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Sales is already an interesting game. Buyers must be skillfully shown their need for your product or service in such a way that they become convinced of it, and gently but firmly closed on the idea of having their company pay you money for it. But the factor of competition adds a whole other layer ...

Part of fully evaluating an opportunity is gaining a clear understanding of your prospect company’s decision-making process. On a broader scale, it is an integral and vitally important part of sales key account management. Sometimes the decision-making process is simple; for example, in smaller companies, the purchase approval might be signed off by one person and ...

A key factor in sales account management—and of course in opportunity management—is fully identifying a sales opportunity. That begins with answering some key questions about the opportunity itself. The answers can be researched by salespeople themselves or, probably better, by inside sales reps or sales assistants before an opportunity gets forwarded onto salespeople. That way ...

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, ...