Professional Selling – Will it Soon be the Survival...

 
In recent weeks, I have been discussing the future of professional selling, and amongst other predictions, I have suggested that in my humble view, within five years, just 5% of external salespeople will remain.
It will therefore come as no surprise that I have received a number of emails asking if I will clarify what these survivors will look like, what will be their characteristics, and what will differentiate them.
Over the past twenty years I have trained, developed and mentored almost one hundred  thousand sales professionals - from foundation right up to “master craftsman” level -and I think this has given me a unique opportunity to formulate an accurate profile of a “Top 5% Achiever.”
So What Is It That Top 5% Players Do?
They:
o Position themselves with the real decision-makers… continue reading

Are We Witnessing the Dawn of a New Type of Leader?

 
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 labour 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… continue reading

Middle of the Sales Pipeline – Acceleration

Most everyone focuses on the front of the sales pipeline, and there is much written about all of the things that happen early on. But what about once you have potential sales opportunities? How are they moved forward to closure, and what happens during that “dark phase’ when your once-wonderful prospective customers are not returning your calls or e-mails?
Welcome to the middle of the pipeline, or for those of you using a funnel approach to track sales opportunities, welcome to MoFu (as coined by Hubspot, for middle-of-the-funnel). This less talked about period is where your prospects live, breathe, and sometimes hide – and during that time many opportunities disappear due to lack of nurturing from you.
We need to work on ways to accelerate the pipeline. In simple terms,… continue reading

Schhh! Can You Hear the Silence?

 
Yes, me too. Nobody – well hardly anybody – is talking about “Sales 2.0″ anymore, and yet less than twelve months ago, you couldn’t hear yourself speak above the incredibly loud din that rose to a deafening crescendo.
So what happened? Has it gone away? Have we moved on to “Sales 3.0″ and everyone forgot to tell me? Was it all a figment of my imagination, or perhaps a bad dream?
It is now more than five years since Nigel Edelshain first coined the term, on a balmy Sunday afternoon way back in 2006, and perhaps we all now accept that actually, it was just the next phase in a continuous cycle of change in the way we all sell.
But the silence we are witnessing now is almost as loud as… continue reading

Five Attributes of Top Sales Influencers

Being recognized this month as a Top Sales Influencer made me wonder: What IS an influencer, and how can this help build a business or a brand?  I mean, it is a great thing to have happened – quite an honor –  but what is it, really?
Wikipedia talks about identifying influencers:
Market research techniques can be used to identify influencers, using pre-defined criteria to determine the extent and type of influence. For example, Keller and Berry propose five attributes of influencers:

Activists: influencers get involved, with their communities, political movements, charities and so on.
Connected: influencers have large social networks
Impact: influencers are looked up to and are trusted by others
Active minds: influencers have multiple and diverse interests
Trendsetters: influencers tend to be early adopters (or leavers) in… continue reading

The Nature of Dynamic Leadership

People have been debating the nature of leadership for as long as records have been kept – certainly as far back as Homer and his peers: The topic continues to fascinate and enthral us today, but the way in which we assess leadership roles is changing.
Where once we looked to military and political leaders for inspiration and insight, now it is increasingly business leaders who hold our attention and provide role models.
Ask someone to name a leader whom they have admired and they are just as likely to name Richard Branson as Winston Churchill; Bill Gates as Margaret Thatcher. This focus is reflected in the growing number of books and articles about business and the main players.
Most writing on good management and what it takes to get… continue reading

So What Makes a Highly Successful Sales Team?

I am often asked just what it is that makes a highly successful and effective sales team – what differentiates them from an average one?
Actually, the answer is more simple than you might imagine – all roads lead back to the leader!
The role of a sales leader is to translate the organisation’s vision, mission and values into a meaningful context that sales teams can relate to and feel excited by. If this is achieved then the sales leader will have created a sales team with a shared mental model. This transforms an ordinary sales team into a high performing one.
For clarity, here is a brief description of the following terms:
An organization’s vision is a guiding image of success formed in terms of a huge goal. It… continue reading

We Should Never, Ever, Doubt Our Ability to Succeed

In conversation with one of my learned chums this week, the subject of success came up – or more precisely, just what makes some people more successful than others, and I have very strong views about this.
I believe that one of the defining and most significant qualities of the most successful people we know is confidence. It is their inner belief that they can achieve anything they want to achieve, and enjoy as much success as they wish – however they personally define success.
Success is different for all of us; some people use obvious material signs to show the rest of us that they have made it … large houses, fast cars, ostentatious life styles, with a deliberate “Look at me, I am better than you” statement.
Certainly,… continue reading

B2B Sales Podcast With Michael Boylan on Value...

Last week we shared a recent interview with Michael Boylan, best selling author of The Power to Get In, Accelerants , and TEETH – Does Your Value Proposition Have Any? Michael is an award-winning keynote speaker at hundreds of conferences and Fortune 500 company meetings. Michael can take any organization through the sales process with dramatically increased results. We were honored to speak with him not just once but twice.
Today’s conversation shares how once you gain access to the C-level decision makers you wanted to get in front of in the first place, now what do you say to move the conversation forward? Many organizations have poor value propositions and their visit to the C-level suite is short-lived. Listen as Michael talks about a proven framework – a common sense… continue reading

How To Measure Your “Social Value”

In days gone by – in fact, not so very long ago – people in my position were judged by the number of books they had written. Sales “spokespeople” churned out volume after volume, and were held in very high esteem - and quite rightly so. Without them, my world would have been a much less interesting place; it was a big part of my education, and I am certain that holds true for hundreds of thousands of others in the sales space.
Then came sales articles sites and blogs – all in the last five years – and this offered us an alternative route to gain recognition; to educate; to hopefully inspire and motivate. At this point, book sales began to plummet, and today I am told by several well known… continue reading