I put all these tips into “Rent it Up!”, my book on self storage sales and marketing. You can order “Rent it Up!” by following this link.

You can also see some reviews of “Rent it Up!” on Amazon.

Please let me know how you like it.

I could have picked many titles for this book. I could have chosen a challenging title like: “So you think your company’s sales culture is good?” I could have picked a brusque attention getter like “Hey, your company’s sales culture sucks!” I could have picked something a little more academic sounding such as “Stimulating a 2 percent improvement in bottom line corporate profits through the institution of sales culture enhancements”. I could have picked a title that boasted: “I quintupled the revenue of my company by creating a sales culture…and so could you!”

Any one of these might express my feelings about the value of a good sales culture and about my opinion of most companies’ current sales and customer service practice. 

But why did I choose the title I did?

At home shows, you hear the cooking demo people and the tool demo people doing their pitches. Some of their pitches are long and involved. I realize their goal was different then ours. They are trying to make sales and collect revenue at the show.

But our script was simple: “here you are”, “Here is something you can probably use”,  “Did you get one yet?”  were our phrases.

Then we had to perfect the physical business. We learned to extend the arm all the way to the person passing by. We learned to leave our hand with the card out in front of the person until the card was accepted. You can’t get much simpler than that. We also handed out about 1,500 offers. We had a good day.

MDI is the name of the company and they have cars on the road now and available. Their business model includes building boutique factories close to the markets they plan to sell in to keep costs down and keep community involvement high. Great concepts.

compressed air cars

Technology and Marketing:  Internet marketing and advertising

Session Title:

“David drops Goliath with web content.

5 steps to beating your competitors on the search marketing battle ground.”

1. Select a strategy that your big competitors cannot defend against
2. Become disciplined in areas where the big players are faltering
3. Pick the battles you can win
4. Get your whole company involved in search marketing
5. Integrate your marketing, sales and people management efforts

It makes perfectly good sense that a guy named Tron should be so interested in technology and internet marketing. Tron will show you strategies for outperforming your biggest competitors in the on-line marketing arena while spending a fraction of their budgets. He will look at paid search, organic search, affiliated networks, advertising directories, social networks, web 2.0 approaches, blogs, article submissions, web site design and other tactics that might serve you well.

Tron’s approach is unique, because his experience in business management has always focused on sales, marketing and people management. Taking this focus and applying it to the latest internet methods and technologies makes for powerful results.

Tron will take examples from the group and exam current web strategies to show where people are already heading in the right direction. Tron will also show the most common mistakes in selecting a web marketing strategy and in implementing strategies.

People will take away a much better understanding of what methods are available to help them craft a web marketing program that will beat their biggest competitors. Members will learn to better evaluate their current vendors, consultants and marketing staff to help obtain optimal results.

I attended several meetings this week where our senior staff people were hashing out the latest tweaks to our new style guidelines, new evaluation processes and new training and coaching protocols. I was very proud to see how the team clearly knew the desired outcome and clearly knew how we were getting there. There was healthy debate and generous disagreement. This is all good. What I have been hearing on spot checks of phone calls is very good, too. The callers are responding well, the reps are feeling better about calls and the conversion rates are rising. Sounds like a win-win-win.

This gives me more great stories to tell for the next time I appear as a business speaker and tell people that they can create a selling culture.

As a business speaker, I realize that time is one of the most precious commodities any of us have. People who attend my sessions make me feel really good when they tell me that they found my keynote speech or my training session to be well worth the time spent. When wrapping up a meeting, I am always pleased to hear someone say “good meeting” or “that wasn’t a waste of time”.  I hear a lot of complaints from many people about meetings. Meetings drag on. Meetings get derailed by someone who is feeling talkative. Meetings stray from their purpose because someone who is going off on a tangent. If you are the business leader at this meeting, it is your job to keep the meeting on track. It is your job to highlight a valuable point and pursue it. It is your job to stop someone when they have made a good point to keep them from talking too long. It is your job to stop someone if they are about to stray off track. A meeting is not the time to let someone talk on and on. A business meeting is not the time to let people develop ideas and go off on related paths. These activities are for brainstorming sessions and for open-ended discussions. A business meeting has a theme; it has a specific topic and it has specific goals.

The polite thing to do in a business meeting is to ruthlessly keep the meeting on track, so there are clear outcomes and action items. Keep the meeting on track and a two hour meeting can be done in half an hour. Keep a meeting on track and a half day session can be done in an hour and a half.

Simply say “I am going to interrupt here” and then get the meeting back on track. Take a good point and tie it up. Re-start the discussion on the point of topic. Get control of the flow. You can qualify your remark with something like, “This is a great idea for a brainstorming session. Develop some parameters and get a few people together to develop that idea at another time”, or “That is a topic for another discussion. Send me an email recap of the idea later and we will discuss it at another time.”

Every CEO has concerns about his or her organization. They know something needs to change. Every CEO has important initiatives both large and small that need to be well executed. Business progress normally requires a change in practice or a change in behavior. How can so many things change all at the same time? Sometimes you can help lots of things change at once. Sometimes it is best to change one thing and then allow the new alignment to cause the rest of the changes to happen all by themselves.

Tron Jordheim’s active and engaging sessions will help you decide how to effect the change you need and how to find the one thing that will change everything.

• identify what needs to change
• separate these changes into paths of change
• consider the impacts of that change and the corresponding new alignment
• select the one change that will change everything
• focus on creating unstoppable momentum for this change
• set about making the change
• how to be sure things are changing as intended

Tron Jordheim’s unique viewpoints and experiences along with his fun attitude will make this session one you will want to attend over and over again, to find more inspiration to change one more thing that could change everything in your business.

Learning to find the right thing to change and being in control of that change will help decrease the time and money wasted in sloppy and clunky execution and will get new initiatives paying for themselves faster.

Participants will go home with a solid understanding of how to devote resources and energy into effecting the one change that will start a chain reaction of successful changes leading to cleaner and more profitable execution of strategies and tactics.

Tron Jordheim is a member of the National Speakers Association and a public speaker at both conferences and company functions.

So that is like saying the first rule of football is …you can’t hang on to the ball; or the first rule of baseball is …you can’t score by swinging the bat. Maybe those are true, too. But I do know that you cannot sell anybody anything. You can, however, help people talk themselves into buying just about anything. Your job as a sales person is to help people talk themselves into good reasons to buy your offering. Your job as a sales manager is to help your sales people develop good qualifying questions that will help your prospects think through the purchase. Your job as the product developer is to create something people can see value in.

Then you can set about not-selling. Not-selling is a way to sell according to the first rule of selling. You do not tell people why they should buy; you ask people how they would use your offering. You don’t show people why the offering is good for them; you ask people to show you how it might be good for them. You don’t talk about the features and benefits; you ask about the benefits people find in the features. When the person has finished talking himself or herself into buying you ask for the order and finish the purchase.