Recently I received a prospecting voice mail message from a salesperson. The salesperson explained his company was “the leader in Microsoft hosted Exchange solutions” and he encouraged me to visit his company’s website. That was it – that was the “meat” of the voice mail message.

If you received that salesperson’s voice mail message, what would go through your mind? Do you think it might it be a question like, “What the heck is a Microsoft hosted Exchange solution?” Do you think the voice mail message would inspire you to call the salesperson back?

Why did the salesperson’s voice mail message fail to accomplish the desired end result? Because it focused on a solution rather than a problem.

If your prospecting calls and related voice mail messages talk about a solution, in effect you are assuming that your prospects are already aware of the problems that your solution can solve for them. If your prospects are not able to relate your solution back to their own specific problems, your message will probably just “bounce off”.

If you use industry-specific jargon to describe your solution, you are making the additional assumption that your prospects are familiar with the jargon that you are using. If they aren’t, it further reduces your chances of attracting their attention!

How could this salesperson restructure his voice mail message to be more effective? Instead of talking about his solution, he could talk about one or more of the problems that can be solved by using a hosted Exchange service. A revised voice mail message might sound something like this:

“We help small companies look like big companies to their prospects and customers; plus, we help companies of all sizes focus more of their time and resources on their core businesses, which accelerates growth and profitability. If you’d like learn how we do this, please give me a call.”

This salesperson could further enhance his message by including a specific quantified impact that his company’s services have produced for customers. Here is what it might sound like if we add a quantified impact to the previously revised voice mail message:

“We help small companies look like big companies to their prospects and customers; plus, we help companies of all sizes focus more of their time and resources on their core businesses. This has helped some of our customers reduce their operating costs by as much as 30% in just six months. If you’d like learn how they were able to achieve these results, please give me a call.”

Do you see the difference between the revised messages and, “We are the leader in Microsoft hosted Exchange solutions; please visit our website”? Do you agree that the revised messages are likely to capture more prospects’ attention and produce more returned phone calls?

There are other advantages to focusing your prospecting messages on problems rather than solutions. If you talk about a solution, your message will have the most appeal for prospects that are already actively looking for that specific solution. But, do you think those (few) prospects are just sitting around waiting for you to call? Or, do you think they might be doing some proactive research? In fact, isn’t it possible they might already have some price quotes in hand? If they are that far along in the buying process, how does it impact your chances of winning their business? If you do manage to win their business, how profitable is it likely to be? Wouldn’t you agree that in this situation your solution is more likely to be perceived as a commodity, and the business is likely to go to a low bidder?

Contrast this scenario to a properly managed, problem-based prospecting approach. If you are successful in attracting a prospect’s interest by talking about the business problems that you can solve and the quantified impacts that your company has delivered to customers, the natural next step is to ask the prospect to identify which specific problems pertain to their business. Once the prospect prioritizes their problems, you can ask more questions to help them quantify the impact of these problems on their business. If the quantified impacts are substantial enough, it becomes quite easy to justify a very profitable price for your solution.

If you want to improve your prospecting effectiveness, stop leading with solutions in your prospecting calls and voice mail messages. Instead, lead with the problems that you can help prospects solve, and (ideally) one or more of the quantified impacts that your company has produced for customers. This type of problem-focused prospecting approach will attract the interest of a larger percentage of your prospects, produce higher close rates, and generate more profitable sales.

Copyright 2005 — Alan Rigg

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: Why Most Salespeople Don’t Perform and What to Do About It. His company, 80/20 Sales Performance, helps business owners, executives, and managers DOUBLE sales by implementing The Right Formula for building top-performing sales teams. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

Unless you’ve got a restaurant or cafe as a business, getting a whipped cream dispenser would probably be the last thing that would enter your mind. This is probably because of their image of being one of those professional kitchen equipments.

However, don’t lose hope so easily. You don’t really need to be a chef or a pro in the kitchen for you to have a dispenser. Even a normal household, like yours, could get their hands on a whipped cream dispenser. In fact, there are several reasons why you should actually get one!

First off, you get to have all the whipped cream that you want! As they say, sky’s the limit! Of course, provided that you’ve got enough cream in your supplies, then all you’ve got to do is create more whipped cream using your dispenser.

Have you ever thought of how much money you can save by doing this? And that’s exactly the second reason, you get to save up! Instead of buying ready to use whipped cream in canisters from the supermarket every time you need one, now all you’ll have to buy is the cream. Owning one also saves you more time, since it lessens your supermarket trips.

Lastly, your food gets to level up too. Keep in mind that first impressions lasts, and with food, presentation is essential. Adding whipped cream to deserts and drinks has been proven to make a big difference overtime! Not only would the looks improve, but of course, you also get to add that special touch to your food’s taste by the help of adding some whipped cream.

Whipped Cream

Web hosting services are in very high demand and therefore any re-seller who knows what they are doing can make a bundle quickly without too much trouble.

However, just like in any other business, one needs to be cautious and to be very much aware of exactly what they are doing.

The first and most important thing you need to do is find a reliable web hosting service. And that host also needs to have a good reseller program. There are not too many around that have this ideal combination but they are there, if you know where to look.

A reliable web host will mean that the clients you sign up will not run into problems and in case they do, the host must be able to provide proper customer service and respond quickly to any technical problems. This is very important because your reseller business will grow much faster if your current customers are able to refer others. Or if you can refer prospective customers to a portfolio of satisfied current clients.

You will be able to earn more with hosts that already have reseller programs as they will already have good packages on offer that you need to pay very little for and yet have high revenue potential with. Some reseller programs are specifically designed so that resellers are able to enter the web hosting business with very low overheads.

These days we have hosting services that have flexible plans. This will enable you to sign on a higher volume of customers and should also give you a more reliable and steady stream of income. In one popular program I know the reseller pays only $ 29.95 per Month for 2 GB space/10 GB Bandwidth. If the reseller has 100 accounts hosted @ $ 6.00/month. He has to bill his customers every month and will get paid a total of $ 600 income ($ 570.95 Profit)

As a reseller you will also need to have a well thought out plan on how you are going to market and promote your own web site. There is no way your reseller program is going to be successful unless you have a system for attracting enough traffic to your web site so that you have a good chance of turning a high percentage of that number into actual paying clients who will pay the web host you are working with, so that you can in turn get your reseller commissions.

It is absolutely important for the reseller control panel at the web host to provide absolute control for you as a reseller to manage and invoice your clients. This is especially useful where you have a monthly payment system. In this case good records are imperative so as to ensure that follow up for payment is made as easy as possible. There are some hosts that even have private label features and offer multi lingual control panel.

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