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In the first football practice of each season, Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach of the Green Bay Packers would start the practice by saying “Gentleman, this is a football.” The purpose of his speech was to start each year with the basics and to begin anew with fundamental approaches to the job at hand. In business the same approach is necessary. Begin anew with the basic fundamentals everyday and one of the best business fundamentals is to remember to pick the low hanging fruit.

The low hanging fruit in business are the easiest paths to a sale. Examine your categories of customers to determine the low hanging fruit. The first category is your existing active customer. The second category is the inactive customers. Third category is the interested potential customer. Fourth category is the most likely potential customer. The fifth category is the general public.

The existing customer likes you, is currently doing business with you and is in the process of being habituated to you. Think of how you can add more value and reward this customer more. A large percentage of these customers can become hypersensitive to all offers you make them. Give them the opportunity to buy more, upgrade, and become a member or VIP.

Next, take your existing inactive customers and communicate to them and reward them. As you begin to rebuild the relationship begin to make offers for them to buy. It’s a proven fact that a large percentage of these customers will do business with you again and would love to have that opportunity if it is given to them. Most customers are simply lost because of a lack of communication and the relationship after the sale is never consummated.

Although you always have to look for new conquest customers, most businesses forget to spend the time and effort on the first two categories which are always the lowest hanging fruit. The first two categories produce the most sales, revenue and profits. More importantly, those profits are the most easily repeated. Conventional thought is that you have already sold the existing customer and now must move on to the next customer because there isn’t a profit opportunity in the one’s you have already sold. This fallacy keeps many businesses continually chasing their own tail and never having the opportunity to exponentially grow their business. At the same time, businesses that fall into this trap spend more and more money on advertising and marketing dollars to get the same or even less number of sales. I liken this process to a “dead man’s spiral” that a plane can get into before it crashes.

Start today by segmenting your customer base into the categories mentioned and create as many sub-segments as possible to start finding “riches in the niches” of your own customer base. Any business can experience resurgence and growth by going back to the fundamentals and picking the low hanging fruit.

Mark Tewart, author of How To Be A Sales Superstar

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Sales people provide life for all companies. If everything starts with sales people, it only makes sense to make sure that you are recruiting the best potential sales people

Tip 1: Recruit from want, not need. Make recruiting an everyday activity, don’t wait until you need it.

Tip 2: Have a strategy to recruit people all the time. To orchestrate a successful ongoing recruiting program you must first have a game-plan. Plan and develop a flow chart of your desired results. Write down the obvious. You must know why you are looking to create a recruiting strategy. “When the why gets strong, the how gets easy.”

Tip 3: Know who is in charge of recruiting and his/her qualifications. People must be educated on creating and orchestrating a strategy that works. Don’t leave the who and how to chance.

Tip 4: Newspaper ads – the Sunday paper is full of ads for sales people. If you plan on using help wanted ads as part of your recruiting, you must write the ad with the mindset of the good sales person you are looking to recruit. Use two age-old formulas: WIIFM – “What’s in it for me?” and AIDA – “Attention, interest, desire and action” when creating your ads.

Tip 5: Try using several avenues to recruit such as full color newspaper inserts, business journal classifieds, a banner ad on your web site, local colleges, Internet job postings, radio ads, military bases, job fairs and employee referral program. Never leave the vitality of your company to just one avenue of marketing. You must build a marketing web that has many marketing branches to attract good people.

Tip 6: Have an “ideal employee” profile. Know who you are looking for before you find them. When you’ve developed a precise guideline of what the perfect recruit looks like, you can begin your process with that in mind and then remove the emotions involved in interviewing.

Tip 7: Payment plans satisfy base-level needs of the potential recruit. Pay all recruits during training and guarantee them a living wage during their learning curve. Many potentially good sales people are not given the chance to ever enter the business. Lower the barriers of entry in order to find the best people.

Tip 8: Have at least 50 written interview questions. Don’t you show a sales person how to profile customers? Preparation is key to a good interview. Be ready with sub questions to the interviewee’s answers that allow him or her to elaborate and communicate in detail. A good interview will follow the 80/20-rule and allow the recruit to speak 80% of the time.

Tip 9: Test and profile a potential sales person. Anyone who has interviewed people has come across a great interview, horrible employee. A good recruiting strategy must utilize many tools to reduce the emotion and help to make a more logical and quantitative selection. There are many tools today that can be used to gauge the personality, sales aptitude, emotional IQ, intelligence and just about anything else you want to know about a possible future employee

Tip 10: Don’t hire people based only upon resumes. If you want to hire good sales people, recruit and hire based on talent and attitude and teach them the necessary skills.

Recruiting and hiring effectively is a continuous process that is both part science and being creative. Having a consistent plan will make your recruiting a success.

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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No, I am not crazy and yes I am talking about the well known shock jock known for his outrageous radio show. Howard Stern is a genius for many reasons and they all apply to how you can succeed as a salesperson, manager and entrepreneur.

Let’s examine several of the reasons and the lessons that can be learned. First of all, lesson number one in business is to never be boring. Although, you may not agree with Howard Stern’s humor or persona, he certainly isn’t boring and that not only attracts people, it keeps people listening who say they might not like him or his show. I liken it to the train wreck theory. People may say they are horrified by something but it does not keep them from paying attention to it.

One of the lessons to writing good advertising copy is in having a great headline. Ninety percent of the effectiveness of a good sales letter can be traced to an attractive headline. If someone is not drawn in by the headline then they certainly won’t read the rest of the letter. The same rule applies to having an effective meet and greet when you first come in contact with a potential customer. Your potential customers are going to make instant and lasting judgments about you. You have to get someone’s attention, stand out from the crowd and give a compelling reason for someone to keep paying attention. Howard Stern gets attention and keeps people listening.

Secondly, be contrarian. The world is full of what I call “me too’s.” Decide who you are and be that person or business. Don’t look at everyone else and copy what they are doing. The masses are not successful and copying others just makes you another faceless entity. The fact is that you stand a much greater chance of being successful if you do exactly the opposite of the masses. Be somebody, do something and be newsworthy in doing it. Don’t be a copycat. Howard Stern stands out and goes against the grain of what everyone else is doing in radio and therefore has created a category of one.

Next you should declare who you are and who you want to be. Don’t wait for some magic person or media to anoint you or certify that you are something. Howard Stern declared himself the ‘King of All Media” and that was when he was almost solely known for his radio show. Because Mr. Stern was willing to decide what he wanted, declare and then shout it from the rooftops people started to accept it and treat him as the king of all media. Suddenly, Howard Stern was in movies, TV, CD’s and multiple different forms of media that he was either not in or was not even being considered for by industry people in those particular media forms. Who do you want to be? Decide and declare it. I have a saying, “You are who you decide to be in any given moment. It does not take money, fame, education, connections, other people or any other excuse that you might presently be sabotaging yourself by using as an excuse to keep you or your business from being what you want.

Another essential element of success is to create a following. Make you and your business personable. The more personable you are and the more you communicate that in an endearing and enduring fashion the greater following you will create. If you have customer that have not heard from you in some fashion for eighteen months then it is as if they never did business with you. You are forgotten and all the hard work that went into creating a customer and potential follower is gone. Most people work so hard on getting new customers that they ignore the customer’s they have. You must move your customers from being customers to being followers and fans.  Howard Stern works very hard at creating consistent followers and then creates fans from his followers.

Howard Stern’s radio show is like a radio soap opera with real live stories involving him and his co-stars. Each person on the show opens themselves up in a personal way that invites the listeners into very private view of their lives. The listeners feel connected because they can relate to what’s going on in their world. The Stern Show was reality radio before there was reality TV.  Don’t be afraid to show some warts and be personal with your customers, they will connect with you on a deeper level and trust you more for talking about the so-called “elephant in the room” that nobody would mention. Be vulnerable and people will let you in; act perfect and people will shun you. Nobody can relate to perfection.

There are clues to success and you can find them all over. Often the best places to look are in places most would not look. Somehow I doubt that MBA classes are being taught today about the marketing and sales genius of the Howard Stern Show. The reality there is probably more lessons to be learned in listening to two hours of Howard Stern than taking two hours of an MBA class. Who knew you could learn so much about business from a so-called shock jock.

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar- Break All the Rules and Succeed While Doing It”

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You may find this article a bit odd knowing that it is being written by a trainer and speaker on the subject of sales. I believe traditional selling is dead on arrival. The days of hiring and building a well trained sales staff that executes all facets of the sale, follow up, prospecting, marketing, telephone skills and building a database of repeat buyers has for the most part been dead for a while.

Some of you reading this may be shocked or even angry at such a statement and declare that it is certainly not the case at your business. However, it is the case for ninety-five percent of businesses across the country. If you have been able to recruit, hire, train and retain a professional staff of salespeople who execute on an extremely high level then I say “bravo to you.” Our company has certainly helped many businesses do the same thing. However, after almost thirty years in the business I can tell you it is not the norm.

What I see in business today as an average is scary. I see lazy, untrained staffs that either cannot or will not learn the skills necessary to become a strong, professional salesperson. I see businesses with weak or non-existent game plans to recruit, hire and train a strong professional staff. I see managers who like to sit behind their desks and wait for untrained sales staffs to bring them deals.

I continue to see businesses moving to more and more specialization and technology. I see businesses utilizing CRM’s, on site or external Internet departments, outsourced BDC’s and sales processes that heavily utilize managers and technology. Although technology does not sell, it surely assists you in the process. More businesses will move towards an old school but now new school process of product specialists and managers. People will only be trained and expected to perform in certain areas of competency. Any form of finance will be moved more towards the front of the sale rather than the back of the sale. Many smart businesses have moved towards this arrangement years ago.

Businesses have been beating their heads up against the wall forever trying to get salespeople not only trained, but get them actually doing it. For the most part, it has not worked. I have heard certain sales trainers cry out “It’s not an option.” That’s easy to say, but those same sales trainers went broke while owning their own businesses. I am not writing this article to be politically correct. I am writing this article to be a witness to the truth as I see it. The average salesperson today in most stores is lucky to have a job let alone resembling anything close to a professional salesperson. Customers just won’t tolerate amateurs and old school selling anymore.

If you are fighting the same battles you have been fighting for years and not getting better results then it may be time to stop blaming your managers and look in the mirror. It may be time to try a different approach. And to all the truly professional salespeople out there that don’t fit into the ninety-five percent category I mentioned, you have my apologies as you should be held in very high esteem and not lumped in with all the rest. You are truly some of the most valuable people on earth. If you would like to receive my free report on the new generation of selling, email me at info@tewart.com with the phrase “new generation” in the subject line

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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I want to wish everyone a happy new year. As I was out and about today I could tell it was this time of year every where I went. I went to the gym to work out and it was packed as usual for this time of year with people hell bent on starting early on their resolutions. It’s always great to see people starting to vigorously pursue what they believe they have been putting off. However, as someone who has been going to gyms and working out most of my life I know traditionally 90-95% of these people will have stopped coming to the gym by February. They say it takes twenty one days to create a habit. Unfortunately, it only takes one day to break the habit. The reality is that resolutions even with the best of intentions don’t work.

What does work is a goal created with an action plan based upon a strong sense of why. When the why gets strong, the how gets easy. All decisions are based upon the pleasure and pain principle. You are either striving for pleasure or running from pain in every thing you do. Both are excellent motivators. You must also consider wants and needs. We all need to be healthy but we don’t always want to do what is necessary to get and stay that way. Even for someone who has been practicing a mostly healthy lifestyle most of my life, I certainly have had periods of lethargy and fallen into slothful ways. I often say that people will climb mountains for want they want but won’t necessarily cross the street for what they need.

To be successful, you must have a big-ass goal. Going to the gym is not a goal. Be exact, be specific and make it big. Take one workout or one step at a time. Measure your results over a period of time. Set a routine to your actions. Always focus on the WHY. Create reminders of the pleasure and pain motivators such as the worst picture of you that you can find or also write down your goal in sentence form and carry it in your wallet and look at it everyday at the time you have set to take action. Get a coach, mentor, trainer or someone who will keep you accountable and call you on your excuses, head games and overall bullshit.

I friend of mine once said that people tend to overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. Whether it’s working out or any other goal it is simply amazing what can be done in a short period of time. However, when most people start their journey, a short time can seem forever. Take one step at a time.

Remember that you are not going to be perfect. That’s exactly what I told myself while I stood in line at the liquor store with all the other New Year’s Eve imbibers. Have a happy and prosperous New Year and as I tell my son everyday when I drop him off at school. “Think big, live large and you are in charge.”

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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I have a confession to make. I am old enough to remember rotary phones and black and white TV without cable, satellite or remote controls. I grew up in a house without central air conditioning and the first several cars I owned ran on leaded gasoline. As I look back its fun to remember those things but I certainly don’t spend any time or effort trying to relive those times with those circumstances. Times have changed and so have I. For you change, you must first let go.

Nature abhors a vacuum. As soon as space is created it is quickly refilled. The same is true in your life. For you to grow and to gain you must first be willing to create space by giving something up. In the examples of yesteryear I gave above, I gave up those things through the force of the marketplace. Don’t wait for the force of the marketplace to make your changes. Most of the time if you are forced to make changes you will be too far behind the curve.

The Law of Familiarity states that you tend to follow what you are most familiar with. Change is not your natural choice even though change is a constant force. You will make excuses for the status-quo. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the most common phrase for excuse. In today’s marketplace, it may not be broke, but it probably is obsolete and ineffective.

The first step to change is to grow your change muscle. Start educating yourself daily to developing trends. Pay attention to the emotions and wants of the masses. The great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky said “I go to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is already.” Your job is to always be watching and asking the strategic question “What’s next?”

Don’t worry about being right or wrong or you will never change. The fact is that you will be wrong more than you will be right. Being wrong will create a path to getting it right. Staying put and status quo is no longer an option. Status quo is no longer safe and has now become a death sentence. The only thing you don’t know about status quo is your exact time of death. It could be swift or it could be long and painful. The world and the marketplace are changing at a faster rate than ever before. Change and information sharing is now instantaneous.

You spend most of your day executing a model and processes you have become accustomed to. I would invite you begin spending twenty percent of your day based upon changing those things or least investigating possible changes. No matter what you do, your toughest challenge will be in just letting go. When you cling to your current status quo, it becomes a security blanket that provides you feelings of comfort and security. You must be willing to grow up every day and let go of your security blankets.

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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It’s the Christmas season and Santa Claus is everywhere you look. It’s also the time of year to reflect on the year past and look forward and plan the New Year. Santa Claus is a great sales model in both cases.

First of all, Santa Claus rewards you based upon the past year. If you were a good boy or girl you get rewarded. Ask yourself if you were a good boy or girl this year. Did you put forth maximum effort in trying to grow your sales, people, marketing and life skills? Did you work diligently in bringing value to the marketplace?

Good input leads to good output or garbage in and garbage out. My mentor, the late Jim Rohn said, “The marketplace cares about your seeds not your needs.” I hear a lot of people talking about their needs in this troubled economy. I hear people talking about their debt and need of income. Although it’s natural to do this, you are focusing solely on yourself and your needs. The marketplace does not care and your thoughts direct you towards more of the same, being needy. Begin again as a child and wish. Begin to design your life with a focus on want rather than need. If you sit on Santa Claus’s lap he does not ask you what you need, he will ask what you want.

Next, think not just of what you have or have not accomplished but what you will give. Santa Claus teaches us to give and give freely. The Law of Giving and Receiving is absolute. When you give, you receive. Giving changes your mindset and it changes your heart. When you focus on others you set reciprocation in motion. Nature abhors a vacuum and fills it quickly. When you give you create a vacuum or space. Be willing to give something up and be willing to give more and more to your customers and you will be justly rewarded.

It’s a great time of year no matter your plight in life. If you are in a good position, it’s time to be thankful and plan to do more. If your plight is not as good it’s time to be thankful as well. Be thankful what for you do have rather than focusing on what you don’t have. Be thankful for your ability to take responsibility to change. Be thankful for your ability to choose your thoughts and emotions no matter your situation. It turns out that Santa Claus is not just for kids but is a great inspiration and mentor for adults as well. Santa Claus is the ultimate salesperson.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be a Sales Superstar”

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Brian Kelly, has officially left the University of Cincinnati and taken the job as head football coach of Notre Dame. My friends from all over the country have contacted me to ask what I think of Brian Kelly and why he has been so successful and if that will carry over to the Notre Dame job. My answer has been different than what they have heard from others. The number one reason for Brian Kelly’s success in the past and will be in the future is that he is a superstar salesperson.

Most people expect me to answer that Brian Kelly’s success was because he was a master of the high powered spread offense or a genius at offensive schemes or a great recruiter, tough disciplinarian or just plain smarter than everyone else. Although Brian Kelly is very smart and is a top notch at all the things I mentioned, Brian Kelly is a flat out Sales Superstar. Brian Kelly’s sales ability makes him the best at whatever segment of the job he applies those sales skills to.

At the highest level of coaching, there seems to be very little difference in football knowledge from one coach to another. There does not seem to be vast differences between one coach and another in creating or recognizing offensive or defensive strategies or schemes. However, there is a huge difference in the ability of Brian Kelly or other top notch coaches in their sales ability.

To win big at college football, a coach must energize the alumni, staff, fans, students, media and the players. A top notch coach must be able take that energy and sell a vision to anyone and everyone. People have to buy in to the story. Great salespeople tell great stories.

Beyond recruiting great football players, he sold exisitng players who may have not had great talent that they could be great and he had to sell certain players on changing positions for the betterment of the team. Every player received their own sales plan from coach Kelly.

Every assistant coach was sold by Brian Kelly in the work, discipline and execution neccessary to carry out a successful game plan. After the gameplan was created and sold, he had to let his coaches coach. Once again, this takes great sales ability.

Coach Kelly sold the University on a plan to take the football program to the next level and how to get there. Brian Kelly sold the university on making commitments to improvements and he sold alumni and donors on giving the necessary donations to make those improvements happen. All of this comes from having masterful sales skills.

Although, I believe Brian Kelly is very skillful at the X’s and O’s of coaching as well as every other facet of coaching, without a doubt the overriding factor to success that most people miss is his unique ability to persuade. Brian Kelly would succeed as a car salesperson, teacher, CEO or anything else he chose to do in life because he truly understands the power of a salesperson.

While many people reject and even cringe at the thought of selling, Brian Kelly obviously understands the path to success depends on being a sales superstar.

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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Best Wishes,

Mark Tewart, author of “How To Be A Sales Superstar”

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