What Price Confidence?

Have you ever spent your time looking at just how many blogs there are out there? It seems that every gun carrying, pinball playing, mac loving, tv hating, cake eating, hair losing, merchandise printing nutter can put his opinion on the web and share it with the world. With this in mind, I'd like to thank you for taking the few precious minutes out of your day to enjoy the random musings of the safari park that is my brain.

So to the title of this week's blog - what price confidence? Well if you're clever, you can actually set that price at around 25p. Now of course 25p won't get you that much confidence - perhaps enough to offer to buy someone a drink but you're still going home alone. Spend a little more and you too could go from dud to stud, or in the case of the ladies - drag to.....well you get the idea.

At this point you clearly must be wondering what I have taken this morning. Well, they do say Omega 3 capsules are good for the brain, but I don't think they class as mind altering drugs.

No, I'm talking about merchandise (surprise surprise). Now those of you who know me will know that I don't believe in using gifts to close sales. Many companies like to give their sales people gifts to take out to meetings - a little trinket to leave behind to thank the prospect for their time. Sadly, there are some companies who don't use these gifts wisely - they treat them almost as if they were some sort of bribe and it's just so unnecessary.

If you have a sales person on your team who believes that the difference between closing a sale and not is whether or not he leaves a nice mug behind then there's more than one mug at that meeting. (See what I did there - I mean, that's actually quite clever isn't it? Do you know I'm making this stuff up as I am going along? Seriously, this blogging is a laugh - you should try it. I'll read yours too and then we can each think of ourselves as writers with an audience and celebrate over champagne and cucumber sandwiches - lovely).

This week I met with a company who told me that the sales in one office increased by 13% once their staff had gifts to leave with customers. The key here is that the gift, in and of itself, is not actually important here. What is important is that the sales people did have something that they could leave behind.

Sales are a tricky business. In many cases the days can be quite soul destroying - rejection after rejection. Your heart really does have to go out to those poor people sitting in a call centre in Bangladesh phoning to offer you a cheaper phone service. Actually, no it doesn't, I'm in the middle of my bloody dinner! And another thing - if you are genuinely from BT and offering me a cheaper service and I don't have to pay anything, why don't you just switch me on to that? Surely noone would actually say no to that would they? AHA!!! So you're not actually from BT after all are you then, and don't go telling me that your name is Mandy when it's perfectly clear that your name has probably got more syllables in it than that station in Wales.

Right, sorry. Sales. So how do we get that bit of confidence I was talking about? Well put yourself in the shoes of the sales person (size 9 if you're interested). You're going to visit 5 potential clients today. Some of them will say yes, some of them will say no and some of them will tell you that they want time to think about it. Now of all of those responses, you've only a 1 in 3 chance of leaving with a truly positive result. Now let that roll around in your head just before you start the meeting and think what your body language might be like.....exactly, your confidence may well be a little low.

Now picture this. Regardless of the outcome, you know that you're going to be leaving a really nice gift behind when you leave. You have a very very strong chance of leaving a good impression behind because you will be giving that prospect a warm and fuzzy feeling and that's the last thing he remembers. How's your body language now? See? You know you're leaving on a positive note and your confidence increases as a result.

If you're not sure, try this simple exercise. Think about something that you want from a colleague - a favour - and go and ask them knowing full well that they will say no to you. Look at how you approach them. Now, then think of a fairly unreasonable request and go and make it knowing full well that the person will say yes. It's just a bit of fun but you'll be amazed at the results.

I hope you can see now why it is a good idea for your sales force to be armed with some gifts to leave behind. You're not bribing customers, you're investing in your staff, and surely that's worth at least 25p.