Like this article? PLEASE +1 it! Evan Signature
Evan Carmichael Top Header about About Home Profiles articles Tools forums inspirational quotes About facebook Twitter YouTube Blog

Linda Richardson Tagged Articles



Helping Customers Move Forward
Let’s focus on how you can accelerate closing by being “helpful” to your customers. What would you do in the following two scenarios to be “helpful?”
Shorten the Sales Cycle
It seems as if your customers' number one goal is to lengthen it! The economy and an environment of heightened skepticism have doubled or even tripled the length of the sales cycle in many industries. So what can you do that is in your control to accelerate the close?
Talk To Me
How are you changing your sales dialogues to encourage customers to open up to you and tell you about the impact the economy is having on their businesses and how that has changed their priorities? Customers won't really open up unless they trust you, and gaining and keeping trust is not easy in light of what most customers are going through.
A, B, C, E-MAIL OF PROSPECTING
When you’re trying to get a meeting with a prospect, the ideal outcome of your telephone call is to get a face-to-face appointment. But in spite of your skills and making a second effort some prospects will not agree to a meeting yet!
A SALES METHODOLOGY
Do you have a sales methodology that your team follows? What is a sales methodology? In Linda Richardson's new article, A Sales Methodolgy, Linda will review the importance of a an effective sales process and methodolgy.

ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS
KNOWING HOW TO FINESSE POTENTIALLY INTRUSIVE QUESTIONS SO THAT YOU ARE COMFORTABLE ASKING THEM AND CLIENTS FEEL GOOD ABOUT ANSWERING IS AN INVALUABLE SKILL.
CHALLENGING MESSAGES
Even in the best of times, change can be stressful — and these are hardly the best of times. If you are faced with announcing a less than welcome change, how you position the message dramatically influences how your sales team will hear it. The following are some ideas to help you and your team deal with the change:
DECISION MAKERS VS. INFLUENCERS
Because clients’ needs have become increasingly complex, most salespeople recognize that to meet those needs a team effort is required. Being able to gain access to team members, preparing with them, and performing in front of the client as an effective team are essential to meet clients’ broader and more complex needs.
ESCALATION AS A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY
Escalation can be a highly effective negotiation strategy. Having unlimited authority in a negotiation can seem, and is, powerful, but it can be equally dangerous. If your client thinks that you have unlimited authority, he or she can read that as a green light to keep driving for more.
GETTING THE STRAIGHT SCOOP
Win or lose, how diligent are you in placing a call to get feedback from your clients about why they did or didn’t choose you? There is so much to learn — whether to identify strengths you hadn’t even recognized as such that you can use to win future business, to know what appeals most to your client so you can be extra sure to deliver on that, or to correct misses and prevent them from happening to sink future deals.
LEADS, LEADS, LEADS
In a more challenging economy clients’ decision processes often become more protracted. You think that salespeople would jump on every possible lead. Yet our research and experience show that, even today, many leads are too easily discounted. For example, some salespeople mistakenly discount a lead because the level of the contact isn’t high enough. Yet research shows that many opportunities begin at the operational level.

LEVERAGE YOUR PREPARATION
Preparing for a sales call, while it still takes discipline and time, has never been easier. Technology (CRMs, Google, other web resources) has dramatically reduced research time. The other side of the coin is that technology has made business more instantaneous and that has put more demand on salespeople’s time.

NO BUDGET – UNLESS OF COURSE…
Many of the customers we are talking to may be like your customers. Their budgets have either been cut or all but vanished. What can you do? Linda Richardson article "No Budget - Unless of Course.." explores some helpful tips.
ROOM FOR TWO EXPERTS IN YOUR SALES CALL?
I read an article recently about programmers. It described programmers as program experts and their clients as domain experts. I couldn’t help thinking how customer-focused we could be in sales if we thought of clients as domain experts.
STICKY QUESTIONS
How should you answer an “uncomfortable” question or concern by a client that you wish you didn’t have to discuss, for example, a situation in which a colleague left your organization under difficult circumstances or negative press?
NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL
Many salespeople are reporting that it is taking them twice as long to close a sale. They also agree that there are fewer deals and, therefore, the need for them to close the deals that are in the pipeline is more acute. Certainly customers will not buy without clear value justification and trust in you. But what else can you do to increase your chances that you, not your competitor, get the business that is out there?
YOUR EMAILS – THE IMPRESSION YOU MAKE
Today, e-mail is probably the most common way of communicating with clients. I continue to be amazed by the e-mails that I get to see that salespeople have sent to their clients.

Proposal Coaching: Template and 8 Questions to Ask
Your salespeople need your support. And while they may try to entice you to write or help them with their proposals, in fact they need your support in the form of coaching, not doing their work for them.
Final Presentations: It’s Not Over Until...
Great news! You've made your presentation and are one of two finalists down from six - pretty exciting, especially in light of the extended sales cycles you've been facing. Your customer has given you a date of two weeks from today when the company will announce its final decision. Your contact said he'd get back to you. What do you do in the interim to increase your winning?
Make a List, Delete Excuses
Selling is as much mind-set as skill set - especially today. Sure the economy has made it harder to conduct business and find and close opportunities. It has also made it harder to decipher what obstacles are due to the economy and what are due to our own performance. A 2009 DI study with 1600 corporate customers showed that customers attributed 33% of lost deals to things they feel were in the salesperson's control.

Sales Proposal Executive Summaries: Don¡¦t ¡K Unless
Your proposal can make or break your sale. It can get you in to see the customer or keep you out. When you do include an Executive Summary in a proposal, it¡¦s the first thing most customers read. More importantly, it may be the only thing executives/key decision-makers read at all. Executive Summaries establish that all-important first impression. They can draw customers in ¡X or turn them away. Unfortunately, many Executive Summaries are neither a summary nor executive.

It Takes Two (Essential Sales Skills) to Build the Relationship
Many things go into winning a sale ¡X the fit of your solution, your sales strategy, how clearly you articulate value, your pricing, and so on. While all these factors impact a customer¡¦s decision to buy, Aberdeen, an independent research firm, in its study with 500 best-in-class companies, identified the relationship between the customer and salesperson as the #1 reason why a customer buys from a particular salesperson.

The Search for Perfection - How it Can Ruin Your Sales Efforts
Sometimes perfection is good but sometimes there is a strange dark side. First the good and then, in the fifth paragraph, I'll share the frightening dark side with you.
Virtual Sales Conversations
Linda Richardson presents a few tips to follow to help you engage in productive and professional virtual sales calls
Chatter Matters!
Will Salesforce.com's Chatter revolutionize and accelerate call preparation, communication, sales coaching, and sharing of knowledge?

Empathy: An Endangered Sales Skill
ALL agree that empathy is the ability to exhibit interpersonal sensitivity about another's concerns and understand another person's perspective. Clearly these two abilities are absolutely essential in sales success. But is empathy is in trouble?
Getting Paid for Out of Control Projects
Overruns in scope are common. Getting paid for them is not so common.

Increase Your Win Ratio: Get to the Executive Sponsor
Deals are lost for a variety of reasons: better fit by the competitor’s product, stronger relationships, a more creative solution, cost, customer delays … Customer delays are cropping up more and more often. Certainly the economy is playing a role, but to commit, customers need more information. The problem is that much of the time the executive who will ultimately make the buying decision does not have convincing information because he or she is not involved in the process until decision time. When the executive is invisible or inaccessible until decision time, it is highly probable you won’t have reflected his or her strategic vision and therefore your solution isn’t compelling enough for him/her to commit the budget.

The Value YOU Bring Is As Important As Your Products
What you bring as YOU, the value you add to helping customers meet their business objectives, your ability to help them see a broader perspective, is as important, often more important, than what your products will do for them. Lately, there has been a focus on the need for salespeople to increase their business acumen - and rightly so.

How Is Your Phone Being Answered?
Consider these four points: Is your phone answered by the third ring? Is the greeting friendly, professional, interested and energetic? How is voice mail etiquette handled at your company? Is your voice mail answered by you and is the message up-to-date? Let’s look how one call was mishandled.

Get the Budget - Skip a Wild-Goose Chase
Before you expend days on that complex proposal or jump on a flight again to see your client or prospect, find out about the budget. While knowing client needs is paramount to maximize opportunities, knowing the budget is also vital.

Call Me - How Not to End a Client Letter/eMail
End your follow-up sales letters or e-mails with your next step.

Transferring a Call
Essential tips on how to properly transfer a call.

Short of a Mack Truck: Keep Your Aches and Pains to Yourself
Short of being hit with a Mac truck, when you get to your client meeting, avoid telling a client about personal daily woes, particularly as an excuse for not performing.
Out of the Mouths of Babes - Negotiation Best Practices
Negotiation Skills start at any age.
Scope Creep
As you and your team get into development and implementation, you find additional needs - small and not so small add-ons that you are asked to provide or are needed to complete the project. When this happens, you, as well as everyone on your team, must be alert to \"scope creep,\" in which the project gets bigger based on new components or needs - but the committed budget stays the same!

Hi-Definition Sales Preparation
The changes in selling are profound and require that sales organizations and salespeople adapt quickly. A major area for adaption is preparation, and, fortunately, the tools to prepare at a hi-def level are at your fingertips.

A Healthy Disregard
When Larry Page, co-founder and chief executive of Google, promised on the company’s Web site to continue to maintain, “a healthy disregard for the impossible”, it brought to mind the smarter vs. harder debate and got me thinking about what I believe it takes to succeed in sales.

Other Linda Richardson Related Articles

Working with Wisdom: A Question of Values
Linda Naiman answers questions about workplace challenges.

Working with Wisdom: Control Freak Confidential
Linda Naiman answers questions about workplace challenges
A Day as a Gen Y Imposter
A conversation between Linda Gravett, PhD, SPHR (a Baby Boomer) and Robin Throckmorton, MA, SPHR (a Gen Xer) as they remember the day they did a presentation. This was not a normal presentation. On this day, Linda dressed the part of a Gen Y and Robin dressed the part of a Radio Baby Imposter. In the article they share their feelings and impressions as they deliver a training in the shoes of another generation.
A SALES METHODOLOGY
Do you have a sales methodology that your team follows? What is a sales methodology? In Linda Richardson's new article, A Sales Methodolgy, Linda will review the importance of a an effective sales process and methodolgy.

NO BUDGET – UNLESS OF COURSE…
Many of the customers we are talking to may be like your customers. Their budgets have either been cut or all but vanished. What can you do? Linda Richardson article "No Budget - Unless of Course.." explores some helpful tips.
Virtual Sales Conversations
Linda Richardson presents a few tips to follow to help you engage in productive and professional virtual sales calls
What can a Business Coach do for my company and Why Should I hire one?
In this article Phil Richardson, a Licensed Professional Business Coach and experienced Business Advisor, Consultant and Corporate executive shares with business owners and executives the "Inside Scoop" on What a business coach does and Why they might want to hire one.
Why MMS Makes For A Great Marketing Tool!
With the kinks in multimedia messaging being ironed out, MMS is proving to be a haven for savvy marketers. In this article, Linda Mentzer tells you why!
Why Content Curation Adds Rocket Fuel To Your SEO Efforts!
Linda Mentzer reasons out why and how content creation (and curation) is like a shot of adrenaline when you’re running the SEO rat race!
The 411 On Permission Marketing In 2012
Linda Mentzer hands over the goods on permission marketing and what strategies to adopt in 2012!
Featured Article

Bottom Footer



Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!
Name:
Email:
Popular Articles

The new marketing question. Will they follow?

How to Conduct a B2B Marketing Content Audit

••••••>SEO Tip Of The Day: HTML Validation
Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.