by Mike Brunel | May 22, 2019 | Sales
As many of you may know, I owned a media consultancy company called NRS Media. We consulted to Radio, TV and Newspaper publishers, and online media companies all over the world.
As you can probably appreciate, it involved a lot of travel, with many of our staff often on planes for weeks on end. (with weekends off, of course.)
If you want to watch a great movie on air travel as a businessperson, I would recommend Up in the Air starring George Clooney.
Some of the tricks and manoeuvers he goes through to get on some of his flights are very funny and I am sure many of our staff think the same, as they contemplate their journeys.
One of the questions that I always ask when I arrive at the counter is “How busy is the flight today” if the answer is “Okay, not too bad, not too full” I always ask the next question.
“Can you block off the middle seat?” I ask,
“I’ve got a bit of work to do and want to spread out”.
Usually if they have one, they will do it for me.
You see, the middle seat is NOT the seat of choice for a frequent traveller, it’s a seat that nobody wants, unless it’s the kids and they share it with each other.
The kids don’t mind, it gives them the chance to play against each other with some new video game, or a movie they can watch.
So, the question is, would you pay for the seat to be FREE? Well, some people would, and one airline, my airline, Air New Zealand does just that.
It’s part of their new makeover on their new flash Boeing 777’s. If the seat next to you is empty, you can secure it; if you part with $150.
They also sell you the option to stretch out on a mini futon, sort of like a mini bed. As the saying goes, two seats are better than one, and the middle seat is catapulted to “wow” status.
Not a bad idea, thinking outside the cockpit, don’t you think?
I love looking at other businesses for ideas. Your sales organisation can be innovative too, you know.
Create your own upsells.
Good selling.
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
by Mike Brunel | May 15, 2019 | Sales
This week I wanted to share a question that one of my clients asked me in a call last week.
We were talking about ideas to motivate her team.
This was her question:
‘How do I get my team to think like me, or to at least follow some of my behaviours?’
We got talking about her love of reading; any books on business that she could get her hands on, she would read.
It was a habit she had learnt long ago, from one of her original managers.
She had discovered by reading these books, which shared successes in other companies, that she could apply many things she learnt to her own business.
Start a library.
I said to her “why don’t you start a company library?”
She looked at me with a bit of a sideways glance, and said, “You aren’t serious?”
“Yes I am” I said.
Not only start up a library, but bribe them to read a book a month.
Tell them that you will pay a $50 bonus for every book report they submit each month.
It does not have to be a fifty-page novel, just a few pages on the key points they learnt from the book.
Whoever reads the most over the year, gets an iPad preloaded with a collection of both yours, and their favourite books.
You will certainly notice a difference in their attitude.
It’s also a way to quietly bed down your culture.
The ones that you notice will go that extra mile and do the reading, are the people that you want in your organisation.
Have a great week.
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
by Mike Brunel | May 1, 2019 | Sales
Do you know the life-time value of your clients?
What does it mean to the long-term survival of your business?
I was visited recently by my mother in law. We do get on most of the time, after she forgave me for snatching her daughter, nearly 25 years ago.
Each week she goes to her hairdresser and gets her hair tended to with the usual treatment and blow wave.
I know this because of a recent episode that she has repeated to her daughter, every time she sees her.
She is angry.
She is angry over a small thing for sure, but for someone who has been doing that activity for over 30 years, one might begin to understand why.
Vouchers.
She received some vouchers in the mail from this hairdresser, with the offer of a discount when she next visits. It appears that this might have been a generic promotion that was sent out to this entire businesses’ database.
As it was scheduled to be used by a certain time, my mother in law-perhaps being a little absent-minded- decided on her last visit to this hairdresser, to produce these vouchers and ask for a discount on her just completed treatment and blow wave.
Sorry that voucher has expired.
Once the daughter of the owner looked at these vouchers, she explained that they had expired and ‘sorry, but the discount no longer applies.’ (a week over).
Well, you can imagine what the reaction was… not good; and as a result, the relationship has now ended, even after a couple of phone calls between the two parties.
Value.
After asking my mother in law a few questions, we discovered some interesting maths. This woman had been going to the hairdresser once a week for over 30 years, with an average price of $30 per visit. Give or take a few weeks away here and there, I calculated that at 48 weeks a year for 30 years, she has spent $43,200.00 or thereabouts at this particular salon. (1440 x $30 = $43,200.00(48x30x $30))
The lifetime value of that client was a whopping $43,200.00
The hairdresser had lost a lifetime client over $3.00. (The voucher was for 10% off the visit.)
It makes you think. It might sound a little trivial to fight over $3.00, but sometimes that is all it takes.
It can be argued that it was really a silly reaction on both parties and in the end, it could have been resolved.
However, these are the little things that can trip many of us up.
Do you know what the lifetime value of your client is?
Worth finding out.
Good selling.
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
by Mike Brunel | Apr 24, 2019 | Sales
- Talk to them. I know this sounds simple, but everyone is focused on what is happening in the world economy right now. Your clients are not.
They might have one eye on the news, but they also have to open their doors and get on with business. If you are talking to them about how you can help, you become part of the solution and not the problem.
- Be personal. If you have clients who are finding the economy a little tight, get into their place of business with good news. Get some case studies together; go to them with success stories. Keep them informed about what the market is doing.
- Be friendly: Cheer them up. What is wrong with you going in with morning coffee or tea, or picking out a resource (see our resources) that you can send them a lin k to?
- Be the expert. If you want to add value, take your client some information on Facebook, Twitter or other social media information.
This exercise sets you up as the expert, and gets past the strategy of just selling your stuff.
- Any good financial advisor will tell you that in good and bad times, there are always stocks that do well. The same is true in business. Are there businesses that are doing really well at this time? What categories are doing well? What clients are suited to this environment? Chase them; learn where they are, add value and reach out to them.
Most importantly, stay positive and focused on serving your clients.
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
by Mike Brunel | Apr 17, 2019 | Sales
This is not original, but I thought it might be useful for all those sales managers out there that get interruptions every minute of the day.
It’s called “got a minute” meetings, I learned it from Chet Holmes’ book, The Ultimate Sales Machine. I was reminded the other day, by a time management coach as we discussed the importance of taking control of your time.
You know those meetings I am talking about.
“Hi Mike, got a minute?”
“Hi Mike, can I see you for a minute?”
“Hi Mike, in a minute can I see you, for a minute?”
Chet thinks there is a simple way around it… here are the steps:
1: You schedule your own time for a meeting… in other words; on your daily calendar you schedule them as appointments.
2: You let your staff know that from “10am- 11am today” I will be doing “got a minute meetings.”
- Post that calendar on your front door and they can make an appointment anywhere in that hour on that calender.
- They are in 10-minute blocks so you can see six people ONLY in that hour.
- They come in with the issue, a possible solution, and they have 10 minutes with you to work through it.
That’s it. You control the time. You might want to run these twice a day, or once every other day.
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
by Mike Brunel | Apr 10, 2019 | Sales
I have a sales system that looks at building five key processes in a business.
I call it the ADA programme- Anchor- Decision-Action.
One of the key elements to this process is to build strong sales plans.
When talking to clients, I relate the story where I was on a senior management team of a radio station and we decided that we would create a hit list of all the clients that we did not have on the radio station. We called it the ‘Wall of Clients’.
Monitor your competition
The first part of the plan was to monitor our competition. We listened, watched, and read about the advertisers who were not on our media company.
We then selected 30-40 clients who did not advertise with us, decided if they were a good fit for us, and then went after them.
Visualise your goal.
Any goal-setting program you read or hear about will tell you that if you have a goal you are committed to, then you need to write it down and visualise it.
We created a huge board in our sales office and wrote every advertiser from that list of 40 that we wanted to have on our media company.
Our goal was to have those clients advertising with us within 12 months; they would be either a long-term client or using us consistently to fit in with their advertising needs.
The truth is that it took us 15 months to get them all, but that one idea turned our business around.
How can this help you?
- Create a top 40-50 clients who fit your profile of an ideal client
- Write them up on board
- Allocate them to members in your team
- Build sales strategies around the acquisition of those clients
- Set a time frame
- Celebrate every new success
Whatever career you decide to take in sales, it’s always good to get some help.
That’s why you can get FREE in your inbox every morning for 7 days; the 7 Day Sale Challenge.
Hop on over here and subscribe.
For more content like this, please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Mike Brunel started mikebrunel.com after being a successful entrepreneur and founder of NRS Media. He co-founded NRS Media in Wellington, New Zealand, expanded it into a global powerhouse in media sales and training, and was eventually responsible for opening offices in London, Atlanta, Toronto, Sydney, Capetown, and Bogota. He has hired hundreds of salespeople around the world.
He made a lot of mistakes when it came to hiring his superstars. Check out his How to Hire A Super Salesperson Each and Every time – It’s packed with tips and ideas on how to hire great salespeople. Don’t ever Hire Bad Salespeople Ever Again. Promise!
