 |
About The Seminar |
|
Media Reprints |
|
Client Testimonials |
|
Business Golf Tip |
|
About Us |
|
|
 |
Media Reprints | |
|
HERE'S A DIFFERENT KIND OF GOLF STRATEGY Making Contact HOW TO TREAT CLIENTS ON THE COURSE...AND HOW NOT TO. A business contact-call him Al- invites you on a golf date. When you accept, he asks: "By the way, what kind of a golf bag do you have?" You tell him you have a big, black leather bag with tags on it from Pine Valley and Augusta. And just to make sure he doesn't get the wrong idea, you tell Al you are not interested in any freebie bag with his company logo on it. He laughs, then asks about your clubs. You've got graphite shaft irons and Big Bertha woods. Golf ball? You play Titleists. When you arrive at his club, exactly on time, Al is waiting for you, introduces you to the club pro and has everything all set. He hands you a layout of the course, along with a sleeve of Titleists and a handful of tees. He asks if you're pressed for time, which you are, so he cancels lunch at the turn and suggests you play "ready golf." Al's not a very good golfer, but he is knowledgeable and polite and knows when to be quiet. He has played this course of often, but offers advice only when asked. The one exception occurs on the fourth fairway. As you start to pull your nine-iron from your bag, Al gently warns that there are some nasty hazards hidden around the green. It might be safer to play a pitching wedge. You thank him, risk it anyway, hit the green and par the hole. You're waiting for him to bring up business and walking to the sixth tee, Al finally does. Gently. There's a proposal he has been working on, and he'd like you to take a look at it. You make it clear you don't want to talk shop, and he starts talking about Tiger Woods. Five holes later, you rip your longest drive of the day, but it tails away and comes to rest on the cart path. "Great shot," Al says. "And that's a free drop of the path, of course." Jeez, the guy even knows the rules. You wind up back in the clubhouse at seven over, one under your handicap. Even with Al's high handicap you've won by three strokes, and he's buying the drinks. As you start to leave, he says he'll call you in a week or so. He's a decent chap, you think, and his proposal will be worth a hearing. Stop congratulating yourself. He's gone to school on you, and he's played you better than you played that fourth hole. How did Al know you were a fast and focused player who doesn't like to prattle on about business while playing golf? And that you don't easily accept others' advice? Answer: He learned it at school- a new kind of golf academy that teaches students not how to play the game, but how to play the golfers. Remember when you told Al about your big black leather golf bag with those expensive clubs? From his half-day seminar on business golf, Al had learned that your bag is a tip-off to your personality. It marks you as a "director" type. Since when did customer golf get do sophisticated? The name of the game used to be pretty straightforward: Lose to your betters. "Show me a man who is a good loser, and I'll show you a man who is playing with his boss," was accepted wisdom. Even now, no shrewd salesperson worth his or her expense account is going to embarrass an important client by beating him badly. But there is a lot more to customer golf than the final score, according to Bill Storer, president of Business Golf Strategies, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. "Think of it as a six-hour sales call,' says Storer, who stages seminars that "add distance to business golf." Storer, whose handicap is 20, played many rounds of customer golf as a sales manager for AT&T/Lucent before starting BGS in the summer of 1995. He knew there was a market for his services; he had seen many business opportunities blown on the links. "Companies stage outings and have their own people playing together and their guests playing by themselves," he says. "Wasted opportunities." Or worse. Storer recalls one outing where a young salesman quaffed one beer too many, then lipped his golf cart, dumping a guest on his head. The guest, who shouldn't have been invited to play in the first place, suffered a concussion and had to be taken to a hospital. Storer teamed up with Richard Block, a biophysicist and golf instructor (handicap: 10) to devise their seminar program to help businesses get more business out of golf. Their clients now include Bell Atlantic, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Lucent Technologies, Uniroyal Chemical, Prudential Reinsurance, and a lot of smaller companies. Computing Concepts, a computer service company, recently hired BGS to address its staff of about two dozen salespeople, including a half-dozen women. Most were around 30 years, and only a few were experienced golfers. Some had never played at all, though they soon will. Sal Pulitano, president of the company, wants his salespeople to take the kinks with clients, and he is planning to sponsor some golf outings. Actually, it's an advantage that so any members of Pulitano's sales force were new to the game, said Storer. No bad habits yet, and they can learn the game properly form a pro. "Skilled self-made golfers are extremely rare," says Storer. "If you do not take lessons form a pro, you are putting yourself behind a very long learning curve." The half-day seminar was all about "how to use business golf to build relationships and ultimately put bigger numbers on the bottom line." To that end, the attendees were given a few pounds of golf literature to study. The theme: Golf is more than a game it's their business. Customer golf has come a long way from the days when the salesman with the six handicap blew up on the last three holes to make sure his client won. That kind of brown-nosing went out with wooden shafts. According to BGS, today's version is more subtle and scientific. |
||
|
Learning How To Do Biz On The Course Through 30 years of playing golf, 23 years in sales and marketing for AT & T and Lucent Corp., and 200-plus golf events he helped stage as an independent planner, Bill Storer has seen great wins and disastrous losses on the golf course. Now he's in the business of training salespeople to grab victory from the jaws of defeat on the golf course. Storer's company, Business Golf Strategies of Basking Ridge, N.J., conducts half-day seminars designed to make an organization's sales and marketing force as effective at selling on the golf course as they are in more formal business settings. The task Storer tackles is tougher than it sounds. After all, the golf couse has long been considered an excellent place to entertain clients and customers as a way to solidify a business relationship and help sell a product or service. How could a relaxing afternoon on the links be seen as anything but an uninterrupted, five-hour sales call? In his years in sales, "AT & T and Lucent taught me well how to sell in an office setting", Storer said. "But no one taught me what to do during less-formal, client-entertainment activities." "Our seminars teach professional men and women how to behave in a less-formal setting, to think differently about client entertainment." While Storer's program can be trimmed to as little as 75 minutes, ideally it takes five hours to complete, either all in one day or spread over two to four days of a company's sales meetings. For the best results, Storer said, the instruction is followed by time on the course itself, where the sessons can be reinforced. The program includes five modules; how a person is perceived by the customer during a round of golf; building a sales plan for the day and how to make the plan work; business-relationship skills and dealing with different golfers' personalities; the rules of golf; and 17 rules of business-golf etiquette. Included with the program is a 150-page binder for each participant that includes much of the material covered in the seminar. Storer is convinced that meeting planners in charge of arranging golf events will find the program valuable. "It's an extension of sales training, and not how to swing a golf club," he said. "It's new, it's different, and meeting planners are always looking for something new to bring to sales training." |
|
Teaching client golf as 6-hour sales call Bill Storer can't understand why salespeople pull all-nighters to get ready for a big meeting but don't prepare as carefully for a round of client golf. After all, to him, golf is a six-hour sales call. Storer, an accomplished golfer, left a sales career with AT&T Corp. in 1989 after 23 years. In his next job as a golf-event manager, he noticed something wasn't right with the "sales golf" he witnessed. "Suddenly it dawned on me: There are a lot of people out here who don't know what they're doing," he said. "Not only do they not know how to play the game, they don't know how to use golf as an effective business tool." "Some of these companies were spending $25,000 on a golf outing once or twice a year," Storer said, "but they weren't getting much return on that investment." With the help of Dr. Richard Block, a biophysicist and golfer, Storer spent two years developing Business Golf Strategies Inc. The Basking Ridge, NJ, company (908-204-9350) has presented many seminars since 1995, helping salespeople with everything from course etiquette to foursome matchups to 19th-hole behavior. Some of the topics covered in Storer's half-day sessions include "Understanding Whom to Invite and Why" (to identify the people who can make decisions), "How to Build Better Client Relation-ships by Adapting to Different Personality Styles" (to match up people who will have a good time together) and "The Rules of Etiquette and How to Play 'Ready Golf'" (to keep the day moving). Each attendee receives a copy of the Rules of Golf and a 150-page workbook that complements the seminar. "What we really do is an extension of sales training," Storer said. "AT&T did a great job of teaching me how to sell across a desk in the customer's office. But they --and no one else we've come across -- teach how to do that on a golf course. And that's where relationships are built." Storer maintains that half of all sales come out of so-called "relationships selling," where a salesperson-customer bond exists well before the sale closes. And speaking of the closing, what about the age-old question: Is it proper to discuss business of the golf course, or do you leave that for another time? "The single answer to that is to know your customer," Storer said. "With some personalities, you can talk business while you're putting your shoes on. With others, you have to wait." Still, there are guidelines. Storer suggests keeping business out of the beginning and the end of the round. If it comes up at all, it should be between the fifth and 15th holes. Better still, salespeople should consider how they're going to handle the situation at the "20th hole" the follow-up sales call at the customer's office. Jack Lee, director of voice applications for Bell Atlantic in Madison New Jersey, said Storer's seminar opened his eyes. "There's a lot of solid information about how to do business on the golf course," Lee said. "After attending Bill's class, I'm convinced a lot of people just don't know how to do it. "There's so much you wouldn't even consider in preparing for the golf date. For instance, you might want to know the Rules of Golf. The customer might be a stickler for the rules, and you'd have a hard time recovering if you said something stupid about them." Storer hopes seminar veterans who use his principles will see that each dollar spent on client golf outings will yield more sales or at least relationships that lead to sales. "We're not suggesting you have to sell something every time you're on the golf course. But you're always selling yourself."
Business Golf Strategies, Inc.
Copyright 2004, Business Golf Strategies, Incorporated |