A familiar challenge for sales people is understanding the critical path to revenue, or closed business. In most complex B2B sales, multiple people are included in the evaluation and decision making process. Ensuring you are selling to the right people is challenging and time consuming. The result of selling to the wrong person almost always [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
On piece of advice, rarely addressed in traditional sales training is the importance of communicating with multiple individuals on the buying side.
Once you know the lay of the land and have established a need for your good or service, including the key players in follow up calls, emails and reviews is critical. This type of [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
How do you measure sales effectiveness?
Do you set out to measure the conversion rates from email and phone campaigns to new business? What is the typical conversion from a phone connection to a proposal? From proposal to new business?
Surprisingly, the numbers behind the sales effort is a complete afterthought for most organizations. This information, no [...]
Thursday, February 11, 2010
What is the best sales opportunity? When your customer has a stated problem your solution can solve. In most sales organizations, identifying these opportunities is challenging and time consuming. Phone calls, emails, trade events, and advertisements only yield limited feedback and few ‘hot’ opportunities. A survey is the best tool to extract specific information in [...]
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sales vs. Marketing
They drive growth, are always looking for results, and try to stay ahead of the competition. Innovation, creativity, and resilience are just some of the attributes of these departments. However, these departments are constantly butting heads. They each have similar goals, share the credit of a good job, and share the blame in [...]
Friday, January 29, 2010
Taken from Joe Paterno:
“You have to perform at a consistently higher level than others. That’s the mark of a true professional.”
Friday, January 29, 2010
Trade show Myths
Having worked and attended hundreds of trade shows, these events are akin to herding cats. It is hard to keep exhibitors excited to talk to the next customer. Attendees are looking for free knick knacks or tickets to the night’s event. Most are likely hung-over, tired and aimlessly walking the aisles.
Unfortunately, for most [...]
Monday, January 25, 2010
The ‘if you build it, they will come’ argument has long been prevalent in the technology space. With few exceptions, this model has proven to be completely unsuccessful; however, most company’s emphasis lies in building a better technology, not building a better sales team/sales channel.
Did your solution build itself? Without building market awareness, do you [...]
Monday, December 21, 2009
How many sales reps cringe when their manager schedules an all day training session?
To be a successful sales professional, you need to practice your craft. You would never run a marathon without the proper preparation. Yet many people are labeled ‘sales’ and expected to produce with no strategy, support, defined process, or training.
Unfortunately, sales training [...]
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The first criteria of a successful sales rep? ORGANIZATION.
On a daily basis we interact with sales reps that miss meetings, forget names, emails, phone numbers, and even struggle using simple sales tools like Salesforce and Webex. It becomes easy for prospective customers to forget these reps and their products. Sales reps are a companies front [...]
Friday, March 12, 2010
0 Comments