As a new business with years of cleaning experience under their belt Rest Ashore Cleaning knew that they could be successful once they were able to put themselves out there and promote and sell their services, what they were in desperate need of was some guidance and confidence to push them in the right direction.

After meeting at a network event Rest Ashore really liked the sound of our programme and it seemed clear that our coaching was exactly what they needed. The cleaning company made a decision to engage with The Reluctant Salesman and apply our approach, in their own words it was “the best decision we ever made”.

Our programme simplifies the selling process making it less daunting, providing the tools that are needed and can be used on a day to day basis.

“Terry has given us so much confidence to successfully build our brand and as a result, we are busier than ever.” – Katie, CEO of Rest Ashore Cleaning.

The sales approach they were given during the workshop made it really clear to see where they had been going wrong and by changing their approach they could really excel.

The Reluctant Salesman has provided Rest Ashore Cleaning with a method that they can employ throughout their careers and they now encourage others to do the same.

“We are really excited for the future of Rest Ashore Cleaning and really can’t thank Terry enough for what he has done for us. We would recommend his services to anyone starting their own business or finding themselves stuck in a rut, you won’t regret it.”

It’s feedback like this that makes me love what I do, thank you Rest Ashore Cleaning and we wish you luck for the future. 

The Reluctant Salesman was founded in 2002 and from the outset our unique approach to the sales process has proven to be not just effective but transformational for thousands of individuals and companies that have undertaken the training. So glad to add the cleaning sector to our extensive clientele portfolio. 

The post Making Selling Simple in the Cleaning Sector appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

The post Book PREVIEW: Ten New Clients by… Terry Mullins appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

There wasn’t much selling involved. I was there to buy and they were there to sell so getting it done was in everyone’s interest, but it wasn’t easy. Timber merchants still exist and are a lot friendlier now but you don’t see many DIY people there these days. Most go to the big DIY stores where you can buy nails, screws and even lengths of wood in pre-wrapped plastic bags, and nowadays I’m right there with them. I probably pay a little more than I need to but everything is displayed and most of it fits in my car, and apart from the occasional checkout queue, it’s a lot faster.

The big stores attract professionals and amateurs alike because they make buying complicated stuff simple. It’s not lengths, it’s packs; it’s not boxes of fittings, it’s single bags. They have realised that selling is simple when we make buying simple and that the biggest obstacle you have when selling anything is client confusion…

There’s a story that some years ago a famous London luxury store had a problem selling a new range of jam in their food hall. The jam in question was available in many different traditional and exotic flavours and displayed in a beautiful rustic solid oak display. Big things were expected of this new ‘traditional’ product and nobody could figure out why it wasn’t selling. An enterprising member of staff was asked his opinion and he enlisted the help of his mum. The lady spent just five minutes looking at all the jars and then nailed it. “There’s too many to choose from,” she said. The store reduced the selection and sales took off.

Making products easy to buy is relatively simple but services are a bit more of a challenge, but it is possible to productise (horrible word) many services and make them easier to buy.  If you know my material, you know I’m not big on persuasion -if someone is talking to me about a product or service, I know that they are looking for that product or service. It’s common sense, so why do I need to persuade someone to do something they already want to do? My job isn’t to make them buy, it’s to HELP them to buy, in fact to help them to do what they already want to do. If I can reduce the service to a package, a generic version of what it is I do with a price attached, then selling is easier.

An accountant wishing to sell their service to business start-ups has a business start-up pack that covers everything needed for the first year, a solicitor has a flat fee for house purchase work, a web designer has one or two package prices to cover the most common website builds.

Indeed, there’s an old saying – ok, it’s not that old, I just made it up…

If You Confuse Them, You Lose Them

Is your offering too complicated? If so, it’s worth remembering that making it simpler for the client will make selling simpler for you.

The post Could confusing your customers be costing you sales? appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

The book lays out a blueprint for creating a subscription business in just about any industry. The popularity of subscription services is growing all the time and I’m willing to bet that you are already subscribing to all manner of them. In my case software, Amazon, Netflix and several services are paid through subscription – it just makes sense.

The book explores a range of subjects including the nine subscription models and the psychology of selling a subscription, which is worth the price of the book on its own.

A testament to the power of this book is that as a direct result of reading it, Zoe Howard from Caxton Communications and I have created www.simpleselling.online a site that makes The Reluctant Salesman system available and affordable to everyone.

If you would like to try out www.simpleselling.online for 14 days just click on the link, no credit card details are required.

The post BOOK REVIEW: The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

If you have ever heard me talk about money, then you will know that I believe there’s no such thing as too expensive. I mention this because I am only too aware that people get hung up on getting their prices right and they often attribute their sales failure to getting their price wrong. Another thing you may have heard me say is people seldom buy what they need, they usually buy what they want. I’m about to give you an example of both.

These two ideas came together beautifully this week when I read about the Patek Phillipe 5004T. It’s a watch and it’s a bit pricey… if you want one it will set you back £2.98 million.

Now is £2.98 million too expensive for a watch? Well, it certainly would be for me but as each one they produce is snapped up straight away clearly it is not too expensive for everyone. I think this shows that while there is no such thing as too expensive, there clearly is a thing called ‘I can’t afford it’.

OK, what about this want and need business?

Modern technology has made a lot of things that we might have once needed almost obsolete – rolls of film, fax machines and encyclopaedias, for example – and we really should have added watches to that list by now.

One thing we are not short of is ways of telling the time. Just about every appliance you own displays the time: your laptop and phone, of course, but your coffee machine, dishwasher and microwave could probably help you out with a super accurate time update if needed.

Nobody needs a watch anymore but plenty of people still want to buy them, including me. Ergo, we don’t buy what we need we buy what we want.

You may question this and say ‘what about food and clothing – we buy those because we need them’, and that’s perfectly true except we don’t just buy any old food or clothing; rather, we make certain compromises based on our personal preferences and what we can afford, then buy what we want within those parameters. That’s why I have a watch that I don’t really need that cost way more than I had to spend.

Ok, so now we know that when someone wants something and they can afford it, chances are they will buy it, and this leads us to the concept of targeted selling, or put more simply, choosing clients. At The Reluctant Salesman we advocate a pro-active approach to finding clients by first identifying who the right clients are and then finding simple ways to engage with them. The first criteria question to ask is always ‘can they afford it?’ and if they can’t then you don’t contact them. Simple, isn’t it?

But do you know who your clients are? Most businesses think they do but they often don’t. They try to sell to whoever comes through their door and end up spending a lot of time talking to the wrong people and, worse still, occasionally selling to the wrong people. That’s bad because the old adage ‘profit is sanity, turnover’s vanity’ is still true and when you are accommodating somebody else’s customer, you are lowering profit.

Client Check

Look at your client base and ask yourself do all your clients generate the same level of profitability? Are you doing work for some and charging less than you charge others? Do you have clients who are frankly more trouble than they’re worth? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, for any of your clients, then chances are they are not really your clients because you didn’t choose them – they picked you.

You might consider a little client weeding and getting a pro-active client acquisition strategy. It may not mean you will be able to afford a Patek Phillipe 5004T but it will make your business more profitable.

The post Why it’s time to stop worrying about pricing appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

Much of the film follows Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus on a book tour across America, a very successful book tour because the book they were promoting has sold over 4 million copies. There are also some really interesting contributions from academics and people who have adopted the minimalist life style along the way.

To say that this film had an impact on me would be an understatement: it was like a bomb going off… I started to look at my home, my business, in fact my entire life, in a completely different way. This isn’t just another film about decluttering, although I’ve made six trips to the dump since I saw it. It’s more to do with not filling your life with rubbish and wasting your time, energy and money in the pursuit of more rubbish.

One contributor made the point that we don’t live in the size of house we need. Instead we see how much money we have or can borrow and buy the biggest place we can afford, then we spend more time and energy filling it with stuff we don’t need and seldom use. This makes no sense on a personal level and represents a potential disaster on the global level.

On my six trips to the dump I noticed every parking bay was occupied and as soon as one was free it was quickly filled. Everything that I and my fellow dumpers were throwing away was something we desired at one time but now it was just a problem.

Surprisingly, this is a very upbeat documentary with an important message that could just change your life – and that’s not something I say lightly.

The post TV REVIEW: Minimalism – A Documentary About The Important Things appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

The ‘loving to buy’ part you may question but take shopping for instance, which many of us don’t enjoy so much. I don’t like dragging myself around most shops looking for stuff that I have to buy but put me in a bookshop or an Apple store and I’m like a kid at the beach.

This desire to get something we really want or to take advantage of some promotion or other has seen shopping become a contact sport, with the spectacle of people on Black Friday fighting over a TV or trampling each other underfoot to get a 60% discount on some overpriced item or other. It’s disgusting and disturbing but it does at least demonstrate my point: when people want to buy something, they’re pretty well unstoppable.

The ‘hating to be sold too’ part we all understand. If on your shopping trip somebody appears at your shoulder and asks if ‘you need any help’ then you immediately resist. We hate being sold to so much that an offer of help is seen as undue pressure, and if they keep trying to be ‘helpful’ we will probably hang the thing we were thinking of buying back on the rail and leave the store. Paradoxically, it seems the only way to stop someone buying is to try to sell to them.

It’s exactly the same in business to business or even corporate to corporate sales, for the simple reason that you are not having sales conversations with businesses – you are having sales conversations with people who work for businesses and they’re just like you.

I was recently conducting training for a large insurance company who specialise in insurance for farmers. On the way to the seminar I saw a poster in the lobby with a picture of a young farmer and his comments on the representative who sold him his insurance:

“My local inspector is Nick, and through him our farm gets all its insurance. Nick is great to deal with because he’s not a salesman.”

Nick was one of the 42 participants in the seminar and after I read this out I asked him if he was a salesman and he said he’d always thought he was. When you think about it selling is the only job where it’s a compliment to be told that you’re good at what you do because you’re not like all the other people who do what you do.

So what can we take from this? In essence: people don’t like being sold to and the more we try to sell to them the more they resist. Therefore the key to making more sales must be less selling, simple!

This sounds totally contradictory but only if you buy into the salesperson stereotype and hold onto the idea that the choice you have is to do nothing much or to be a pushy salesperson and persuade people to do what you want, completely ignoring the fact that they are talking to you because buying something from you is what they want or need to do. Once you really get this, you then understand that we don’t have to make the sale happen, we simply have to make the sales process easier. We need to facilitate their need.

The job of the modern salesperson isn’t to persuade people to do something that they don’t want to do, it’s to facilitate their need to do the one thing that they do want to do. The goal of the client is exactly the same as yours: they want the sale to happen. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be talking to you.

You don’t need to persuade someone to do something they already want to do, you only need to relax and help them to do it.

The post Why the key to selling is to RELAX appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

Ring the changes

In 1928 Alexander Fleming identified penicillin, the first chemical compound with antibiotic properties. No grey areas there, that was a breakthrough that transformed medicine. But what about subsequent developments in antibiotics – are they all breakthroughs or just developments?
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell took out a patent on the first working telephone, a device that allowed people to talk to each other over distance. Over the following 120 years or so, telephones developed, the design of the equipment changed, the quality of the communication got better, the distance between speakers increased to allow talk from one side of the globe to the other and people could even walk around with them in their pocket; but the basic use of a telephone never really altered. It was still a device that allowed people to talk over distance.
Things really changed in 1999 when the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphone. Now that really was a breakthrough. It was a breakthrough because it took something we were all familiar with in such a radically different direction that it changed our perception of what it is and what it does, so much so that most of us seldom use our phones anymore for their original function; we spend most of the time we are on our phones not talking to anyone.
To make a breakthrough, you have to create something totally original or reimagine what is possible with something you already have. Once you unleash the power of imagination, real breakthroughs are always possible.

Transform your 2017

New Years resolutions are usually about doing more of what’s good for us and less of what’s bad for us, but that’s only development – transformation requires something more.
At the Reluctant Salesman we talk about ‘breakthrough technology.’ It’s not penicillin or the smartphone but it does have the potential to transform your business and your life by taking something people see as difficult and making it simple. We all know that doing what we have always done will give us the results we always get, so maybe it’s time to try something different.
To help you get started in making that breakthrough in 2017, I am offering all of our UK subscribers, free and without obligation, a New Year coaching session. It’s a thank you for your support. Just send me an email to terry@thereluctantsalesman.com and I will be in touch.
In a year that has seen so much change, much of it challenging, I would like to wish you a very happy Christmas and a truly prosperous New Year, and I look forward to meeting up with you in 2017.
Terry

The post Break through your sales barrier appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

The post BOOK REVIEW: Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.

It appears the world is full of people who are highly qualified at doing things that they don’t find particularly fulfilling, but because they have invested so much time and energy acquiring the skills and knowledge that has brought them success they feel stuck.

This is a problem, and according to one chapter heading ‘Designers Love Problems’, so why not just design your way out of it?
It seems a lot of the books I am reviewing lately have identified a social shift and develop a recurring theme of the way in which uncertainty, coupled with seemingly endless possibility, are creating discontent, this one at least has the merit of offering a route out of the dilemma and is therefore well worth taking a look at.

The post BOOK Review: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans appeared first on The Reluctant Salesman.