Posts from — May 2010

I lead a lot of sales training sessions that focus on the first half of the sales process. In the workshops we do a ton of live warm and cold calling on speakerphone.

I make and hear hundreds of prospect calls a year. Everyone wants the silver bullet for B2B sales, especially for landing that first meeting or interest. Get ready…here it is. If you look like your prospects, sound like your prospects, feel like your prospects, even smell like your prospects then you cease being a sales person and turn into a peer.  Read more...

Referrals can be really powerful selling tools when used correctly and as part of a formalized plan. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way to ask for referrals. Too often, sales people and business owners commit classic mistakes in asking for them and assume, based on their disappointing results, that referrals might simply not be worth all the effort.

Referrals do work. Working with our own clients at Engage Selling, we’ve seen closing ratios on sales calls tighten dramatically when referrals are incorporated into the sales script…some as much as three-to-one (in other words, obtaining one sale out every three sales calls placed).  Read more...

1. Never negotiate with anyone who is not qualified to negotiate. If in doubt, ask your contact how they’ve handled a similar type of negotiating in the past. Listen for names, dates and other details that will provide clues as to their level of responsibility.

2. Never put things into writing unless you’re prepared to live with them. Once an item is put into writing, it becomes an anchor either for you or the customer. This is especially critical when negotiating with a professional buyer who will use anything put into writing as leverage.  Read more...

Once you’ve set up a Referral Rewards Program, the next step is to get proactive and make asking for referrals a part of your sales and account management processes. This way you aren’t waiting for clients to think of you to offer them up.

With a good process in place, you create a steady stream of referral prospects while letting your customers know how important referrals are to you.

You can enlist everyone in your organization who works with your clients to ask for referrals. There are only two things that hold them back today:  Read more...

As a professional sales trainer, I have the opportunity to talk with salespeople, from a wide range of industries, representing a variety of products and services.

Based on their feedback, I find that while most sales reps are challenged in this difficult economy, some are doing quite well.

In fact, it’s not unusual to find evidence of both success and failure even among sales reps working in the same office, trained by the same manager, selling an identical product, in the exact same market.  Read more...

In today’s message I want to talk about the most profitable sale ever made.

In any business there is one type of sale that brings the most profit. There is one single sales activity that can make the most difference in the profitability of your company. Not taking advantage of this all important sales opportunity will cost you thousands of dollars.

That sale is called the “upsell” or “add on” sale. The reason this type of sale is so profitable is because you have already invested the cost of acquiring and administering your client.

It has been said that on average a happy customer or client will share their experience with three other people, while a negative experience will be retold upwards of 6 to 7 times.

I readily admit I don’t have the scientific numbers to prove whether the above claim is true or not, but I can tell you that if there’s even the slightest smidgen of truth in it I don’t want to find out for sure! Do you? No, of course you don’t.  Read more...