Posts Tagged ‘Sales’
If Prospecting is the Toughest Part of Selling, Why Do We Put Our Least Experienced People in Those Roles?
Many people believe prospecting is the toughest part of selling. I’m actually not sure I believe that, but I do believe prospecting is tough. Our customers overwhelmed with just doing their jobs. Add on top of that, the fact they are constantly deluged with messaging from innumerable companies competing for attention and their budgets. Getting…
Read MoreMath Works, Always: How Do We Tilt the Numbers in Our Favor?
In sales and marketing, we at least claim to be very numbers oriented. We have metrics around everything: Click-throughs Bounces Open rates Time spent on a page MQL, SQL, SAL Daily/weekly dials Daily/weekly conversations/meetings Demos Pipeline Coverage Win Rates Average Deal/Transaction Value Sales Cycle Time Lifetime Customer Value Renewal Rates ….. I could go on.…
Read More“Active Listening” is Not a Technique
Catching up on my reading, I ran across an article on Active Listening. It was focused on sales people and the author made the statement, “Active listening makes them feel like they are being heard…” I’m sure that’s not what the author intended to communicate, but it got me thinking about many other things I hear and…
Read MoreLeveraging Your Information Advantage
In the “good old days” of selling (if there ever were any), a lot of sales people reveled in their “information advantage.” Prospects and customers relied on sales people to educate them on products and solutions. Those days are long gone, customers are self-educating on the web. They no longer have to rely on sales people…
Read MoreDiscounts, Deals, and Advance Access: Keys to Increasing Sales
Are you shooting all the different kinds of ammunition you have in your sales arsenal? I’m going to go over what I believe are three of the most important ways to achieve a sale. For the purpose of this article, I want to focus on the initial sale, so I’m going to skip upselling and cross-selling. As…
Read More5 Simple Steps to Easy Sales Forecasting
Let’s suppose that your business experiences a 10% increase in customer orders in the upcoming three months. To take advantage of this opportunity, you might need to order more supplies, introduce changes to your work schedule or even hire someone to help out with the added workload. If you don’t have enough time to adjust,…
Read MoreAre You Using This Clever Facebook Strategy to Boost Your B2B Sales?
Most of us have developed at least fair skills at Google searches, but for many small business owners there may be a search platform that will pay far quicker dividends than Google. I’m talking about Facebook. Searching Facebook is, in many ways, the same as searching Google – at least for people, places, and keywords.…
Read MoreProduct versus Solution Selling
It must be that time of year, but recently I’ve gotten a number of queries from thoughtful executives: “Dave, we need to transform the way we sell from product to solution selling……” That statement is always a little confusing to me, naturally I ask, “What does that mean and why do you want to change?”…
Read MoreStop Reading (Just) Sales Books!
Reading is important to our professional development and growth (not to mention the scientific evidence of how it improves our cognitive capabilities). Far too few business and sales professional actively read as part of their personal and professional growth. (Perhaps, that’s part of the reason we consistently see the stunningly poor data on results.) Every…
Read MoreSales Agility and Adaptability
A few of us have been having a conversation about whether adaptability and agility are important in sales. I think we are in uniform agreement it is important, however, my initial reaction was, “Why are we even asking this question, isn’t it a foundation to selling?” As I reflected on the issue, I get why…
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