SELLING STRATEGIES by Maura Schreier-Fleming
Maura Schreier-Fleming is a professional salesperson, sales trainer, and motivational speaker. An engineer by training, she was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. With over 20 years of sales experience, she teaches the art and science of selling with a unique, hands-on perspective and a great deal of real-life insight. She can be reached at Maura@BestatSelling.com or 972.380.0200.
be a sales visionary. Are they growing? If not, you may need to take another look at what you’re doing.
Do you know successful entrepreneurs? Ask them what they think made them successful. You’ll often find lots of reasons. I recently did that. I heard everything from coming to work every day and working hard to doing a better job of reducing risk. All of the answers are right — after all, these people are all successful.
So what’s the common denominator for success? I think it is that they are all visionaries. They saw what other people didn’t. Here’s what sales visionaries see.
Plant Your Garden Managing a sales business is like tending a garden. Gardeners plant seeds and help them grow. Savvy gardeners start with good quality seeds.
Salespeople find prospects and help them grow. Sales visionaries start with the right prospects. The right prospects are the ones who have the potential to grow. How do you know you’ve got them? These prospects are able to make decisions quickly. Customers who take too long to make decisions miss business opportunities.
The right prospects have plans, too. When you ask them how they’re going to grow, they are thoughtful. It may be a simple plan and that’s fine. People who have no plan make me nervous. Winging it has never worked for any successful business I’ve seen.
Can You Make Things Grow? I’ve found that business visionaries need one thing to be successful. They thrive on possibilities and languish when needless obstacles are in their way. If you want to slow them down, create unnecessary work for them. Sure, they’ll get rid of the obstacles, but that will frustrate them.
Sales visionaries are the same. They remove obstacles for their customers. These sales visionaries make it easy for customers to work with them. How do they do it? They ask their customers about what gets in their way. They know their customers’ businesses. Then they look for ways to make it easier for their customers to work with them.
One sales visionary created an easy to use order form that saved his customer time when ordering. Another sales visionary made sure deliveries were stocked on the customer’s shelf. Both did work that the customer would have had to do. These visionaries sell more because they make it easy for their customers to buy.
They’re Creative Thinkers Visionary salespeople solve customer problems. They solve problems, not just by using logic, but with their creative thinking. They are able to connect the dots of information in ways that will help their customers. Here’s what I mean.
One visionary realizes that if he could reduce risk for his customers, they would make more money. So he created a grid where he rated the risks they face. He evaluated risks based on the financial impact on their business and the importance to the company.
He identified the important risks for his customers that had a big financial impact on their business. How did he do it? He reads many different journals and read about a financial tool that he decided to apply to his customers’ business. That’s creative thinking.
Being a visionary is key to business success. Start looking at your prospects and customers if you want to
AUSTIN—A Travis County district court sentenced a Baytown woman on workers’ compensation fraud-relat-ed charges. The court ordered Pamela McCoy to repay $11,340 in benefits to Texas Mutual Insurance Co. and serve five years’ probation.
McCoy reported a job-related injury while working as a warehouse supervisor for Sheff-Man LP of Cypress. She claimed she was unable to work as a result of the injury, and Texas Mutual began paying income benefits to her.
Meanwhile, Texas Mutual investigators uncovered evidence that McCoy was working for a chemical company in Houston, where she reported two additional job-related injuries and was again placed in off-work status.
Investigators call this type of scam double-dipping, because the claimant collects benefits for being too injured to work when he or she is, in fact, gainfully employed.
Texas law requires claimants to contact their workers’ comp carrier when they return to work. Left unchecked, double-dipping and other workers’ comp fraud can lead to higher premiums for all Texas employers.
Austin-based Texas Mutual Insurance Co. maintains three teams of in-house fraud investigators. In 2009, they saved, identified or recovered $16 million through their claimant, health care provider, and employer fraud investigations.
6 FEBRUARY 25, 2010 • THE INSURANCE RECORD
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