We all have them, the “Must Win Deals,” where we pull out all the stops. We do everything we need to do to win the deal. Often, we are at our most creative moments when we do these deals. We thoughtfully overcome every hurdle, we get the customer to think differently, we mobilize all the […]
Sales Process
The Five “Whys”
The “5 Whys” is a tool developed decades ago, attributed to Sakichi Toyoda in developing the Toyota Production System. Anyone involved in TQM or Lean knows about the “5 Whys,” and how to leverage them. It’s one of the most powerful collaborative tools to help us help our customers learn and think differently. It’s the […]
“I’m Selling As Hard As I Can, Why Aren’t You Buying?”
The universal lament of sales people is, “Why aren’t my customers buying? I’m busting my ass selling to them?” We make dozens of prospecting calls, send hundreds of emails. We find customers with some level of interest, then do everything we can to convince the customers to buy our products. We train ourselves about our […]
Process is the Foundation for Agility/Nimbleness
We want to be flexible, nimble, able to adapt to the circumstances, leap on an opportunity, respond quickly. We abhor process since that constrains our creativity and ability to innovate. Too often, when I talk to leaders and sales people about process, they cite some of the things outlined above as the reason they don’t […]
Build Your Buying Journey Step by Step
One of the staples of marketing is the ability to understand how a human being goes from never having heard of you to actually buying something from you, time and time again. In simple terms, it can be thought of as a sales funnel. But, that suggests a very linear, logical progression and if there’s […]
Confusing Simplification with Simplistic
Both we, our customers, our markets, our worlds are getting more and more complex. We face rapid change/disruption, overwhelm/overload, risk/uncertainty, turmoil, constantly shifting focus/priorities/agendas. In the face of this, we struggle to respond, whether it’s to fix performance problems, address new opportunities, grow and expand. As leaders and business professionals, we must constantly seek to […]
How Does Your Customer Make Money?
Can you answer the question, “How does you customer make money?” By that, I don’t mean at a superficial level, like, “Well, dugghh, Dave, they sell stuff……” I mean really understanding your customer’s business. It includes things like: Who are their customers/markets? What drives success with them? How are those markets growing? How does your […]
Sales Managers “Closing Business”
I was struggling to meet with a sales manager. He really wanted to talk, we had critical issues he had asked for help in addressing. He kept postponing our calls, “Dave, I’m running all out, I’ve really got to be out in the field closing business for my people…..” We finally had our meeting. I […]
Deal Strategies: Helping the Customer Buy
Recently I wrote, “What If We Kept The Target Close Date Sacred?” It focused on improving our pipeline management, discipline, and integrity. But the way we address these issues is in our deal strategies and how we engage the customer in each deal. Most of the time and too much of our training focus on […]
The Pipeline Review
I was meeting with a client, we were doing the first pipeline review as part of their implementation of the Sales Execution Framework. Pipeline reviews are a great starting point for the process, a good pipeline review helps identify and isolate potential challenges as well as the performance leverage points. The client was a very […]
