I was asked recently by a long-term client, “What makes the difference between an average sales organization and one that is world-class?” Great question – and one that deserved some forethought to answer. So, after a few long flights and a couple of days of contemplation I shared the outline below with him. I’ll be […]
Category Archives: Sales Techniques
The Root Causes of Losing Deals You Can’t Afford to Lose
Sales organizations, large and small, spend millions of dollars annually on sales process, sales methodologies and sales training and more often than not end up disappointed with their ability to improve their overall sales results. They’ll often assume that the primary problem is that they chose the wrong sales effectiveness firm to work with and they’ll choose another firm – only to find that the same problems continue to exist. In reality, unless they can find the root cause of the sales deficiency, they’ll continue to chase their tail, and spend far too much money doing so.
Stop Selling…Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) Instead!
If you want to build trust and make the prospective client comfortable in confessing their business challenges in order to help them solve these challenges, become a SME on the broader context of your business and your client’s business challenges and the client will ask you for help instead of you asking the client for an order!
UnSelling™ Makes Cold Calling Bearable
If you are in the business of generating demand and getting appointments with potential prospects, try crafting your words differently to make the prospect feel less threatened that they are being “sold” and far more comfortable with having a collaborative discussion with you to evaluate the options and implications of their potential solution options.
Influencing Your Client’s Evaluation and Decision Process
The average sales person (and team) tends to be overly deferential to their clients. Which would be a sound strategy if the average client had a clear idea of how to evaluate their alternatives to ultimately choose the best among alternatives.