Category - Sales

Are your people really engaged? A common complaint among business owners is that they feel that not all their employees are fully engaged, in other words, the employee is not giving their best. With sales reps, I hear managers and owners complain that a rep is coasting. The rep has made their quota or their …

Understanding Key Business Risk issues As a sales rep, you should be well versed in general business issues. Understanding risk issues from a business owner’s perspective enables you to talk at a much higher level about the impact of your product or solution on the business versus just talking features and benefits. To understand risk …

Revenue, Expenses and Risk In all business purchases, there are 3 main business drivers that business owners and managers have as their core. The last 2 blogs I dealt with revenue and expenses. This one is on risk. There are two types of risk – general business risk and risk in the buying decision. General …

In sales, you must understand what the core drivers are for a business owner when he or she is making a business decision, especially about buying your product or service. In the business owner’s mind, they are relating everything they evaluate to three key core business drivers: revenue, expenses and risk. They are asking these …

Revenue, Expenses and Risk is What Matters Most If you are a business owner, at the end of the day, you measure your success in 3 ways in terms of affecting profits and business continuity: 1) Did you increase or protect revenue? 2) Did you reduce or control expenses? or 3) Did you reduce or …

Getting People to Embrace Change As a business owner, you know that the business world is ever changing and you must adapt to the new environment or die. You may see the need to change and see all the benefits to change, but your people may not. Even worse, is that they may resist the …

Salesforce.com released interesting data on the quality of leads and how fast they convert to deals. The data shows that leads coming from referrals have the shortest sales cycle and the highest percentage to close. Social media referrals/leads came in 2nd. Surprisingly, leads coming from tradeshow events and marketing and advertising were low on the …

In the book Achieve Sales Excellence Howard Stevens developed the seven rules of the customer from conducting 80,000 customer interviews over 14 years. This research also included 7,500 sales reps.  Neil Rackham’s research with Xerox, IBM, and other companies with over 1500 sales transactions, agrees with Steven’s research. From my own anecdotal experience: (Being a …

Selling is a beauty contest, not a race. Unfortunately, the majority sales reps and sales leaders focus on their goals, their quota and making the numbers in the forecasted time frame, thus creating the sense of a race. This race approach is very seller centric, not customer centric. According to a recent Salesforce.com study, 82% …

Customer Aligned Selling Customer Aligned Selling is focuses on aligning your sales process with how the customer wants to buy. It includes understanding how they think, understanding and adjusting to where they are in the buying process. Customer Aligned Sellling is being a buyer’s agent helping them through the buying process, not selling. Customer Aligned …