As the president of Dale Carnegie Training in Madison, Terry Siebert knows how to win friends and influence people. But that doesn’t mean he always fully understands them.
Don’t misunderstand — Siebert is a people person. But he’s not immune to the bafflement that accompanies any true and thorough assessment of modern homo sapiens.
It’s a flawed species, to be sure — particularly when it comes to the forbidding wildernesses of networking and sales. Fortunately, Siebert is here to help. On Nov. 20, as part of the IB Seminar Series, he’ll give a talk titled “Turn Sales Leads Into Cash,” and he has more than a little advice for salespeople on what to do — and what not to do.
First, the (fairly basic) don’ts:
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Terry Siebert |
No. 1: If you’re at a networking event, it’s important that you actually network. That may sound obvious, says Siebert, but it’s the obvious advice that often goes unheeded.
“When you’re [at a networking event], don’t hang out with your friends,” said Siebert. “And that’s not new, but it just baffles me when we go to these big annual meetings and you’ll have an entire table of 10 being from one bank and another table of 10 from another organization, and everybody sits down and talks with each other just like they do every day, versus breaking out and meeting other people.”
No. 2: Follow up on your leads — or make sure your employees are doing so.
“We’ve got a client that actually tracked this stuff religiously, and when they did their study, they found that of the leads that were passed onto folks, something like 40% had been followed up on,” said Siebert. “Sixty percent of the people were not even contacted.”
Of course, Siebert won’t be focusing on the negative during his presentation. As an experienced business coach, he has plenty of positive advice on what you should do, starting with maximizing your networking opportunities:
“First of all, I’m going to concentrate on planning when you go to a networking event,” said Siebert. “I mean, what’s your goal? Is it to dump 50 business cards into people’s laps and get another in return, or is it to have two or three meaningful conversations with people who you think might be there? And I think it will be a little different twist on what you normally think of when you go to these networking events. In other words, go in with a plan, and rather than having a plan that would be more shotgun-oriented, go in with a plan that would be more of a rifle and a strong target as you’re going in.”
Siebert says he also plans on giving advice about adeptly moving into and out of conversations.
“I see people talking, how do I break into a conversation like that?” said Siebert. “Because one of them is one that I really do want to connect with. So the two halves of that would be breaking into a conversation and then, now I’m involved in a conversation and I see someone else I want to talk to, how do I move out of that conversation and into another one?”
Siebert will also give some advice on developing a branding (or elevator) statement, and he’ll provide an outline with some flexibility built in so people’s statements don’t come off as canned. Then he’ll get to a bit of advice that may sound like a no-brainer as well, but is — in our ego-besotted world — rarely followed.
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“I’m going to get into the whole idea of questioning and listening rather than telling someone all the things that are good about you when you connect with people,” said Siebert. “The real goal should be for you to find out as much about them as you can. That does two things. Number one, it’s going to give you information, but probably, number two, it’s going to make that other person feel like they have a sense of importance as well.
“I’m going to go through a tool, and I’m going to have people actually put this tool to use in how to connect with somebody, and what kinds of questions to ask versus the sports, current events, or even the worst of all things would be selling them something when you don’t even know what they might be looking for. So the whole idea there is get interested in them — don’t try to get them interested in you. And if you do it that way, you’re going to probably find out they might even have some interest in you.”
Becoming a sales professional
Being focused on clients, rather than one particular sale, is a theme that Siebert comes back to frequently. He makes a distinction between the “salesperson” and the “sales professional,” and the difference has a lot to do with putting one’s ego and immediate goals aside to focus on the whole person and the long-term picture.
In Siebert’s view, a salesperson talks, while a sales professional listens. A salesperson is self-centered, while a sales professional is customer-focused. A salesperson is an order taker, while a sales professional is more interested in building relationships.
“I think the bottom line is the salesperson oftentimes will get it done, but the sales professional will actually get it done right,” said Siebert. “And when I say ‘get it done right,’ the seed is being planted for additional business, whereas the salesperson has got that order — take one and run and it’s done. If you’re a sales professional, you’re building a partnership.”
Of course, for more than two decades, Siebert has been building partnerships of his own, aiding business professionals in reaching their goals. Perhaps it’s a testament to his own dynamic people skills that he doesn’t really have to sell others on the validity of his work. When asked whether he gets a lot of personal fulfillment from teaching others, his pitch is as genuine and inspiring as you might imagine.
“That would be an understatement,” said Siebert of the fulfillment he gets from his job. “They ask sometimes, where do you get your return on investment in this business, and you have somebody that you maybe worked with a year ago or two years ago or three years ago shoot you an email or give you a call, and they’ll say something like, ‘Do you remember that goal I set in that class two years ago? Well, here’s what happened.’ And you don’t sit back and say, ‘Well, I did that,’ because obviously I didn’t. But to say that you were some part of that process, it’s somewhere between a nice warm feeling and just kind of boosting the confidence that we have in what we do. Kind of another self-assurance thing based upon the kind of progress people made. Absolutely, it’s a tremendous, tremendous business to be in.”
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