You’ll hear it said that salespeople should talk benefits, not features.

This is bad advice.

In certain situations, talking about features closes a sale. Any lead generation salesperson who doesn’t take the time to learn features inside and out is bound to fail.

If you’re looking for a formula, here is one that beats “talk benefits, not features”: Talk features when challenged on a benefit.

Start With Benefits

Some prospects are happy to accept product/service benefit statements at face value. If you say, “Our widget will improve your production throughput by 25 percent,” there are people who will believe you. Why? Maybe because the reputation of your company precedes you. Maybe they don’t really care about doing thorough research. Maybe they already know about the features. Maybe they have to spend $10,000 on something before the end of the year, and your something is the best option going.

But far more often, prospects are skeptical. They want you to prove it. How exactly does your widget improve throughput by 25 percent, they may want to know. At this point you need to explain the (perhaps literal) nuts and bolts of your offering. You need to explain the value of the unique engineering, the greater durability of components, why the offering needs less maintenance, etc.

If you can’t convey this with authority, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, the prospect will conclude that your offering is no good, a risky investment. To convey features with authority, you must:

• Explain features in plain English
• Explain features with specifics
• Explain how the features are superior to the competition
• Explain their impact specifically in the prospect’s application — i.e., in the selling context

Features Rock

There’s a widespread belief that today’s buyers care about engagement and brand image and a vendor’s social commitment. I’d be careful not to buy in too heavily to this idea. Your social media activity doesn’t improve a prospect’s bottom line. Your brand image doesn’t reduce a prospect’s operating costs. Your company’s charitable activity, laudable as it may be, doesn’t help the prospect prevent onsite accidents and injuries. The faster and more directly you can establish your business value through benefits and prove it through features, the more leads you’ll put in the pipeline.

Don’t Start With Features

Some salespeople start by talking features, perhaps thinking they will dazzle prospects with their knowledge. But starting with features is as bad as not being able to talk about them, because without first articulating the benefit, prospects won’t know how all of your technical detail relates to their business issues. If you’re in the middle of a presentation and the prospect leaves the room or falls asleep, there’s a good chance you are talking about features too much and too early.

Online Reviews: Handle With Care

You might think you can skip all the features by pointing prospects to online reviews of your product/service to seal the deal. If you do this, you’re playing with fire. It’s true some prospects are greatly influenced by third-party reviews, but online reviews can backfire badly, because:

• The prevalence of fake reviews has made people skeptical of positive reviews. Even if this plague of fake reviews has not infected your industry, the perception is still going to be there.

• If prospects comb the web for reviews of your product/service, sooner or later they’ll come across a negative review. This one negative review could undo the benefits of the 10 positive reviews they read earlier: game, set, match to the competition.

Get Facts for Your Features

Big companies have in-house testing capabilities, and companies of any size can use independent testing labs to establish the quality of (or certify) various product components. Doing this puts more power in your presentation of features.

For instance, it’s one thing to say a particular mechanism is twice as strong as the competition’s, resulting in less downtime. It’s another thing to say an independent lab has run your mechanism for 500,000 cycles without failure and the competitor’s failed after 250,000 (or never has been tested at all).

If you go into a sales call ready to talk features, you’re much more likely to make a sale. If you add to that testing results or other meaningful data (order fill rates, customer retention rates, etc.), then your presentation will be as close to irresistible as it can be.

This blog is all about lead generation, but today the topic is lead termination. Reluctant as sales people are to give up on any lead, it's physically impossible to follow up forever on every lead that's been generated. At some point, you just have to stop. And yet, every accomplished sales person knows that persistence pays off. If you quit after eight attempts, you wonder if number nine would have been successful. It's this type of thinking, along with sheer stubbornness, that may keep you chasing leads longer than you should.

The problem is, if you spend too much time chasing leads that never pan out, you have less time to follow up on leads that you can close. Persistence is admirable … up to a point. At what point does persistence become a handicap in lead generation? Here are five signals that the time has come to stop pursuing a sales lead.

1. You get no response whatsoever.

When a buyer has no interest in what you're selling, the most efficient way to get rid of you is to not engage. If you've had five emails unacknowledged or five voicemails unanswered, a clear pattern has been established — and its shape is a big, fat zero. Time to move on.

Is five a magic number? Not really, but in my estimation three attempts is not enough to pass judgment. Going beyond five attempts puts you in the position of being a pest, of wiping out any goodwill the buyer may have. Retaining goodwill is important even in failed lead generation efforts. First, the buyer may become interested in what you're selling a month or a year from now. Second, if the lead later falls into the hands of a colleague, you want to leave the door at least slightly open.

2. You have better things to do.

If chasing leads with low closing potential prevents you from following up on more promising leads to the best of your ability, you've got to let go of the inferior leads. I stress "to the best of your ability" because closing a sale — any sale — takes not only persistence, but also creativity, passion and preparation. Chasing leads with low closing potential drains not only your time, but also your energy.

On the other hand, if you have extra time at your disposal, putting serious effort into marginal leads is something to consider. Maybe you can come up with a creative new approach that wins over the prospect. Maybe your timing will be perfect. As long as your follow-up doesn't merely annoy the prospect, you may as well give it a shot.

3. You sense a personality conflict.

A successful sale usually hinges on some degree of chemistry between you and the prospect. If you're not feeling that chemistry, then you may not have a realistic chance of making a deal, no matter how solid your proposal is. You shouldn't take personality conflicts personally; it's just a fact of life that occurs with even the best salespeople in the world.

Swapping leads with a colleague is an excellent, win-win tactic to overcome personality conflict situations. It could be that one of your fellow sales reps will get along swimmingly with your prospect, and also have a lead of his or her own that you'll be able to salvage. This is a much better outcome for you, your colleague and your company than letting two leads dissolve into nothing.

4. The prospect makes unrealistic demands.

The prospect promises an order if the price is 20 percent below your cost. The prospect promises an order if you can deliver it three weeks sooner than you can possibly get it there. The prospect wants a six-month free trial and then 12 months to pay, if the trial goes well based on vague criteria. When you're faced with demands that are clearly unreasonable, your best move may be to walk away rather than get mired in hopeless negotiation.

When buyers make unrealistic demands, it's usually because they really don't want to make a deal or because they don't understand how your industry works. Either way, you're unlikely to make progress if you can't sway the buyer after two or three attempts. An alternative to walking away is to go over the buyer's head — and it's probably worth a try before throwing in the towel.

5. You really can't help the prospect.

Sometimes in the course of lead follow-up, you realize your products or services aren't a good fit for a particular prospect. Even if the prospect doesn't realize it, you know it — and there's no point in pursuing a sale that will blow up in your face.

Even if you can easily make the sale, you're better off not making it and letting the prospect know why, for two reasons. First, if you're wrong about the fit being bad, the prospect will enlighten you as to why it's a good fit. Second, the prospect will respect you and your company for being forthright, which opens the door to a sale of something else or a strong referral. As a matter of fact, when you turn away a sale in this situation, you're next move should be to ask for a referral — great salespeople generate great leads even from their bad leads!

Every sales rep knows how hard prospecting is. The unpleasant truth is, most buyers simply don’t want to talk to sales reps and will do anything to avoid contact. There are many reasons why buyers don’t want to talk to you, but how do you figure out what the reason is if they won’t talk to you? Very frustrating!

If you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall trying to break through and initiate dialogues with prospects, it could be that you’re stuck in a rut. For instance, a lot of reps rely on email to start a dialogue. When they get no response, they continue to send emails. After the 10th or 50th or 100th email, they give up. A better way is to switch tactics. If you do, you may land on one that addresses the reason a buyer is not responding — and this could enable you to get a response.

Why Buyers Avoid Contact With Sales Reps

There are many reasons why a buyer will ignore you. Here are the main ones:

• They’re extremely busy.

• They’re happy with the status quo.

• They don’t think your product/service is needed.

If you send email after email to a buyer in any of these situations, all you’ll do is annoy the person. Here are things you can try to get a conversation going.

• For buyers who are extremely busy, send emails at off hours or weekends, when they have more time. Try phoning them at off hours. Send them a presentation folder with a small gift such as a logo pen. Invite them to lunch — if they are really busy, they may enjoy an excuse to get out of the office.

• For buyers happy with the status quo, communicate how one of their competitors is succeeding because of your product/service. Plant a seed that their business may be in trouble if they don’t check you out.

• For buyers who think they don’t need your stuff, you’ll have to do a little homework. Can you talk to someone else at the company who can give you information that verifies the need for your stuff? Can you find an example of a competitor or company in a similar industry that uses your stuff? In this situation, if you can present the right facts, you’re well on the way to a conversation.

You may have to try all of these methods before you hit the right one, but that’s OK. By covering all the bases, you’ve got a better chance of success than if you merely repeat the same, canned follow-up process over and over.

No two salespeople are exactly alike, but outstanding ones have certain things in common. Having been in sales and sales management for many years, I’ve noticed the best of the bunch invariably have these attributes.

1. Tenacity. Great reps usually need to be told when to stop pursuing a lead. “I give up” is not in their vocabulary if they think the prospect is a good fit. A sales manager knows he or she has the makings of a great rep when the manager has to hold back a trainee rather than push him or her to follow up.

2. Ability to learn. Many of the attributes listed here can be learned, which is good news for aspiring salespeople. However, great salespeople are outstandingly receptive to training. They are not know-it-alls, and yet they are very confident. It’s the ability to learn from experience and training that enables them to continually improve.

3. Confidence. Successful reps are not afraid to make cold calls, to face a serious customer objection head-on, to carry on a sales conversation with prospects who may be better informed and more experienced. Without confidence, reps will spend too much time behind the scenes getting ready and not enough time in the field getting results.

4. Money motivated. Hurray for the free market! Great salespeople may be in it for a lot of reasons, but money is always one of them. Whether reps are paid on commission, salary or a combination, the scorecard is revenue. If reps are indifferent about their earnings or content with what they are earning, where will they find the motivation to increase their production?

5. Eagerness to help. Money is never the only motivation with successful sales reps. The great ones genuinely want to help their customers become more successful in every way. They have a real interest in understanding the customer’s business, and in getting to know customers on a personal level.

6. Work ethic. Successful salespeople are hard workers. In many sales organizations, it’s easy to slide, easy to take short cuts. But even if a rep has all the natural talent in the world, success will never come without putting in the necessary time and effort.

7. Ability to prioritize. Whether the rep is a wizard with CRM or scratches out reminders on sticky notes, the great ones are terrific at knowing when they are spending too much time on “A” and not enough time on “B.” They can rank their top sales opportunities in order from 1 to 25, sometimes from memory. This is a vital skill in sales because not only does the rep have 100 balls to juggle, the number and size of those balls are always changing.

8. Ability to listen. The stereotype of a great rep is someone who is a great talker. The reality is, a great rep is a great listener. I’ve seen reps who are not particularly glib that succeed anyway because they catch every nuance of what the customer says and read every non-verbal signal with precision. This finely tuned radar enables reps to understand exactly what the customer needs from them to make a purchase.

9. Belief in their company, product and service. To make sales again and again, a rep needs to believe in what he or she is doing. I’ve seen reps fake it and do OK for a while, but eventually their true feelings show — and prospects pick up those warning signals. A lot of sales reps get down on their employers, but whether justified or not, such an attitude pretty much locks in mediocre sales performance. Great reps love what they are doing — they love selling and love what they are selling.

10. Good team players. Instead of complaining or moping, great reps try to improve weaknesses in their company’s products and services, and they do it in a professional, constructive way. They also work well with support team members in purchasing, customer service and other departments. They are respected and well liked not only by their best customers, but also by their fellow employees.

Not all salespeople are born with these personality attributes in place and flourishing. But most of them, maybe all of them, can be cultivated with effort and the right guidance.

In sales and marketing, the opposite of love is indifference.

If prospects hate you, at least they may be talking to you. If prospects are indifferent, they don’t engage at all.

Indifference is a major obstacle for sellers of both commodities and new, innovative products. For commodities, buyers are indifferent because they already have 5, 10 or 100 suppliers lined up. For new products, buyers are indifferent because they do not recognize a need. Either way, sellers have to overcome indifference. These techniques may do the trick.

• For a new product or service, invite the prospect to participate in a beta test. This reduces the risk of trying something new, but perhaps more important, makes the prospect feel special because you value his or her input.

• If you include a post-beta test case study or press release in the package, you may find prospects getting interested in the PR value of participating.

• Invite the prospect to participate in a focus group or (easier and more scalable) complete an online product survey. These options gently nudge indifferent prospects into a conversation, and it works because the conversation is about them, not about what you are selling.

• Make an offer prospects cannot refuse. Every buyer, no matter how indifferent, is hardwired to react to a great deal. A great deal involves one or more of the following:

  o A deep discount from list price

  o An extended warranty

  o A money-back, no-questions-asked guarantee

  o Free trials

  o Free customization

  o Rebates

  o Free or deeply discounted related products/services

  o Extended billing terms

  o Free maintenance

  o Free or deeply discounted replacement parts

  o Generous trade-in allowance

  o A creative idea all your own!

• Back up. The natural tendency is to push harder against indifference, like a football coach delivering a halftime pep talk. It may work in sports, but in business, ratcheting up the pressure is more likely to drive the prospect away for good. Instead, back up and try to ease prospects into engagement. For instance …


  o Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter

  o Send them a relevant case study

  o Swag — T-shirt today, $500 order later

  o Major swag — Leather jacket today, $5,000 order later

• Ask for an office/factory tour. Prospects may be indifferent to what you are selling, but they are excited to show off their company. A walk through the facility will get them talking, and probably open the door to other influential contacts.

• Give them a sales lead. Earning gratitude is a terrific way to turn indifference into interest. If you can refer a customer to your indifferent prospects, they will be thankful — and perhaps thankful enough to at least hear you out.

Over to You

What have you done to turn indifferent prospects into customers?

Following up on lukewarm sales leads is one of the most unpleasant tasks in all of sales. Even if the prospect has some interest, there are a lot of things working against the salesperson:

• The timing may not be right.
• The prospect may have a strong existing relationship with a competitor.
• The prospect may simply not like talking to salespeople.
• Something in the salesperson’s follow-up process is turning off the prospect.

A telltale sign of follow-up problems is when salespeople feel as though they are pestering the prospect. How many email follow-ups is too many? Too few? Too often? Not often enough? How many times can you leave a voicemail? What is the right thing to say when you leave a voicemail?

All of these questions are tough to answer because they generally boil down to guesswork. Here is a question I learned a long time ago that removes a lot of the guesswork and makes follow-up a whole lot easier and more effective:

What is the best way for me to follow up with you on your inquiry?

If you can get the prospect to answer that question, to give you his or her blueprint for following up, you are much closer to making a sale than you’re likely to get through guesswork.

The question allows the prospect to tell you how to proceed. This is good because, if you follow the instructions, you certainly can’t be accused of pestering anyone! In addition, the question gives the prospect a sense of control over the sales process, which always makes the purchaser more comfortable.

The challenge, of course, is to get the prospect to answer the question. The best options are face to face or on a phone call, but even if email is the medium, I’ll wager a prospect is more likely to answer a simple, straightforward business question like that one versus responding to an email sales pitch.

Give it a try. It may just save you a lot of time, and fill that lead pipeline more quickly.

When you read marketing and sales copy, you see the word “unique” all the time. Everybody wants to be unique because, so the thinking goes, a unique product or service will reel in prospects like nothing else.

In reality — this is my view, not necessarily the agency’s — being unique is vastly overrated. In fact, being unique can be detrimental to generating leads.

Marketers Love Unique. Prospects Don’t.

Uniqueness is an attribute marketing people love. If you’re selling your product or service to marketers, touting a unique attribute may work. However, if you’re selling to anyone else, it probably won’t work.

Solve my problem.

If I’m a plant manager, an IT director, a purchasing agent or in some other decision-making or decision-influencing capacity, I’m interested in whether your idea saves me money, solves my problem or improves my life. I don’t care whether your idea is unique or as old as the hills; if you bring me an idea that saves me money, solves my problem or improves my life, I’ll buy it.

Touting uniqueness is inward thinking. You’re proud of your innovation, your accomplishment — as well you should be. But the people you are selling to have their own agenda, and that is what dictates their buying decisions. Offering a unique item may briefly grab their attention, but it won’t make them buy anything.

Reduce my risk.

Beyond that, being unique can be a BIG negative. Buying something unique implies risk, and as we all know, businesses are notoriously risk-averse. No matter what a buyer tells you, part of the thinking is: Do I really want to stick my neck out and buy an untested, unproven product? If it fails, I’m going to look like an idiot. I’ll lose my job and my reputation. Let some competitor take a chance; I’ll sit back and see how it turns out. I can always jump on the bandwagon later.

This line of reasoning is not unusual. When I was in the packaging business, we sold commodities and highly innovative products. The innovative products were by far the hardest to sell, and the hardest to sell profitably. Hard to sell because a new concept has to be explained in detail, tested, reviewed by committees and tested again. Hard to sell profitably because newness requires extended warranties, generous return policies and extensive guarantees. If the unique product produces so much as a hiccup in operation, there will be hell to pay.

Selling something recognizable is easier than selling something that isn’t. Labeling a product or service as unique creates roadblocks — not shortcuts — to a sale. In light of this, companies with a unique product should develop a sales pitch that positions it as something familiar — to demystify it and take the fear out of buying it.

I’ve heard it all before.

Another serious issue with positioning an item as unique is what I mentioned at the top of this article — everybody is doing it. When buyers hear claims of uniqueness, they may well think, “Yeah, right.” The problem is, “unique” has become a throwaway adjective. So, if you tout your product as unique, buyers who accept the claim are immediately concerned about risk, and ones who don’t accept it immediately think you’re shady. It’s a no-win situation!

What Are You Really Selling?

Uniqueness is a marketing shortcut that turns out to be a sales detour. Slapping the “unique” label on a product or service takes away the hard work of articulating why the thing is worth buying. It takes away the necessity of putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and seeing things from his or her point of view.

You might be thinking, "Calling my product 'unique' gets me in the door. It arouses curiosity." True enough — sometimes it does. However, if instead you say your product can improve throughput 25 percent, or reduce monthly utility bills 25 percent, or increase space utilization 25 percent, I contend that type of claim will open even more doors — because now you won’t be appealing to the merely curious (a small percentage of buyers), and instead will be appealing to the conscientious (a much bigger percentage).

In short, sell what your customers are buying: savings, solutions and improvements.

Not unique advice, but advice that has certainly stood the test of time!