Black Sales Journal

The quest for income starts now, and you need not delay.  Realistically 2012 has started already!  Planning for 2012 is the smartest use of your time, especially during some of the down time that happens during the holiday season.

The time is now, and you need to approach this aggressively.  You need a plan, and you need it to be well structured.  Black sales professionals have a couple of real important needs when it comes to prospect generation:

• Credibility
• Compatibility
• Capability

Let me briefly explain what I am suggesting from the prospect’s angle:

Credibility – Are you good enough to do business with me?  Are you knowledgeable enough? Are you willing to represent my interest to your organization and others who you work with?

Compatibility – Are we going to be able to work together?  Will you work with my organizations interest in mind?  Are you the professional that I need?

Capability – What do you and your company do well, and can you do it do for my organization?  Can you provide value?

You must solve these needs to get past the incumbent sales professional and win the business.

3 Ways To Kick it Into Gear

The actions that you take now and in early 2012 to increase your prospecting base should be designed to answer the questions above.   Below are some ways you can answer the questions, and increase your effectiveness:

• Gear-up your customer referrals
• Deliver captivating prospect and customer seminars
• Amp-up your networking

You may remember that these have been discussed at one time, yet it is time to do it now, and do it with some confidence.  Each of these specifically addresses an area that is naturally suspect by buyers for the Black sales professional.

Gear-up Customer Referrals

Many sales professionals go their whole professional life without asking a good customer for a referral.   I know that may sound ridiculous, but it is true.  This is not a cry out for help; it is an effort to broaden your professional network.  The difference here is that with a referral comes some instant credibility.

If a good customer gives you a referral, there is an implication that the referrer is giving approval of your credibility and that answers the questions above under credibility.

It should be part of your normal sales process.  I personally work with a life insurance professional who is methodical in asking a simple statement and question, “I think we have covered all of the issues that you specified prior to our meeting.  I do have one question that I would like to ask.  Do you have any friends or associates that could benefit by the services that I can provide?”  To date, I have provided him with numerous referrals, as Ron is a professional.  You do not mind giving a referral to someone who is knowledgeable and treats customers well.

Ask your best customers for referrals and follow-up immediately.  Always thank your customer for the referrals verbally, as well as in writing.  Implicitly, that individual knows that they are ‘vouching’ for you and they deserve the thank you note.  Keep score of how many referrals each customer gives you.  In addition to the ‘lifetime’ value of a customer in terms of revenue, the credibility that they afford you is very valuable as well.

Deliver Captivating Prospect Seminars

As you may remember from Black Sales Journal 3/24/2011 Finding Prospects Through a Seminar, a seminar is a way to talk to several prospects at one time.   It can establish you as a resource and potentially as an expert.  This shows the prospect/customer that you have capability.  The topic has to have some broad interest, and as the lead speaker, you need to be bringing some expertise (yours or an expert speaker) to bear to make it meaningful and informative.  Some examples are:

• A tax expert holding a seminar on the new IRS Rules for depreciation of plant assets and their impact on midsized manufacturing prospects
• An investment professional meeting with prospective customers to talk about the effect that owning gold can have on their retirement portfolio.
• A manufacturers rep gathers prospective customers for a new product that will cut hours of the processing time for the manufacture of machine tools.

In order to be the main speaker you to be an expert, or have strong expertise.  We cover this in-depth in Black Sales Journal More On Being an Expert 6/27/11 because being an expert is the most successful way to thwart racial preference.  If you can save them money, save them time, or just flat out save their company, they will consider working with you even if you are ‘purple’.

You put a group of people with like interest in a room with you or an exceptional speaker, and highlight a topic that saves money, saves time, or increases revenue, and you have the formula for an energetic audience.  This energetic audience can have the tendency to depend on you and your capabilities.

Our professionalism and efforts such as this begin to change racial perceptions, even though those perceptions are generally unjustified.

Amp-up Your Networking

Networking is both a skill and an activity, and if you master the skill, and excel at the activity, you will find prospects in abundance.  It is akin to “speed dating” because you have moments to show your business compatibility.  This quick sampling needs to show that “I can work with you!”

When I say amp-up you networking I am suggesting that you commit yourself to a strong networking schedule right now, and develop the endurance and discipline to follow it. To see a good review on good networking practices see BSJ 2/21/2011 Networking for the Black Sales Professional.

This is not an effort to ‘harvest’ business cards; this is a quest to find prospects, and eventually customers.  Your effort needs to be to commit to a networking schedule, and some strong networking principles:

• Pick your groups well.  Find those, which have the opportunity for success and have plenty of individuals involved.
• Know your “elevator pitch” (BSJ-8/11/2011 Know Your Elevator Pitch) and be able to tell what makes you and your company different in seconds.
• Know the end game, which is determining the fit for you and your organization with the customer, and getting an appointment.
• Learn something about your potential customers.  Test the fit, and set the stage for a relationship in the future.  You have something to give in this mutually beneficial relationship.
• Above all, record and follow-up quickly and effectively on the contacts and any referrals you might receive.

Be involved in no less than two networking opportunities every month.  Never get out of the habit, and keep track of where you get you prospects and customers so that you know which networking groups give you the most benefit.

Do All Three!

Do all of these for maximum benefit.  If you are not the expert for the customer, work to be one (BSJ XXX Your Customer Needs an Expert).  If you cannot be the expert, round one up and sponsor him to talk to your group.  That is pure networking.

Your objective is to find the mix of activities that is optimal for you.  Be an effective professional.

Always be effective!

Customer preference in any forum is powerful.  Preference in sales is powerful, and manifests itself by creating unfair advantages for one option or another.  Racial preference in sales is powerful, and can even be damning against the sales professional that never gets an opportunity because they are the wrong color (regardless of what color they are).

You will remember reading about racial preference in sales and its effects in Black Journal before.  This depiction of racial preference in the buying process makes more clear the effect that race has on the decision of who a buyer will potentially work with.

I will define Racial Preference in sales as simple definition that I will give as follows:

The customer choosing to work with a sales professional who is of a particular race or skin color.

That’s it.  Simple preference to work with someone on the basis of his or her color or race.  It happens every day in one way or another.  This is not the most insidious type of discrimination, just the most pervasive.  It is also more ‘natural’, and does not seem wrong to many who do it.

There are also opportunities for preference to have minor versus major effects so this one is on the basis of degrees.

We will use an example of “true” racial preference, meaning control of all other externalities.  This study was done by Stanford University News, July 19th, 2010 (see the whole article).  This story was well done by Louis Bergeron and is essentially a clinical example of what happens when race gets in the way.

A Strong Example of Racial Preference

This example is as clinical as it can be, done by researchers at Stanford.  I will use some clips of the dialog, and you will understand the design and results of their tests.

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Online shoppers more likely to buy from white sellers than black, Stanford researchers say

When a seller’s race is evident in an online classified ad for an iPod nano, black sellers receive fewer offers and less money than white sellers, says a new Stanford study.

Online shoppers are more likely to buy from a white seller than a black one, according to a study by two Stanford researchers who posted ads on local classified advertising websites across the United States.

Courtesy of Jennifer Doleac and Luke Stein

Classified ads featuring a black person’s hand holding an iPod being advertised for sale received 13 percent fewer responses and 17 percent fewer offers than ads showing the iPod held by a white hand.

The ads offered the latest version of the iPod nano for sale, with each ad containing a photo of either a dark- or light-skinned hand holding the popular digital music player. The ads with a black hand received 13 percent fewer responses and 17 percent fewer offers than ads showing a white hand. Black sellers were also offered less money for the iPods than white sellers.

“We were really struck to find as much racial discrimination as we did,” said Jennifer Doleac, one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate in economics. “On average it’s a younger, more educated group of people shopping online and if anything they probably discriminate less than the population as a whole.”

“We suspect that the negative effect of race would be even larger in the general population,” she said.

Doleac and fellow researcher Luke Stein, also a doctoral candidate in economics, ran ads in more than 300 locales, ranging from small towns to major cities, during the course of a year.

The study showed that black sellers were at the greatest disadvantage in the Northeast, where they received 32 percent fewer offers than whites. In the Midwest, black sellers got 23 percent fewer offers, and they got 15 percent fewer in the South. The West was the only region where the difference in the number of offers received by black and white sellers was not statistically significant.

The amount of money offered black sellers was between 2 percent and 4 percent less than the offers white sellers received. The disparity was most pronounced when the ads were posted in locales with high crime rates or where blacks and whites were geographically isolated from each other.

Buyers responding to classified ads of an iPod for sale made offers 2 percent to 4 percent lower when the iPod was shown being held by a black hand instead of a white hand.

In general, black sellers were at much less of a disadvantage when the ads were posted in more competitive markets, where larger numbers of iPods were for sale, Doleac said.

The iPod listed in the ads was always a silver, 8-gigabyte version of the most recent edition of the nano, which also plays videos. Each ad stated that the box had never been opened and the iPod was for sale because the seller did not need it.

Doleac and Stein never met with the buyers in person. Instead, when it came time to set up a meeting, the researchers said they were out of town and offered to ship the iPod to a buyer’s home, which produced another striking disparity.

Potential buyers corresponding with black sellers were 44 percent less likely to agree to have the iPod shipped to them and were 56 percent more likely to express concern about sending payment to the seller by PayPal.

Doleac and Stein interpreted the buyers’ reluctance as indicating a lack of trust in the sellers. The would-be buyers were also 17 percent less likely to include their name in emails when they responded to ads placed by black sellers.

“The results were obviously disappointing in terms of what they said about the state of society,” Stein said.

Because they never met with any of the buyers, Doleac and Stein have no information on the race of the respondents.

Stanford University News, July 19th, 2010
Study Conducted by Jennifer Doleac and Luke Stein
Article By Louis Bergeron

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Why This Example? Draw the Parallel!

I chose this as an example because of the simplicity of this display of preference.  The difference in the offers on the iPods was simply the color of the hand.   There are those who suggest that my characterization of preference might be flawed.  I would suggest that there is no clearer and simpler example of racial preference that can be

You need to draw the parallel from this P2P (Personal to Personal) activity to the B2B (Business to Business) and B2P (Business to Personal) sales that most of you undertake every day.  The bridge on all of these is simple:  In B2B and B2P sales, you always are selling to a person.  There is no doubt about that…you are selling to a person and not a company.

Practical Applications

Job Hunt and Resume – The practical aspect of this is that unless you are aware that an organization you are applying to be looking for a minority candidate, you should ‘scrub’ your resume of racial indicators.  I discussed this in depth in Black Sales Journal 11/21, Is Your Resume Race Neutral?

Business Cards – Another practical application is that I feel it is important to keep your picture off of your business card.  The business card is not an ID, it is your business information in a quick and familiar format.  Keep the picture off unless you want it well known as might be the case in some real estate and B2P positions.  This was specifically mentioned in Black Sales Journal 2/10/2010 9 Prospecting Tips for the Black Sales Professional.

You want to show that you are the professional looking for the opportunity to solve a customer’s problems.  Once you crest the hill we call preference, you can begin to show your true talents.

Always be the best.

Your comments are welcome.