• Understand project goals and costs
• Craft well defined requirements or update existing ones
• Ensure accurate descriptions were sent to consulting candidates
• Reach consensus on required values and culture fit

Preparation will provide clarity about organizational goals and context for conducting interviews.  When you think you are ready to interview potential consulting partners, refer to these three successful interviewing strategies and develop appropriate probing questions:

1. Ask for two or three self-appraisals relating to accomplishments and testimonials, referencing projects most like your own.  For example, you might ask, “Why do you think your last project in Boston was successful?”  Do their words match their deeds or do you find some inconsistencies?  You want answers to questions that provide you with accurate self-appraisals.  Do you notice a tendency toward excessive self-regard that won’t mesh with your company’s culture?  Look for character, not just talent.  Do they express themselves logically and clearly?  Candidates should be able to tie self-appraisals to accomplishments, demonstrating logic, clarity and consistency.  Descriptions of different projects should be unique and detailed and the consultant should be able to share why their firm is ideally suited to your project.  Already, you should start to understand what results you can expect.
2. Ask broad-based questions related to topics they should know intimately.  For example, “Describe your last consulting experience and how you managed performance expectations while mitigating risks.”  Does the candidate grasp the factors at play?  Do they show a tendency to put the client’s needs first?  Look for a consulting partner that understands topics and themes that feature often in their areas of expertise.  Their prior consulting experiences should help them express important nuances that can help you assess them.
3. Ask for complex comparisons to learn more about how they think.  For example, “Compare how you solved problems for manufacturers with your projects at service companies” Their perceptions will tend to reveal how they think.  Do they cling to aphorisms and talk in empty platitudes or do they speak candidly, humbly and from experience?

If you can increase the likelihood of hiring the “right” consulting partner for your organization, you will severely reduce organizational costs and move faster towards the achievement of goals.  Read between the lines, watch for behavioral cues and protect against your own biases as interviewer.  The interviewing techniques shared are likely to improve interviewing performance by engaging candidates and encouraging them to reveal more about themselves.  If you ask the “right” questions when you interview a potential consulting partner, you’ll be more likely to make the “right” hiring decision.

Some salespeople severely limit the number of cold calls they make in spite of the potential rewards because it involves either (1) a first telephone call to a given prospect or (2) an unexpected face-to-face “call” at a prospective customer’s business.

Salespeople are afraid of the risk, and the reality, of rejection because they think, when a prospect says “no”, they are rejecting them.  Before long, they start viewing cold calling as a horrible chore that should be completely avoided.  To protect themselves from feeling personally rejected, they often develop self-limiting beliefs and corresponding excuses:

•       “I don’t have time”

•       “I don’t like it so I’m not going to do it”

•       “I can reach my goals without doing it, so I don’t need to do it”

To an employer, it may appear that employees simply don’t know how to cold call.  In fact, employees don’t feel comfortable making cold calls because they experience emotional stress related to their fear of rejection.  How can an employer help salespeople overcome their fears of cold calling and rejection so they can cold call more consistently and make more money?

Consider providing the following four cold calling tips at your next sales meeting to help develop consistency and resilience in your salespeople:

1. Develop a detached, professional perspective with qualifying as the primary objective.  Employees tend to think cold calls must coincide with immediate needs in order to contribute toward sales goals.  Instead, salespeople should maintain a positive, self-assured perspective viewing cold calling as a necessary step toward qualifying leads.  Use humor after the call to diffuse any tough situation, keep calling consistently and you’ll move past the moments of rejection quickly.
2. Warm up the cold calling process.  You’ve got about 30 seconds, so tell them your name and the name of your company and then get to the point quickly.  Make the process more effective by turning your cold calls into warm calls.  For example, send emails or letters before calling to help differentiate you.  Call at a time predetermined and communicated in your correspondence to demonstrate your professionalism and follow through.  Emphasize your past successes with similar clients and highlight solutions to problems.  Prospects may be more likely to take your call if they read your communications and respect you for your approach.  Emails and/or letters + phone calls = Warmer conversations, better appointments, and more profitable deals (Test this for yourself!).
3. Hold yourself accountable. Let prospects know when you’ll be calling via email or letter, and you build trust with the prospect and hold yourself accountable to calling at a specific time. If you are still struggling to pick up the phone, try FedEX instead of sending emails and you’ll likely get yourself to start making calls. Why? You won’t want to spend the time and money to send a letter by FedEX and then waste your effort by not calling.  Schedule calling with a co-worker or a partner that sells complementary products or services and then hold each other accountable to making a certain number of calls.  Pick a calling time and schedule it (consider calling Tues, Wed or Thurs from 8 – 9 a.m. or 4 – 5 pm). Always schedule calling in your calendar rather than leaving it as an open task.
4. Get smart about targeting.  Target industries or segments that have the highest likelihood of needing what you offer.  Target the job titles that are the likely buyers or decision makers.  Look for trigger events that provide a good reason to call, such as an article published in a newspaper or magazine.  Match the strengths of the product or service to the needs of the target market.  Show how the position and price are aligned with the prospect’s needs and communicate value.

Salespeople can achieve top performance through cold calling if they develop a strong value proposition and learn how to overcome their fears of rejection.  Start by helping them develop a strong value proposition.  Then encourage them to use the four tips above to call more effectively and consistently.  If you also help them address their underlying fears of rejection, your sales team may become even more highly effective and resilient.

Therefore, employees who cold call effectively often retain their jobs, achieve higher levels of compensation and advance in their careers.  Tougher mindsets result, creating a company culture of overcoming resistance, rejection, obstacles and discomfort.

Are your people taking risks and seizing opportunity?

Cold calling is a critical stage in the sales process.  When employees cold call effectively, companies make money and break into new accounts without referrals or introductions.

The companies also save money because cold calling efforts are among the least expensive methods for qualifying leads.  Qualifying leads protects the salesperson and their company from chasing after people who are incompatible with the products and services offered.

Cold calling is not a pointless numbers game.  It’s a long term approach that saves time and money.  Every name employees scratch off a list and every piece of information gathered provides further justification for cold calling.

Are you afraid that all your prospects will be annoyed by unscheduled interruptions?  Do your employees have the preparation and education they need?  Help your employees develop self-confidence through education.  Teach them how to cold call.

Are you on a path to improving your effectiveness, through altering and testing various media, messages and timing? You’ll know you are effective when you find ways to trigger the attention of your qualified leads. When you have their attention, you may be on the road to prosperity. But if you fail to gain their attention for an extended period of time, you may not know what to do.

What you may find especially frustrating is that you know enough to know your scenario is unique. It is unique, and therefore, you don’t want to blindly duplicate what others are doing because you don’t have unlimited time. Your prospects, their needs and behaviors, and your company’s products, services, people and budget are all distinct.

However, if your efforts don’t generate revenue quickly, you could find it difficult to adequately finance your lead generation activities, resulting in poor outcomes for the rest of your business.

Sales activities require financing. Prospecting, networking and cold calling are expensive. Therefore, cost/sales analyses should feature in discussions about lead generation. Consider the opportunity costs of sales outsourcing vs. developing and training in-house salespeople. Compare lead generation campaigns with results and costs. Which of the following costs should you quantify?

Know your audience:
• Finding out prospects’ names
• Learning about what’s important to them
• Figuring out where they go for solutions to their problems

Have your “best” people talking:
• Obtaining, developing and retaining professionalism, behavior and attitudes in salespeople
• Keeping the people best at lead generation from becoming too busy to do lead generation
• Creating and monitoring a successful hand-off process between marketing and sales

Develop successful strategies, tactics and offers:
• Developing a successful sales pitch
• Practicing delivery in order to sound comfortable, concise and natural
• Determining why prospects read your emails and yet do nothing

Qualify and nurture prospects:
• Finding prospects who are a fit
• Determining and agreeing upon criteria that defines a “qualified” prospect
• Developing processes to ensure salespeople follow up on leads generated by marketing

Measure and research:
• Software for tracking, measurement and analysis
• Ongoing market research

Are your offers, strategies and triggers getting the attention of qualified leads? At what cost? Are you worried about enduring weak triggers and extended lead generation costs?

But as a sales person, I understood. They wanted me to enjoy myself but they also needed me to leave. Those chairs helped motivate me without anyone having to actually tell me “the next guests are arriving soon”.

As a restaurant owner, steep competition and fickle consumer tastes force you to work every angle just to survive. With sophisticated sales and marketing you,

• create high-stimulation environments
• offer seating that doesn’t encourage too much lingering
• make high profit items easy to find on the menu
• bury low profit items in the middle of menu pages
• utilize savvy pricing strategies to create the illusion of relative bargains
• overbook reservations to adjust for no shows

However, tension develops in the marketplace between educated buyers and sellers of food. Some restaurants only keep 4 cents of every dollar spent by a customer and feel they have to resort to tactics some customers don’t like. For example, they may have to use yesterday’s surplus food in the next day’s specials (especially on Mondays). Savvy customers watch for signs that expensive meats are being used in pastas, stews, and soups to possibly hide the less-than-fresh taste of the meats. (Source: SmartMoney)

Customers are always looking for great food and great overall restaurant experiences. For value, some consider bringing their family to IKEA for “a delicious meal at an affordable price” (Source: IKEA). Others take advantage of special offers at fabulous restaurants through OpenTable and “Restaurant Week” (Source: OpenTable).

Restaurant owners, like all business owners, try to meet and exceed the expectations of their customer base in order to generate sufficient profit and earn repeat visits. They know all buyers help them keep the wheels of their business turning, even the most educated buyers, who find some of their tactics unsavory.

Buyers have every right to look for ways to extract the most value for their dollars. So, what new sales techniques can restaurant owners learn? They need more profit without having to resort to more sauce, gravy and butter.

Please provide any thoughts or ideas in the comments section below.

Two years ago, major retailers began offering Black Friday-type deals online. They figured crazed shoppers and deal-hunters would rather click for deals than stand in lines. But they didn’t offer the same deals for online shoppers as they offered in their actual stores. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping))

This year, shoppers have more sophisticated tools. They will comb through department stores and outlets looking for bargains, scanning barcodes and comparing in-store deals to their mobile-only deals. Their smartphones will enable them to verify store prices are best prices otherwise they will simply click to take advantage of a better deal.

Other consumer behavior will include not leaving homes, and not dealing with lines or crowds at all. Instead, the buyers are armed with apps and websites to aggregate deals and comparison shop in relative comfort.

As a business owner, remember that consumers are taking full advantage of Black Friday discounts by doing research and ignoring tactics to get them to buy last year’s inventory.

How do you use persuasive ads and buzz to get consumers in stores and still help them make the best purchase decisions? Irrational shopping decisions can really put a retailer in the black. How can traditional retailers survive when online competitors undercut prices and consumers see it in real time?

Please provide any thoughts or ideas in the comments section below.

In many ways, entrepreneurs and Occupy Wall Street protesters are similar:

Entrepreneurs:
• Demand independence and are often tired of feeling oppressed by their job
• Believe they can make a positive difference in the world
• Want to see their vision become reality and are willing to take risks to get there

Occupy Wall Street protesters:
• Demand our political system serve all of us, not just the rich and powerful
• Believe that Wall Street owns Washington
• Believe that their efforts will help reclaim our democracy
(http://occupywallst.org/)

They both tend to do well at getting heard and getting ideas into the marketplace. They both suffer similarly when their ideas fail them, when they are evicted or when they are forced to improve their approach. Among both groups, they may accept failure of their closely held ideas as evidence that they need to go back to the drawing board and emerge later, better suited to thrive. If they need get a job or obtain better skills, they are often willing to do that.

However, there are others who don’t accept failure as feedback that they should do revisions. Instead, they think it’s the world that needs to do the changing. They insist that any failure of their ideas represent more evidence of oppression. They want to endure in a world that hears, listens and ultimately yields to their will.

Occupy Wall Street’s latest slogan is “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come”. The Occupy Wall Street movement has to address basic questions of where the protesters will meet and sleep. Furthermore, they need to adapt and emerge with ways to get people who share their beliefs into public office. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-0)

Entrepreneurs and Occupy Wall Street protesters must make sustainable progress or adapt before it’s too late. In the protesters’ case, they need Occupy Wall Street Version 2.0.

Please provide any thoughts or ideas in the comments section below.

If relying solely on population growth, Chevalier Consulting Group guesses circulation of the Beacon Hill Times has grown only 3.5% since the year 2000 (Source: Boston.com) Beacon Hill populations probably won’t spike this decade either and the internet continues to disrupt the newspaper industry.

So, what should a local weekly paper do, spend money on a new website like The Boston Globe did? Improve its content?

We think the Beacon Hill Times can gain market share from other local competitors like yellow pages, radio, television, and direct mail by studying what other papers are doing to survive. Search for stories like the one about Verican helping the Victorville Daily Press with an “Email Edition”. (http://www.verican.com/local-newspapers-can-survive-with-adoption-of-interactive-products/)

We might trip over your newspaper sometimes but we want the best for your sales. To learn more, please contact Chevalier Consulting Group at 617.939.0139 or visit us at http://www.chevalierconsultinggroup.com/sales-consulting-training-outsourcing-solutions/.

What some people don’t know is that they don’t have a single cupcake formally for sale in their stores. Take a look: Johnny Cupcakes.

Instead, they sell t-shirts. Some first time walk-ins to the store probably shout, “you tricked me – and if you people wanted to sell t-shirts you should have called it Johnny T-shirts”. But, apparently some buy a new t-shirt and satisfy their sugar craving elsewhere.

What’s worth talking about is how this company used “buzz and exclusivity” to launch themselves to success. (Source: Inc Magazine)

Call Chevalier Consulting Group Now at 617.939.0139 before someone else gets what should have been yours!

While we don’t want to make a particular judgment call about Scientology, we think there is an important lesson here. Chevalier Consulting Group thinks the Church of Scientology got off the ground because someone knew how to articulate a strong value proposition. They went on to make massive profits and probably didn’t pay much in taxes.

Do you want everything to be cheaper, to hire more and better qualified people, get tax benefits, gain access to capital, get good PR, buy at auction, find all the great deals and be independent? (Source: Entrepreneur Magazine)

Then deliver real societal value and make sure your team knows how to articulate it. For more revenue now and ideas that can make you money, call Chevalier Consulting Group at 617.939.0139.