Sales and Service: January 2007 Archives

Part 3 of my interview with Flo Schell covers her seven step process for creating sales through relationship-building. (If you missed part 2 go here and part 1 go here).

Flo: step number one in my mind is really understanding yourself, knowing what makes you tick, knowing what makes you become fearful, knowing when you’re at your best, knowing when you might feel confused. What are all of those things that you know about yourself that will help you as you’re identifying who you are and what you do to a customer.

Step two we talked about earlier is choosing your customers well. So again, if I’m a brand new coach and my background happens to be franchising and sales and education, then I might be thinking that the customers might be most interested in my franchise coaching work would be members of a franchise company, individuals who like the idea of outsourcing and bringing in some new thinking.

It could be an individual in the franchising world who’s dissatisfied with their sales progress and wishing for a new idea about how to approach sales. So you could see that I would be identifying what it is that my customers have that would be ideal candidates for my business. So I would want to choose my customers well.

Barbra: And do we sometimes not choose well?

Flo: Yes, indeed. We sometimes do not choose well. We kind of know it going in. It’s interesting that when I wrote the book, I kind of said, Well, there will be times when you just have to make the sale for one reason or another or you just decide that if you don’t accept that customer, your business might flop or whatever. It’s a process.

But at one point, my son, who was one of the pre-editors, said to me, Mom, what if you really have to take that less than perfect customer? Wouldn’t your readers really like to know how to make that person a stronger customer for you?

So I said, Yes, absolutely. There is now a section that talks about how you can take a less than perfect customer and using coaching skills and caring skills, really connect in a way that you can make that customer be more ideal for you.

Flo: It’s very interesting. Because we all have to accept customers at one point or another who are not ideal. It’s just an economic truth.

So step three is getting clear on precisely what you as the salesperson has to offer. This is something that I’ll bet you wrestled with in the beginning of your coaching career and I certainly wrestled with in the beginning of mine.

Did I want to be a personal life coach? Did I want to be a franchisee coach, a sales coach, a business coach? Did I have to choose, Barbra? Did I have to choose just one?

So getting clear on really what I had to offer and who I wanted to serve was a very big, big point. So I recommend that as step three.

The fourth step is figuring out the problems that your customers have. As you know, Barbra, as 21st Century humans, we are all beset with problems of time and money and people relationships and frustration and overwhelm and isolation.

So we all have the same problems but to different degrees and at different times in our lives, some of them seem bigger than others. So understanding what your customers’ problems are and then the next step, step 5, is communicating how you can solve those precise problems. Does that make sense?

In Part 1 of my interview with Flo Schell (that's her photo at left) about sales, we left off talking about how we already have the skills that we need to create a wonderful sales experience for our customer. In Part 2 below, Flo explains how to do this.

Flo: Let’s just imagine that we have a relatively new coach and this coach has created their business and is now really trying to consider who their ideal customer is and perhaps create five or six profiles of the people who might really require or desire their services.

And so that coach is already formulating an idea of the kinds of people that he or she is trying to attract into their business life. In fact, they’re creating, hopefully, a marketing message and even a marketing look that will attract that particular kind of favorite customer.

So, for example, if my favorite customer is a corporate America kind of individual, which it is in my case, my website will look almost like an IBM-like website. It will have the colors of blue and gray perhaps, or with my personality, probably a shot of orange. But there will be a look that a corporate professional could relate to.

Barbra: I’m going to stop you there, Flo. I find this really interesting and yet I’m still trying to get my mind around how this relates to selling. If I put it in my own words, tell me if I’m getting this. So you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, that selling begins even before I’m talking to the customer.

Flo: Thank you so much for clarifying that. Absolutely that’s what I’m saying.

Barbra: Okay. The first thing you said was, I would make a list of who my ideal customer would be and what would be attractive, almost what would make them feel comfortable in terms of a website.

Flo: Exactly. And as we’re attracting those particular people into our lives and they’re feeling, I like the face of this person or I like the feel that I get when I go onto this website or when I hear this voicemail message or when I hear this radio interview, there will be a connection almost the way you would have if you were meeting a new acquaintance for the first time.

Barbra: It makes me think of when I first started doing life coaching and I had a bio on my website and it mentioned that I had three cats. I can’t tell you how many people phoned to inquire about my services said, When I saw you had three cats, I knew you were the one for me. Isn’t that funny?

Barbra: Hello. This is Barbra Sundquist from HomeBusinessWiz.com. I’m here today with Flo Shell who is a business coach specializing in sales coaching. Flo also has expertise in franchises.

In fact, prior to starting her coaching company, Flo was a major player with Sylvan Learning Systems. You probably recognize the Sylvan name as a very well known name in the education business and they’re actually a franchise, one of the leading educational franchise systems in the world.

While at Sylvan, Flo developed a franchise sales strategy that had the incredible result of doubling the amount of franchises at Sylvan from 300 to more than 700 over a seven-year period.

So, Flo, you obviously know a lot about sales and sales coaching. I would really like to welcome you today to talk to me about that.

Flo: Barbra, I am really thrilled to be having this conversation with you today. Thank you.

Barbra: Flo, I must admit that sales is not one of my areas of expertise so I would like to ask you some questions and learn more about it if I could.

Flo: I’d love to hear them, thank you.

Barbra: Great, let’s get started, then. Let’s start with that word “selling.” I know that so many people are afraid of that word. Why is that, do you think?

Flo: You know, that’s a great question, Barbra. If you were to look at the definition of selling in Webster’s Dictionary, for example, it is quite a bland definition. Actually, the definition is something like, “exchanging products or services for money or something else of value.”

Barbra: Okay.

Flo: So when you listen to that definition, you say, What makes it so nasty to so many people? And yet there is a magic word in that definition that I think can explain it for us in many ways and that word is money.

I think that we all have very emotional feelings about the money we spend and the value that we’re getting for that money. So that may in part create that image of nastiness.

But I think it’s much more than that, Barbra. I think that all of us at one time or another and many of us more than one time or another, have had very uncomfortable selling experiences. Would you agree with that?