Increasing Predictability, Reducing Risk: The Pipeliner Selling System

What are the fundamentals of every sales process?

Sales Process and the Pipeliner Selling System

The reason salespeople need a sales process is because buyers follow exact journeys. If a salesperson isn’t following along, they are going for the close when the buyer is much further back in their journey. That´s a rapidly lost sale.

So how can the sales process align with a buyer’s journey? This is where the Pipeliner Selling System comes in—for each stage of the System is designed to dovetail with each stage of a natural buyer’s progression.

The 5 Stages

When a buyer begins their journey, they are an Investigator. They are seeking out possible solutions for issues they are experiencing in their company. The job of a salesperson is to focus in on this prospect, and also to focus the buyer’s attention. That’s why the first stage of the Pipeliner Selling System is Focus.
Following the investigation stage, the buyer becomes a Prospect and the salesperson enters the next phase of the Selling System, which is Engage.
When the prospect has successfully been moved through the Engage phase, they become an Evaluator. The corresponding phase for the salesperson for this part of the journey is Convince. This is where the sale is actually made.
Following the Convince stage, the buyer then becomes a Customer, moving into the Close stage of the Selling System, where a new process begins.
As the new process is applied to the customer, they are targeted for Advocate status. The phase of the Selling System that applies here is Cooperate, because advocacy is a collaborative process.

The Pipeliner Selling System is comprised of the common denominators to most or all sales processes. It is designed to reduce your risk and leverage your opportunities.

If you’re uncertain of your sales process or—worse—you don’t have one at all, the Pipeliner Selling System will lay a firm path for you to follow to create a robust, reliable sales process for your sales organization.

Download Increasing Predictability, Reducing Risk: The Pipeliner Selling System now!

How to Win in Sales

The techniques of sales are now driven by the behaviors of a different buyer. Winning requires new thinking and new tools.

Enter the New Era of Sales

The world of sales has changed and traditional sales techniques are no longer as effective as they used to be. It’s no longer a seller’s market. Instead, due to the growth of content marketing, social media and the wealth of free information that’s readily available, buyers have control. Within this book you find the answers to these questions and more:

How did the buyer’s decision-making process change?
What sales and marketing strategies are now most effective?
How does this change affect your sales pipeline?

Download this free ebook and learn how to take control of the front end of your sales pipeline and adapt to the new sales landscape with effective sales strategies.

Take advantage of the new generation of customisable, easy-to-use CRM software. It’s an effective way to gain increased visibility of your pipeline and purposely drive sales. Empower sales teams by collecting and sharing best practice.

Social Upheaval: How to Win @ Social Selling by John Golden

Principles, tactics, and practical advice about using social media as a selling tool.

About Social Upheaval

Drawing on his experience in re-making global companies, author and sales expert John Golden shares his ebook “Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling.”

In the book, John explains how every B2B salesperson can add social selling methods to their toolkit, and why it is so important that they do so without delay. The book covers:

The social selling model
Getting involved in social selling — the right way
Leveraging the psychology of sales
Building an online presence
Planning a social media campaign
How to get started — listening and monitoring
Consistency as a strategy

This powerhouse ebook is a short, easy-to-read treatise that delivers practical advice and tactics to successfully leverage social channels and social behaviors — the new frontier of selling, Social Upheaval is provocative, entertaining and above all immediately useful.

I encourage every sales professional to read and apply these principles.

— Dave Brock

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Emotions In Sales

Entering the Sales world is a lot like engaging in a boxing match. How do you make your emotions work for you?

Knowing Your Opponent

For many in Sales, stepping into a sales opportunity is like stepping into a boxing ring. You’re going to be throwing punches, ducking and weaving — avoiding blows that could disable you or knock you out. The goal is to remain focused at all costs, not lose your nerve, and engage every tactic at your disposal to win.

Emotions are actually involved in a sale from the very beginning, even before you are. People inquire about your product or service in the first place because of an emotional response. The first act in establishing a seller-buyer relationship is fully understanding the emotions connected to the buyer’s issues, because their emotions will guide you all the way through a sale.

The Emotions

Fear

A lesson we can learn from Muhammad Ali is a very profound one: It isn’t the fear that you feel, it’s what you do with it that matters.

Anger

Anger can certainly be justified. But even in dealing with something or someone that makes you justifiably angry, if you don’t pull yourself out of it to some degree, you’re not going to be able to communicate rationally on the subject, or deal squarely with the situation.

The opposite of anger would be best be described as empathy. When you’re lost in anger, a person is deliberately not engaging in empathetic thoughts or behavior, and in fact is refusing to do so. In empathy, you reach out, strive to understand, and to some degree identify with other people.

Sadness

Sadness is another emotion we all experience sometimes. Despite our best efforts, it’s going to happen; it’s a part of life.

What might be the opposite of sadness? Most would probably say happiness. For a salesperson happiness might accompany a won deal, or perhaps even the completion of a stage of the sales process.

The Power of Nurturing the Positive Emotions

What about positive emotions such as joy? Believe it or not, they require as much care as the negative ones, maybe even more.

Download Emotions in Sales now.

Cutting Through the Water: Becoming a Champion Salesperson

In any field, being good is one thing—but becoming a champion is quite another. Taking swimming as an example, some people swim very well. But to become a champion—such as 1972 7-time Olympic Gold Medal winner Mark Spitz, for example—it requires serious dedication, training and practice.

Fortunately, becoming a champion salesperson—what we call a salespreneur—doesn’t require the length of time and physical endurance necessary to become a champion swimmer. But it does require a level of skill and knowledge well beyond that what has traditionally been required of a salesperson.

This book covers what it really takes to become a champion salesperson—a salespreneur.

Chapter 1: Resolving a Bad Image

Although the two professions of champion swimmer and salesperson often have much in common in their dedication, courage, and success, the two differ tremendously when it comes to image. The image of a salesperson is somewhat tarnished, a bit seedy.

You as a salesperson have your work cut out for you. Much of the time your prospects have an innate distrust of all salespeople and automatically include you in that category. How do you overcome that barrier?

Chapter 2: The Born Champion?

The conventional wisdom is that you’re either born a salesperson, or you’re not. If you are, you can sell. If you’re not, you probably shouldn’t even try.

This is completely false. Just as it’s completely false that a champion swimmer “is born that way.” If that were true you could toss untrained children into the deep end of a pool, and a percentage of them would just start swimming. This has never been known to happen.

A champion salesperson, just like a champion swimmer, has trained.

Chapter 3: Perceiving Through the Water

A well-trained champion swimmer is keenly aware of their surroundings: their path in their lane, their closeness to the wall, their distance to the end. Similarly, a salesperson must have a keen awareness of the sales environment and all the factors in play.

Chapter 4: The Salesperson is A Servant/A Leader

Well, which is it? Let’s examine each role in detail—and discover that it’s both.

Chapter 5: The Servant and The Leader

Part of your alertness as a salesperson must be to know when to switch back and forth to either of these roles. This is also true of switching from a listener to a speaker and back.

Chapter 6: The Salespreneur

There is a considerable difference between a salesperson and a real salespreneur—just as there is quite a difference between someone who can swim and a champion swimmer. In addition to training, there is considerable difference in dedication, focus, in willingness to risk, and in responsibility.

So what are these differences, and how does a salesperson fully evolve into a salespreneur?

Download Cutting Through the Water: Becoming a Champion Salesperson now.

White Paper — CRM Empowering the Sales Force

How two companies improved business performance with Pipeliner CRM

CRM at the Forefront of B2B Sales Strategies

One of the best ways CRM technology can be a tool for salespeople is through visibility — easily seeing and understanding customer accounts and relationships. This allows a sales representative to build, grow, and maintain the right level of customer service. CRM attempts to build a 360-degree view of each customer to discover the customer´s needs, meet those needs effectively and in a timely way, discover opportunities for cross selling and upselling, expand current customer relationships, and improve competitive positioning. Drawing different data points from each part of the company as well as outside the firm enables organizations to gain a holistic view of each customer. CRM technology can aid in the process of creating visibility into an account.

Users can gain visibility into the behavior and views of the customer by having account information all in one place. When data is easy to view and analyze, it gives sales managers and others immediate visibility into what is happening. This increased visibility enables sales managers to support salespeople and allows sales teams to communicate more effectively, resulting in more effective sales strategies and better customer service.

CRM systems assemble and organize all customer information in one place in an easy accessible manner for salespeople to view, analyze, and act on. Instead of shifting through call logs and different databases, CRM tools (e.g., a centralized dashboard), showcase each client account for salespeople to view, interpret, and act.

The rise and growth of the CRM (customer relationship management) industry aims to make the customer relationship management task easier and more efficient for salespeople. CRM offers huge potential to empower salespeople to perform their jobs better, resulting in greater company-wide successes.

In this case study, you’ll learn how Juniper Systems, Inc. and Integrated Systems, Inc. utilized Pipeliner CRM for their customer-centric strategies and philosophies to build and maintain the best relationships with the right clients.

Visibility makes work easier, more effective, and more time—efficient resulting in better client relationships. With visibility of customer accounts, salespeople are more responsive, more aware and able to meet the client’s actual needs and wants.

White Paper: CRM Onboarding

There are many issues to take into account when choosing a CRM solution. But chief among these considerations should be onboarding—that is, how easy is it to implement, train your users on, and administrate your new CRM solution?

There are several reasons to pay attention to onboarding:

The longer it takes to integrate and bring the system online, the longer will it will take before your CRM solution begins showing a return on investment.
The same is true for the length of time it takes to train your users. This is especially significant if a CRM application is complex and has a long training runway. The most important CRM users are your sales reps. How long can your company afford sales rep downtime while they’re training on CRM, even part time? Another factor is that salespeople are slowed down in sales velocity as they’re having to train, while they’re forced to work back and forth between existing solutions and the new CRM solution.
Administration can reap serious cost when it comes to implementing a new CRM solution. With traditional CRM applications, there is training needed for CRM administrators. Then once the solution is up and running, it can take one and sometimes more full-time administrators for CRM.
This White Paper addresses the various factors of CRM onboarding in detail—and illustrates with real-world numbers how Pipeliner CRM addresses these issues for a fraction of the cost of its competitors.

Hard Numbers

For this white paper, we actually surveyed our customers and got real-world numbers on onboarding Pipeliner CRM. We then compared these figures with known data about onboarding our chief CRM competitors.

Direct comparisons were made in the areas of:

How complicated it was to get the CRM application up and running
Length of time of the onboarding process
Difficulty of implementation and rollout
Ease of data migration

Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Creating a Sales Force

Central to any company’s sales efforts is, of course, its sales force. A topflight sales force isn’t just something that happens all on its own—it is composed of individuals, each of which have become properly skilled.

Today an expert sales force cannot exist without the right CRM solution—and an effective, empowering CRM solution is central to keeping a sales force sailing along on an even keel through revenue highs and lows, and through personnel arrivals and departures. That CRM solution is the key to increasing sales force effectiveness, and providing many other needed benefits.

Chapter 1: How to Build the Vital Sales Force Skill Ladder

It used to be that a sales rep making halfway decent numbers had a future. But in today’s highly competitive marketplaces and internet-assisted buying, it takes more than just numbers for a salesperson to truly survive. A topflight sales force must be composed of experts in every area of their craft.

Chapter 2: Selling the CRM Solution to the Sales Force

Obviously CRM benefits should be demonstrated to management – in the end it will be management that will cut the check for CRM purchase. But it will be the sales force that ends up having to use this new CRM application. It will be they who take to it happily or begrudgingly.

Chapter 3: CRM Solutions and Sales Force Turnover

Turnover is especially painful when it comes to the sales force, if only because you’re dealing directly with company revenue. A sales rep departs and you’ve immediately lost regular sales from that territory or area. It’s the CRM solution that can ease the difficulty of that transition…or not.

Chapter 4: Increase Sales Process Effectiveness Without Doling Out More Cash

Putting in a CRM solution that actually follows your sales process and possesses proper metrics allows you to monitor – and improve – that sales process all the way down the line.

Chapter 5: Breaking Down the Wall Between Marketing and the Sales Force

In some companies it’s obvious, in others it’s more subdued. But it’s normally a constant situation: marketing and sales just can’t see eye-to-eye. They snipe at each other, each criticizes the other to management, and in some measure each is deemed responsible for the other’s perceived shortcomings. If a way were found for the sales force and marketing to work in complete cooperation, the war could actually be won by both sides.

Chapter 6: Where Sales Force Technology has Brought Us

For buyers and for the sales force alike, the sales landscape looks completely different than it did even 20 years ago.