Old Ways of Doing Business No Longer Work

 
The increasingly intense competitive challenges of the world economy challenge everyone - everywhere - to adapt in order to prosper under new rules.
In the old economy, hierarchies pitted labor against management, with workers paid wages depending on their skills, but that is eroding as the rate of change accelerates.
Hierarchies are being replaced by networks; labour and management are uniting into teams; wages are coming in new mixtures of options, incentives and ownership; fixed jobs melt into fluid careers.
As business changes, so do the traits needed to survive, let alone excel. All these transitions put increased value on emotional intelligence.
Competitive pressures put a new value on people who are self-motivated, show initiative, have the inner drive for outdoing themselves, and are optimistic enough to take reversals… continue reading

Is Referral Selling All It Is Cracked Up To Be?

 
In a word, “Yes” – In five words, “Yes of course it is!”
Some interesting facts about referral based selling that you may not know:
• 85% of all sales people do not generate enough quality referrals.
• Salespeople who actively seek and exploit referrals, earn 4 to 5 times more than sales people who don’t.
• Referral business closes and converts more than 70% of the time.
Why is referral based selling so powerful?
A referred customer is already pre-sold on the credibility of the sales person, their company and the relevance of the products/services sold. These types of opportunities are much warmer than a cold-call based opportunity because it maximizes the goodwill, inherent in the relationship between the referred customer and the referring person. By association, sales… continue reading

Analyzing Sales Opportunities in Your Pipeline

Do You Have a Sales Funnel?

Are you part of a B2B sales organization proactively looking each week at what deals are in your sales funnel (or sales pipeline)?  You probably fall into one of three camps:
A. You have a robust, helpful CRM tool that gives you several helpful reports which you can review each week, and lists you can easily pull up on a just-in-time basis.
B. You have a poor CRM tool, perhaps not cloud-based and it is difficult to use with poor reporting capabilities. Basically you work around this system if you work in it at all.
C. You have no CRM system and use some combination of e-Mail, Excel, Outlook, and/or sticky notes to “track” your prospective sales opportunities.
Whichever scenario you are in, there… continue reading

Four Secret Negotiating Behaviours You Need To Understand

 
As I have said often enough here on this blog, I enjoy negotiating very much: I have worked hard to learn and perfect my skills over many years, and practiced in a variety of circumstances – so allow me share just four secrets with you today …
A skilled negotiator will create high levels of rapport and be sensitive and empathetic to the people they are negotiating with, yet can still be hard on the issues. The ability to separate the people from the issues, and recognize that negotiations are often fraught with emotional intensity, can help sharpen the focus on the interests of the other party to better balance perceptions.
If the negotiation doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and your prospect is behaving like a bully, you… continue reading

Lessons for us all from a 19th Century Opera Composer

 
Most people are familiar with the old saying, “Easy come. Easy go” In the sales world we often observe that sales people who experience success quickly falsely assume that the sales profession is going to be easy.
After a month or two however, those fortunate few often reach a different conclusion. Without much sweat equity invested, they head off and look for the next rainbow. If only we could teach a new saying, “Easy come. Forget That” We may not be familiar with that saying, but we can look at a 19th Century opera composer who expressed it and set the example we may well want to copy.
After experiencing a degree of success with his very first opera, a young and unknown composer, Giuseppe Verdi, hit the big… continue reading

3 Sales Tips From Two-Year Olds

Before I got into professional selling, I was a preschool teacher who worked with two-year olds. We were licensed for 12 two-year olds in our room within a daycare center, and I had two assistants. For anyone who knows me now, it may be hard to believe that I did that for five years, utilizing my degree in education. I actually loved it, but unfortunately, it didn’t pay the bills.
I got into professional, business-to-business selling and made a wonderful career out of it – but what I learned from two-year olds stayed with me years later. It was reinforced after hanging out with one special guy I call Vitamin E this past weekend. He has mastered these sales techniques, and I want to make sure as you start off… continue reading

Sales Team Development – The “Total” Approach

 
It is a harsh fact but the reality is that not enough companies have learned how to employ sales training as a strategic tool: Those that have are leaders in their industries, offering their shareholders maximum return on investment, are able to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, are respected by their customers, and provide consistent sales performance. The sales people that work for those companies are motivated and stay in their jobs longer.
Quite often sales managers and executives don’t have the time and experience to do this correctly. Companies with internal training departments do provide guidance, but sales training is quite different from designing and delivering training to other constituencies within an organization, such as customer care, technical support, or human resources.
The first step for any… continue reading

Destination:London Date: June 7th ….You Really Should be There!

 
It was only a matter of time before the highly successful Sales 2.0 Conferences made it across the “Pond” and June 7th is the date,London is the venue.
Why London, and why this year? Larissa Gschwandtner provides the answers …
“During the last 2 years we have seen an increasing interest and demand from business executives in Europe to understand and leverage technology within their sales organizations to improve overall sales effectiveness. From our 2012 survey done in conjunction with Frost & Sullivan of global sales leaders, we discovered their top 5 challenges are:
1. Implementing lead generation strategies
2. Aligning the sales process with customers’ decision-making behavior
3. Enhancing sales reps’ productivity (focusing on the highest-value activities)
4. Integrating win/loss analysis into sales strategies
5. Responding to pricing… continue reading

Saturday Guest Post: 4 Sales Tips for Reaching Prospects by Phone

 
In an inbound marketing world, is there still need to call people? This is the current question on many sellers minds and one that deserves some ongoing discussion.
Of all the ways we have seen people actually talking to prospects, it most often is in a combination of the following:
1) Simple web research
2) LinkedIn or other warm connection
3 )Have data and knowledge of your prospect’s world
4) Use of  the telephone
Let’s dive into each of these and see what the trends are.
Simple, quick, web-based research is extremely important when you are calling prospects. The worst calls you can receive (or emails, for that matter) are when you feel like a name on a list, or a number in someone’s dialing log. I don’t want… continue reading

Productivity Tips for Sales Teams With iPads and Tablets

photo courtesy of Apple(R)

Did your team receive iPads or other tablet PCs and you find them under-utilized? As a long time PowerPoint user myself, I have felt guilty about my iPad being my glorified Evernote platform and e-mail source on the road.
Ashley Furness, CRM Market Analyst at Software Advice recently wrote about this very issue – teams of salespeople have received or will received tablets but do not have clear deployment plans. One company we know bought them to appear to be on the “cutting edge” over their competition, but they don’t do anything unique or amazing with them.
While 78% of businesses plan to deploy tablets by the end of 2013, more than half lack an articulate deployment plan. Ms. Furness asked 7 sales and technology experts… continue reading