In my last blog post in this series, I discussed how a sales team must be precisely focused for the industry they are in. The sales process and all sales activities must have a precise industry-specific focus. It goes a bit deeper than that, however—for the personality profile of the reps you are hiring must ...
In my last blog, I pointed out that today salespeople must be customer-centric: that is, placing the majority of focus on the buyer, their issues and needs instead of the seller’s product only. In this blog let’s discuss the need to be industry-specific in these efforts, and what that requires. So now we have a ...
In my last blog, I discussed how difficult building a sales team can be, especially for a startup. Your sales reps need to be entrepreneurial-minded (what I call salespreneurs) in order to help get the company truly off the ground and headed toward success. Now let’s take a look at how these salespreneurs should focus ...
Tension is high, and anticipation is thick as the annual sales kickoff for DisruptaCorp begins. Employees at the young tech startup settle in their seats. Mobile devices are hurriedly silenced and stowed. Chatter dissolves into quiet. The CEO, Priya Neghandi, stands in front of the room alongside her VP of Business Development, Kelvin Wickersham. Without ...
Raise your hand if you’ve heard any of these statements over the last 2 years: “67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.” -SiriusDecisions “57% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a customer’s first contact with a supplier.” -Corporate Executive Board (CEB) “On average, prospective buyers in B2B settings have completed 57% of ...
Recently I had the opportunity to work with a great client at their worldwide sales conference in Miami. During the two days, I spent several hours with their sales management team and four hours with their salespeople, they have a great sales culture and you could feel the attitude in the room. In the post-meeting ...
“We liked your proposal, but…” Lose the Sale… Those five words said it all. The client proposal that I’d worked on tirelessly for weeks wasn’t good enough to close the sale. Once I heard, “we’re going with another company,” it was tough to hear anything else. When a client call starts like that, you’d probably rather ...
Have you noticed how many things are dead these days? Cold calling is dead. Outbound marketing is dead. Many say that even marketing as a whole is dead. I grew up during a time when it seemed like a lot of things were dead: Paul was dead. (The rumor in 1969 was that if you ...
What is TRIZ, you ask? TRIZ is a tool developed by a Soviet inventor and science fiction writer, Genrich Altshuller, in 1946. The English translation of the Russian term is “theory of inventive problem-solving.” Altshuller and his colleagues studied thousands of inventions in many fields and detected patterns in the way inventive solutions happen, and ...
There has been a dramatic shift in the way buyers perceive and interact with salespeople — as any sales manager will know. The Harvard Business Review has spoken – it’s “the End of Solution Sales.” If you’ve adjusted your strategies and sales process accordingly, you’re ensuring success. If you haven’t, perhaps you’ve seen sales performance suffering. ...
