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 ...
This is an important question when it comes to any opportunity in sales strategies: Is the deal worth winning? In the very beginning of the life of a business it may seem that any opportunity is worth pursuing—and in the long run that may be true, whether or not that opportunity is profitable. While profit ...
Within sales strategies, the use of BANT—an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need and Timing—has been around for decades. Salespeople throughout the world memorize this acronym and mentally run through it whenever qualifying an opportunity, and sales management routinely preach it so that salespeople will remember it. Within each of these four elements, however, there is ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
For many years, sales techniques have been a matter of heavy focus—by sales management, sales trainers, sales book authors, and of course salespeople themselves. Endless techniques are evolved, refined, taught, adapted or rejected, and endlessly argued. But if there is one particular factor underlying all sales techniques that nobody could argue against, what might that ...
