Category: Sales

What are you giving out today
for Halloween?
Odds are… candy and gum
or more precisely
lollipops or tootsie rolls.

Halloween is the largest holiday
for confectionery sales
(followed by Easter and Christmas).

The top candy given out today are…

1 – Lollipops
2 – Tootsie Rolls/Pops
3 – Smarties
4 – Bubble Gum
5 – “Fun Size” Chocolates
(with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups the favorite)
6 – Pixy Stix
7 – Sweetarts
8 – Starburst
9 – Caramel Candy
and
10 – Candy Corn

Hhhmmm… I now know
why my hairdresser gives out lollipops
to her younger customers.

Though if you’re targeting older customers,
70% of parents sneak snack-size chocolate bars
from their children’s trick-or-treat sacks.

BTW… Candy and Gum ranked 4th
among all food categories in 2009
(trailing carbonated beverages, milk, and salty snacks).
If you are making a no-candy stand,
know that you’re in the minority.

I was unsuccessful with my latest round
of the Great Agent Hunt.

I have a personal relationship
with some of the agents I queried.
These agents are professionals.
They have professional pride
in the projects they represent.

Our personal relationship
didn’t come into play with the actual decision.
They don’t feel they can sell
the manuscript
so they rejected it.

Where I saw a return on this relationship
was in the rejection letter.
The other agents sent the standard
‘I am not sufficiently enthusiastic
about this project
to represent it’
which says absolutely nothing.

My agent buddies told me
‘Publishers aren’t looking for demon stories
from new writers.
They have established writers supplying
these stories.’
THAT is feedback I can use.

Don’t expect friends to
risk their reputations
on your substandard product.
You can, however, expect
a more detailed ‘no.’

My city is in the middle
of a fierce battle for mayor.
The top three candidates
have massive teams of enthusiastic supporters.
That’s great.

Except they aren’t organized enthusiastic supporters.
One candidate’s team contacts me
at least once a day by phone.
One day, I was contacted three times.

I feel stalked.
I no longer answer the phone.
I am tempted not to vote for this candidate
simply because he’s a pain in the ass.

More contact is NOT better.
Don’t stalk your prospects.

Being on the great agent hunt,
I receive rejection after rejection
every single day.

It is tough
yet rejection is part of any success.

How do I deal?

I ALWAYS ensure that
I have multiple submissions circulating.
When I get a rejection,
I hustle and send TWO something else’s out.

Keeping the pipeline full
gives me hope
that the next email may be a ‘yes.’

Double filling the pipeline
increases the chances of success exponentially.

And I have zero spare time
to dwell on the rejections.

I helped represent
my writing organization
at a book event yesterday.
The goal was to recruit new members.

I had the afternoon shift.
I arrived to find all five writers
sitting behind the table.
They told me it was deadly slow
and there was no interest in membership.

I stood in front of the table
and soon had more interested people
than I could process properly.
I put the writers behind the table to work.

One of my salesman buddies
tells me that he always makes sales calls
standing up.
He says prospects can hear the difference.

You also can’t make sales
with a table between you and your prospect.

Sell standing up
and sell on the same side of the table
as your prospect.

I recently submitted a story
to a large publisher
via email.
I received nothing back.
No autoreply saying it was received.
No human email saying the same.

The process for authors
is to submit stories
and then wait months,
sometimes years
(yes, years)
for a response.
If the email has not been received
then the waiting is for nothing.

So I emailed to confirm
that they received my original email.
They emailed back and said they had.

Yeah, silliness,
especially since an autoreply
could have done the same thing automatically.

If you aren’t going to respond
within a half decent time frame
and your business depends
on the people contacting you,
at the very least
set up an autoreply.

Whenever I go to a seminar,
I usually contact the guest speaker
and ask
if she wants to have
lunch or dinner or coffee or whatever.

Often she’ll be busy.
The savvy organizers
will fill her free time
before and after the event.

Sometimes she won’t be.
I’ll ask her how many people
she wishes to have lunch with
and I’ll invite a mix
of folks at her level,
(because successful folks
like to mix with successful folks)
and potential fans.

The rare but golden time,
she’ll have plans
but she’ll invite me along.

I risk absolutely nothing
by asking
and have everything to gain.

Scott Ginsberg has a great post
on setting yourself up
as the answer
to customer’s problems.

One of his tips?

Be brief.
Give the answer
and nothing else.

“Brevity is eloquence.
No need to deploy every weapon you have.
Like my mentor says,
“Pastors need to learn
how to preach one sermon at a time.”
Are you vomiting when spitting would suffice?”

It used to be
we’d put up
with that know-it-all
(usually with the fancy degree)
in the office
who had the answers
but forced us to sit through
a long rambling speech
filled with fifty cent words.

With the internet
and the speed of information searches,
we no longer have
that sort of patience.
We want the answer
and only the answer
and we want it now.

If you want to be seen
as the go-to gal,
don’t make your customers wait.

A small publisher told their writers
that they couldn’t share sales
during chat days.
Their words?
“It can’t be done.”

You and I
and anyone with any IT knowledge at all
knows that is bullshit.

What they really mean to say is
“We won’t do it.”
or
“It will take time better used elsewhere.”

Be very, very careful
when claiming that something CAN’T be done
because someone, right now,
is doing that impossible something.
When your audience finds this out,
trust will be shot
and they’ll distrust every word you say.

There are no CAN’T’s in life.
Take that word out of your vocabulary.

I was eating at one of my favorite restaurants
and the waiter started complaining
about how demanding patrons were
and how they were never happy, etc. etc.

He thought he’d get sympathy.
My reaction?
This man can’t handle his job.
And I figured
that I was one of those ‘demanding’ patrons
he’d tell his next table about.

If you complain about your customers
to other customers,
you soon won’t have customers
to complain about.

If it is a legitimate complaint,
talk to your manager
under the guise of
‘how would you handle….’

If it is one of those work grumbles
we all get,
talk to a friend who is disconnected
to your office
(i.e. she won’t tell anyone
about your rather trivial complaints).

If you need an excuse
to give a customer
like
‘sorry, it has been crazy in here’,
present it as a positive observation,
rather than a complaint.

I once saw a waiter get chewed out
by a customer.
That waiter came to my table,
grinned
and said ‘she’s one of our regulars.’
I don’t know if he was joking
but we all laughed
and he was seen as a professional.

Customers buy
solutions.
Don’t load them down
with more problems.