Business Blog | Lilamitre-arte.com

When you are selling your products to clients, you don’t want to be pushy about it, you want to be persuasive.

Have you ever been around a sales person who seems to have everything going for him?

He has no problem talking to people, people like him, he seems to meet all of his sales goals so effortlessly.

This is not because he is lucky, or he was born with a natural gift when it came to selling. It is because he took the time and effort to make sure he went into the field well trained with the appropriate sales skills and product knowledge to make his sales seem as though they come without any effort.

This sales person, through hard work and sales training, has given himself the power of persuasion because he has the ability to find out what it is that his customers need.

When a sales person is being pushy with their product, it is a turn off to the customer. The last thing a customer wants, is somebody they just met up in their face who won’t stop talking. Pushy sales people come off rude, unprofessional and unknowledgeable.
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What routines are preventing you from increasing your sales?

Whether you realize it or not, you are a creature of habit. Unless you do shift work, you probably get up at the same time everyday, follow the same routine to wake up and get yourself ready for the day, drive the regular route to work, do the same things once you get to work, and take the same route home at the end of the day. Once there, you probably have dinner, watch television or read the newspaper, and follow some sort of routine once it’s time to go to bed. You set the alarm for the same time and when it sounds the next day, you start the cycle over again.

Don’t get me wrong. Routines can be good. They help us improve our productivity. They allow us to multi-task. They make us feel comfortable, safe, and secure. They reduce stress. Plus, when we have developed a great routine, we can often generate more business. However, the drawback is that they can be difficult to break away from.
When you become accustomed to a specific schedule, it can be easy to forget changes in it. For example, if you usually schedule your first client meeting after 9:30 it is very easy to miss a meeting that was recently scheduled at 8:30. I recently encountered two situations that relate to this.

The first was an appointment with my massage therapist. For several years, she scheduled her appointments on the hour or half-hour. So when she booked my massage at fifteen minutes after the hour, she forgot about it and was several minutes late.

The second was my fault. I normally meet with my trainer early in the morning, three days a week. I had to re-schedule one workout due to a business commitment and made my appointment for a later time on a different day. Unfortunately, I arrived at the gym at my usual time only to realize that I was several hours early. The change in the schedule messed up my routine.
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If you are involved in sales, fundraising or just an active networker, you have probably tried a variety of tools to manage your contact list and remind yourself to stay in touch with all of the prospects and people you meet. This tickler file is designed to be an inexpensive, effective, tool that can be used by salespeople in a variety of different types of organizations.

This tickler file uses inexpensive index cards and a simple file box. You will need the following items to create your own index card sales tool. I found everything I needed at my local office supply store. The total cost was around $25.00.

- A box to store the index cards
- Monthly 3″ by 5″ index tabs
- Daily (1-31) 3″ by 5″ index tabs
- Alphabetical 3″ by 5″ index tabs
- A ton of white ruled 3″ by 5″ index cards (you don’t need a photo, right?)
- A bunch of colored 3″ by 5″ index cards (pick your favorite color)
- A small case to carry your in your pocket

Once you have purchased the required supplies, you can organize your 3X5. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you are assembling your 3X5 on January 1st. If this is the case you would first organize your tabs in the order below (front to back):

- January tab
- Daily tabs 1-31
- February – December monthly tabs
- A-Z alphabetical tabs
- Blank index cards – white and your favorite color

All of your cards should now be in the file box and the first thing you should see is the January tab.

Next, you should start creating cards for your leads. In the beginning, this is going to take some time (assuming you have a lot of leads). You might choose to use one color card for prospects, one color for customers, another for personal contacts, etc. If you are not going to organize your contacts by color, you will only need white cards. Nonetheless, you can either copy your contacts information onto the cards or simply staple their business card to one of the index cards.

The system works like this.

Let’s imagine it is January 1st. and you attend a networking event where you meet a potential client. You get this lead’s business card at the event and you want to contact him/her on the 2nd., so when you get to your office, you staple the leads business card to a white index card and drop it behind the “2″ tab and then go home for the day. After all, it is new years day and you have been working hard to create your new sales system and you attended a networking event.
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If you hate cold calling, and even if you don’t, you should start capitalizing on the work you’ve already done.

So often we don’t utilize one of the most persuasive selling components in our marketing materials – the words of our own clients. Many creative people have wonderful testimonials from clients, but never use them for fear that they are “bragging” or that it is “too self promotional.”

Well of course it’s self promotional! That’s what good marketing is!

When you are finished a project for a client, why not capture that moment in the client’s own words to use for showing potential clients the value of your services? Testimonials are even more crucial for creative businesses because it is more difficult for the average person to set a value on most arts related items and services. Seeing others talk about the value of working with you will help them more readily understand the value of your work.

If your client doesn’t come running to you with a testimonial, then ask her for one. There is nothing wrong with that and most clients are honored you asked them.
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