Advanced Tip - Differentiation

One of the keys to being remembered by your prospects is to differentiate yourself. Unless you're lucky enough to be in a purely niche market and selling for the company that owns that market, that is the de-facto leader in it, you can assume that you are one of a myriad of sales guys hitting the prospects up on any given day. Obviously your product has some merit and value to the prospect or you wouldn't be selling it, but how do you make sure you're top of mind when it comes time to make a buying decision? The easy answer is to be the best. Which is, of course, easier said than done.

In the meantime what other things can you do to make yourself memorable? Remember, the key here is to make sure that when the prospect decides it's time to make a purchase, regardless of product YOU are the name they remember. Nothing is worse than having a customer call your company's receptionist asking for "sales" after you've spoken to them. Except maybe calling up a customer and finding out they had forgotten about you in the purchasing decision because another sales person was better and more memorable. Come up with tricks that go beyond just the product and your presentation.

Everybody knows someone in their industry who always wears hawaiin shirts or has bizarre shoes or something like that. You know that person because of that item. You know their company or product based on the company or product, but you remember the individual because of their quirk. Not everyone has the chutzpah to wear bright orange shoes or go to an executive meeting in a casual shirt, but there are other ways to get around that. The first key is to be an individualist. Steve Jobs doesn't wear a hawaiian shirt to every presentation, but everyone knows who he is because of his individuality. It doesn't matter if you work for a staid old company like IBM or some other highly corporate group with so much process that it quells individuality; at the end of the day you have the choice and the ability to be yourself. How you express this is purely up to you. Perhaps you have a unique hobby that you can throw into conversation. Maybe you did something interesting in a previous career life. Perhaps you know someone famous.

I can't stress enough how important it is to drop these tidbits in as early a conversation as you can. Every sales person in your industry has your exact same training, and run with the assumption that they have more experience and better product than you. And are better sales people (they probably aren't if you're reading this site, but run with that assumption; it will make you work harder, which in and of itself will make you better than most sales people). Because they have the same training, they are saying the same things, and because they have better product and more experience, they're saying it better than you. So you need to make sure you're the memorable guy.

You: "Hello Mr. Customer...this is Bob from Acme Widget co"
Customer: "Oh...the hang gliding guy who once went on a date with Gwen Stefani! How are you Bob? Nice to hear from you!"

OR

Customer: "Ohhh the guy with the wierd green hat, right? How are you? Good to hear from you!"

The alternative is not nearly as much fun:
You: "Hello Mr. Customer... this is Jim from Second Place Widget co."
Customer: "Hmm. Second Place Widget co... who are you people again? Oh right. The Widget guys. Have I met you before? How did you get my number?"

Obviously these are extreme examples, but we've all been on the other end of the line with either response. The idea is to make sure you always get the first one. This is even more effective if you can twig on a customer's hot button; if you can access some piece of their outside life that grabs their interest. If Mr. Customer happens to also be a hang glider or a Gwen Stefani fan, you've just made a friend as well as a prospect. If the customer thinks Gwen Stefani is a useless waste of radio time and is afraid of heights, well you haven't made a friend necessarily, but he'll still remember you. Of course having a friend inside a customer's organization is always a benefit when it's time to close the deal.

There is a bit of an art to this showing individualism. You can't go into a cold call bragging about your dating history or open with "You ever been hang gliding?"; that will just anger the customer and make him feel that you're wasting his time. You need to find a way to slip it in unobtrusively. One thing I always do is comment on the hold music if there is some; having been a jazz musician in the past I can always throw in something about the music and if it garners a response carry on from there. If there's no hold music or that comment gets ignored, I wait until another opportunity and slip in a comment about something else that's a bit unique and interesting.

In closing, remember to always strive to find a way to differentiate yourself from the other sales guys trying to sell your customer something. It can be as simple as dropping a single sentence in or just showing up with a funky tie, or it can be more elaborate and involve the whole conversation.

As always, keep closing and sell with integrity.