A Misguided Sales Ad

From a sales ad for an Account Executive role (emphasis mine): This person will play a critical roll in the sales process to help educate and market product offering to prospective customers. No. Please don’t do this. Here is what that one sentence implies – features and benefits selling. That approach to selling should be buried at the bottom of a tar pit with other dinosaurs. From a post last week – “people don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” In other words, your ad should speak to salespeople who know how to sell solutions. This company would be better served speaking to the salesperson’s ability to… Read More

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Selling With Brand Power

First, a Foxnews.com article – Tech Companies Top Survey of Most Influential Brands with this ranking: Google Apple YouTube Wikipedia Starbucks Now the lesson we have learned over time – salespeople whom sell for the market/brand leader often have difficulty moving to a company in the same market with less market share. This fact has played out time and again. The issue is simple, when you sell for a market leader, getting sales appointments is never as difficult as selling for a mom & pop competitor. Hiring companies often think they have scored a coup by hiring a salesperson from the 800lbs. gorilla in their market. Most times, these salespeople… Read More

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Free Tools for Researching Leads

I follow some of the career articles that the Star Tribune writes and found an interesting one titled New Year, New Career: Nine Tools for Researching Leads. You are probably wondering why would I reference a career newsletter? Well, let me tell you it has some great free resources for your salespeople to use in researching their business leads. Please allow me to highlight those that would be relevant to almost any sales team. Just Sell – Sign up to receive detailed information on at least 50 companies that have experienced a major event in the last 5 business days which will lead to future growth… delivered straight to your… Read More

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Tips for Effective Listening

If you have been in sales for any length of time you have probably heard something to this effect – “If you’re talking, you’re not selling”. I came across an article at Salesopedia that provides 10 tips for effective listening. Now the article is not written directly for salespeople, but there are some great points that are good reminders we can apply to our everyday sales life. Face the speaker. Sit up straight or lean forward slightly to show your attentiveness through body language. Focus solely on what the speaker is saying. Try not to think about what you are going to say next, if you do, you may not… Read More

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Do You Make This Mistake When Presenting?

From the JustSell.com daily email: sales lesson: Harvard Business School Professor emeritus Theodore Levitt once said, “people don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” sales point: Your prospect doesn’t want a product, she wants a solution. You need to listen to uncover your prospect’s hidden needs, and then sell your product as a solution. It’s not about what you’re selling – it’s about how what you’re selling can help the customer. Be valuable. And remember – a good salesperson walks away if he cannot truly help his prospect. Utterly profound. The professor’s quote is brilliant. And the last line of the sales point is one we preach… Read More

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The Fine Art of Stalling

“Let me think it over.” “I’ll get back to you.” “We’ll take a look at it.” If you have been in sales more than a day, you are familiar with these sayings. They are the prospect’s attempts to “stall” a buying decision. These comments are trouble for any salesperson who does not get these fuzzy phrases qualified. And yet often the salesperson accepts these stalls and presumes a close date for the deal. This approach is almost always the explanation for a prospect making it through the sales funnel but never closing. These are the deals that hurt because they have been forecasted with a high probability to close. And… Read More

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3 Steps To Remember Names

I am simply awful at remembering names which is a real drawback when working in sales. JustSell.com offers some quick tips to help improve your memory when meeting new people: 1 – Give full attention 2 – Repeat the name 3 – Make an association Follow the link and you will find bullets under each of the 3 steps with specific suggestions. If you struggle with names, this 1 page article is well worth your time.

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What, Not How – Part 2

Just caught up to this SM&M article – Advise from the Field. A couple excerpts: Rather, Feldshuh, the president of the merchant-services company, tries to gear agents to move from the lagging 80 percent into the top 10 or 20 percent of sellers. He does that through concentrated, thoughtful, in-the-field strategies, warming reps up to clients first with short, non-pitching meetings. Then he asks them to “open their mouths” and deliver a pitch just days after they’ve gotten their feet wet from dropping off BPS materials at prospects’ offices. The tactic works, he says, and boosts their performance through gradual sales improvement rather than a do-or-die approach to closing the… Read More

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7 Deadly Sins of Salespeople

From SM&M – The Seven Deadly Sins of Salespeople: 7. Chattering 6. Gourmandizing (never heard this word before) 5. Inactivity 4. Obliviousness 3. Shallowness 2. Presumptuousness 1. Ignorance You will need to follow the link to read the description of each “sin.” It is well worth the time as the author has laid these out in detail. I agree with all of them though I would have swapped the order of Presumptuousness and Ignorance. My reason is this – a salesperson can effectively close a deal without having a spy (to use the author’s word) within the organization. A salesperson who presumes to know critical pieces of qualifying information will… Read More

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Of Cold, Coffee and Closing

This is not the way to start your day – it is -20 degrees here this morning in New Prague, MN. That’s pretty cold even by our standards. Next I read that there is going to be a coffee bean shortage next season which certainly means that prices will be increasing. Not what you want to read on a -20 morning. However, I was thinking about the importance of qualifying in successful selling based on this post from yesterday. A key point to understand is that qualified deals close themselves. If a salesperson can successfully qualify the prospect, they do not need to use slick closing techniques. The obvious question… Read More

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