The Sales Blog
There is a reason your contacts sometimes don’t want to allow you to develop relationships with contacts in other parts of their business. There are also reasons they sometimes don’t want you to develop relationships with the people north of them on the organizational chart. … [Read more...]
Paying homage to Lefsetz. Then, it was very difficult to acquire information about your prospects. Now, it’s impossibly simple to find information about your dream clients—if you do the work and use the tools. Then, there weren’t a lot of ways to prospect. It was … [Read more...]
If your business model isn’t lowest price, and it almost certainly isn’t, then you can’t afford to sell price. As much as you believe it would make it easier to sell, it would do nothing to help your produce better sales results. Here are a few reasons why. Execution Is … [Read more...]
When I teach undergraduates my Personal Selling course (a survey on business-to-business sales), I begin the class by asking the students to tell me what words they would use to describe salespeople. Without failure, I hear words like “greedy,” “selfish,” and … [Read more...]
Your sales manager should never have to manage your activity. Your self-discipline, your goals, and your personal ambition should provide the motivation for your activity. If your sales manager has to look at your activity then you are doing something wrong. You sales manager … [Read more...]
So many things in sales are outside of your control. This means that you have to be exceptional at all of the things that are within your control. You don’t have any control over the relationship that your dream client has with your competitor, whether they are deeply in love … [Read more...]
There’s so much written now about how the imbalance of power between buyer and seller in the past was due to the fact that the seller had more information. Allegedly, because of the free flow of information on the Internet, your clients are now equal when it comes to … [Read more...]
Is it because you believe that the fact that you made a cold call to a prospect you are entitled to a call back? Do you expect a call back because you're too lazy to call back yourself? Is it because you return every telemarketing call you receive at home or at work? Do you … [Read more...]
I just listened to a voicemail from a salesperson. She said she wanted to invite me to a conference that I would “absolutely be interested in attending.” She left only her first name, her phone number, and a cryptic message. She bet (or her company bet) that the more cryptic … [Read more...]
You think you need your power sponsor to agree that you are the best person to add to their management team, that your solution is best, and that they should move forward with you. Not so fast! What about the rest of the organization that is going to be impacted by a decision to … [Read more...]
Leaving A Trail of Negativity Behind You