new food pyramid came out. The balance has shifted away from immediate sales in a community of active buyers with “discretionary income”, in all income ranges, to a new normal. The gestation period of a piano sale has tripled for larger ticket units, doubled for mid-range units, and there is a thirst for technology with a piano like never before. 

Is there terribly diminished interest in pianos? NO! There are people everywhere, everyday online considering a piano purchase, but our diet of sales activities is still focused on the easy stuff… junk food: the lay-downs and people we can get into a shopping cart. The appetite for information is unappeased from a lack of a sufficiently educational sales culture. Shoppers are getting TONS of information and pricing without context.

The result? Slower sales and people gravitating towards other things that aren’t so daunting. Why? Because we spend WAY TO MUCH TIME ASSUMING THE VALUE OF WHAT WE SELL. As an industry, we assume that there will always be people who choose pianos, hands down, over other ways to spend their money. Some actually choose other things if they aren't sold well enough on the benefits of music. They may choose travel or other luxury marketing options for themselves and their kids. Travel ball and music make a well-rounded extra curricular diet for children, but many times it is easier to get them excited about playing a game then the piano. Both are healthy and developmental in their own right, but the curiosity about the instrument that naturally manifests itself is met with more price points, percentages and financial incentives than beneficial evangelism by our industry. Sometimes we just plain sell the thing instead of what the thing can do for them. The days when everyone was expected to have a piano built a false sense of security. WAKE UP PIANO INDUSTRY!

With the technology available to us today, we can create excitement with shoppers whose information we capture by providing them "value added” content and becoming their tour guide. Many more visits to the store and pianos sold with assistance over the phone can be made if we win the content war. This article is about a healthy “sales activity” diet, not content, but understanding that the diet of what you serve up to prospects is what will make your activity diet taste good to them. Perfect segue into some specifics about what your healthiest sales diet should look like…

First off, let’s agree on the fact that overindulgence is unhealthy, agreed? Too much of anything is abuse, so let’s shine a light on the most abused ingredient: poor, bad tasting salesmanship; selling primarily on price. Having the lowest price as your main sales ingredient forces overindulgence. It’s all about bellying-up to a bland tasting buffet and having as much as you want based upon a great price. I think that this is the way of commodity sales and Amazon has proven that buying power and convenience rule in the commodity, everyday needs arena. NO argument can be made against their successful formula. Is it a proven model of success. However, how does it work when you are trying to talk the largest possible amount of luxury marketing buyers to stick RV’s, high end jewelry, Yachts, airplanes and 100K+ pianos into a shopping cart? Is anyone doing it, yes. There is a percentage of folks that can be sold stuff over $7-10K without experiencing before making the purchase but they are outliers, read on…

The abandonment rate to a large online purchase is 98.5% conservatively. It gets even harder as the price climbs. Many studies show only .5% of the market will trust a large ticket item purchase without sales representative intervention. What does this mean in terms of the significance of “value added” information and sales support? It means it is critical to the success of a company selling luxury items. AI can’t replace the trust built by a person. It takes a personal effort to get most luxury buyers to the point where they will pull the trigger. You have to feed them until they get ready to shop in earnest, and the difficult reality is that the vast majority feel no need to keep you posted. You simply get the call when it is finally time for the call to be made.

What did a healthy sales diet look like as recently as 24 months ago? If you had a lead of any flavor, including a digital one, and you were disciplined enough to call, text, and email on a consistent basis, about 30% would engage and either decline your services, explain a delay, or start having substantive communications with you. They may look for you online and definitely go to your company’s website but they were not as much in the shadows and ghosting as they do today. 

Ghosting is now the norm. People who respond within the first ten days are extremely serious and closer to the end of the sales funnel. The response behavior of the market has changed. They formulate much more of their opinions not only on reviews but also on social activity and posts. They need to SEE you, not just talk to you, to gain some confidence in you as their “go to.” We have evidence that demonstrates that sales professionals who brand themselves sell much more effectively than those only using traditional follow-up methods. The emotions of a prospect are most influenced by seeing you as a specialist and, better yet, a high profile specialist who displays happy customers online.

So now that we have illustrated the lay of the land, there are lots of prospects online but they are harder than ever to talk to, let’s discuss how to make someone consider you their concierge and the person they want to buy from when they do purchase. Let’s discuss what your activity diet needs to look like:

The first ingredient is 3 parts value added information to every time you make an ask.

Stated another way, 75% of your conversations should be YOU providing educational and inspirational content: pictures and videos of happy customers, links to informational articles of interest, invitations to events, posts from social sites that show you serving people and active in the musical community. Things that position you as a specialist.

Yes, part of your activity diet is to promote a visit to the store, yet sometimes a visit with less of a selection suggestion is more appropriate depending how far down the sales funnel they are. Often, just getting folks to fall in love with your place allows them to fall in love with an instrument. If you take anything away from this article remember this: “People want to buy, they just don’t want to be sold.” Your activity diet is to feed them all the information that they need to make their best decision, whether it is today, tomorrow, next week, next month or a year or two from now. Your diet is to be mindful of what you feed them.

How do you know who to feed, how much and when? Common sense and reminders for follow up in the CRM of your choice. Your should have at least thirty prospects in your pipeline to feed daily; if not, you’ve given up WAY TOO SOON on way too many prospects because they wouldn’t respond and talk to you via phone call, text or email. If you don’t nurture every lead until they disqualify themselves, you are leaving (sorry for another food reference) A LOT OF MEAT ON THE BONES. If you can’t see yourself nurturing someone unless they will talk to you, you are living in yesteryear. If they took a step toward you by calling the gallery, stopping in, texting, chatting, or becoming a lead, 75% of the time they will buy at some point. 

So your diet involves trusting the diet, trusting the process and sending that person who six months ago said they wanted a baby grand some information; something like: “Dear Mary, When I came across this piano I thought of you. If you are still looking for a piano this may be one you would like to know more about. If you’ve already found one, let me know and I’ll take you off my list.” This should be accompanied by a picture or video. The same one that can go to John and Harry and anyone else your CRM told you needed a touch about a baby grand that day. Your activity diet should be to feed people information about the piano type they inquired about ad infinitum, or until they say they bought somewhere else, or decided against a piano and bought an XYZ. 

Being a champion at anything, piano competition, gymnastics, boxing, debate, takes discipline and hard work made easier by working smart. Get organized with your catalog of content, post evidence that you make people happy when they buy from you, and prospect tirelessly. This is the recipe for success. Be the champion piano information resource and information disseminator in your market. Champions pay attention to their diet of activity, their protocols, not just what they put in their body. 

More than likely, you can outperform your competition by paying attention to your sales activities. There aren’t that many disciplined enough people in your way. There’s not that much in between you and being the “go to” person in your market for information about what you sell. Your diet consists of doing the activities needed to be the most sought after specialist in your market. The ingredients it takes to brand yourself as such should make up your diet. 

“Concentrate on the activities of prospecting, presenting and following up, the sales will take care of themselves” - Brian Tracy

“Activity equals results. If you want to increase your results, increase your activity. Increase contact with customers. The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities.” - Brian Tracy