From the category archives:

28 Articles

Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 28 – Whatever else you do, keep the initiative.

November 23, 2009 28 Articles

Conclusion
This, then, is the tribal wisdom, the folklore which those who went before you have learned. Like any folklore it needs interpretation, and contains seemingly contradictory advice. Over time, as you apply unremitting intellectual effort to study your territory, you will learn to apply these ideas in your own way, and will add to this [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 27 – Keep your extraction plan secret.

November 23, 2009 28 Articles

Note: This is the only Article of the 28 that does not easily translate to sales strategies or tactics. The best that comes to mind is the continued presence and continued management of client relationships when your sales duties and responsibilities require you to reduce the time spent with existing clients.
Keep your extraction plan secret. [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 26 – Build your own solution. Only attack the enemy when he gets in the way

November 23, 2009 28 Articles

Build your own solution-only attack the enemy when he gets in your way. Try not to be distracted, or forced into a series of reactive moves, by a desire to beat your competitors. Your aim should be to implement your own solutions – the “game plan” you developed earlier in the campaign, and then refined [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 25 – Fight the enemy’s strategy, not his forces.

November 20, 2009 28 Articles

Fight the enemies strategy, not his forces. At this stage, if things are proceeding well, your competitors will go over to the offensive. Yes, the offensive – because you have created a situation so dangerous to your competitors, by threatening to displace them from the environment, they have to attack you to get back into [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 24 – Small is beautiful

November 19, 2009 28 Articles

Small is beautiful. Another natural tendency is to go for large-scale, mass programs. In particular, we have a tendency to template ideas that succeed in on area and transplant them to another, and we tend to take small programs that work and try to replicate them on a larger scale. Again, this is usually a [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 23 – Practice armed civil affairs

November 19, 2009 28 Articles

Practice armed civil affairs. You must restructure the prospect or client’s environment to displace your competitor from it. You must focus first on meeting basic needs, improving the problems that you were hired to fix, then progressing up towards more value creation as each successive need is met. Surveys and personal interviews with contacts at [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 22 – Local forces should mirror the enemy, not ourselves.

November 19, 2009 28 Articles

Local forces should mirror the enemy, not ourselves. By this stage you will be working closely with the prospects and clients in your territory, training them or supporting them, and building their capability to achieve the promised results that allowed you win their business. The natural tendency is to build forces in our own image, [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 21 – Exploit a “single narrative”

November 18, 2009 28 Articles

Exploit a single narrative. Since sales is a competition to mobilize support, it pays to know how people are mobilized. In most companies, there are opinion-makers who set trends and influence perception. Your competitor has a single narrative, a simple, unifying, easily-expressed story or explanation that organizes people’s experience and provides a framework for understanding. [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 20 – Take stock regularly

November 17, 2009 28 Articles

Take stock regularly. You need to develop metrics early in your campaign, and refine them as the you progress. They should cover a range of activities and economic results and issues. Use metrics intelligently to form an overall impression of progress – not in a mechanistic “traffic light” fashion. Typical metrics include: new engagements with [...]

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Twenty Eight Articles for Sales: 19 – Engage the women

November 17, 2009 28 Articles

Note: Despite the lack of continuity with the original article, I have removed the part of this article called beware the children. It doesn’t fit well in translating the articles to sales. However, the section on engaging women makes more sense than it should, and it had to be retained. For more on marketing to [...]

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