When you are in an airplane, you may or may not pay much attention to what is going on in the cockpit. You may happen to glance at the massive control panel (dashboard) with all the switches, gauges, nobs and buttons, but it’s just a glance… before you hustle on to your seat to get… Read More
Maximizing the Customer Experience for Long-Term Sales Success
When you work with large accounts, your customers can have a dozen or more regular contacts with different parts of your organization. Each of these interactions has the potential to make or break the long-term relationship you worked so hard to create. Even one mishandled interaction can derail the relationship, sometimes irrevocably. Of course, you… Read More
Predicting What Your Sales Team Should Do Next
Predictive Lifecycle In the past decade the B2B buyer has radically changed. Increased access to information has given buyers more power to control the sales process. At the same time the buying environment has become more complex as companies struggle under ever tighter budgetary and time constraints. These macro-shifts have led to a segmentation of… Read More
Putting a Structure Behind Strategic Account Management
Almost every sales organization places a premium on what they would call key accounts, major accounts, or strategic accounts. For new or expanding businesses, winning a few “big names” gives them a foothold in targeted market segments. For established businesses, these accounts can be linked to a significant portion of yearly revenues, either directly or… Read More
Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy
For many years Document Security Management (a pseudonym) had a thriving business in retrieving and shredding or securely storing organizations’ documents. Executives and their assistants loved its one-stop-shopping value proposition, and the sales force cultivated deep relationships with them. By the early 2000s, however, it was clear that cheaper digital storage technology, especially the cloud,… Read More
Reach Your Quotas with this Eight-Point Sales Execution Strategy
When it comes to sales strategy, cultivating a successful team is key. But, how? Well, the simple answer is good old fashion discipline. The best B2B sales teams understand that delivering sustainable revenue growth requires thoughtful sales execution, and PGi’s sales team is no exception. PGi demonstrates a systematic approach to sales that draws from… Read More
Reinvent Your Sales Process While Still Hitting Your Numbers
If you have a monopoly, then your reward is a quiet life, one devoid of having to deal with competition. But most firms face changing competition, threats to their installed base, and quarterly investor expectations — all of which place sometimes conflicting demands on sales efforts. Sales forces are expected to both: Maintain the current… Read More
Sales Intelligence: Identifying the Whisperer
Purchasing a large project is rarely decided by one person. The evaluation and decision making process is almost always the effort of a team of representatives from different disciplines within the customer’s organization; e.g. finance, IT, engineering, and manufacturing. As a salesperson to a new company, it’s difficult to know which discipline has more vendor… Read More
Sales Lessons From Baseball’s “Moneyball”
Tracking baseball stats has been part of the game since the very beginning of the sport. But, about 20 years ago, baseball’s ‘game of numbers’ changed – becoming more precise, more prescriptive – and much more powerful. By analyzing player performance numbers in new ways, one losing team went from nearly last place to win… Read More
Sales Training Contradictions Drive New Requirements
In a perfect world, sales managers would be able to stop time, get their reps in a training workshop for a few days, and not lose one crucial minute of prospecting and sales calls. Sadly for them, that world doesn’t exist. As a result, 80% of companies don’t train as many salespeople as they want… Read More
Storytelling – an Art and Science
We used to call it “rapport building” – that application of a salesperson’s natural gift for gab at the beginning of sales calls with prospects or customers. Or so we thought. What else could it be but the natural ability of a talkative salesperson to set up business part of sales conversation with some chit-chat… Read More
Strides Ahead: Building Sales Performance Through Insight, Teamwork, and Accountability
Stories of athletes and sports figures capture our imaginations and our hearts. We are riveted by stories like that of U.S. Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug, who famously, and painfully, injured her ankle during the all-important final rotation at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, yet still landed her crucial second-attempt vault to clinch the gold medal. We’re… Read More
Taking Your Insights Beyond the Data Point
Selling with insights is no longer an option—it’s a mandate for reps hoping to lay the groundwork for a memorable, differentiated story. But new research shows that if you’re only challenging your prospect’s status quo with surprising data points, you could be doing insights all wrong. To make the change scenario you’re proposing more compelling… Read More
Tested And Proven: The Only 3 Sales Questions You’ll Ever Need
Sales questions. Ask the right ones, and you’ll build trust, uncover opportunities and cement your relationship as a trusted advisor. Ask the wrong ones, and you’ll become known as “a salesperson”. Voltaire once said “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Yet, it seems that most sellers do a poor job of asking great questions…. Read More
The 7 Steps to Sales Force Transformation
The Growth Engine In most companies, everyone expects growth—investors, executives, leaders, customers, and employees. The growth ‘engine’ of any business is its sales organization. Therefore, the upside of a successful sales force transformation can be significant, including: increased revenue reduced cost of sales increased lead conversion rates improved sales and share of wallet with existing… Read More
The Case for Social Selling & How to be Successful
Every minute, there are 350,000 tweets and 290,000 Facebook updates; every second, two new members join LinkedIn. These numbers are impressive, and they aren’t static or declining – they are growing rapidly. Today, prospects and customers are just a click away, and modern day companies must adapt their sales strategies to attract these next-generation buyers…. Read More
Three “Moments of Truth” – Three critical conversations take place in every sales cycle. And, to succeed, your reps need to master all three of them.
It’s a question that’s bewildered sales leaders through the years: What distinguishes high performing salespeople from low performing ones? Like most questions where the answer seems elusive, it breeds more questions: Are your best reps benefiting from more business-friendly territories? Are they simply getting more leads? Are they selling better products than your low performers?… Read More
Three Big Don’ts for Hiring the Right Sales Person
There’s some truth to the old axiom about hiring people: First-rate managers hire first-rate people while second-rate managers hire third-rate people. There are hiring savants among us who are adept at selecting first-rate sales people. But most of us are less accomplished – having, for example, hired the sure-thing sales star who flamed out in… Read More
To Beat the Competition, Follow the Rule of Three
The rule goes that things in threes are more effective. And, if you take a look at today’s highest performing organizations, you’ll see that the rule of three is definitely working to their advantage. These companies, including market leaders like Box, Comcast, and Groupon, have adopted not one or two, but all three critical technologies… Read More
Traditional Search is Dying as Sales Organizations Make Way for ‘Context’
If you haven’t yet paid attention to contextual search, it’s time you did. Contextual search is a form of web-based search whose results are based on their value to the user rather than their relevance to the query, as with traditional engines. And it’s nothing new: Leading companies have been developing and investing in this… Read More
Uh-Oh. Demo Days Are Here Again
Robust demos are back in full swing abounding in many enterprise sales opportunities. What’s wrong with that? Plenty. In working with sales organizations all around the world I am seeing an uncanny sales practice when left unfettered will negatively impact many active sales opportunities and portend inaccurate forecasts and weak pipelines. It’s the great and… Read More
Use Social Media to Make Your Customers Look Awesome
How do you feel about your customers? Go ahead and be honest. Are they a “necessary evil” or you “like them as long as they don’t complain” or maybe you truly believe “they’re the reason I love what I do”? Whatever you really think, there’s no denying that your customers hold the keys to making… Read More
What Did You Learn from Your Last Sale?
One of the underrated aspects of being a sales person or making sales as a business owner is that every sale is a learning process. We have an opportunity to learn something from every new customer, every conversation, and every deal closing. We learn from every sale that goes well, and we especially learn from… Read More
What Happens When A Brain Scientist is in Charge of Sales?
It stands to reason that the first approach a brain scientist would take in sales would be to analyze how a sales person thinks. Or, more specifically, how exactly do brains work in a sales setting? We’ve heard about how incentives and motivators can spark salespeople to do near heroic feats to reach their goals,… Read More