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Richardson Company Tagged Articles
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Helping Customers Move Forward
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| 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?” |
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A, B, C, E-MAIL OF PROSPECTING
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| 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! |
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A SALES METHODOLOGY
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| 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. |
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ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS
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| KNOWING HOW TO FINESSE POTENTIALLY INTRUSIVE QUESTIONS SO THAT YOU ARE COMFORTABLE ASKING THEM AND CLIENTS FEEL GOOD ABOUT ANSWERING IS AN INVALUABLE SKILL. |
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CHALLENGING MESSAGES
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| 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: |
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DECISION MAKERS VS. INFLUENCERS
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| 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. |
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ESCALATION AS A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY
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| 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. |
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GETTING THE STRAIGHT SCOOP
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| 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. |
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LEADS, LEADS, LEADS
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| 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.
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LEVERAGE YOUR PREPARATION
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| 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.
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NO BUDGET – UNLESS OF COURSE…
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| 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. |
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ROOM FOR TWO EXPERTS IN YOUR SALES CALL?
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| 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. |
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STICKY QUESTIONS
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| 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? |
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NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL
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| 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? |
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YOUR EMAILS – THE IMPRESSION YOU MAKE
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| 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.
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Proposal Coaching: Template and 8 Questions to Ask
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| 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. |
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Final Presentations: It’s Not Over Until...
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| 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? |
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Make a List, Delete Excuses
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| 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. |
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Chatter Matters!
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| Will Salesforce.com's Chatter revolutionize and accelerate call preparation, communication, sales coaching, and sharing of knowledge? |
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Sales leads: the good, the bad, and the opportunity
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| There are cold leads, warm leads, hot leads, targeted leads. But is there a commonly accepted definition as to what a good one actually is? Jim Brodo, Richardson's SVP of sales review the various categories of a good lead and how to optimize and allocate resources for following up and nurturing the various levels of leads that are developed. |
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The Value YOU Bring Is As Important As Your Products
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| 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.
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