davefellman.com

Engagement is a magic word in business. You want employees who are engaged with you, not just showing up every day and working for a paycheck, but understanding and working with you toward your goals. You want customers who are equally engaged, which helps you to maximize the value of each customer relationship, and you must engage with prospects in order to turn them into customers in the first place. Finally, you want suppliers who are true partners, not just people/companies who sell you things. So how does this happen? Better communication, perhaps involving a different approach to communication. This fast moving session will help you to understand the Rules Of Engagement in the modern marketplace.

Rules Of Engagement: A Guide To Better Communication – And Better Relationships! – With Everyone Who Is Important To Your Business

Be At Your Best Every Day: 5 Principles To Consistent Sales Success

Whether it’s your full-time job or just one of the many hats you wear as an owner or manager, you are a salesperson. So the question is, are you really functioning at your best in that role every day? It’s easy to get sidetracked, to develop bad habits, and even bad attitudes. It’s not always easy to maintain your enthusiasm and your commitment to growing your business. This is a session that will help you to reboot, through 5 Guiding Principles:

Have a business-building attitude
Be all about customer service and Customer Maximization
Don’t make it all about price
Time really is money, pay attention to how you’re spending it
If you have bad customers, do something about it!

5 Ways To Improve Your Small Business

This presentation, which works as either a keynote or a breakout session, is drawn from The Small Business Book: 10 Ways To Improve Your Small Business. In the book, Dave covers each of these 10 strategies in detail. In a 60-90 minute timeframe, he can cover all 10 in “highlight mode” or 4-6 in detail. You can decide on the program that best meets your programming needs and your members’ needs and interests. Here are the 10 strategies:

What The CFO Should Know About Sales & Marketing
It’s been said that “sales guys” and “numbers guys” come from different planets, and from a pure personality perspective, that may be true. From a “we need to make this business profitable” perspective, though, Sales and Finance must be able to communicate, and Finance must provide the correct checks and balances to ensure profitability. In order for that to happen, the “numbers guys” have to understand the mechanics of sales and marketing, and that’s what this program is all about.

Learning Objectives:

How to build accurate forecasts and benchmarks into the marketing planning process.
How to measure sales performance through both objectives and subjectives
How to use compensation to motivate desired behavior and performance

How To Get More Value From Your Customers
According to Dave Fellman, each of your current customers provides you with three distinct levels of value. First is the value of what they’re buying from you now. Second is the value of what they could be buying from you. Third is the value of influence, or the ways in which current customers can help you to build new business relationships. In this fast-moving seminar, he’ll explain how to maximize the value of more of your customers, increasing your sales and profits!

Learning Objectives:

How to protect the first level of value with an appropriate level of customer service
How to capture more of the second level of value by educating customers about the breadth of your product line
How to take full advantage of the third level of value by gaining—and using—testimonials and referrals

How Full — And How Strong! — Is Your Pipeline?
You have some good customers, but do you really have enough of them to get beyond your current income level, to make the kind of money you really want to make? Here’s an equally important question, do you have enough prospects in your pipeline to ensure that you’ll get where you want to go, and sooner rather than later? This session will prepare you to build and strengthen your pipeline, teaching you who to prospect and how to prospect for maximum success in the modern marketplace.

Learning Objectives:

How to identify good "suspects" and then how to identify the real decision-maker
How to qualify or disqualify prospects according to three key criteria
How to handle the most common early-stages obstacles and objections, including gatekeepers and voice mail
How to track your progress on the “front end” of the sales cycle and how to measure the strength of your pipeline

Networking in the 21st Century
Much of the “buzz” in the sales community these days is about Social Media Networking. There’s no question that these networking opportunities have potential, but how do you make them work for you, and are they really any better than “traditional” networking techniques? In this program, Dave Fellman will explain that the most important part of networking has always been the working part, and he will teach you how to make the most of all of your networking opportunities.

Learning Objectives:

How to master the fundamentals of networking: meeting, greeting, growing your network and building relationships
How to leverage your network through referrals and testimonials
How to plan and structure a comprehensive networking program
How to measure each component of your program to know whether it’s working or not

Sales Management: Compensation That Works!
It’s a sad fact that most sales compensation plans don’t work very well. You want yours to motivate your salespeople to high performance, and it’s sometimes hard to understand why the opportunity to earn more money doesn’t do that. It turns out that the “voice” of the money often isn’t clearly understood. This seminar is based on the principle that “money talks,” and it will show you how to make the money say what you want it to say, rewarding and reinforcing the performance you’re looking for.

Learning Objectives:

How to set your overall sales compensation budget
How to use salary, commissions and bonuses to provide maximum motivational muscle
How to add “non-cash” compensation to the mix
How to build loyalty that goes beyond compensation

Sales Management: How To Hire A Winner
You’ve decided that it’s time to hire a salesperson, either to open new territory, or to replace a salesperson who’s leaving (or being discharged!) This can be an exciting time, but it’s also a dangerous time. You want to hire a top performer, not an underachiever who’ll cost you time and money and never deliver a return on your investment. There’s a lot more to hiring a winner than just running an ad in the paper or on monster.com.This seminar will teach you where to look and exactly what to look for.

Learning Objectives:

How to profile the ideal candidate for your sales position
How to “network” for candidates who aren’t even looking for a job right now
The right questions to ask in the interview stage
How to test for the most important “success factors”

Time Management

& Organization:

Less Talk, More Action

Time Management and Organization are subjects that represent a lot of talk but not a lot of action among typical salespeople. In this program, Dave Fellman will present real-world time management and organizational strategies, and explain how to improve sales performance by prioritizing and putting everything in its proper place. Time is money, and it is all to often wasted!

Learning Objectives:

How to maximize selling time and minimize distractions
How to prioritize between customers, prospects, and administrative tasks
How to deal effectively with interruptions
How to use old and/or new technology to get organized for effective selling

With so much having changed in the marketplace, it is probably time to rethink every element of sales performance and sales management. Dave Fellman is a thought-leader in both management strategy and compensation strategy. In this fast-moving session, he will help you to understand that any “sales problems” you have are really management problems — and they’re usually problems that can be solved!

Learning Objectives:

How to assess your current salespeople against the optimum Sales DNA for your products and markets
How to train necessary skills, and motivate better attitudes
How to set and manage by measurable objectives and by equally measurable subjectives
That “money talks,” and how to make your sales compensation say what you want it to say, rewarding and reinforcing the behavior and performance you’re looking for and discouraging bad habits and attitudes.

Rethinking Sales Management

Much of the “buzz” in the sales community these days is about Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, but Dave Fellman believes that the best thing a salesperson can do right now is to re-focus on the fundamentals. “Everyone seems to be looking for a new way to sell,” he says, “because the perception is that the old way isn’t working. It’s not that the old ways don’t work, it’s just that most salespeople don’t execute the fundamentals very well.” Dinosaur Wisdom is a very modern presentation of those fundamentals, and this program will either teach or remind you and your sales team how to sell yourself and your products more effectively.

Learning Objectives:

How to differentiate yourself from your competitors through questions, not just answers; and through actions, not just statements
How to get organized for effective selling
How to overcome the most common obstacles and objections, including the price objection
How to use Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn more effectively; to support your fundamentals, not replace them!

Dave Fellman is the author of Listen To The Dinosaur, which was listed by Selling Power magazine as one of its "10 Best Books To Read" in 2010.

Keynotes and Seminars

Here are expanded descriptions of several of the most popular segments:

The “visibility” segment is a discussion of the three elements of visibility: Advertising, Signage and “Commercial Good Citizenship.” Attendees will gain a much clearer understanding of how these elements contribute to a solid marketing strategy.
The “team” segment includes a strategy for evaluating each employee and creating a plan to train, manage and motivate to improved performance.
The “value” segment covers the three levels of value every customer provides: the value of what they’re buying now, the value of what they could be buying in the future, and the value of influence (testimonials and referrals.)
The “time management” segment provides real-world strategies for managing time and minimizing interruptions.
The “negotiation” segment provides strategy for negotiating more effectively with customers, suppliers and even employees.

Put Some Measurement Into Management
Don’t Be Afraid To Negotiate
Plug Your Profit Leaks
Plug Your Time Management Leaks
Don’t Be All Business

Be More Visible In The Marketplace
Build A Better, Stronger Team
Get All The Value From Your Customers
Take Advantage of Technology
Put Some Work into Networking

Aviate, Navigate, Communicate

Dave Fellman is unique among your many choices for a keynote speaker. He was a highly successful sales & marketing speaker/trainer/consultant with hundreds of speeches and seminars to his credit, long before surviving the airplane crash which provides the core of this dynamic keynote address. He has a proven ability to connect with an audience, and over the past 30+ years, he has helped tens of thousands of small business owners and employees to maximize their potential.

In 1999, while piloting his own his own single-engine airplane, Dave was confronted with an in-flight engine failure. He immediately implemented the aviator’s emergency mantra...Aviate, Navigate, Communicate: maintain control of the airplane, pick an emergency landing site and fly toward it, and communicate with any internal and/or external resources who might be able to help. The story of his glide toward safety—and of the actions he took when a construction vehicle pulled out from nowhere onto his intended touchdown site—will hold your audience riveted to their seats. The story of how he recovered from his injuries will teach them something about the value of hard work.

But that’s not the only "moral" of this story. The real lesson is in the way Dave ties Aviate, Navigate, Communicate to the challenges of modern business and modern life. No matter how bad your situation may seem, he’ll explain, the best strategy is to Aviate (maintain control of the things you can control), Navigate (determine the direction toward a better situation and make and follow a plan to get there), and Communicate (with family, friends, employees, co-workers, customers, or any other any internal and/or external resources who might be able to help.) This is an important message, delivered by a speaker who has truly "been there!"

David Fellman & Associates
501-102 John Haywood Way, Raleigh NC 27604
(919) 606-9714
dmf@davefellman.com

Uncommon Solutions For Common Obstacles and Objections

Customers and prospects are really pretty predictable in terms of the objections and obstacles they raise. This seminar will introduce strategies for handling the most common initial objections most salespeople run into, and several more “later stages” objections, including the price objection. In that segment, Dave Fellman will explain how to negotiate more effectively, exploring the three fundamentals of this advanced selling skill.

Learn how to respond to:

We’re happy with our current supplier
I’m busy right now
I don’t need anything right now
Just send me some literature
Your price is too high!