Posts from — October 2005

The purpose of a 1- or 2-hour seminar is to attract potential customers for your product or service. The topic must be provocative enough to attract attendees, without sounding too much like a sales pitch with breakfast thrown in.

Topics can be about the latest advances and/or technology in your industry; the impact of the latest political, legislative, or economic changes; increasing profits, reducing costs, avoiding unnecessary expenses, and so on.  Read more...

It’s easy to spend days, weeks, or months speaking with a prospect, working up to a decision to buy. This is especially true if your prospects are in larger companies.

Sometimes your lead can go dead. You’re not sure why, but your contact person just goes quiet – sometimes disappearing for good.

Was your price too high? Did you say something wrong? What should you do?

I’ve had a few clients in exactly this situation – one even had his prospect located overseas. And they report great results by using this simple procedure.  Read more...

Trade shows are a great place to network. People are there to meet other people, and learn about who’s doing what. These 6 tips will help you maximize the networking opportunities at any trade show.

1. Meet the exhibitors

The exhibitors at any trade show paid to be able to talk to you. Make an effort to visit as many vendors as you can. Learn about them and what they have to offer. You might also ask who their target market is, or who their ideal client is.

2. Make it fun!  Read more...

Over the decades that I’ve been involved in sales, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of salespeople.

Certain negative tendencies — mistakes that salespeople make — keep surfacing. Here are my top five. See to what degree you (or your sales force) may be guilty of them.

Mistake Number One: Over concern with strategy instead of tactics

Gather a group of salespeople together around a coffee maker and listen to the conversation. After the obligatory complaints about all types of things, the conversation inevitably drifts to questions of strategy. How do I accomplish this in that account? How do I get this account to this?  Read more...

7 Phrases You Can’t Say in Sales
(Because They Will Undermine Your Credibility and Drop Your Closing Rate)

Years ago, George Carlin listed seven words you can’t say on television. Then HBO came along, said all the words, and the world of television changed forever. Now, I know that even before you read the seven no-no phrases in sales, you might be tempted to think, oh, whatever these are they will eventually become acceptable, too.

There are two big problems with this reasoning.  Read more...

A lot of energy is expended within selling organizations as they try to identify, adopt, and administer a sales process that works for them. The holy grail of selling is to find a foolproof method for creating a customer, the ultimate finished product of the perfect sales process. Prepare to be disappointed.

Webster’s tells us that a process is “a particular method of doing something, generally involving a number of steps or operations.” By performing specific actions in a certain order on allowable inputs, we can produce a finished result that meets a predefined design specification. This works well in manufacturing, and in recurring activities that we find in other areas of our businesses.  Read more...

The following 7 sales skills are what I have found to be the most important skills for professional salespeople. Get good at these, and you’ll be able to make a lot of money no matter how the economy is doing.

Sales Skill #1: Qualifying Fast to Avoid Wasting Sales Time

Do you chase after your prospects until they tell you yes or no? Do you ever tell your prospects “No”, as in “No, I am not going to sell to you”? There are many things in selling that you do not and will not be able to control. The one thing that you do have control over is your time and how you choose to use it.  Read more...

Several weeks ago I asked my Newsletter subscribers to send me their biggest sales challenges. So far, I have received 275 challenges. While I am still in the process of categorizing them, I noticed that a number of them mentioned “Closing the sale” as their biggest challenge.

Closing the sale, cinching the deal, tying up all the loose ends, and getting to a yes decision is an important skill in the selling process. Even getting a “No” decision is better than holding onto an everlasting pending one.  Read more...

How did you do this past year on your sales goals?

Did you write your goals down?

Did your review them frequently, and revise them as conditions changed? Or did you set them at the beginning of the year, and forget about them by February?

What do you most want this coming year?

The first and most basic step to getting what you want is to know what that is, and to constantly remind yourself of that. Goal setting is an important skill. One that you’ve may have read about and heard about many times before. It only works though if you do it.  Read more...

In my business, it has been an interesting and very busy two quarters. I’ve worked with sales managers, marketing executives, professional services practice managers, business development executives, divisional presidents, two dozen sales teams, nine VPs of Sales and directly with 29 CEOs in North America and in Europe. I’ve seen a lot of deals won and more than a few lost.

When I first meet my clients, I find that some really do not know why they have won or lost business, although often they think they do. Their answers to just a few of my questions provides me with a pretty good idea of where to dig in more deeply. (Note: For me to perform a comprehensive diagnosis and provide appropriate recommendations for improvement, a formal win/loss analysis is required.)  Read more...