Within each one of us, there is the ability to do great things with our lives.

A mantra that will facilitate your abilities are the simple words “I am” followed by the dreams and desires that you wish to bring about. This mantra needs to be spoken by you in your private moments, and said to every person that will listen to you!  One such example might be, “I am going to publish a book.”  Find that private place for yourself, whether it be alone in your car, or while walking alone in the woods, and say it with determination in your head and heart. Say it often! Make it a part of your everyday speech. When you are talking with friends, family, co-workers, and strangers, say it to them as well.

I certainly think so. Putting forth the effort now will  reap quick rewards and will pay back much more over your entire career.  Imagine you always had their up to date contact information. Now take that a step further and imagine that all the people in your personal database did the same thing and that you had access to all of their connections.

That is what LinkedIn has become.

Here are some current statistics on LinkedIn:

• More than 100 million members from over 200 countries
• Adding an estimated 1 million members per week
• Over 170 industries
• 100% of the Fortune 500 have executives active on LinkedIn
• 25% of all LinkedIn members are senior executives.

This is a professional network you should belong to!

LinkedIn is a social media powerhouse. It’s the place to hang your personal shingle and your company’s shingle — where others can “see” you before they meet you. It is quickly becoming more important than your bio on your corporate web page.

LinkedIn users turn to LinkedIn first. It is a place to be talking about yourself! It is a place to use a curious introduction that sums up what your firm does and what you do to help people.

The Goal

The goal is to build a big professional network to promote your firm, find and be introduced to potential clients, discover inside connections to help close deals, and research companies & industries. So start talking about your firm and yourself!

Your profile is the foundation of your LinkedIn brand for you and your firm. The goal is to be “seen” more. There are two key things to make this happen:

• A detailed bio with a lot of searchable keywords
• A lot of connections so that people can see you in their network.

You, in turn, can see more users through their networks. You will get out of LinkedIn what you put into it, so harness all of its power by putting effort into branding yourself and your firm.

Five Steps to use LinkedIn

Here are the 5 key steps to get up and running:

1.  Build and optimize your LinkedIn profile

Make it detailed. You’re communicating your brand! It should list out your work experience, professional credentials, technical skills, professional training, and industry organizations. Inject a note of personality into it and share interesting facts about your firm’s areas of expertise. Establish credibility with those who view your profile.

Does your profile speak to your target audience? If you’re looking for clients, list out industry keywords, recommendations, and LinkedIn groups. The goal here is to demonstrate you can solve their problem. You can be the solution to their needs. You can help!

 2.  Make your profile SEO-friendly!

Search Engine Optimization is key, so add keywords! Increase the likelihood of your profile being a top result for specific keyword searches. The more keywords you can squeeze onto your profile, the higher your chances of being found. And you want to be seen so you can tell the world about your capabilities.

3.  Change your external profile

Your name should be something meaningful rather than the default setting. You do this in your settings page. For example, my external name is www.linkedin/in/mobunnell instead of www.linkedin/in/m45fguths or something like that you get by default.

Submit this new name to the Google database. If you don’t, Google will typically not return your LI profile when people search on your name because it resides behind LI’s firewalls. You want people to find your LI address using Google. Go here to add it: http://www.google.com/addurl/. It’s as simple as typing in the address and hitting return. I put my LI address in my email footer and it’s on my business cards as well. I want to make it easy for people to connect with me.

4.  Ask others to join – efficiently!

Start adding connections! The easiest way is to upload your address book to LI. When you start inviting people to connect with you right after you meet them (in the future), it is nice to take the time to briefly customize each invite instead of using the default – but when I initially got into LinkedIn several years ago, I started by loading my entire address book.

With your address book loaded, you’ll be notified on your home page if any new people join that you already know. This is a great time to send an invite for a connection.

You might also try searching for specific people that you’ve lost track of. Odds are, they’re on LI or will be soon. You should definitely target people in your company and people in your industry because they will have many insular industry connections to others you know or want to know.

 5.  Ask for testimonials

Definitely ask your Raving Fans for testimonials. Let’s say you work pretty hard at it for a year and get 50 testimonials on LI. Then, say a year from now a potential prospect searches you online and sees all of these testimonials on LI because you’ve made it easy for them to find you. Maybe he or she even knows one of the people that wrote you a great testimonial. That’s powerful! The advice I’ve gotten is to ask for testimonials in person (but established through LI) after people say “thanks” because you’ve done a great job on something. I think this is great advice. It will take time to build testimonials but it’s worth it. You establish credibility amongst professional peers through recommendations.

Have fun with it! It is mildly addicting to start connecting with people. You’ll discover and reconnect with lots of people you haven’t talked to in awhile. As your network grows, and people are perusing contacts of mutual friends you have, they’ll discover you. It’s fun to get invites from people you haven’t talked to in awhile, so relax, have fun and start talking about yourself!

Get Started!

If you haven’t been using LinkedIn already, feel free to connect with me.  If you have been using it and we aren’t connected yet, what are you waiting on? Let’s connect!

I’d love to hear how you’re using LinkedIn and other tips you might have. Please comment below and to let me and others know.

How many times have you been in the middle of preparing a BIG proposal just wishing like crazy you knew how much your client wanted to spend?  If I were a betting man (and I’m not!), I would bet at least more than once!

I know I used to do it all the time. I’d do all the research on the client and their business needs, brainstorm with my team on some great solutions, put together a fantastic team to do the work, and feel really good that we had a winning solution that they couldn’t refuse.

But, then we had to price it.  Gulp!  We had never talked about the price.  We had talked about vision and scope and timelines and process and resources, but we never once talked about price with the client.  So, there we were at the eleventh hour with the proposal due the next day and we were still scratching our heads over how much to charge.  We had already estimated our labor costs, overhead, travel expenses, and margin to do the work, but it seemed like so much money!

So, we began to second-guess ourselves….

• Should we discount our labor rates?
• Could we complete the scope of work within a few hours?
• Maybe we should low-ball this one in hopes of getting the next BIG one?
• Could we make our quarterly numbers if we took a hit on the margin just this one time?
• What if they reject the proposal because it’s too expensive?

Sound familiar?  Well, the story gets better!  Read on!

What I Learned from a Used Car Salesman About Pricing

(No, not the stereotypical used-car salesmen that people are scared of becoming! I’m talking about an honest, hard-working used car salesman.)

A couple of years ago, I had to buy a new car to replace my aging 1994 Ford Escort.  It had given me a lot of good years, but with 264,589 miles, it was almost time for a new one.  I rarely buy a brand new car, so when I say I had to buy a new car, I mean I had to buy a used car that would be new to my family and me.

So, I gathered up my wife and kids and off we went in search of a nice new used car for the family.  When we got to the first used car lot, a very friendly sales guy came up to us right away.

“Good morning, Sir!  And, helllllooooo pretty ladies!  How can I help you today?”

“We’re looking for a new car for our family.  Well, not a new car, a used car, but it would be new to us,” I explained.

“Weelllllll!  That’s great!  You’ve come to the right place!  We’ve got plenty of new cars and plenty of used cars, but they would both be new to you!  Haha!  About how much are you looking to spend?”

[Stunned silence.]

[More stunned silence.]

My wife and kids saw the shocked expression on my face.

“Mo, honey, the man asked you how much you wanted to spend.  Aren’t you going to answer him?”

“Uh, yeah, uh… uh…., I just…., well, it’s just that….Holy Cow, Mister!  Do you know what you just asked me?”

“What?” he replied, seeming agitated. “All I did was ask you how much you were looking to spend on a new car…I mean a used car!  Look, if I don’t know how much you want to spend, we could be here all day looking at cars that cost too much or ones that didn’t have the right features for your family or ones that were too old or had too many miles on ‘em.  All you gotta do is tell me how much you’re looking to spend and we can find you a nice car that matches your price.  I got a thousand options for you right here on this lot!  If you don’t want to tell me how much you want to spend, that’s fine with me, but it’s gonna take us a whole lot longer to make a deal because I’ll just be sitting here second guessing myself trying to figure out what you want to spend.”

Isn’t that a great story?  For me, it was another one of those BIG “Aha!” moments.

How to find out how much your buyer wants to spend

Ask!  

Plain and simple.  Ask, in the same language the used car salesman asked me.

“About how much are you looking to spend?”

Don’t get stuck asking “What’s Your Budget?”. Their budget most likely won’t be the price they are looking to spend.

Ask before you start writing the proposal or preparing your cost estimate.  By asking this way, you’re not asking them to commit to a price or spend their whole 2010 – 2020 budget on your project.  If you know how much they are looking to spend, you can match the scope, time, and resources of your proposal to the amount they want to spend.  Then, when you give them the proposal, they will be delighted, because it will represent “about how much” they wanted to spend.

If they tell you a number higher or lower than you expected, you can always adjust the scope of work.  Just make sure they agree with the scope changes.

Not every buyer will be able to tell you how much they want to spend, because a lot of times they haven’t thought it through, or maybe they are really just fishing around for cost “guess-timates” for budgeting purposes.  It doesn’t hurt to do some fishing of your own when that happens.  Here are some more questions you could ask if a buyer answers with “I don’t know.”

• Can you give me at least a range?  Are we talking a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand?
• Have you had any other estimates that seem about right?
• Have you done any projects similar to this?  Do you know what they ended up costing?
• If this is coming out of your budget, what percentage do you want to set aside for this effort?
• If you just need this for budgeting purposes, is it okay if I give you a range based on the scope?  We can fine tune it when you decide to go ahead with the work.

Pricing has always been a sensitive subject in the selling process.

But it shouldn’t be!!

After all, everything has to cost something and your buyer doesn’t expect you to give your services away for free.  In fact, sometimes, the higher you price your services, the more perceived value they have.  Read our BIG blog on “4 Reasons Not to Discount Your Prices” for more about pricing and the psychology of payment.

We’re interested in your thoughts! Leave a comment below and let us know what other tips or techniques you have to find out pricing so that you aren’t wasting your time or your customer’s time.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/

Imagine that you’re sitting at a table of 8 people and you’re already on your second large coffee trying to stay focused. There is a PowerPoint presentation going on that just won’t end. The presenter is on slide 37 of 50 and you’ve already been sitting there for 45-minutes trying not to fall asleep. Your brain doesn’t seem to want to function. You can’t absorb any of the information and there is at least a long, drawn out 15 minutes left of the meeting, which feels like eternity.

Do you enjoy being in those situations?

Don’t worry!! If you don’t enjoy those situations, keep reading and you’ll be able to save yourself, and others, from boring and time-wasting presentations.

How Not to Use a Powerpoint Presentation

I used to create a sales deck for almost every sales meeting. I would spend hours making sure I had every single thing I could think of in the deck, including the history of our company, our office locations, the logos of our key customers, an overview of all of our business lines, a couple of impressive case studies, and a partridge in a pear tree. I didn’t want to leave anything out in case they asked me about it. I had my PowerPoint crutch with me at all times!

Unfortunately, in many of the sales meetings, it took so long to get through the deck, we never had enough time to talk about the client’s needs and we would end up trying to schedule another meeting. Today, I wonder how many deals I lost because I was doing all the robotic-like talking through my PowerPoint crutch instead of listening to the customer’s needs.

Times sure have changed!

Today, I rarely — if ever — prepare a PowerPoint presentation for a sales meeting, even if I am meeting with someone for the first time. Instead, I use a process called Dynamic Meeting Preparation. The process has six simple steps.

6 Steps of Dynamic Meeting Prep

Follow these steps to a more interactive, valuable, and exciting meeting that will help you get to the next step.

Step 1: Have one goal, and only one goal for the meeting. Your goal should always be to get to the next step, regardless of where you are in the sales cycle.

Step 2: Frame the meeting. Tell the prospect exactly what your goal is for the meeting.

Too often, sales people justify the first meeting with “We’re not here to sell you anything! We’re just here to get to know you.” If that really is your goal, then you won’t get to the next step in the selling process, you’ll just have a nice chat and waste everyone’s time. Instead, tell the client exactly why you are there.

Consider this: “We’d like to spend this time learning about your needs and to discuss how we might strategically invest in you as a way to earn the right to do business with you. We’ve prepared a list of five small projects that we are willing to do — on our dime – but, if these aren’t the right projects, then we can identify some others that would be helpful to you. Are you okay with that?” (PS: A “yes” is a big win here!)

Step 3: Prepare for half the time and twice the time for the meeting.
When is the last time a sales meeting went exactly as you planned?

By being prepared for half the time, you will be sure to hit your key points and not get sidetracked with anecdotes or dialog that doesn’t get you to the next step. By preparing for twice the time, you will be able to spend more time learning about your client’s needs, or even be able to start work on your strategic Give-to-Gets.

Step 4: Prepare tough questions ahead of time.
Think about tough questions they might ask you and also prepare some that you will ask them. Think of questions that are strategic, financial, technical, process-oriented, or relationship- oriented. Use Gravitas, from GrowBIG® Course 1: Sales Foundations, to help you think through the many dimensions of the client’s business.

Step 5: Adapt to the client’s thinking style or make sure you are prepared to communicate to their preference, not yours! If you can’t determine their thinking style, be prepared to cover all four-thinking preferences.

Step 6: Finally! Prepare your materials! Based on the five steps above, determine what the best presentation materials might be. Do you really need a 20-page PowerPoint or can you get to the next step with a one-page description of your business model and a list of your strategic Give-to-Gets?

Getting that first sales meeting with a new prospect is a huge win for you. Don’t waste your time doing the wrong things before the meeting. Instead, do your research on the prospect and be prepared for a dynamic meeting that is almost guaranteed to get you to the next step.

What additional steps do you have for preparing for meetings? Let us know in the comments below.

Mo