Dec 18, 2014
About Today's Guest
Joe Ingram was an electrical engineer by degree. He was "good at making flow charts but not at keeping his mouth shut." Hear how he turned that inAbility into a successful career in sales, sales training, and entrepreneurship.
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Rubber-Meets-The-Road Tips
- Joe did project management for 10 years then worked at a criminal defense law firm. (That has sales written all over it, "don't it?")
- But that is where he got a taste for sales.
- He built a call center and outside sales team and expanded the
firm from 2 states to 7 states and ramped up revenue from $300,000
per month to $1,000,000 per month!
- He wanted to get paid for his results.
- He hit accelerators in his first 20 days on the job.
- Then he realized he couldn’t help these criminal defense attorneys succeed.
- So he got into car sales! (Lawyers...car salesman...wow! All
that's left is to become an insurance salesman...!)
- Has been in the auto industry for about 14 years.
- He learned the art of speaking with people over the phone and selling the appointment instead of the product.
- He was told he couldn’t become a GM from his position so he proved them wrong in under 4 years but he didn’t like it. It wasn’t his own.
[Tweet ""Sell the appointment, not the product" says @joeingramtweets"]
- Joe Verde then hired him to manage his sales teams. He was assigned the under-performers and in 5 months grew their sales 54%.
- Joe realized he had a knack for sales and training so he started an insurance business on his own and he still has that today.
- Then he started his own training firm - BDC Genius (Bring Da Cash!)
- He is taking the support structure out from the hands of the
producers so they can just go sell and produce!
- So he does the busy work from inside the dealership to help the sales guy.
- He helps the face-to-face salespeople get good on the phone.
- A client had him come in for five hours on a Saturday and within 30 days their complaints that got to the manager went from 5-7 per day to zero.
- A lot of times salespeople are afraid to ask for an appointment. When the internet boom hit, everyone focused on email templates but the largest increase of online traffic activity is “Click To Call.” Even Siri says “do you want directions or do you want me to connect the call?”
[Tweet ""The largest increase of online traffic activity is “Click To Call.”" says @joeingramtweets. Get good on the phone!"]
- There are three types of salespeople:
- Relationship builder trying to win friends. The sales cycle is too long with these people.
- Problem solver (the pain seekers…you don’t like taking their calls because they ask silly rhetorical loaded questions and the prospect is rolling their eyes.) We’re guilty of using the old, wrong material over and over again because we don’t have anything better.
- The Challenger - brings the most value. I’m okay saying “this is not right for you.” About 20% of the time you have to say “this is not right.” The Challenger is not chasing the commission.
[Tweet ""To grow #sales, you must know the three types of salespeople”" says @joeingramtweets. Get good on the phone!"]
Links Mentioned
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