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sales person Tagged Articles
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Sales Coaching Tips
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| Sales is often considered the battle ground that business is won and lost one. Having an effective sales team is a must. Like soldiers- your sales people will have to brave many challenges to overcome possible customer issues and make the sale final. Unlike soldiers though they have the handicap of having to perform up to a customer's standard and they aren't allowed to shoot anyone. There might be a need for some sales coaching tips to help any sales person sharpen their skills, review basics and capitalize on strengths. |
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When the Seller Becomes a Stalker
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| The idea of sales is to draw customers in so that they will get to know our products and services and ideally buy them, over and over again. What happens when the sales person becomes aggressive? |
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10 Ways to Increase your Sales
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| Want to increase your sales and grow your business but worried you will come across as a pushy sales person? Not sure what to do or where to start to ensure your business is a success this year? The key to success, particularly in sales, is planning ahead and always be willing to try something new.
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5 Quick Sales Tips to INCREASE sales
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| Did you come back from the New Year break invigorated and inspired to make 2009 your best year yet? Have you just realized that its the middle of February and you still havent done anything?
Use these 5 quick tips and get motivated, get active and start taking the steps toward building your success this year. |
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Are you asking questions that make your customers & prospects THINK?
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| Questioning or probing as it is also known, is most of the most important skills you can learn when dealing with customers and one of the most powerful. The ability to ask questions that uncover important information about a customers needs, current supply and willingness to change is a strong characteristic of a consultative sales approach.
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Achieve your Sales Targets with your Sales Pipeline
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| Being aware of and managing the amount in your sales pipeline each week, fortnight or month can have the single biggest impact to achieving your sales consistently from month to month and quarter to quarter.
It is an important forecasting tool that all businesses should use even if they dont have salespeople, as it clearly shows how many sales to expect and when to expect them. |
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Boost your Sales through Reinvention
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| Is it just me or is 2009 going to be the biggest and best year yet?
Despite what is being reporting in the media and what we are seeing overseas, many of the people that Ive spoken to recently are extremely motivated and confident that 2009 is going to be their best year yet (including me).
So if 2009 is going to be your best year yet, now is the perfect time to sit down and work out what you want to achieve and what you need to do to make this happen. |
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Build your Sales Pipeline and Boost Your Prospect Numbers
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| Do you get frustrated constantly searching for prospects and contact information? The traditional methods of building a list of people that you can market and sell to such as purchasing databases, driving around business parks and noting the tenants of buildings that you walk past are great, and they do work, however, they are costly and time consuming. |
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Business Networking Tips
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| Networking has been good to me over the years. Apart from referrals, it has been the single most successful way of generating new business and building my professional network. It must be the salesperson in me, but there is nothing more rewarding than meeting and connecting with new people who end up as friends, associates or clients.
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Consultative Needs Based Selling Approach
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| Looking at your business from a sales perspective and most importantly understanding your business from a client perspective, is one of the most important first steps in sales.
Most people hate being sold to but love the feeling of buying; so the clearer you can explain how your business helps and "what is in it for them" the easier it makes prospective customers to make a buying decision.
The consultative/problem solver approach qualifies and listens to the customer and helps them to buy what they need. The consultative approach focuses on the needs of the customer and how you improve or benefit them in some way. |
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How can I increase the number of Referrals I receive?
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| Im sure most of you would agree that selling to someone who has been referred to you is much easier and more enjoyable than those generated through traditional sales efforts such as direct mail and cold calling. The success rate is higher because they are in the market for your services and are also much less price sensitive because the referring party has told them the value and benefits that you can deliver. |
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How can I make cold calling easier?
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| Lately I have been working with a number of sales teams to help them increase the success of their cold calling and I thought I would share with you some of my tips for success: |
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How can you find the best of the best in sales?
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| Many people believe great sales-people are born, not made but I disagree because sales is a process that can be taught to anyone and it is simply how the process is applied that separates good from great. Success in sales comes from skill development, attitude, confidence and behaviour.
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How to avoid being a pest in your sales follow up
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| Did you know that one of the biggest gripes against salespeople by decision makers is the lack of follow up?
Many people resist following up because they find it uncomfortable and dont want to seem pushy or annoying and many people dont follow up because they simply forget. This lack of follow-up presents a great opportunity for those who are organized and take the time to do it. |
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Overcoming Sales Objections
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| Objections are simply reasons or concerns that a prospective client has as to why they won't make a decision when you want them to. You will hear statements such as:
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Quick Prospecting Tools
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| Do you get frustrated constantly sourcing new sales and contact information? |
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Sales Tips to give your sales a boost in 2010
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| customers, the same results can be achieved.
Besides, you can find new customers from referrals within your existing client base.
Here is a couple of quick tips to help you build your revenue in 2010. |
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Quick Tips to Presenting Proposals
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| These quick tips will help to reduce some of the 'discomfort' that can be associated when presenting your pricing options |
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SALES TIPS AND TRICKS
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| Want to increase sales but dont have the sales skills or worried you will come across as an aggressive, pushy sales person? The key to developing confidence in sales is by being flexible and open-minded about trying something new! |
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Sales Tips for Selling in a challenging economy
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| Its difficult to ignore the news of the financial crisis that is occurring around the world and the fear and uncertainty that it is creating. Here in Australia many companies have been tightening their budgets and reducing their spending over recent months and it looks like its going to continue. So what does this mean for those of us running businesses or working in sales? |
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Sales Tips for the First Appointment
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| Its all about planning and preparation
Its amazing how many sales people and business owners I talk to who under-estimate the value and importance of planning and preparing for a first appointment.
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How to Create a Winning Content Strategy
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| How many times have you found yourself wishing you could find the perfect salesperson? You know the kind the salesperson who is at the office every day clearly communicating your message and hitting the mark every time. When the conversation begins with the prospect they immediately know this salesperson understands them completely and within just a few minutes they feel completely confident that your companys product offering is just right for them. Not only that, this salesperson can meet with far more clients than you ever dreamed was humanly possible. Well, I am here to tell you this sales person is available RIGHT NOW, and is willing to work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! |
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Cold Calling Best Practices
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| Cold calling is the process of approaching prospective clients, typically via telephone, who have not agreed to such an interaction. The word cold is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting the call or has not specifically asked to be contacted by the sales person. |
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Using Your Talents
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| Read and learn from this depressed, overweight housewife who blossomed into a professional speaker and writer. At barely five feet tall, Pam Lontos weighed over a hundred fifty pounds, was spending most of her day in bed, and was under the care of a psychiatrist who told her that she would always need counseling.
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Moving Up In Life
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| It has been accurately stated that when you hire somebody smarter than yourself, you prove you are smarter than they are. We can apply that to all areas of ability. The sales manager should strive diligently to hire sales people who are better at selling than he or she is. That way they can share information and they will both be even more effective. Also, by continuing to learn from each sales person, the manager will stay one step ahead of all of them. Exactly the same thing applies in coaching. A good head coach seeks assistant coaches who know more about their specialty than he does and he learns from them. Ditto for managers in manufacturing, engineering, architecture, etc. |
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Christopher Columbus Was a Salesman
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| Many people do not realize the important role that sales people have played in America. America was discovered by a salesman. Christopher Columbus was looking for India and missed it by about 10,000 miles. Fortunately, he was a better salesman than he was a navigator! |
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Im not a sales person but I have to sell. What do I do?
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| After thousands of hours of study and many years honing technical skills to be a competent professional in your chosen field, it can come as a rude shock that you now need to sell your services and capabilities as well. In todays busy market, a competent selling capability isnt a nice-to-have it is an essential business and life skill.
Interestingly, the topic of selling and growing a business often doesnt feature in those university lectures does it? In fact, selling is in many cases covered over and, if spoken about at all, was only mentioned as an unsavoury aspect employed by the desperate. We dont have to sell because we are are the famous last words of many failed professional or small business owners... |
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Walk a mile in my shoes
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| Walk a mile in my shoes is a song written by Joe South and made famous by Elvis Presley. The song is very much about challenging closed mindedness, respecting and honouring differences, and learning how to get along with each other. However, I propose that it also has a lot to say to sales and marketing people. For instance, the first verse sets it up well:
If I could be you and you could be me for just one hour
If we could find a way to get inside each others mind
If you could see you through my eyes instead of your ego
I believe youd be surprised to see that youd been blind
Many a customers ire has been roused when a sales person shows up and fails to find out what a customers priorities are. Instead, launching into a self absorbed diatribe of product information and self aggrandisement. |
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How do you create future sales superstars?
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| How many of us entered our sales careers with our eyes wide open? Fully aware of what it takes to be an effective sales person ably resourced with the tools, processes, plans and support essential to our success. Knowing full well what you were getting yourself into.
For most, if not all of us, our initiation into sales was nothing like this, and was cushioned with little or none of these luxuries. Does the analogy sink or swim resonate with anyone?
All of this makes the story I am about to share quite unique and refreshing. Recently, some rather clever and farsighted managers gave some very fortunate young people the opportunity to get a large glimpse into the world of selling. |
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Controlling Your Inner Critic
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| Ive hit a wall, Sally said to me. I just cant move forward. If you are a sales person, business owner or job seeker, chances are you have had days when no one wants what you are offering. Some people are able to continue making their pitch enthusiastically and others find it really difficult to continue.
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Why is Sales Management so Tough
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| This question has challenged every business and leader since even before the days of "The Death of a Salesman" a great book by Arthur Miller. Managing a sales force is quite different from selling to a customer. It requires different skill sets. And yet a common mistake we make when filling the Sales Managers position is that we take our top sales person and promote them to Sales Manager. That decision fails more often then it succeeds.
The reason is simple --- "A Sales Managers primary responsibility is not to focus on selling". The Sales Managers primary responsibility is to focus on the promotion of sales. It's about leadership.
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Where is the Red Cape --- Maximizing Counter Sales
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| As a counter sales person, when a customer walks through the door, you are generally the person they are looking for. The customer wants to place an order and expects you-the counter sales person-to take care of them. Although this encounter is usually brief, let's examine what the customer's overall expectations may be. What do customers expect of counter sales professionals? Since the customer's perceived value of you as a supplier drive their expectations, knowing the answer to this question is important to meeting expectations and building relationship equity.
Today's customers expect more than free coffee and popcorn at the counter. They expect a more than satisfactory experience with the people that represent the company they are doing business with. |
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Five reasons to Mind Your Emotions
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| Courage doesnt always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says Ill try again tomorrow.
This quote more often than not reflects my life as an entrepreneur, business woman, sales person, mother, partner and friend. On those days and nights when I feel overwhelmed and sometimes exhausted by all my responsibilities and commitments that little voice reminding me to try again tomorrow keeps me focused on why I am doing what I am doing it helps me to continue to cultivate my resilience, to continue to put one foot in front of the other, to make decisions and to keep on moving. If I am ever in doubt, that little voice reminds me of all the other challenges I have mastered and that my track record speaks for itself. |
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Can sales and medicine mix?
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| As you know, I am an advocate for the philosophy that everybody lives by selling something and that people buy from people they trust. At its best, selling is about the principle of exchange:- the exchange of value where both parties benefit from open and transparent communication and know what they are engaging in.
So can selling be seen as a legitimate role in the various practices of medicine? I.e. GPs, dentists, optometrists, physiotherapists, surgeons, etc.
If we take it that good selling is where people are fully informed of the facts surrounding their situation, are given legitimate options to choose from, and are in a position to make their own decisions without fear of deception, bullying or intimidation then, yes, selling can form a part of the practice of medicine. |
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Product Training is Not Enough!
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| Many small business owners invest time and energy to ensure that their sales people are well versed in fully understanding the products the sell. Some even take the time to train their teams on how to differentiate their offerings to gain a competitive advantage. This is all good. |
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Fishing and Selling
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| What do fishing and selling have in common? Anyone.... |
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A Car Sales Story with a difference
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| Is there such as thing as a good car sales story?
My husband and I recently bought two new cars over the Christmas break. We initially went in to buy one car. It wasnt a Christmas splurge if thats what youre thinking nor was anything it like the recent press on luxury cars and their owners. We wanted to go smaller and greener for all sorts of reasons I am sure you can image and one of our cars was at the end of its lease. Having done our research, the make of our last four cars wasnt doing enough, in our opinion, to be greener so we decided to look elsewhere and try something different instead. |
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Thinking of promoting your best sales performer to sales manager? Think again!
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| Many businesses have made the mistake of promoting their best performing sales person into the role of sales manager. Their logic well they are great at selling, theyll be great at sales management. Sadly most of these situations end in disaster.
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The relationship of revenue growth to your job?
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| Every sales person knows the relationship of prospecting to sales is critical. Without prospecting you are not likely to get a sale. We all know the relationship of sales to revenue growth is high. But how many people in your company know the relationship of revenue growth to their specific job?
The sales people do. Owners do. They think about it every day. |
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A view for the other side
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| Following for last weeks piece on Procurement, I promised I would delve further into the view from the other side of the table and how, we, as sales people, view procurement and some of the practices which help or hinder sales and partnership effectiveness. And what our common enemy is.
So lets take a look at the other side of the table.
Many a seasoned sales person can tell you story after story about the Gunna Gunna customers:Gunna do this, gunna do that be it never goes anywhere. |
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Are you really listening?
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| Ever misinterpreted or missed hearing important information which meant that you missed a vital opportunity? Youre not alone. Listening has always been, and still, one of lifes most vital skills. With so much competing for our time and attention I have found the effectiveness of mine and others listening skills are being increasingly challenged.
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Do Not Call
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| Last week Smartcompany ran a story saying that the Federal Government may include business numbers in the Do Not Call register. What are they talking about?
Prospecting for new business via the telephone (referred to as unsolicited phone calls) is still a legitimate and critical business activity necessary for anyone in sales and in business, especially in business to business sales where consumer marketing and advertising strategies do not work effectively. It is a vital activity any business or sales person worth their salt should be doing on a regular basis. Therefore I do not believe that the government should include business numbers in the DO NOT CALL register. |
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You dont have to make Negotiation a part of every sale
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| I often get requests by sales mangers for negotiation skills training for their sales people when in fact upon further investigation their people usually need consultative selling skills training first. You cannot negotiate effectively if you cannot sell effectively first. Both are processes which need to be learned and applied in the correct order. However over 90% of sales people follow no logical process when selling or negotiating leaving their sales at risk.
So to clear up the confusion between selling and negotiation I thought it might help to examine when you sell and when you negotiate. |
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How to sell new business meetings - the greatest secret revealed
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| Do you want to know the greatest secret of selling new business meetings for sales prospecting. Its really easy to do and can double or triple your effectiveness overnight. Find out what it is here.... |
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136 Effective Presentation Tips by Tony Jeary and David Cottrell
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| In these tough economic times we should all be on the lookout for ways to make ourselves stand out in business - in a good way. Being able to step up on the job and to create and do an effective presentation is a great way to make ourselves stand out. Are you an entrepreneur who does presentations for your business? Are you a sales person who does presentations for clients? Are you a speaker who speaks in front of crowds on a regular basis and you want to stay at the top of your game? Are you in a business and you want to advance and impress your boss? All of these people can use the information in this book. |
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What Are You (Really) Selling?
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| It is every sales person's job to distinguish his or her products and services from those offered by the competition. And in a business world crowded with competitive offerings, an attempt to accomplish this by selling features and price most often fails.
BMW makes cars, but they talk about (sell) performance and prestige! Volvo sells safety. What are you selling?
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Flexi-budget - Planning for uncertain times
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| During these uncertain times, companies need to maintain the discipline of good planning and budgeting, but how can you plan and budget when the goalposts keep moving? Orchard Growth Partners is rolling out a flexible planning and budgeting methodology which allows companies to prepare flexible and layered budgets. |
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What are the benefits of a CRM system in your business? Part 1
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| The concept of CRM has been around for a long time. The original form of CRM was a manual card system kept by a sales person that usually sat on the sales person's desk or alongside them in the car. These client cards sets were very valuable to the sales person as this is where they kept important customer information such customer contact details, key contacts in the company, a running commentary on their activities, personal and product preferences, buying patterns, business connections and so forth. Each card was a dossier on each client. To successful, well managed sales people, their client cards were gold. |
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Sales Success: Do You Have the Top Qualities of the Most Successful Sales Professionals?
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| Relating to your prospects in the right way will make all the difference in your sales results. In this article we'll look at eight core competencies of the top 1% of all sales professionals so you can make sure you're developing these skills as well.
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7 Questions You Must Ask Before Buying Sales Training
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| Before you whip out your wallet or sign on the dotted line there are seven questions you should ask to make certain you are making the best decision for you. After all, you wouldnt be investing in sales training unless you expected to get real value. So... |
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C-Level Relationship Selling: Business Development Is All About More Sales
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| Any successful person learns process and probability - business person, athlete, gambler, sales person, etc. This article will show you how they can help develop more business.
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Create Large Accounts by Establishing C-Level Relationships
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| Learn how to move from vendor to preferred supplier in a heart beat. Heres the path to C-level executive suites. Once relationships are established there, sales come easily and continuously. |
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C- Level Selling -- Subtleties Make Big Differences in C-Level Selling
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| Just a few words rephrased, or a few actions rearranged can make huge differences when it comes to winning over C-level executives and closing sales. However, without a sales coach youll never pick-up what needs to change with your approach and/or delivery. |
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The real $ value of role playing
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| Tell almost any sales person they are going to participate in role plays as part of their sales training and you will hear a collective groan. In short most sales people hate role playing. It is often seen as a form of potential embarrassment, or something stilted and false. Many people feel self conscious and don’t want to look ‘bad’ in front of their peers. It doesn’t help either that over 90% of all sales people follow no logical processes when selling. |
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The Yin Yang of Selling
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| In the 20th century the emphasis on B2B selling had a distinct aggressive ring to it. So much so, that you could walk down the halls of many businesses and think that you were involved in big game hunting. Many of these teams saw selling as an extreme sport, or more precisely, Big Game Fishing or Hunting.
* Customers were ‘Targets’.
* Getting a sale was referred to as ‘the Kill’.
* Customers were regarded as objects to be possessed or trophies to be placed in their cabinet. |
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Sales Coaching 1 SIMPLE Way to Get More Business
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| How many times have you spoke with a sales person and never really got a grasp of what they were selling? How many times have you visited a website and couldnt figure out what it was about? How could these businesses be screwing up like that? |
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Sales Coaching – How to Find Clients
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What do you do when you are just starting a business and need your first client? What if your existing clients have closed their purse strings? What if you just want to grow your business and the only way to do that is to get more buyers? |
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Short and Simple Copyrighting Tips
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| Since copywriting is another form of sales, learn how to sell. Whenever you have the chance, read books on selling. This will make you see life and the way you approach you future customer or you do you marketing completely differently. You will also find below 5 short and simple copywriting tips which will allow you to achieve a sales person or good internet marketer state of mind. |
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Increase Small Business Sales Stop Asking for Referrals
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| Why would I tell you to stop asking for referrals when every sales trainer, sales manager, or sales mentor youve ever met tells you to ask for referrals? Oddly enough many commonly held beliefs are based on myths rather than facts... |
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Closing the Sale: Assume the Close, But Never the Reason
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| There are certainly many techniques and approaches involved in completing a sale, but closing is not a stand-alone activity. Even worse, a seller who attempts to "close the sale" too aggressively without properly executing the entire selling process can do more harm than good. This mistake is often due to one dangerous assumption...
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Competing motivations creating confusion
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| How to incentivise and reward sales people has long been a contentious topic. Too many times I have seen businesses set up incentive programs that reward the wrong behaviours which can affect team morale, client relationships, sales, staff retention, and so on.
For instance, I recently met the managing director of a medium sized software business who asked me why would his sales people keep selling one version of their product when they had been instructed to also sell in a newer more comprehensive version of the product. |
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How we can learn Master Sales lessons
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| Like many people in Australia, my family and employees have been captivated by MasterChef Australia.
What I love about MasterChef is that it can be seen as a metaphor for expressing our talents and being the best we can be. Given my interest in everything to do with sales, personal mastery and performance, I particularly love the parallel I have been able to draw about what it takes to be an elite master chef and an elite sales person and elite sales leader by the observation I have made in MasterChef. |
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Testing times when recruiting good salespeople
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| When I consider how I spend my time professionally, I find it is often devoted to demystifying two things:
1. What is good' selling?
2. The proper use of psychometric assessments, especially in sales recruitment
Having written on the former on many occasions, I would like to dedicate this space to the latter - the proper use of psychometric assessments in sales recruitment. |
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Who's delivering your sales training?
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| You cannot fake real sales experience and sales wisdom. It is one of the professions that is the hardest to teach and train because without real life sales experience you are at risk of being seen as inauthentic.
To help you make the best choice when it comes to selecting the right sales trainer let's consider the following: |
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Help my sales people cant close sales
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| The biggest cause for people not being able to close sales it not the close itself. It often starts at the beginning of the sales call.
Sales people need to be able to properly understand client's needs and discuss possible solutions that meet those needs with the relevant products and services before any close can take place. Once this has happened they can close the sale but not before. If a sales person cannot meet a client's needs with their products and services then it is a no sale'. |
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Sales Management Training: 8 Competencies of Top Sales Professionals
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| Do you know what separates the top 1% of all sales professionals from everybody else? It's a set of 16 core competencies discovered through years of research, which lead to their extreme level of success. This article will help you understand 8 of these skills so that you can enjoy your own sales success. The next article in this series will discuss the other 8.
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Sales Training - Make sure you choose one that understands the stages of learning
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| Its important to choose a sales training company that understands how people learn and the best way to develop them at every level. If you are considering sales training then you have to read this article to find out more... |
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How can I find an independant sales rep?
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| In my opinion, a business owner should only engage a salesperson, either independent or otherwise, when there is a proven sales process and structure in place. This will enable a new person to integrate quickly and successfully to develop their own unique selling style and be guided by the support of an established sales model. |
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Gaining Market Leverage
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| Whether you have an established business or are developing a home based business in your spare time the ability to market and sell your product or service is the key to profitability and growth. |
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Identifying Needs in Sales
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| Whether your inbound or outbound sales, you have to ask questions in order to procure a need for your product or service. We follow a different process based on the type of sales environment Each is discussed in great detail our Sales Training program. |
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The Shadow Syndrome
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| Is a sales manager an essential component of a successful sales / marketing strategy? |
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My Pipeline is full, but the deals aren't closing!
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| Salespeople that spend large chunks of valuable time and energy attending multiple pre-sales meetings, conducting 'needless' needs analysis and writing proposals at the customer's request, are more often than not left scratching their heads in a state of ambiguity and confusion. |
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How Beliefs Can Sabotage the Sale
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| Many times as sales people, our personal beliefs can get in the way of our success regardless of what we are selling and at what price.....read on.. |
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What Makes a Great Sales Professional?
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| Being great in sales is not about having the "gift of gab" or being aggressive. There are three critical attributes for sales success today. Read on for more..... |
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Leadership Accountability
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| When a person is hired or promoted to a management position, where people are required to report directly to them, inherent in that action is accountability for those employee's performance and productivity. This often comes as a surprise or shock to a manager when they receive their first performance review and it is less than satisfactory. A sales person is solely responsible for himself or herself and the work they perform. Once promoted to management this accountability for what others may or may not accomplish is new territory for them.
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Are your sales people living in false hope?
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| Salespeople that spend large chunks of valuable time and energy attending multiple pre-sales meetings, conducting 'needless' needs analysis's and writing proposals at the customer's request, are more often than not left scratching their heads in a state of ambiguity and confusion.
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The Add On Professional
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| Sales pros work hard to establish a close personal relationship with their clients. When the sales person and their company perform as the product or service was promised, a bond is created and mutual trust is established. This trust assists the representative in maintaining the business and obtaining contract renewals. Selling is not a one-time activity. New sales are the lifeblood of every successful thriving business.
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What Is Your Sales Teams A. Q.?
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| It has been known for some time that if you want to measure an individuals intelligence, you administer an Intelligence Quotient test. This has been an accepted method of measuring ones intelligence for many years. In sales management, intelligence is important, but this does not get you closer to measuring or predicting your sales teams effectiveness or the ability to predict with any certainty the projections of future sales. How do measure this? With an A. Q. test. |
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C-Level Selling Tip 3: Sales Rejection, What You Didnt Learn in College
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| Sales people have 3 role, marketing, selling and relationship development. Most only market because they really dont know the difference. Then they get rejected. Learn all the skills from this C-Level Selling Tip 3 - Sales Rejection. |
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Attitude, Belief, and Confidence...the ABC's of Sales
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| I once believed that in sales, if I could just learn that one killer closing statement, that one closing technique that worked every time, all my troubles would be over. Unfortunately, that statement and that technique do not exist. Dont get me wrong; there are proper techniques that are extremely helpful in the sales process. Proper sales skills cannot be discounted. However, the three areas that will outshine rusty or nonexistent skills are the ABCs of sales; and the lesson I quickly learned was that there is a balancing act. |
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Top 7 Reasons Your Sales People Cant Sell
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| As the business owner or entrepreneur you may get pretty frustrated because it seems like your sales people cant sell. Naturally you want to blame them for their inadequacies. |
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Whos in charge of your sales recruitment?
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| 1. How much is a good sales person worth to you?
2. How much is a good hiring manager worth to you?
Speaking about recruitment in these current economic times may seem foolish, however in the area of selling, this is where you could make great strides by picking up highly effective sales people who have found themselves on the job market or are looking for a better business to work in. I know of a few highly competent sales people and sales managers who have been let go along with other staff as part of large staff reduction strategies.
In my opinion, the last people I would let go in this market would be highly competent and high producing sales people.
Which leads me to the contentious issue about who makes the decisions to hire and fire sales people. In particular, who hires sales people. |
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Seeing the world from your clients perspective can make for easier sales
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| Each week we meet and speak with a variety of prospective and/or existing clients who have problems they need solving in our area of expertise. It is more than likely we will deal with a mix of clients: some with little or no understanding about what we really do and those with previous experience, knowledge and opinions in our area of expertise. And then there are those clients who are in between. Whatever their level of sophistication, how well we understand and identify our clients' key priorities and problems, and what they value about working with a credible business partner is crucial to developing, attracting and retaining healthy client relationships and growing sales.
However, most businesses tend to view the world from their own perspective and not from their clients'. This means: |
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Common Sales Mistakes Part 1
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| As markets tighten I thought we could reflect on some lessons learnt in the past by highly experienced, successful sales people. The following lessons are from some of the participants of my Sell like a woman' research project and make for interesting reading in what not to do' in sales. Here is the 1st part of a 3 part series on common sales mistakes. |
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Persistence and the Honourable Retreat
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| Did you know:
Over 50% of sales people give up at 1st contact if they get a NO' from the prospect never to go back to that prospect again.
At the 5th contact 7% of sales people are left to speak with the prospect to see if they can do business together.
At the 8th contact there is only one sales person left to work with the prospect. Hopefully it is you.
Many sales people, especially those new to sales, often take it personally when a prospect says NO'. Many fail to persist and often fail to favourably position themselves to leave the door open' for future contact thus limiting their sales opportunities even further. |
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Great hires / bad hires: how to tell the difference BEFORE you make the offer
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| You hire someone. They don't work out. They leave. What is it that you remember and say about them in the past tense? It's rarely the fact that they didn't know how to work the numbers, or that they couldn't put the pieces of a widget together. No, it's almost always their soft skills that generate conversation-their personality, character and values.
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Dont Forget to Answer this Question When Selling
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| Sometimes you get so wrapped up in what you are selling and the business of trying to sell you overlook some of the most basic things required to sell. One of the basic things you must do when selling is answer this question for your potential buyers. |
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Are good sales people born or made?
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| This age old question is being pondered by many business owners and managers as they strive to increase their turnover and profitability. |
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Questions That Sell
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| We are working on a new campaign for a client and spent a few hours today looking at competitive web sites, ads and brochures.
After about three hours we looked at each other and said, Can you remember anything any of these companies said that stands out? Ken said, I bet if I took all these brochures, and removed the company name and logo, even our client couldnt tell them apart!
Every single firm started their pitch with a description of their products and services, and lots of detail on how great they are. Then they added thrilling descriptions of their plants (usually with a picture of the parking lot) and a price list.
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Positioning Power
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| In the game of chess, the queen is the most powerful piece in the game. She can move any number of squares horizontally, vertically, or diagonally as long as her path is unobstructed. However, at the beginning of the game, the influence of the queen is restricted because of the configuration of the pieces. Although the same rules govern the play of the queen, because of where she is positioned at the beginning of the game she is unable to move and cannot attack. Her only role is to provide limited defensive to the surrounding pieces.... |
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Why I Ask
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| A Marketing Mistake to Stop Making |
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Handling Rejection - Is Rejection an Illusion
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| Tips on destroying rejection. The successful have learn to manage "rejection" now you can too. |
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Sales Staff Motivation
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| An article on how important recognition and praise is to staff motivation. |
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The Optimistic Sales Professional
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| Sales is a demanding profession. Top performers know that to sustain a high level of performance, they need to keep fit and well - both physically and psychologically. An increasing body of research is showing that keeping an optimistic outlook, and having the physical energy to meet the demands of working in sales are critical to a sales person's effectiveness, success and overall well-being. Something many of us know intuitively, however it good to have it validated.
Managing and overcoming setbacks is key to succeeding in anything. In sales we are tested everyday. Without a sense of optimism it would make getting up to face each day that much harder.
So what is Optimism? |
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Getting past the Gate Keeper
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| This time of the year many people are trying to get back into the swing of things after their Christmas break. It's about this time that many sales people begin their prospecting efforts in earnest and many people are back from leave. It is as good a time as any to prospect.
So as it's the New Year, I thought we could take a fresh look at some old issues.
One of the most common complaints I hear from sales people time and time again is How do I get around the gate keeper?' |
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Dont tell me its out of your control
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| It's out of my control.' I can't do anything about it.' I'm just the sales person.'
Sales people who sell in equipment and service contracts take note. This story is about you and your responsibility to the customer for the life of the sale not just the initial sale of the machine and the signing of the contract.
The quotes above are what I heard this week from a sales person from a well-known equipment manufacture who sold us a complete equipment and service package 18 months ago. It certainly wasn't what I wanted to hear. Without going into too much detail we have had the printer from hell'. |
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Broken Promises & Bagging the Competition
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| Nothing irks customers more than sales people overstating their capabilities and making claims and promises they cannot keep or live up to. It's the fastest way to break trust and leave customers doubting you and your business. Making grand claims with little or no substance is foolish at best. In today's networked world, many people have access to information and can check pretty quickly whether what you claim is true or not.
So can you do what you claim you do? |
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Sales Management for C-Level Selling - 6 Steps to Make Your Sales People Better
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| Are your sales people as good as you think they should be? If not, here is an easy, no-costs process to make them better. |
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C-Level Selling - The Most Powerful, Yet Least Used Sales Questions
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| Learn how to get commitment from C-Level executive and how to handle resistance, ambivalence and Nos. |
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How to Choose the Best Fulfillment House (For Your Project)
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| You have a marketing program to execute. Maybe you're running a sweepstakes promotion, warranty registration, literature fulfillment, or you might even be selling products online. In order to bring this program in on time and within budget, you'll need access to some highly sophisticated software and equipment, plenty of warehouse and production space, plus a few additional helping hands to get the project out the door. And oh yeah, you only need these resources for the length of the program. But you need them now! So how do you maximize results while minimizing costs (not to mention the impact on internal resources)? You use third-party fulfillment (3PF), of course.
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String Me Along Why Dont You
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| How do you avoid being strung along by customer and prospects? Why does this happen, how can you position yourself to minimize this aggrivation and what questions could you or should you be asking? |
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Solution Sales - What is it?
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| An article discussing what is Solution Sales. |
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The Transition from Sales Person to Sales Manager
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| An article taking about the transition from Sales Person to Sales Manager |
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10 Summer or Anytime Quick Sales Coaching Tips
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| With spring just passing and summer now here, the cold winter months are now a distant memory for some and there is new energy. These 10 summer sales coaching tips may help you secure your goal to increase sales.
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What do clients want?
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| Clients don't expect to be coerced, bullied, tricked or intimidated into buying. They don't expect to be treated like an idiot by sales people who just talk at them and flash brochures or product sheets. Relationships do not work effectively if they are forced! |
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Constipated by information
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| I confess, like most sales people I do not like - no I hate - paperwork and administration, because in my experience most of it is unnecessary. |
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Being authentic in sales
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| The 20th century approach of one-upmanship, although still encouraged by many traditional sales managers, seems to be slowly retreating into the shadows of the past as crude and old-fashioned. Polar opposite to the latter, but just as unproductive.. |
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Ashamed of being in sales
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| Over the years I have met many sales people who are really good at selling, have all the ingredients, write great sales results and are highly valued by their companies, yet they never feel satisfied in their sales career. The afflicted sales person just feels a sense of unease and guilt about being in sales, a disquiet that never seems to get resolved. |
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Influencing vs Negotiating
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| It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our "sales force fitness" profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story. |
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Getting Sales Recruitment Right
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| Your small business is growing and diversifying. You've experimented with bringing in an inexperienced sales person (who did not work out). You realise you need a more experienced direct sales person, but you don't know where to go or what to look for. |
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Selling and managing are not the same
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| I wrote recently about sales burnout and the challenges many SME business owners have of being all things to all people including, usually, the main sales person and sales manager. Like many people, I have known that selling and managing are not the same thing. They are two very distinct jobs with different demands and expectations. |
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Burnt-out, tired, had enough?
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| Sales is not for the faint hearted, nor is running your own business. For those of us who run our own businesses and/or have careers in sales or sales management, we find we are often faced with stressful situations. How do we manage ourselves in times of stress? |
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Professional Visitor or Professional Sales Person?
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| I am seeing a lot of time wasted by sales staff aimlessly chatting with clients.
How often are you left with the feeling that your sales people are seeing clients, but beyond the "hello" and general chat, nothing of substance is happening?
I call it the phenomenon of "professional visitation". |
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Who is your 'brochure' written for?
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| We are sick of apologising for our businesses not being able to live up to false expecations and promises too frequently splashed about with gay abandon in the marketing materials, annual report, PR hype et al that we are required to use. |
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You cant improve salespeople without improving sales management first
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| I am constantly appalled at the lack of effective sales management in companies these days. Not a week goes by in which I don't see a company make the mistake of focusing exclusively on salespeople in trying to improve sales performance.
Experience has shown that sales managers are even more critical than sales people for creating durable performance change |
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Are your self-promotion tactics ethical or not?
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| Today it's not uncommon for some people to stretch the truth in order to get a job, get a sale, get ahead or just get noticed, but this behaviour raises some important issues about the good, the bad and the ugly of self-promotion... Proactive self promotion is essential in sales today because good work does not speak for itself anymore - You DO. So are your self-promotion tactics ethical or not? |
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Why you cant have a one-type-of-sales-person-does-it-all approach
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| There is a large body of research that shows there are many types of sales people for different types of clients, products, and markets. Just because a sales person may be excellent in one market may not mean they are well suited for another. In today's world we are well equipped to define the type of sales role our business needs and define the salesperson's selling style to match that role. So let move away from limiting sales stereotypes and open ourselves to diversity. |
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Are you creating competing motivations in your sales force?
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| I recently met the managing director of a medium-sized software business, who asked me why would his sales people keep selling one version of their product when they had been instructed to also sell in a newer, more comprehensive version of the product.
It turned out that his sales people earned more commission by selling in the older version than the newer version of his product. And the sales people made the bulk of their income from their commissions rather than from their salaries.
There you have it. What makes perfect sense to the sales person does not always work for the organisation or the customer. |
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Sales Success Begins with Defining What You Value
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| What does sales success mean to you? How does your success relate to what you value? |
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5 Tips to Improve Your Follow-Up Sales Skills While Building Customer Loyalty
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| Are your following sales skills building customer loyalty or inadvertently turning off customers and reducing sales? These 5 tips may help you increase sales, improve customer relationships and demonstrate why you are the Red Jacket in the Sea of Gray Suits. |
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The Power of Empathy
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| Empathy-Selling is a compassionate understanding of the thoughts and feelings of your prospects and customers. |
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What to do with a "cold" lead
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| We have a client who has so many requests for quotes on his desk he is way behind on filling them.
At first this seems like a problem we would all like to have. So many leads we can’t get to all of them! But there is a down side to this story. Our client has no way of sorting the leads into those that are “hot” and need immediate attention; and those that are “cold”. Maybe these cold leads are from qualified people, but who knows when they are going to close.
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The curse of the BDM
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| The traditional Business Development Manager (BDM) role inherent in many sales models often turns out as a 'Bad Decision by Management'. |
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How to be an elite Sales-Athlete
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| I call anyone serious about selling a 'sales athlete'. If you look at elite athletes, many if not all, seldom step outside the realms of what they do best. It's very hard to achieve an elite level in life, sport or selling - multi-tasking. In particular if multi tasking requires a completely different or contradictory set of skills. |
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Should incentives for my salespeople be aimed at quick cash in the door or long-term growth?
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| In the current economic climate, there is little difference between short term and long term.
No one can confidently predict what's going to happen next month - let alone next year.
Front-end sales incentives designed to stimulate action are a good idea. Sales people should always be rewarded for success, but (and it's a big BUT) not at the expense and integrity of your company's value proposition and reputation.
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The Action Habit And How It Helped My Internet Business
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| This article is about how you can develop healthy habits, such as the action habit.
Many people in life do not take action because they say it does not feel right. Whilst studying clinical hypnosis I have developed many ways to overcome these traits that so many people have.These skills have helped me to help many other people in focusing and reaching their goals. |
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A Salesperson Does NOT need to Prospect to be successful!
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| If youre a salesperson youre probably relieved that
you dont have to prospect anymore because its a task that is laborious and youre hoping theres a
better way to find customers. If youre an owner, sales manager or Vice President of Sales youre
probably very curious about new ways of finding customers because youre always trying to find ways
to motivate your sales team so they keep prospecting. Here's the magic bullet... |
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Think Link
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| How to Stop Order-Taking & Satisfy Customers by Selling What They Need |
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So What
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| Learn how to make sure your customers aren't thinking "So what" during your sales presentations. |
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Are Sales Cycles A Thing of the Past?
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| Sales cycles, sales steps, sales effectivenss, CRM, sales performance. Stop thinking sales cycle and start thinking customer buying process. |
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Why Consultative Selling is the only way to Sell
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| When there's less money around; buyers are even more careful with their money. They do not want to be Sold but prefer the option of buying. But how do you achieve this? By using the Consultative Selling Model. |
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Prospecting Improves Morale & Is The Key to Increasing Sales - Find Out the Success Formula
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| [Business:Sales] Prospecting needs to be part of the entire sales process not just when a sales persons calendar is filled to the brim with appointments. The reason is when the pipeline of appointments dry up the sales person will feel low and morale will suffer for them and those around them. When morale is low theirs one place to look for the culprit and that is the prospecting pipeline. This will be one of the major clues that will determine why morale is low or high. Find out what the SUCCESS FORMULA IS TO INCREASED SALES & INCREASED MORALE... |
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What is 'flexible working' doing to our workforce?
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| The MD muses over the changes for the next few years in our workforce. |
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Holding Effective One on One Sales Coaching Sessions
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| Coaching sessions are the most important duty of a sales manager. How you go about delivering a coaching session will define your leadership. Get your mind right! Are you there to help, or are you there to catch someone doing something wrong? Remember "Cool Hand Luke"?
Boss: Sorry, Luke. I'm just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.
Luke: Nah - calling it your job don't make it right, Boss.
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How great leaders use values to drive performance
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| Great leaders instinctively know the importance of values. Values create the organizational culture. When articulated and implemented consistently, values reduce the need for close supervision, engender trust and co-operation with suppliers and customers, and raise performance. Great leaders recognize this. That is why they commit substantial personal time to articulation and implementation of values. They are also good at mastering paradoxes of values. |
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Interview Questions To Find The Peak Performing Sales Rep.
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| Use an interviewing process to narrow the field of candidates from 100 down to 4, but ask this one question to identify the candidate that will most likely become one of your peak performing sales people. |
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Sell Don't Tell
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| Whether we like it or not, selling and persuasion is going on all the time.
This articles explains how to utilise these skills if you are to be a successful Motivational Manager. |
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The Top 5 reasons that sales people quit.
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| Do what you must to attract & retain good sales people |
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Trained Seals
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| No matter what price you quote, many customers will automatically say its too high, maybe way too high. Like the seal, that response is so deeply drilled into them that just about every rep they meet gets the same reaction. How do you get beyond the knee-jerk reaction and into a reasonable conversation about their situation, needs, budget, and time frames? |
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Sales Coach: High Level of Empathy In Selling Important?
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| Empathy is defined by Wikipedia as: the capacity to recognize or understand anothers state of mind or emotion. It is often characterized as the ability to put oneself into anothers shoes or in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself. Empathy does not necessarily imply compassion, or empathic concern because this capacity can be present in context of compassionate or cruel behavior.
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EMPATHY SELLING
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| Being versatile in sales is essentially having the capacity and skill as a sales person to connect with more people. By being versatile you understand how your customers feel and you also know how they prefer to be communicated with, so you adapt your sales approach and communication style to them. You dont contrive to be someone or something youre not. On the contrary, you give them more of you, based on what you hear, see, feel and understand about them. This is a big part of getting Naked as it demonstrates you are genuinely interested in getting to know them, the real them. The Naked them. |
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Empower your Sales people with the right Sales Coaching Process!
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| Nearly all elite athletes have a coach. Rarely do you see an individual or team scaling the dizzy heights of success without a well thought-out coaching structure, appropriate motivators, and when needed; soft or firm guidance in the right direction. |
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Why hire a Sales Coach when I already have a Sales Manager?
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| Most companies already have a sales manager or person in charge of sales in some capacity, so why hire a sales coach? Many sales mangers are not trained in the subtleties of effective sales coaching nor have they developed the necessary skills and tools to be effective sales leaders. The most common way to hire a sales manager is to simply promote your best sales person. This logic suggests this person is the most qualified to lead the sales team based on their past sales achievements. This type of promotion by necessity is common, but not commonly successful. In the process you may even lose your top sales performer when their leadership abilities fail to match their sales ability. |
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Death of the Sales Person
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| It's a life or death battle in the sales field today. Many will die, but those that live will enter a new sales field, one that promises greater rewards. |
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Spending Money On Marketing is a Waste of Time
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| You must attract your potential customer's interest in less than seven seconds. If you don't, you will have wasted every Euro spent. Yes, that is right, just 7 seconds for the headline and subtext, to hook your potential client.
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Marketing: Dont they know its good for them?
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| Sometimes even convincing your nearest and dearest, to do something, you know will benefit them, can seem impossible. Now try doing that to strangers! That is what marketing seems like to most business owners. So do you do it? How do you create your message? By questioning existing customers who are similar to the ones you are going to market to. |
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Mars and Venus Part V. Buyers and Sellers Want to Close the Sale for Different Reasons.
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| Do you remember that last significant sale you made? Do you remember the buzz you felt from the exhilaration of closing? So what did your buyer feel at that stage? Do you know precisely why they felt the way they did? If you can not tell me for certainty, the real reason they finally made the decision to purchase, then maybe this article could help you close significantly more sales. |
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Should you outsource sales management the key considerations
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| No matter how great your product or service is, if you don't have people using and buying what you produce, you go out of business. So how do you set up an efficient sales and marketing machine, on a limited budget? Do you have experience in sales management? Would you know how to maximize the potential of a good sales person? |
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Align with your buyers objectives to close sales quickly
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| What is the most important reason that sales fail to close on time or even close at all? When you get a mismatch by sellers selling forward and buyers buying backwards! Sounds like double Dutch? Well this article discusses how to position your proposition in line with the prospect to make them an eager buyer. |
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Imagine SuperCharging client meetings
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| I don't know if you have ever been in the scenario where you are about to walk into a meeting, you know that this guy you are meeting has the potential to give you an order that will take you to the next level. |
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11 Reasons Selling Sucks!
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| If you have ever been involved in sales or selling then you may well relate to some of these and hey please grow the list, I am sure there are a lot more out there that I have not even heard of! |
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Creating the right Value Perception for your Customers
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| Value Perception (VP) is the opinion your potential and current customers have of your product or service. This perception determines the value it adds to them in line with the problems it needs to solve or aspirations they want it to fulfill. Also evaluated is your offerings relevance and importance, over and above that of your competitors. |
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Are your Customers Crazy?
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| Do your sales people sit back at drink oclock on a Friday afternoon and share war stories of prospects and customers doing strange and unpredictable things? Are your sales people, more times than your Sales Mangers cares to admit, left scratching their heads as prospects seemingly operate by their own sets of rules, making it up as they go, with a complete disregard for the sales persons best interests and good intentions? That being the case this next section is written for you, in an attempt to help you or your sales people demystify your customers and indeed potential buyers. |
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How the Choices You Make Will Determine Your Sales Results
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| Norman Vincent Peale once wrote: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your World. Your choices come from those thoughts. In sales, have you ever consider the impact of those choices as to your sales results?
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Make down times up TIMES by investing in YOU
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| Cutting costs is NOT always the solution. Sometimes we need more skiils, more training, a better environment or inspired leadership |
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Customer Service for the Independent Retailer
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| Good customer service is the difference between a flourishing store with happy customers and one that is empty and forgotten. Here is a summary of what it means to go up against the big box guys and how you can still compete with them by using the age old advice, as well as a few new tips perhaps you didn't know. |
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How to Shift From Fat & Nice to Lean & Mean to Increase Sales
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| Have you ever considered that maybe one of the reasons for your less that stellar sales is because you are just too fat and nice? Read how by being lazy to not having enforced accountability, you may be your own worst enemy. |
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Know the difference between buyers and decision makers
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| We often tend to focus more on the person who is probably showing interest in products or services you display or demonstrate and neglect the one who accompanies them. |
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Sales and Customer Service are Just Like Steriod Use in Baseball
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| Sales is just like Steroid use in Baseball.
If a customer attacks, complains, whines, demands or points fingers and you simply say, "you're right. I'm sorry," the issue goes away. However, if you get defensive, place blame, make excuses, deny the issue or fail to apologize, your customer will never forget and as a result, may no longer be your customer. The customer is always right - even when they're wrong. |
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Empathy
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| When your customer feels understood they are more open to influence.
Ability to read people, feel what they are feeling What is it? Understanding a need is as good as fulfilling it. People buy what they need from salespeople who understand what they want. Empathy leads to sensory acuity Unlike the mind, the heart finds it difficult to lie. Robert Cooper.
Empathy leads to trust It makes the connection. Integrity |
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I Want To Hold Your Hand
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| I talk with many sales people who have expressed frustration about their prospects current state of mind. We have all agreed that there are buyers out there, although fewer than in the past. They also arent acting like buyers. Prospects are faced with a degree of fear, either real or perceived, about the state of the economy. Although they have a real need, have the resources, and the job security to commit to a purchase, their interest quickly wanes.
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Education Based Marketing the New Sales Paradigm for Relationship Selling
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| Are you engaged in the old paradigm of sales based marketing? Have you heard of education based marketing? If you believe in relationship selling and wish to increase sale, then you may need to change your sales paradigm. |
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Time Management Sales Effectiveness
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| How to Improve on Time Management Sales Effectiveness |
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Write a Business Plan - Nah! I Can Do That Myself (and Why You Shouldn't)
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| There are three reasons why you need a business plan |
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How to Sell in a Recession
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| During these times of shrinking budgets & revenue you can with turn them to your advantage by providing your customers with effective solutions to make them more efficient. |
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How to be a Sales Superstar: Break All the Rules and Succeed While Doing It by Mark Tewart
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| Every aspect of our daily lives are affected by sales, even though we may not think in those terms. When you buy any product or service, various sales people are involved in the background. Even your utilities are affected by the sales process. Sales people have gotten a bad rep for years, but that isnt necessary. We all know people in the sales industry that are superstars. The question is how do you become a sales superstar? Mark Tewart is a definite expert who has the answer to this question and he is sharing his thoughts and tips in his new book How to be a Sales Superstar. |
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The Customer Hidden Inside
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| Theres a customer hidden inside each of your prospects. Are you able to find them? Salespeople got spoiled during the super-heated market of just a few years ago. The demand exceeded the supply, money was cheap and readily available, and there were more prospects than we were physically capable of handling. This was particularly true of Realtors and Car salesmen. |
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Prospecting, Follow-up and Solving "Around" the Problem
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| Do you solve problems by solving around the problem? This is what I mean. Manager Ken is frustrated because his sales force isnʼt prospecting because they are relying on the companyʼs expensive advertising budget to drive the traffic. Even though personal prospecting is the least expensive form of advertising and has the highest success rate in closing customers. Because the sales force hasnʼt been trained or managed properly they are rewarded by manager Ken who increases his ad budget. Kenʼs defense is that he canʼt get his salesmen to prospect. A classic case of the tail wagging the dog. |
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Some sales managers are Idiots
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| Sales Managers don't learn from the success of others. Probably laziness is the reason because we all know what they should do. |
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Work At Home Ideas For New Mothers
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| In a world of double income families, the still single income homes with housewives or mothers are bombarded with numerous work at home opportunities, some of which are pure scams. It is a frustrating job to fish out the real opportunities from this mix of schemes, some of which you might pay money without receiving anything in return. |
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Collecting From Your Customers
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| Are You Letting Customers Off The Hook And They Owe You Money??
An old sales manager of mine taught me something years ago. It's pretty simple.
He said:
"It's not a sale until you're paid."
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How to Win More Sales by Not Being Like Everyone Else
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| Everyone wants more sales. Yet, some sales professionals appear to be living Aesops fable of the Donkey and the Grasshoppers in their quest to increase sales. |
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The Customer Can't Say Yes When You Are Talking
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| It doesn't matter if you are selling a product, a concept or yourself. If you are sales person trying to sell the product or service, a husband/wife trying to convince your spouse, or an employee trying to convince your boss. The sooner we learn to shut up and listen, the faster we will get to the outcome we are looking for? |
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Increase Sales by Removing the Boulders on the Sales Path to Your Front Door
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| Are you easy to do business with? Are you creating obstacles that prevent your customers from reaching you? Does it not make sense to make the sales path as smooth as possible? |
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Awarding a Franchise Semantics or Not
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| This article explores the nature of the franchise relationship. It discusses the commonly used term - Award a Franchise - and explores the importance of this perceptive in for formation of a healthy franchisor/Franchisee relationship. |
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Successful Franchising Building Your Own Box
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| This article discusses how to make sure that any franchise you investigate is first and foremost a strong fit to you and your skills. This is the number one mistake people make when trying to find a franchise on their own. |
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Sales force productivity: Eight Practices to Ensure Your Sales Success
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| We have never needed to improve sales productivity more than we do in this dreadful economy. For decades, businesses have embraced productivity and cost controls in operational functions like manufacturing and distribution; programs like Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma and LEAN are thriving all over the map. Except in the sales department. We suggest that sales organizations can benefit dramatically from adopting some basic principles of productivity management, simple business techniques that lower costs, improve customer profitability and retention, and reduce sales-person turnover. This article explores the eight key practices that contribute to productivity. If the practice is in place in your usiness, it will contribute to productivity. But if it is not, it will actually inhibit productivity and drive up costs. |
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Increase prospecting results by integrating your touches
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| Connecting with prospects for the first meeting requires persistence, consistency and simply wearing them down. You can speed your access time by integrating your communication strategy with multiple connection methods without frustrating prospects. |
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Always play the Odds
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| Goal Achievement is Simple but not Easy. I have observed that most people have no idea how to set a Goal so goal achievement is not possible. The first thing to do is have everything you can control working for you, you will have enough working against you. These are the obvious easy things to do that are often overlooked, yet they make a mountain of difference. And they are the necessary first steps.
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How to Turn Back-of-the-Register Cashiers Into Front-of-the-Register Sales People
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| Do your team members' feet seem permanently glued to the space directly behind the cash registers? Do they use that space to gossip, lurk or hide? How to you turn back of the register cashiers into front of the register sales people? First...it's all about attitude. "I'm not really a sales person" "I don't like to talk to strangers" "I'm really fast just ringing up sales".
That's an attitude you've got to nip in the bud. Of course you would have used the DISC personality tool in your interviewing process so that you know what drives and motivates each team member, who's a natural sales person, and who will need coaching. You didn't? Then let's start from who you already have on your team and work on making better choices in the future with bet |
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Karma Keys to a Referral-Based Business
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| Want to build a repeatable and successful process of increasing sales to both existing customers and new prospects? Then build a referral-based business where giving referrals is just as valuable as getting referrals. |
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Increase Sales Through That Third Contact and Beyond
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| Did you know that 25% of sales people make a second contact and then stop! Are you one of those sales professionals who gives up after the second and does not make a third effort to connect with that desirable prospect? |
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Sales Training Tip What to say and how to say it
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| 'What's in a word' is a series of words and phrases which will help you put together a well PLANNED Sales Presentation when dealing with customers either face-to-face or over the phone. |
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Sales Training Salespeople Need Both Building and Maintaining Self-Confidence
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| Here are another three of six indicators that a salespersons self-confidence needs a boost. Self-confidence in salespeople is something that builds and must be recharged. But how do we know when our self-confidence may need boost? What happens to the salesperson who ignores the indicator lights? |
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Screw The Recession
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| Screw the recession - ordinary salespeople can do remarkable things. Get up and don't let this economy get you down.
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Sales Coaching Tip: Widen the Why Gap between Gains and Losses to Increase Sales
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| Do your sales skills include the ability to widen the "Why Gap" between the potential gains and potential losses for your prospect. Learn more about this gap. |
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By Knowing Exactly Whom You Are Selling Will Increase Sales
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| Are you focusing your sales efforts and behaviors on the wrong people? |
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Increase Sales Coaching Tip: Understand How the Nos Get You Closer to the Yesses
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| Does a No derail you in your attempts to increase sales? Consider, this sales tip to increase sales. |
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Poor Ethics Reflect Poor Business Professionalism & Potentially Poor Business Results
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| Have you ever considered that not returning a phone call could be a reflection of your own personal business ethics? And possibly the lack of ethics is contributing to your poor business results? Learn what dead horses and business values have in common. |
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Referral Based Selling
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| Did you know that:
40% of sales people are failing in their sales careers?
45% of all sales people earn the average income for their industry?
A typical sales person devotes only 10-20% of their time to actual selling because a large proportion of their available time is devoted to cold calling?
85% of all sales people do not generate enough quality referrals?
Sales people who actively seek and exploit referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than sales people who dont?
Referral business closes and converts more than 70 percent of the time?
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Post Sale Follow Up
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| The first sale isn't the end of the sales process but the beginning of the next sales cycle. What you do after you've made the first sale determines whether you get the next one or any referrals. |
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Closing with Ease
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| Next to objections, closing is one of the most talked-about sales training topics among sales people and sales managers. Everyone wants to know how to close and how to speed up the buying process. Closing is easy when you have thoroughly appreciated each customers specific requirements and aligned the presentation of your solution accordingly. |
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Activity Based Planning
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| Selling is both an art and a science. To put it another way, a sales persons skills determine their level of artistry at selling and their strategic planning provides a scientific platform for their sales activities. |
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Open, Leading and Closed Questions
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| In a selling environment where most good sales people appreciate the importance of discovering a prospects requirements, it is easy to take questioning skills for granted. Yet, questions that are crafted with strategic intent can uncover a myriad of secrets stored in the prospects mind. |
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Maximising the Impact of Testimonials
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| If you become a testimonial-based seller, (which I believe to be the most powerful form of sales in the world). Then you can get testimonials for every element, or every step, of your sales cycle.
Jeffrey Gitomer, author of Little Red Book of Sales Answers
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Probing For Pain
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| If your sales people are involved in prospecting then theyll already know the challenges of persuading a prospect to give them the business. Ultimately there is a 4-step process involved in buying, that all of us follow; |
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An Ounce Of Silence
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| It is amazing to watch a true professional finish his presentation and just kick back and watch the prospect talk himself or herself into the sale. The worst that can happen if you button up is that the prospect may start to say something negative and you have plenty of time to counter with positive reinforcement. |
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A Funny Sales Training Story
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| Then the fun began After the first night with his 15 people William came back and reported no sales. Nothing new there for William. It only gets funnier. At work the next day only 11 of his people showed up for work and I questioned William who proceeded to inform me that he was weeding the garden and he was just keeping the best people. Well that night he came back with his crew and again there were NO sales. Again no surprise.
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DON'T LET OBJECTIONS BE THE "KISS OF DEATH" TO YOUR SALE...
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| After more than 40 years in sales, and 30 years training sales people from more than 300 different industries, Ive reached the conclusion that most sales people lack the vital skills necessary to handle objections. |
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YOUR PRODUCT COSTS TOO MUCH!
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| Sales people the world over tell me that the price objection is the biggest objection that their prospects bring up.
In a high percentage of cases this objection de-rails the sale and the sales person walks away empty handed and frustrated.
Guess what? |
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Dont Let your Smile Run Away from Your Face --- The Piano Man
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| There is a song called The Piano Man that uses the phrase - "The smile ran away from her face." That phrase reminds me of the look on many Sales Managers faces as they discuss sales training at their respective company.
The least effective and the most expensive method of training sales people unfortunately is also the most common! Although a new sales person may have experience, simply providing product training for your line card is just not enough. The marketplace demands that sales people provide more than product knowledge, a product catalog and a price list. If that is the type of training you provide, chances are it is the root cause of management frustration, low productivity and high turnover not to mention lack of profitability. Training sales personnel appropriately can be expensive. |
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Top 5 Tips For Good Customer Service
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| Even the best business ideas fail because they lack in the area of customer service. Customer service is the backbone and starting point for any successful business. How do businesses succeed? |
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LEAVE IT WITH ME - I WANT TO THINK IT OVER!
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| Sales people tell me that this is one of the most challenging objections that their prospects bring up. They ask, "What should I say when a prospect says this?"
Well firstly I have to point out that this is NOT an objection, this is actually an "excuse" for not making a decision. It is not the real objection. So this is how we get to the real objection... |
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I WANT A BETTER DEAL - TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT!
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| I often hear sales people say to me, Everything was going well, wed been talking for weeks and then suddenly when I thought my prospect was ready to buy, they wanted to negotiate a better deal. I didnt know what to do!
So what should they do?
I am often asked if I have some kind of Silver Bullet cure to solve this problem.
The truth is, there is no one simple answer to this question.
A better question to ask is, How do I avoid ending up with a situation like this? |
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Understand Your Roles
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| How many hats do you wear? Well, not literally, of course. You hear that phrase all of the time. Wearing many hats. What that essentially means is that in life, we all have different roles that we play in different groups. If you don't consider those roles, it can cause you time management issues down the line. |
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WORK LIKE A MANIAC - PLAY LIKE THE RICH AND FAMOUS - IT'S ALL ABOUT BALANCE!
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| Have you ever wondered how really high achievers manage to get so much done in a business day? Then manage to take so much time off with their family and friends.
Why is time management is such a challenge for sales people?
How can you reduce the stress in your life by being in greater control of your life?
How do you value your time? Do you know what each hour is worth?
Hqere's how...
Why creating balance is so important to achieve real success in your life |
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PROSPECTING - HOW TO GET PAST THE GATE KEEPER
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| In our telephone prospecting workshops the question often comes up"How do I get past the gatekeeper on the telephone to reach the hard to get to prospect?"
Its a good question, because some prospects are more difficult to get to than others. So I have a few ideas for you that may help... |
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HOW TO GET PAST THE GATE KEEPER WHEN PROSPECTING
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| In our telephone prospecting workshops the question often comes up"How do I get past the gatekeeper on the telephone to reach the hard to get to prospect?"
Its a good question, because some prospects are more difficult to get to than others. So I have a few ideas for you that may help... |
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How to Build Trust and Credibility
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| When you are talking with a prospect and you want to boost your credibility, where ever possible back up what you say by showing them something in writing. Research clearly shows that people are far more likely to believe what they see in writing, more than what they simply hear. It boosts your credibility and is incredibly powerful. |
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Is Experience The Best Teacher?
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| Its interesting to consider the wisdom of some expressions in common use these days.
How about the phrase Experience is the best teacher? Or how about this gem, What you dont know wont hurt you? And what about, He or she is a born sales person or Ignorance is bliss?
As I work these days with sales people and sales managers across Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia I see so many examples of why beliefs like these are so dangerous.Experience is not the best teacher |
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Hiring the Ideal High Value Sales Person Opportunity No 2
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| More and more companies have invested in higher value products, services, or solutions, which are especially relevant when the economy slows. And yet many sales people, and their managers, are unable to adapt to this new model.
So to help some of our customers seize this opportunity to recruit and train to this model, we conducted a number of surveys in order to define some of the key qualities that needed to be found to improve the recruiting of this breed of sales person.
This article outlines both the survey methodoloy and the highlights of our findings. |
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ARE YOUR PROSPECTS DISSATISFIED?
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| I hope they are, because it's only when your prospects are dissatisfied that they will buy! |
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Sales Training that Really Works
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| Research and practical experience reveals that many of the widely used sales training approaches and techniques are largely ineffective with a relatively small proportion of the learnings being retained after the training event. Salespeople have relatively little brain space allocated for theory and respond best to highly interactive, participative and engaging simulations that mimic the reality that they will face in the field. Such simulations are feedback rich and play on salespeople's competitive instincts as they compete with one another in the simulations. |
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Basic Sales Techniques
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| Learn these no-brainer basic sales techniques and watch your sales take off. And always remember, selling is easy when you work hard at it.
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Follow-up a Great Question with Dead Silence!
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| Ask a great question... and just listen... don't fall into the temptation of answering your own question or guessing at the answer. |
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3 Simple Measurements for Developing Your Sales Team
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| In addition to looking at the numbers, you can figure out very quickly whether or not a sales person is successful by ranking them on a scale of one to ten... in three key areas |
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Red Hot Sales Prospecting - Using Online Strategies
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| For better or for worse we are more and more moving toward becoming a digital society and certainly the evidence is that our customers are not only relying on the internet to source information, goods and services, but that the most canny of our competitors are right there, beating us to our prospects and building their total loyalty before they even become aware that its time to buy. |
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Field Sales Training Accompaniment
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| The purpose of the field sales visit is to review and analyse performance of the sales person to observe performance, to catch them doing something right and to correct and retrain where needed. |
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COUNSELLING THE SALES PERSON
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| Learn how you can counsel your sales people for greater success |
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Coaching the Sales Person
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| What is coaching and why should you develop the skill?
COACHING is a face to face exercise to help you analyse and improve the performance of the sales person |
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Beating your number one competitor - the status quo
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| The biggest competitor faced by most firms is not the high quality market leader or the low-cost overseas firm. For most businesses, their biggest competitor is the status quo - the client not doing anything. |
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Sales Compensation Guidelines
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| Money alone does not motivate most people, but incentives crafted into a well thought-out compensation plan will produce results you hope for. Here are some guildelines to help you with your pay plans. |
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Be Adaptable With Your Sales Team to Achieve Peak Performance
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| Masterful management is understanding how to motivate and influence increased performance with differing personalities and talent levels. |
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THE TOO SALESY PARADOX WHY PROFESSIONAL SERVICE PROVIDERS CANT SELL AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
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| By John Doerr
The distress is obvious. The complaints are frequent. The clear disdain for the activity is surprisingly unfiltered. What are we talking about? Selling, or more specifically, selling professional services.
In conversation after conversation as I work with clients, conduct seminars, or network with my professional colleagues, I hear the same comments:
Selling conflicts with my values as a professional.
Selling gets in the way of building strong relationships.
You have to have it in your genes - like a used car salesman.
I don't sell professional services - I work with my clients to create the best solutions.
People won't respect me as a professional if I am selling to them.
I can't sell to them. What will they think of me?
It (selling) is not what we do around here.
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Sales Recruitment and Hiring Process
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| Find who you want, don't just take who you get. There are plenty of great people out their looking for a place to contribute. Good people are interviewing you, so you need to be prepared, organized and professional in your approach. You can attract top quality people if your company can support them and your hiring process is attractive to them. |
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For More Sales Success, Ask the Right Questions
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| Asking the right question is always key to getting the right information. According to WIKI HOW, sales people spend too much time "pitching" and not enough time asking questions. |
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Sales Success vs. Sales Productivity: Are They the Same?
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| Everybody wants their sales force to be successful. But is sales success enough? Is a successful sales force the same thing as a productive sales force? Not necessarily. Find out if your team is leaking productivity today, operating with inefficiencies that cost time, money and competitive advantage. |
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Five Myths that Slow Down Sales and How to Avoid Them
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| Time is money, yeah, yeah, weve heard that before. But if time really is money, why do so many professionals squander it chasing anyone with a pulse, including their most horrible prospects? Because they still embrace one of the Five Myths of selling, common mistakes that drain profit and energy from a sales organization. Read on
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Selling Through the Tough Times
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| In this tips-oriented piece, Rick Davis, president of Strategic Sales in the Building Industry, explains how to rise to the situation and sell through tough times. |
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Prospecting: Working Smarter, Not Harder
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| Five tips to successful sales through prospecting efforts from Building Leaders, Inc. |
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Identifying Decision Making Strategies
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| People actually make decisions on a highly individual basis. It is important to understand how people make decisions when you want to influence the decision they make. You will want to know his or her decision strategy. A decision strategy is the process a person typically goes through in making a certain kind of decision. |
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Three Points of Need or Buyer Pain
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| Point One - Hidden Needs or Hidden Pain
Point Two - Active Needs or Awareness of Pain
Point Three - Awareness of a Solution |
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Questions - Questions - Questions
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| Questions
Open Control Confirm |
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Sales Process
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| Why Your Business Needs a Sales Process
A great sales process can help your sales force succeed.
The benefits of a sales process |
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Building Rapport Customer Relationships
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| Being in rapport is the ability to enter someone elses model of the world
To be able to establish rapport is one of the most important skills a salesperson can have.
(A buying environment is a rapport-filled, relationship based, interactive climate in which a person with a need gets informed support in the manner most comfortable to him/her regardless of the outcome.)
A buying environment demands a comfort zone to establish trust and rapport to create a we space.
"When people are like each other they tend to like each other" |
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Do you really hear me? Or: why Positive Sales equals Listening
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| How can you sell your product or service to anyone without knowing what it actually is that they need? You shouldn't, is the short reply. Selling means not only 'making a sale' but focusing on the customer's needs, circumstances and wishes. Get to know them in order to understand them, and do it by asking and listening instead of talking and telling. Why? Because that is what effective, positive sales is all about. |
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How to Creatively Increase Your Sales
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| You probably think creativity is something those artsy aesthetics types have. You may be surprised to know that creativity is a learned skill. |
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Do You have a Strategic Sales Action Plan?
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| Do you want to shake up your sales results? It's time to rethink you're approach and come up with a plan that will produce results. |
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How Well are You Applying Effective Sales Skills?
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| Have you read, studied, perhaps even trained on the sales techniques offered by the best salespeople out there yet they just don't seem to work when you use them? Are you frustrated and confused as to why and how that could happen? |
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Is that Top Producer Accidentally Successful?
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| Youve said it, I know you have. At one point or another youve looked at the results achieved by another sales person and you thought to yourself that person sure is lucky. |
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Make Time for Sales`
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The SBA states that 90% of all businesses fail in their first 5 years. They can blame it on location, credit, competitors, economy-- but the real reason is not enough business. Business owners wear many hats and can easily make excuses for being busy. But they must focus on that top line, or little will make it to the bottom. |
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Sales amateur vs. sales professional
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| I am sure you have heard about salespeople earning $200-300k, a million or even more. Do you think this sales person is better than you are? They are not much different from you; they are not geniuses or impeccable experts in their field. They probably dont know much more about their products or service than other salespeople in the same company.
So you are probably asking yourself how is it that they can make six or seven figures and you are struggling month by month to make ends meet and reach your quotas? |
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Ever heard of LoveSelling Read on despite the name
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| Some entrepreneurs don't see themselves as sales people, because 'sales' is an unpleasant activity for them. Yet, their very existence depends very much on a successful sales strategy. My approach is 'positive sales' - a consultative approach to focusing on providing service first and selling next. Coincidentally, a German Business Guru has come up with a similar idea: he calls it "Love Selling"! |
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11 Reasons why you better make sure the customer is always right!
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| A customer just left you, or left your store unsatisfied. How many customers did you just lose?
One, two because he will tell a friend of his dissatisfaction, three because he will tell 2 friends?
Would you believe ten or more? |
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A Luxury Once Had Becomes A Necessity
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| Two techniques to turn a luxury into a necessity in the buyers mind. A luxury an item that is desirable but not essential. a product or service that gives great pleasure. |
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The Four Major Steps in Sales
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| By definition, a sale is the act of meeting prospective buyers and providing them with a product or service in return for money or other agreed upon compensation. A sale is an act of completion of a commercial activity. The "deal is closed", means the customer has consented to the proposed product or service by making full or partial payment (as in the case of installments) to the seller. |
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If you live by price - you will die by price
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| If your prospect does not see the value in your product or service, and if the only difference between you and the competitors is in pricing, you didnt do a good job as a sales person. The main description of your position inside the company is to create the value, not just to show your price list. |
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How to find your next customer
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| Every sales person, no matter how successful, has this basic problem of whom to sell to each month. Anyone whoever worked in sales knows how one month you can be the best sales person in the company and then the calendar turns to a new month and you are starting from zero again. |
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Sell Yourself First
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| People do judge books by their cover and people by their appearance and first impressions. If you want to sell anything, first you need to sell yourself. |
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