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 ...
Be a good Salesperson is an animated short sitcom that is set in a fictional company office, in the sales department, and parodies barriers salespeople run into. Watch it now: Be a good Salesperson.
It would be wonderful—at least for some—if everything could be automated as has been done in factories. A complex machine such as an automobile can be put together practically from scratch along an assembly line, and there’s never a human hand involved. Computer-driven robotic precision goes into every rivet placed, every weld dropped. And with ...
Progressive pipeline management—otherwise known as opportunity management—is completely dependent on the information available to sales reps. It often happens that such data is somewhat sketchy and incomplete, which of course paints an unclear picture of the risk involved in a sale. The poorer the information, the more the activity of the sales force resembles haphazard ...
While the handling of sales opportunities is a technical subject that we’ve been exploring in some detail, there is an underlying factor that affects any salesperson’s opportunity management. It is also the underlying element to sales techniques. That is, the way an opportunity is viewed. A Matter of Viewpoint Often the way that a salesperson ...
A quality CRM tool is crucial both to the operation of a sales force and, factually, of a business itself. But as a sale travels further up the pipeline, the precision of that CRM application increases in importance. By the time you’re well into opportunity management—that stage of a sale in which a sales rep is ...
Sales management and sales forces don’t much care for pondering lost opportunity. It’s usually like, “We lost it, it’s gone, move on.” And it’s true that considering past losses is completely useless as an exercise just for itself; if one is simply mentally rehashing them, it can be productive of nothing but a bleak outlook. ...
According to a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled Dismantling the Sales Machine, the time has come to let salespeople utilize their “on the ground” judgment and sales techniques when it comes to making various decisions about opportunity management. According to the article, “Selling today requires flexibility, judgment, and a focus on results—not process.” The ...
