One way that you can boost your sales is by upselling. Yet, what is the most effective way to create these opportunities? Here are four strategies that will increase the likelihood that prospects will respond favorably to your upselling attempts.

Strategy #1: Earn The Right To Attempt to Upsell

Before you attempt to upsell you must first acquire a thorough understanding of your buyer’s perspective and situation. This may sound straightforward, but it is here that salespeople often fail. A recent Forrester Research study found that a shocking 88 percent of the buyers surveyed believed that salespeople do not understand their problems enough to be able to help solve them. So until your potential customers believe that you understand their problems and objectives, you are not in a position to even attempt to upsell.

Strategy #2: Gain Acceptance to a Larger Request First

There is some very compelling research from behavioral science that shows you are significantly more likely to gain compliance to an upselling request if you have already gained a commitment to a larger request. For example, it’s easier to upsell service contracts to potential customers once they have agreed to purchase your software platform. The reason is because in comparison to the software, which they have already committed to, the service contract is perceived to be a much smaller decision. This is why the best time to attempt to upsell is right after your buyers have committed to act on a larger, related issue.

Strategy #3: Lead with Insights

How should you introduce an upselling opportunity? The best way is to leverage your expertise and look for additional problems that the buyer has that you can solve. Then once you have identified these, provide an insight that will bring it to your buyers’ attention. Offering these insights will also help you gain more trust and position yourself as an expert who can provide real, meaningful value.

Over the years, I have found that potential customers are extremely open to these insights. In fact, often, the issues potential customers think they have is only part of a larger problem. This is why once you begin to look for upselling opportunities; they are relatively easy to spot.

So how should you introduce an upselling opportunity? Here are some introductory phrases that you can use to introduce these insights:

• “Have you ever considered…”
• “Another option you could pursue is…”
• “Something else that a lot of other people in your situation consider is…”
• “When most of our clients considered this option, they also look at…”

Strategy #4: Get Comfortable Upselling

When you first begin trying to upsell, the number one deterrent will be that it will feel uncomfortable. The reason is because is new. So what can you do to increase your comfort levels? There are two things that must happen before you will begin to feel comfortable executing any new sales behavior: Competency and frequency. Let’s first look at competency.

Learning how to upsell will help you become competent, which will inspire confidence and comfort. In addition to the strategies I have shared regarding how to upsell, identify a few of your customers’ common concerns. What are some ways that your product or service can solve these issues? How are you going to introduce an upselling opportunity? Once you know the answers to these questions, you can begin to focus on the next phase of becoming comfortable, which is frequency.

Before you can become comfortable upselling you must practice it. However, there are decades of research studies that have proven that how you practice is just as important as how much you practice. Productive practice should never involve potential customers. Instead, it should be done in a context that allows you to fail, receive feedback and learn. This is why before you ever attempt to upsell with actual prospects, you should first practice. You can practice with a co-worker, spouse, significant others or even record yourself. Regardless of how you practice, be sure to do so in a way that allows you to make mistakes and learn from them.

Then once you have practiced, received feedback and adapted based on the feedback you’ve received, you will find that you will begin to feel more comfortable.  For example, when you first started driving, remember how uncomfortable that felt? It was only after you learned what to do and practiced doing it that you became comfortable. The same is true with any new sales behavior, such as upselling.

One final thought on upselling. Why should you do it?  The reason isn’t just to grow your sales or improve your income. The reason to upsell is to deliver more value to your potential customers. This is why those salespeople who become skilled at upselling are almost always the same salespeople who have the highest customer satisfaction ratings. In other words, upselling is something you do for others, not to them.

In the 20+ years we have been working with sales managers and salespeople, a constant need is sales opportunity strategy advice. One of the main roles of a Sales Manager is to help train your salespeople on how to stay on track during a sales cycle. Each company will have unique domain, market and competitor background but fundamentally, in each case it is knowing what questions to ask.

During any sales opportunity coaching sessions consider asking these three questions with any sales opportunity:

1. Why do anything?
2. Why now?
3. Why with us?

Let’s explore these, acknowledging the answers can’t all be known at the beginning of a sales opportunity but focusing on answering them is critical to maintain focus and winning the sale.

Why do anything?

Any person and organization has a myriad of priorities. Going through a buying decision whether for marketing services, new equipment or office space, is a major commitment that may include multiple people and maybe competing with multiple priorities. So how will your prospect justify the effort and invest the time? Often, the buyer has latent pain – they know they need to do something but they may not know what they need to know or how to decide. They almost certainly don’t want to speak with a salesperson without a strong sense of what they need and whether it is affordable. This presents your first challenge – how to help the potential buyer to answer the question – Why do anything?

Therefore, marketing and sales campaigns which provide the prospect with honest content where the buyer can educate themselves is vital. Your sales team’s prospecting activities (emails, phone calls) should leverage this content and assist in identifying the issues and required capabilities. Blogs, webinars, case studies as all examples of content that may be beneficial to the prospect as long as it is not overtly self-serving.

Once they engage with a prospect, top sales professionals know they can both help the prospect and increase their company’s potential sales success through a deeper discovery phase. Exploring unexpressed potential needs, linking the implications of the current issues with other functions within the enterprise and tying the project to corporate objectives will both help the prospect build momentum internally and differentiate your offering. This is critical to begin to build your “business case” for taking action.

Why now?

Consider again the myriad priorities within the prospect company and the limited availability for executive support and investment capital or expense. To win the business requires more than beating your competition – you need to help your prospect communicate the importance of this initiative and gain internal approval. Perhaps this project is critical to retain a key customer, or comply with upcoming regulations. It may require a formal cost justification and follow a capital approval procedure. If the prospect does not have experience or insight to elevating the importance of your sale within the company and how to navigate the approval cycle, you will either have to help them or accept the consequences. Tools to assist your prospect such as payback models, use cases and template presentations can be both valuable and appreciated.

Timing is important, as knowing when the solution to fix the “pain” must be implemented and begin operation can drive the prospect’s sense of urgency to purchase.

Why with us?

Successful salespeople develop a competitive strategy starting at prospect qualification, refining and adjusting through the Discovery stage. What are the issues and capabilities that your company has helped the prospect uncover and how do you prove the ability to deliver? Are they unique and important to the prospect? Can the competition respond?

Often the committee will meet many days or weeks after all the vendor presentations. Summarizing the issues, the capabilities you offered and how these were received by the team and communicating to all of the committee members could be your last opportunity to stand apart. Whenever possible, these documents should be personalized.

As a Sales Manager, is it important to have your team act professionally, staying aligned throughout with the prospect’s buying process and possibly added value as it has progressed? Remember, as the point of vendor selection nears, the buyer’s sense of risk rises. How you understand and respond to this state may be the deciding factor amongst the prospects choices.

Summary

During the life of any complex sales opportunity it is sometimes difficult to for a salesperson to keep their arms around the abundance of information, questions, insights and tactics. Consider these three questions as their guide. Regularly reviewing each opportunity with these questions and honestly facing the answers, will provide the salesperson and sales manager the insights to adjust the opportunity strategy. Training your sales team to crisply communicate opportunity status to executives within your company via these three questions will both be appreciated and demonstrate your team’s competence and professionalism.

If you would like an additional set of “Magic Questions for Sales Managers”, Ken@AcumenMgmt.com

You know the mantra. Your sales practice is only as good as your quiver of arrows, and your aim. It’s only as good as your attitude, your product, your leads, your proposal, and your closing skills. Is the mantra always true? How could it be? There are factors—variables—coming into play. These variables affect each stage of the game.

As of my writing this, consumer spending is at an all-time high. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (reported here by Trading Economics), the second quarter of 2016 saw people make more purchases than ever before. What accounts for this? Are products better? More qualified leads? Superior salespeople?

The truth is there are a great many factors affecting spending, just as there are many factors that affect sales. Are spending influencers and sales influencers all the same? No. As I talked about in my last post, this is the age of the informed consumer. Consumers are making decisions outside of marketing and sales funnels, they’re making purchases based on word-of-mouth—digital and otherwise.

But we’re concerned with developments affecting sales, because that’s the business we’re in. Awareness can help keep conversion rates high. The following developments have changed the game for good.

#1: Personalization

According to international marketing and branding agency Base Creative, personalization is one of the biggest trends to watch in 2016. And it’s not going to stop now. Because of the availability of consumer data from online activities, marketing and sales can now personalize campaigns, targeting individuals based on reliable information.

Base Creative’s research shows that personalization delivers 5 to 8 times higher ROI for marketing, and boosts sales by 10 percent, or more. Make no mistake, personalization plays a role in all of the developments I’m presenting to you here.

#2: Mobile payment

Now, because of technology such as mobile card readers, you can make a sale from almost anywhere. This increases the potential for sales in the field. You’ll never be unprepared to close. And, in an article on how to accept credit card payments, Square reports that customers spend 12 to 18% more when they pay with a credit card instead of cash.

There’s the potential for traveling salespeople and mobile businesses to conveniently accept payments. There are improvements in personalization from marketing and sales. Combine these developments and you can see why consumer spending has continued to rise.

#3: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

This just makes sense. Repeat customers spend more, and they do word-of-mouth marketing for you. CRM uses science to simplify the process of selling, to help manage ongoing relationships and create new ones. It does this by sifting through data, allowing you to zone in and personalize the sales process.

Essentially, through CRM, salespeople can now keep track of more contacts, because the software does the work for them. They can hone in on leads, have productive conversations, and move towards conversions with precision. This efficiency wasn’t possible with old-school sales.

#4: Sales acceleration

Back in 2005, Barry Trailer, a founder of CSO insights, released a study showing companies who use CRM generate 17% more revenue than those who don’t. Then Sales Acceleration software came along to automate the process of selling.

Whereas CRM is about really working personally on those relationships, Sales Acceleration can operate in tandem to generate leads and make appointments. It takes out the legwork of scheduling and calling. Inside sales teams who use sales acceleration close deals in an average of 69 days, compared with 144 days for outside sales.

#5: E-commerce

As more and more information has become available to consumers, the e-commerce store has stepped up. For the salesperson and entrepreneur, doing an e-commerce store is like putting your bait in the water and sitting back until the fish bite. This is where sales is becoming more like marketing.

But many are interested in improving their chances, which is where Robin Burton’s advice on how to make more money in e-commerce comes in. Interestingly, certain points in Robin’s how-to post can easily apply to sales:

• “Make buying easy”—of course! Every salesperson knows convenient access to what you’re selling is important
• “Accept all payment methods”—this is a matter of removing obstacles to purchase
• “Watch cart abandonment”—if you’re pretty positive a prospect is hooked, but they drop the line, it’s important to take note and think of ways to incentivize the purchase
• “Bundle products”—this is a classic sales incentive tactic: give them more value and they’re more likely to buy

In other words, sales best practices have migrated to the digital world. Does e-commerce spell an end to traditional, person-to-person sales? That’s something we’ll have to watch. Thankfully, any good salesperson has valuable knowledge to improve e-commerce.

#6: Globalization

According to research from Rutgers on globalization, 54% of U.S. companies are involved in foreign markets, and 72% want to increase their international business share. With the reality of globalization comes new challenges for sales, including adapting practices to different cultures and being flexible to a ton of travel.

In the global marketplace, companies must be tech-savvy, implementing data-driven solutions such as CRM, and automated processes such as Sales Acceleration. With that, salespeople must be prepared to use technology effectively.

#7: Social Media

In a study on entrepreneurs and social media, the UAB Collat School of Business made several noteworthy findings:

• Entrepreneurs are “hesitant” to use social media for their business pursuits
• When entrepreneurs do use social media, two of the top ten things they use it for are prospecting and sales

Social media throws yet another variable in the mix for entrepreneurs and sales. It can be tough to figure out exactly how to use it, but you can’t ignore the fact that billions of people are on various social media channels every day. This creates a whole new prospecting field. It also creates a challenging arena for outreaching and closing deals.

Here again, technology such as CRM and an e-commerce funnel can help a great deal if you want to take advantage of social media. But, in my opinion, if you have an excellent lead and you’re in touch on social, do your best to schedule an in-person appointment. Nothing beats the personal touch.

Seven questions that will change your life

Problems. Issues. Stuff.

You could be forgiven for thinking today’s business environment is full of all of these. Big ones, small ones. Old ones. new ones. And your sole aim in life seems to be to reduce their number, and reassure yourself that someday, when all these problems have been solved, all will be well and you can get on with what you really want to do.

You know the flaw in this. There’s seven days in the week and none of them is ‘someday’. It’s not going to happen. This is it. Real life. Stuff happens. Are you ever really ‘on top’ of everything? Probably not – which means that when the chips are down you really are going to have to embrace the journey, embrace the issues, look each problem smack in the eye – and get positive.

Most would say they want rid of their problems – yet spend much of their time rooted in those very issues, perfecting them rather than pointing their brains towards the possible solutions. Many tackle those problems with a negative tilt – which means the problems stick around, grow and in many cases get ignored until later when they come back into play, by then three times as big.

Questions that DON’T work

These are the types of questions that are asked by those with a negative disposition. Take a look at them (hopefully for the last time?) as a reminder of how NOT to approach a problem;

• What is your problem?
• Why is it a problem?
• Why do you have this problem?
• What caused it?
• What are your limitations in solving it?
• Who’s to blame?
• Why haven’t you solved it yet?

And so on…

Ask these questions and you stay on the cycle of despair. Constantly asking these questions will get you nowhere. They lead to nowhere. You’re still deeply entrenched in the problem, probably feeling pretty depressed about the whole thing and, crucially, you’re no closer to a solution. And by following the thought patterns encouraged by these questions, you’re building up resentment, which is never recommended.

So the main thing here is that we’re prone to think more IN the problem than above the problem. Immersing yourself in these questions will only end up nurturing your problems, making sure they’re fed and watered – helping them fester and grow.

Break the Cycle

Stop.

You need to break this cycle. So instead, consider another set of questions that will help you solve your sales challenges effectively and in most cases very quickly. With these questions you’ll always produce a plan, always produce a solution.

Dive straight in. Find somewhere you won’t be disturbed, close down those gadgets, and give this your full attention.

Think of a problem that’s been niggling away at you for far too long.

If you wanted to remind yourself of how debilitating your example problem is, then by all means take your problem through the set of questions above. It may make for a reminder of your current approach and how it’s not getting you very far.

Questions to change your life

On the other hand, if you’d rather go straight into solution-mode, go straight to the next set of questions below. Answer them initially in your head and give yourself no more than 10 seconds for each question. Your answers should reflect your gut reaction. If it helps, have someone you trust read the questions out to you – remember, anyone helping you needn’t get to hear your answers as they stay within your own mind, at least for now.

So, taking the issue you identified, answer these questions:

• What do you want?
• How do you want it to be?
• What do you need to get it?
• What resources do you already have that will help you get this outcome?
• Where are you with regards to achieving it?
• What’s the next step you can take towards getting your desired outcome?
• When will you take this step?

Notice how you feel at the end of this sequence of questions.

Rather than remain entrenched in the issue as you would have been (when moving through those initial set of questions) I’d wager that you’re feeling much more positive about the issue you chose to explore. It’s likely you already have ideas you implement straight away.

What’s going on here? Basically by asking those forward facing questions you are starting to train your brain to search for solutions rather than dwell on the problem. This can lead to massive shifts in thinking and in turn the hard results and success you will generate. Just a simple set of questions that can have a massive impact.

Change or perish

What have you tended to do up to now? Nurture your problems? Promote a negative outlook? Remember if you can’t solve issues quickly, can’t turn your brain away from negative thoughts about your everyday issues, then you will definitely miss out. You’ll miss out to those who have developed their thinking and problem solving attributes – maybe to other members of the sales team in your own organisation or to other salespeople in other organisations who will beat you to the sale.

So, whenever you have an issue, challenge, problem, call it what you will, use these seven questions, use them early – and notice how much better your overall performance becomes.

It might seem odd to try and pin a ”higher meaning” on sales. Aren’t salespeople mainly in it for the money? It would sure seem that way, given how salespeople are portrayed in the media and in popular culture. But let’s take a closer look.

The Search for Meaning

How important is meaning to a person’s life? For at least one significant answer to that question we can turn to Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, who founded an entire school of thought around a person’s search for meaning. Frankl saw this search as life’s primary motivation.

It is important to point out that Frankl also said that each person must discover such a meaning for themselves—nobody can give it to them. So while we cannot give each individual salesperson the meaning for their own life, we can certainly point out that they mean a great deal more than they might have been given credit for in the past.

Salespeople: Need for Meaning

Any salesperson will tell you: a career choice in sales, while it can certainly pay off, is also a tough way to go, tougher than many other career choices. This is true if for no other reason than the amount of rejection the average salesperson gets—for many, it’s in the range of 60-80%. Even the best salespeople in the world have a closing ratio of 40-50%—meaning the remainder is rejection. How many other professions have to deal with this level of adversity?

On top of this rejection, salespeople are often characterized with labels such as “pushy,” “arrogant,” “manipulative,” and other such labels, while not being recognized for the value they actually create.

Other professions generally have long ago realized their value to society and the culture. A nurse working through the night in an ER knows he or she is helping people. A police officer taking criminals off the streets knows the contribution they are making to society. Even the accountant, in slightly less dramatic fashion, knows that when they balance the books they are performing a valuable service.

So in addition to the high degree of rejection a salesperson experiences, they are also greatly undervalued, with their true worth to the culture rarely, if ever, pointed out and celebrated.

If for no other reasons than these, a salesperson deserves to understand their true meaning.

Media Portrayals

The negative stereotype of salespeople has often been propagated by the media and popular culture making many salespeople almost apologetic for their chosen profession. A very interesting book entitled Television and Movie Representations of Salespeople: Beyond Willy Loman by Kathrine B. Hartman, states that between the years 1903 and 2005, there were over 281 English-language movies made in which salespeople were negatively represented.

This negative representation has spread throughout the culture to the point where today salespeople are still frequently regarded with suspicion.

Interestingly this wasn’t always the case. If we go back many centuries to roughly 1200 AD, salespeople, then known as “merchants,” were the agents primarily responsible for opening up communication, commerce and trade between vastly different cultures—particularly Europe and Asia. Merchants had a positive reputation. For example, in the Arab world it was said that the trader was gracious, and had goodness and generosity.

So by developing an understanding of the higher meaning for sales—both in salespeople and society at large—we can start to overcome this negative stereotype once and for all.

It should be pointed out, though, that this negative reputation isn’t all-pervasive. As discussed in the Austrian School of Economic Thought, a product or service can only be sold to someone when they perceive its value in their own mind—something called subjective value. In order for that product or service to be sold, that subjective value must also exist for the salesperson; the prospect must value the salesperson, too. This shows that the negative portrayals of salespeople haven’t convinced everyone. If they had, nothing would ever get sold, ever.

The Higher Purposes

As we have discussed, most salespeople are not aware that they have a much higher purpose than anyone has ever given them credit for. A salesperson is the primary agent of a company engaged in trade. As pointed out by several authorities in the Austrian School of Economics, “Trade has a peacekeeping element.” This becomes rather obvious when you realize that 2 countries engaged in trade cannot be at war. The more successful the trade between 2 entities, the less likelihood of war or conflict.

To show how off the rails this can get, look at the state of trade in the world at this very moment. Trade cannot be conducted without an incredibly involved trade agreement, such as the one being proposed between the US and the European Union (TTIP). And now that Britain has left the European Union, a whole different agreement will be needed between Britain and the EU. So in terms of trade, the skills of salespeople are needed more than ever.

There is a second purpose, too. Salespeople, when they are responsibly conducting business (as I believe most of them are), are also engaged in creating wealth for themselves, their employers and their communities.

Interestingly these higher purposes are rarely taught or pointed out. Very few people seem to know how valuable salespeople are to our culture and society. Understanding this can directly lead to a salesperson finding their own meaning. It can also help a salesperson hang in there through the tougher times, when rejection is higher than normal.

Motivation

Sales managers are often wrapped up in trying to motivate their sales teams. Some will attempt psychological tricks to create motivation—but salespeople can easily spot such fake motivations, and if it succeeds at all it will be very short lived.

As I said earlier, the seeming motivation for many salespeople appears to money. In the long run, though, I don’t believe that money alone will motivate anyone for very long—there has to be more meaning to life.

Part of this meaning, I believe, lies in altruism: the performance of good for others for no other reason than the good performed. When salespeople really benefit others, they not only make repeat customers but they help enhance their own reputations.

But in the end, while there are certainly other factors involved in motivation including the system of compensation, a primary motivation must be this higher meaning.

Happiness

Every person wants to be happy. In my opinion, happiness is something that cannot be artificially created—it is something that comes as a result of doing or achieving something of significance. Once you have found a reason and acted upon it, happiness happens automatically.

Just like when people experience a truly deep and mutually fulfilling connection in a romantic relationship, happiness flows naturally.

In the same fashion, when a salesperson realizes that they are performing the tremendous service of creating wealth, peace and helping the community, they, too, could achieve this level of happiness in their professional life. It could put a real smile on their face when they sell, and not a fake smile, either—rather one that flows naturally from knowing the meaning and the reason they are selling.

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Understand that the way to repeat business and continuous referrals is to serve customers in an exemplary fashion and not flog products and services at them. They don’t differentiate between sales and service; serving begets sales. They realize that in the long run, the customer relationship is the primary value sales creates for the organization.

Serve their employees in the same way they expect customers to be treated. If salespeople on the inside aren’t served well by their leader, it’s unlikely they will treat customers well.

Have a sales strategy that mirrors perfectly the strategic game plan of the overall organization; they use it as THE context for designing their priorities and how sales are compensated. Chasing sales tactics that don’t have direct line of sight to strategy results in sales dysfunction.

As a top priority, create a sales proposition that separates their team from “the sales herd”. They understand that the answer to the question “Why should I buy from you and not your competition,” is THE key element of their success. If their team looks like all other teams, customers have no motivation to choose them.

Don’t over-analyze everything. The degree of study depends on the risk associated with the decision to be made. They select a course of action that is “just about right” and get on with it.

Don’t look for perfection. The quest for perfection is a roadblock to execution. They understand that success is a function of doing lots of imperfect stuff fast.

Are known champions of change within their organization which gives them personal currency and the ability to garner resources to support their sales efforts.

Encourage salespeople to lose a sale if it means keeping the relationship with the customer. They do whatever it takes to drive home the message that deepening the customer relationship is the critical sales priority.

Spend copious amounts of time with their salespeople in the field. Learning what’s really going on. Determining barriers to performance. Make meaningful change. They don’t have an ivory tower mentality.

Are contrarian by nature? They believe that the source of opportunity lies not in copying what others are doing, but rather charting a course that no one else is on. They are “180 degree thinkers”. Benchmarking sales best practices is not on their radar.

Accompany salespeople to meet with customers regularly. They rely on obtaining customer feedback on organizational performance and input on sales performance from seeing them in action.

They are relentless and voracious learners. Standing still intellectually isn’t an option in a world changing every instant. Value added to the organization depends on sales leaders “keeping up.” They believe staying ahead requires learning leadership.

The smart generation of sales leaders know that success doesn’t come from an academic pedigree.

Smart sales leaders know that brilliant performance is the result of practicing the fundamentals of being different, staying close to customers, serving employees and executing strategy in the trenches.

Are you a smart sales leader?

How do the top salespeople continually blow away their quotas so effortlessly? Do they have some kind of secret formula they follow to ensure success consistently? Yes – and much of it has to do with how top sales performers adhere to the key sales activities in their sales process and clearly understand the buyer’s engagement levels along the way giving them a roadmap/foundation for sales success.

A top sales performer knows the importance of maximizing their time to either move a deal efficiently from lead generation to close or lose early.

And believe it or not, it all starts at the beginning when you engage the prospect. Here are three simple ways you can better engage prospects, win more deals, and become a top performer.

#1: Do More, Earlier in Your Sales Process

Top salespeople know that the more research you do earlier in the process, the better you will be prepared for anything that comes next. If you spend time understanding who the key decision makers and influencers are and what they are trying to accomplish – business outcomes, personal wins, their key priorities and why – and these key stakeholders are engaged, at all levels in the discovery process, the better you can determine if this is where you want to spend your time.

#2: Use Good Old-fashioned Value Linking

By gaining a better understanding of what the prospect is trying to achieve – at all levels of their organization – and the impact if they do not achieve them, you can better position your solution and pricing – and become more of a trusted partner. How many times have you known in your heart that you have the right solution for your prospect/customer, but the deal stalled? Or you lost the deal after spending a ton of time on it? Or you got the verbal OK but the contract sat forever in procurement? We have all been there.

Top salespeople are experts in good old-fashioned value linking. They become that go-to person who best understands the business outcomes and priorities the key decision makers are trying to achieve, and they know when they are at the right levels of the organization. If they cannot determine specific business goals and priorities or clearly understand the impact of doing nothing, they will not waste their time and will either figure out a way get this information or move on.

#3: Prepare for Meetings

Top salespeople know that preparing for meetings with key decision makers is a critical and great use of their time. They would never just show up and wing it. If the meeting does not go well, it may take an inordinate amount of time to get a second meeting or they may never have the opportunity. They want to validate the information they have gathered, fill in their gaps of knowledge and test the buyers level of engagement to best ensure everyone’s success.

Top salespeople know that prospects will be glad when you ask questions about what they care about day in and day out. It shows that you’re confident and knowledgeable and that you care more about their priorities than your own.

So learn from top sales performers and take the time to ask better questions early in the sales process, connect the dots, use it as a way to gain credibility, reduce the sales cycle time. And hopefully, you’ll drive more revenue now that you understand how to engage prospects and win more deals.

With Pipeliner CRM, our main focus has never been to make it more possible to control salespeople (as seemed to be the mission of many CRM applications), but to empower them and, with every release, make it increasingly more possible for them to sell.

We do this because we actually believe in salespeople. We’re not only here to greatly boost the positive reputation of salespeople, but more importantly to boost their self-esteem, and help them to believe in themselves.

Reputation

Going back in time, salespeople have had a bit of an issue with their reputation. There was always a suspicion that a salesperson was going to try and take unfair advantage of a prospect, push something on them that they didn’t want or downright cheat them. To some extent this is still true today—salespeople are still regarded with a degree of mistrust.

The reasons for this lie in the fact that the dishonest actions of a few have tarnished the positive efforts of the many. There have been salespeople that were pushy, or provided inaccurate or only partial information about a product or service, just in the effort to bring in that sale.

It didn’t help that ill-intentioned companies used decent salespeople to push faulty products on unsuspecting customers. In such a case the salesperson wasn’t wholly to blame, and some of them didn’t even know.

At the same time, people have realized that the life of a salesperson is certainly not easy—witness the extreme popularity of Arthur Miller’s award-winning play Death of a Salesman, which opened in 1949 and is still being performed today. People knew it was a tough way to go.

The Internet and Transparency

Today, the honest salespeople—whom I believe are in the far majority—are winning out. Why? It’s much more difficult for dishonest salespeople to succeed today.

The broad proliferation of the internet has brought transparency to commerce and business. When a product is not worthy, word spreads almost instantly, and people will stop buying it. When a company is guilty of unfair practices, the world is going to know about it very quickly, and the company won’t be around for very much longer unless they change. Companies are now becoming wise to this, and many are changing their ways for the better.

The same is true of salespeople. If a salesperson is routinely cheating prospects and customers, a bad reputation is going to rather quickly extinguish that salesperson’s career.
For the same reason that dishonest salespeople aren’t succeeding today—transparency—the honest ones are succeeding. Their reputation precedes them. Through social media, reviews, and word of mouth, great salespeople become known as product experts and people that provide genuine help.

It can also be seen that one of the three of these things—a company, a product or a salesperson—being illicit or unfair can taint the other three. That’s because today, people tend to think of all three as a single unit. For that reason companies should manage, market and brand all three together—with a positive emphasis on all 3 as 1.

Network Selling

In an effort to assist the majority of salespeople—the honest ones—in today’s interconnected world, here is a graphic that we came up with to illustrate what we call today’s Network Selling.

As you can see, the elements the seller brings to the table are:

• Self-aware
• Confident
• Business Acumen
• Value-oriented

The buyer, on the other hand, brings:

• Recommendations
• Reviews
• Referrals

Additionally, the buyer acts as a networked multiplier—experiences good or bad are going to be passed along to friends and colleagues. As you can see, that seller is only going to succeed if that shared data reflects positively on the seller.

You can see in this graphic that the elements shared between the seller and the buyer are those things one which they both must firmly agree for the sale to be a total success and, more importantly, for further successes to follow:

• Business Solutions
• Empathy
• Respect
• Trust
• Win/Win
• Enjoyable

Of paramount importance is that second to the last item, “Win/Win.” In today’s networked selling environment, both the buyer and the seller have to win for sales to be a real success.

Seller-Buyer Transfer of Knowledge

We read today that a big part of the change in today’s sales landscape is that of the buyer—that 60 – 80% of a buyer’s decision is made before ever contacting a salesperson, and therefore a salesperson is no longer responsible for any transfer of knowledge to the buyer.

I strongly disagree with this assessment. Given the components in the Network Selling graphic above, the inherent knowledge that a salesperson brings to the table can never be replaced, even by computer algorithms. This is especially true in B2B sales.

At that moment when knowledge is involved, a buyer can’t make fully informed decisions—this process of knowledge transfer is needed, and is more important than ever.

Pipeliner CRM

So how does Pipeliner CRM fit into all of this?

We have developed Pipeliner from the very beginning from the perspective of the salesperson who is honest, self-responsible, and who is not to be controlled like a machine. We believe that the majority of salespeople are honest and are out to do right by prospects and customers.

We believe people can be self-responsible. It oftentimes happens that the system (as with legacy CRM applications) robs them of their responsibility and attempts to make them into machines, so they can be controlled, manipulated and pushed.

We believe that self-responsible salespeople are capable of thinking logically. For that reason we have developed Pipeliner to be totally visual in all of its features—it allows salespeople and sales managers to instantly grasp sales opportunities and statuses, and act on them.

Unlike many CRM developers of the past, we didn’t develop Pipeliner to better control salespeople, but to liberate them. Pipeliner makes it far more possible for salespeople to see how they’re progressing, and for sales managers to accurately coach and mentor them.

In days past a sales manager had a lot of figures in front of him showing a salesperson’s performance, that the salesperson was not privy to. Hence the sales manager was giving the salesperson instructions or orders, and the salesperson had no idea why.

Today, both the sales manager and the salesperson have the same data regarding the salesperson. I believe that both the sales manager and the salesperson will make correct decisions if they have accurate data in front of them.

I’ve said repeatedly that the world can be changed through sales. Well, if we are to change the world through salespeople, it will only be through self-responsible salespeople, never machines.

Pipeliner is the only CRM solution based in such sound principles—not simply and only on a list of features we think salespeople and sales managers need.  Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.