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As we have discussed in recent blog posts, there are numerous levels to qualifying a sale. There is the basic fundamental of a buyer or other person at a company interested in your product or service. There is the fact of the budget being available or not. Moving up a bit further, there is gathering ...

Sales Pipeline management is best conducted with heavy emphasis on fully qualifying opportunities. The better an opportunity is qualified early on in the sales process, the easier the sale is going to go and the less risky it’s going to be. An important part of qualifying opportunities is the understanding and tracking of buyer patterns. ...

When a raw lead is passed to a sales rep or an inside sales rep, there is often much information missing from it. It usually only has the company name, contact, the contact’s job title, and a phone number and/or email address. A sales rep’s time is valuable, and such sketchy information doesn’t describe the ...

Within sales strategies, qualifying opportunities is often not given the total attention it deserves. In the past, “qualifying” usually went about as far as, “Do they have the budget?” It has been found over time, however, that the more qualification is done of an opportunity, the better the control the salesperson will have of it. ...

Forward-thinking companies are realizing that their sales force is actually an entrepreneurship: it is composed of people who act and think as entrepreneurs. If there is a single factor that separates entrepreneurs from the rest of society, it would be that they make their own games. Salespeople may be (and usually are) employed by others, ...

Most salespeople are very understandably living in the moment. All their attention is on that next sale or those next sales that are occurring right now. Each sale has its own set of peculiarities—such as the buyer that constantly has to be reassured, or the one executive at your prospect company that has a cousin ...

Over the last 20 years, required characteristics of a sales rep have been radically altered. What are the differences, and what must a salesperson be to make it in today’s sales force? How do you define today’s sales force effectiveness? Yesterday Those of us who are old enough can remember the successful salesperson of yesterday. ...

The term insight selling has come about in an era of educated buyers, and is now influencing sales strategies everywhere. Since buyers can conduct plentiful research on potential solutions to their issues, they no longer turn to salespeople until they’ve got a relatively firm grasp on what their solution should look like. Salespeople armed only ...