SPIN Selling is considered to be the Bible of all sales books and was written by none other than Neil Rackham. The book was published more than two decades ago in 1988, emphasizes the importance of asking the right sales questions. SPIN Selling is based on extensive research done by Rackham and his company, Huthwaite.

They analysed more than 35,000 sales calls and were able to put to rest a variety of traditional myths about closing sales. The survey showed that in successful sales calls it’s actually the buyer who does most of the talking. This means, you got it right… salespeople are the ones asking the questions.

Asking questions means that the salesperson is building Rapport with the buyer, building a sales rapport with the buyer actually allows the buyer to feel more comfortable talking.

S.P.I.N. stands for:

• Situation (questions)
• Problem (questions)
• Implication (questions)
• Need-payoff (questions)

Inspirational books on sales like this do not come along every day. This one forced me to come up with the best questions to ask customers so as not to appear so much like the dreaded ‘sales person’ we all tend to encounter from time to time.

The word S.P.I.N. conjures up many images for me. As we all know putting the right S.P.I.N. into your business can change your attitude and improve your selling results.

With the acronym S.P.I.N. we can actually see the four pieces to the selling puzzle.

S = Shrug it off
Let’s face reality… most of the world’s news is not positive. In the US the real estate market is really at one of it’s all time lows, the financial markets are in chaos, and gasoline prices are at an all time high. Shrug it off.

Making the connection to dismiss the bad news is key. If you don’t it will eventually overtake you in a negative way. There will always be bad news so to counteract that is to do something that picks you up. Common sense dictates that if you’re an entrepreneur or a professional sales person you can’t afford to be down and negative. When you’re working with your sales prospects and customers you must project a positive and engaging attitude.

People by nature get stuck in the same routine… but it’s best to try to switch it up on a daily basis. Get out of the rut with exercise, reading motivational books, or get a book of inspirational quotes. The ones that have been most helpful to me are by the individuals who have overcome some type of adversity.

It’s best to stay away from negative people. Negativity can be contagious… is it something that you want to catch?

P = Preparation and practice

It’s best to inject a little Preparation and practice into each and every selling day. When planning sales calls for the next day, you can prepare several questions in writing. Practice the questions you want to ask, if you don’t you end up practicing on your sales prospects and customers. That’s a disaster that’s just waiting to happen

• Prepare and practice how you will present the benefits of your products.

• Prepare and practice how you’ll deal with the price objection.

• Prepare and practice how you’ll ask for the appointment.

• Prepare and practice how you will ask for the business.

I = Initiative

S.P.I.N. selling includes “Initiative,” personal initiative. Professional selling has its ups and downs. When the going gets tough the tough get going.

Differentiate yourself from your competition. Don’t follow the crowd. Take the initiative to learn more about personal salesmanship and selling skills. Notice how I use the word “personal”, you are unique and your prospects and clients are too.

Those to take the initiative to cross sell and up-sell whenever possible are the ones who ‘get it.’ Do everything imaginable to help your customers solve their problems, that’s just one of the ways you show initiative. The trick is to exceed your sales prospect’s and/or customer’s expectations.

N = New

The forth and final piece to S.P.I.N. selling is the word “New.” Did you know that the two most popular words in the English language are “New” and “Free?” Many sites give away stuff that’s free. Free e-books, free assessments, contests to win free tickets to an event, etc. always focus on “what’s new.”

When prospects and clients ask “What’s new?” you must be ready to show them new products, new technology, new methods to solve old problems, new programs. So, ask yourself do you have anything that’s new?

When you get excited when you’re talking about “what’s new” to your sales prospects and customers, it’s contagious! When you’re excited, they’ll become excited, too. Try not to talk about issues that are problematic… it’s a turn off and you will turn off your prospects before you’ve had the chance to turn them on.

When you have new attitude about everything your world begins to change. I don’t need to remind you about the economy and the debt crisis, we hear it every day. As sure, as I’m writing this, Warren Buffett is seeing many buying opportunities right now.

Foreclosures are at an all time high, the real estate market has not rebounded, and the future looks bleak for many. On the other hand, there are many shrewd investors who enjoy buying properties at bargain basement prices. They know, that at some point the market will go back up, after all, as we all know the real estate market is cyclical.

At times it will be tough to remain positive when the news is so negative. You have the ultimate control over your thoughts. Choose optimism over pessimism, positive over negative, sunny versus gloomy, and winning over losing.

Here’s what sets you aside from everyone else. Tell your prospect right away that it’s ok to tell you No, that you will not be offended. By giving your prospect a way out you are going to save yourself a lot of grief.

Your goal is to learn how to build a long-term relationship with this prospect, so make sure that you are selling to the right person.

If you pretend that your independently wealthy and you don’t need their business you will not come across like a salesperson, and people will like you. What’s most important to remember – people buy from people they like.

Growing your business, increasing your sales, and making more money is a lot easy when you put the right S.P.I.N. on it. Don’t you think?

There’s never been a better time to reflect on where you have been, and where you are going. It’s time to get serious about having complete financial and personal freedom in your life. We can show you how!

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Grow Your Success Today

The world’s Social Media Reputation Index has finally arrived. What I love about it most is that it’s an index that attempts to benchmark a brand’s popularity. For many of you who have tried to decipher reach recency and satisfaction recency online it’s definitely been a mystery for many of us. Reach is the noise around a brand, and satisfaction is about its popularity.

How many of us really want to know how brands are performing? Pretty much all of us, I’d say.

No big surprise that E-Bay leads the pack followed by Google, Blackberry and Amazon.

Social Media Reputation (SMR) score provides a benchmark to gauge a brands’ popularity. So, essentially you want your audience to stay engaged in your brand but they are are the ones changing the marketing landscape themselves.

So, I pose the question out there to marketers… Why is it such a struggle to get your campaigns off the ground? Many have to deal with disconnected systems and people. Doesn’t this all lead to frustration for the you and ultimately the consumer? Certain types of marketing as we know it have gone by the wayside. But there is a better solution…

The solution is to create a new world of customer engagement. Consumers face inconvenient telephone calls, irrelevant offers, and untargeted mail. By understanding your audience first, you can manage and optimise your campaigns, to engage the individual across multiple channels.

Consumers inboxes are being choked with untargeted email. Isn’t it better to make email a strategic channel? Analyse demographic and behavioral & real time data. Make every message relevant. Make every message count.

Consumers are tired of searching through irrelevant, static websites. Make your website engaging for the individual by understanding them when they visit and allowing your business users to create relevant content to engage them when they are there.

Consumers are talking about brands but brands aren’t listening. When you listen to how your brand is perceived by your audience across the entire social media landscape everything begins to change. Analyze the conversations and then engage in them, and feedback what you learned into your mainstream marketing.

The new world of customer engagement need not be so daunting! Is your brand successful in social media?

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Grow Your Success Today

Strategy is key with Google but so is Smarts… as many IM’s claim, if you create your own branding, utilize your own language and position yourself on Google, others will see you and follow you. Following does not always mean mimic, it means learn from what others are already doing so well at. My SEO Smarts Today came out of a video I did in Guatemala in response to an email I recieved from Emil. Emil wrote to me explaining to me a young 18 year guy named George has created the latest and greatest SEO tactics around. If you’ve been in the Industry for more than a year, then you know every week there is something new unfolding, this is the life of Internet Marketing, everything moves fast and it’s pretty intense learning. After watching the video, which I loved, I began to think about my own SEO tactics and thought out loud, “I’ve been dominating Google for years now and have never shown anyone how to do it! SEO Smarts Today was born there and then, in a small deserted cafe in a foreign country. I’m so excited to share these simple strategies that literally get me onto Google within minutes, and on page one:)

So here we go. At a recent Marketing Event in Vegas I met up with Jimmy Davis CEO or Harmonic Marketing and Creator of My Story Hub. I began doing a bit of keyword research for the video and found out how many keywords I could use then I got thinking of how to utilize the branding of names, which I am a HUGE proponent of- branding is KEY! Every day I add something else to my branding of my name, blog, articles and my products. Do a Google search on your name and see what comes up.

When you look at the screen shot below you will see that I use my name and Jimmy’s name, also the topic and branding aspect of Jimmy’s company. With these three elements, I did a bit of research to find out if any of these were being used on page one on Google, nope, so I went in and took advantage of that fact and placed my article in a high profile Internet Marketing site, BetterNetworker.com. As you can read here, within 5 minutes I was on page one in two spots. I love the power of SEO and what you can do with it when you know how to use it. I will be launching SEO Smarts Today in April, it will be a downloadable PDF file so anyone can ultilize the information and get started owning their content on Google and making it keyword rich!

SEO is a huge playground to work within. What I do is play with keywords that are under 5,000 to be able to get my site up on page one of Google within a couple of minutes tops. If I want to go deeper, I will use multiple keywords to my advantage to rank high on Google. Symmetry is key in leading a good SEO tactic in place, that is why I created SEO Smarts Today, to give my team and viewers an easy access portal to work from, enabling anyone to take advantage of content placement.

With so many businesses of all sizes being aware of the benefits of social media optimization and implanting strategies to become more connected, social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities.

The days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers are long gone. Especially futile is an attempt to convince people that your products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed drastically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.

Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers.

Below are the top four shifts that businesses are making due to social media optimization (SMO).

1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”

The goal with SMO in most cases is not to sell more but to engage and connect with customers on a deeper level — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.

The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.

Lesson: Rely less on PR tactics and grab at the opportunity to interact with your customers sincerely.

2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”

Being able to communicate on such a wide-spanning platform also allows for small acts that express gratitude and a commitment to customer satisfaction. Sites like Facebook and Twitter provide businesses and their followers a broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.

In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become extremely important.

Since bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.

Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.

3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”

For generations businesses have stressed over the concept of image and maintaining a carefully crafted public persona. Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.

Also important is being aware of what online perceptions of your business are. How people connect with your business dictates to a great extent the longevity and reliability of their association with your brand and service. Therefore, it’s not just about what you tell them about the business, it’s also about what political stances you take and what information you share and

Lesson: Leave the dated concept of company image behind and embrace your business’s differences and human qualities.

4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction.

However, this omnipresence also presents an added challenge: listening to what your customers want and implementing suggestions. Any expansive platform also adds extra responsibility to use the information gathered in a way that is both purposeful and helpful. This means that just as it is extremely important to reach this audience, it is also important to make the changes they are asking for. Keeping lines of communication open during this process is also helpful since feedback is available with every step.

Redesigning your site to fit your viewer’s needs is perhaps the smartest thing any webmaster can do for their online presence. After all, isn’t interacting with a larger community the purpose of having a site in the first place?

Here are 6 priority design and feature areas that are worthy of a revisit to the drawing board. These may not apply to all types of sites, but there’s something for everyone.

1. Email Newsletters

People are connected to email more now than ever before. With Blackberrys and iPhones and Droids all handling rich text email well it only makes sense to tap into that resource. The newsletter is the perfect website sidekick because it satisfies a different user need: newsletters keep readers and customers informed and in touch. When you’re updating a site, even if it’s regularly done, you’re relying on their draw to the site to satisfy your numbers. Having an email newsletter is like sending the town car to go pick up a guest.

Newsletters are fairly cheap. They require little technology and mustn’t be published too frequently. If you don’t have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence. If you do have a newsletter, then improving it according to research findings will likely make it several times more valuable.

Newsletters have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines. In the long run, achieving this liberation is one of the most important strategic challenges facing Internet managers.

Toddle is a great online newsletter design service:

2. Clearer but personable writing

One of the great advantages of writing a blog is that you can express what you want, when you want to. You want to show your personality and speak through your writing, as opposed to just fill up webspace with words that could have been pulled from anywhere in the blogosphere. Even if you’re writing about something someone has already written about, make it your own. Everyone has a new take on something. It’s also important to always be mindful of your audience. Through comments and social networking interaction, you should have a good idea of who you readers are.

It’s just as important to write clearly. One of the beauties of writing for the internet is a global readership. Your article and blog posts are just a Google away (more on that later) from anyone online anywhere in the world.

3. High-Quality multimedia

The internet we’re a part of now is more multimedia based than ever before. High quality and creative content has never been easier to access or even create. All it takes is a new camera, a YouTube account and a good movie editor. Chances are your computer came with a fairly decent one, however there are great options available. Once you want to really get your hands dirty with video editing check out Corel VideoStudio Pro X3 for Windows and Final Cut Studio for Mac.

If you’re embedding videos, play around with the default YouTube embed values. Customize them to go with your site, coordinate with your theme. Also, whenever possible, upload or link to HD content. Make it as visually appealing as possible. Include music and get creative with titles and captions.

For pictures use high quality, high resolution images as often as possible with a link from a smaller version to a large version if available. If your readers want to see a photo up close and personal there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to.

Here’s a basic lesson on iMovie:

4. Search

Thinking of how your readers reach your site is crucial in how you should design and format it. Considering most people get to their desired destination through search engines, knowing how to both answer and be an answer to a search query is very important.

Keywords play a big role in this. Everything you write should have keywords accompanying it. While you write these keywords, think like your reader. Remember that the reader hasn’t already read your article, so don’t draw too much from it. Think about how you want someone to get to your article, not what you want them to take away from it. Keep keywords simple and precise and always include your name.

While it’s expensive to rewrite your content for findability, doing so also improves your standing in external search engines, and SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the highest-ROI Internet marketing tactics. This is a much better investment than running ads that most users won’t see due to banner blindness or adblockers.

5. Think mobile

More and more people are accessing their favourite sites and blogs on the go. This means that not only are they visiting you from the comforts of home, but also while they’re on the train or subway or bus or at a Starbucks or one a park bench during their cigarette break. Think of how your content is viewed on smart phones and portable internet devices. Browsing the internet on an iPhone or Android phone is like holding it in your hands – it becomes tangible for the first time. Many hosts now offer mobile browser support and thinking of creating a mobile sister site is a good idea if you’re getting a large volume of mobile hits. One advantage of hosting with WordPress is the ease with which blogs are displayed on iPhones and other mobile internet browsers. And with the upcoming release of the iPad, expect the demand for on-the-go content to only go up.

WordPress for iPhone:

6. Integrate social networking

It’s shocking how much a share button or bar helps. The Web isn’t just about accessing information anymore, it’s also about passing that information on. Whether it’s through Facebook or Twitter or Digg or StumbleUpon, people are forwarding information to others more than ever before. Therefore it’s imperative that you make it easy for them, because after all, they’re doing you a huge favour.

Integrating Twitter is a great way of publicizing blog updates, as well as having another medium of communication with your readership. Often, Twitter allows you to update far more frequently and express thoughts that may not necessarily be appropriate for the blog itself.