Executives are a tough sell and it takes the right sales skills to match them. One of the toughest skills for me has always been the money topic. I personally like to buy not negotiate and it shows in my sales role. But there are ways to handle the negotiation as you will learn in this ManageSmarter.com article – Back to Basics: Think Before You Offer Discounts. The pull quote (emphasis mine): However, professional buyers and key decision-makers know that many sellers will drop their price at the first sign of resistance, so they ask everyone for a discount and can be aggressive in their approach. Plus, experienced negotiators lose… Read More
Continue ReadingShortening The Sales Cycle
Salesopedia.com offers a good article this week on a timely topic – How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle. The author cuts to the quick on an issue we encounter frequently: To begin with, many sales people just don’t know how long their sales cycle is, we ask and we hear things like “depends” (sometime it fits), “it changes” (it always seems longer during Daylight Savings Time), and the all time favorite, “well you know it’s different in our business”. Well it’s not really. Underlying this is the fact that many reps and organizations do not know what their sale looks like, they have not deconstructing their sale, identified the basic… Read More
Continue ReadingToughest Sales Objection – Indifference
Clayton has a post on his Salesopedia blog that references some recent survey results from their highly-visited site. One result jumps off the screen: What’s the toughest objection? Indifference …….. 64.7% Price …………….. 26.5% Timing …………… 8.8% Isn’t that the truth? We used to work for a sales trainer who always stressed that indifference is the worst outcome of a sales call. Salespeople know what to do with a yes (after writing that, I wondered if there are salespeople who don’t know what to do with a yes…), they know what to do with a no, but no one is certain of what to do with a maybe. As a… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Key To Rapport
Selling Power’s article – Establishing a Relationship – discusses methods for establishing rapport quickly with a prospect. This ability is critical to successful selling. The established approach is to mirror the prospect’s “personality style” (or what we call Selling Style). We teach salespeople how to do this and it is most effective. However, there is one point that has to be made before mirroring the prospect’s style. You cannot establish rapport if you are dominating the conversation. We see this often with highly-extroverted sales candidates. They attempt to talk through many topics in what appears to be a fishing expedition for a connection. Bad move. The prospect has to be… Read More
Continue ReadingThe 8 Essential Objections
From JustSell.com: the objections 1. lack of perceived value in the product or service 2. lack of perceived urgency in purchasing the offering 3.perception of an inferiority to a competitive or in-house offering 4. internal political issue between parties/ departments 5. lack of funds to purchase the offering 6. personal issue with the decision maker(s) 7. initiative with an external party 8. “it’s safer to do nothing” perception Of these, I believe salespeople fall down most often with the last one. If your salespeople are not qualifying a prospect properly, the prospect will most often allow the deal to stagnate. They perceive no loss in waiting. If that is true,… Read More
Continue ReadingTechniques To Foster Confusion
From ManageSmarter.com: • Blended jobs. These are jobs where the salesperson is doing two or more dissimilar selling tasks. Sales specialization improves performance. • Corrupted jobs. Decontaminate jobs that are degraded with non-selling tasks such as “fetch and get” after-the-sale customer service duties. • Account ownership confusion. While necessary, the effective use of global account managers, national account managers and overlay specialists requires explicit account ownership protocols. The ownership confusion bullet catches my eye in that we have a customer that is working through this problem. They have a major account manager who has a tendency to swoop into territories covered by local sales reps. The major account manager often… Read More
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