All Entries in the "Overcoming Sales Barriers" Category
Rolodexes Are Social Networking Roadkill
Bottom line: Imagine if all the sales teams in your company decided to make the most important relationships cataloged in their Rolodex come alive again. That infusion of intensity and customer focus can change a company – and no sales team ever accomplished that going card after card in a Rolodex dialing for dollars.
Overcoming Hidden Agendas in the Complex Sale
Agendas grow out of motive and intent. So, when motives and intentions are not open and transparent to all involved, “hidden agendas” inevitably develop. These hidden agendas are often buried or disguised within the subtext or context of many situations. This tendency to camouflage motives is especially prevalent in too many complex sales cycles.
Improve Demand/Lead Generation, Handling and Follow-Up
Good demand/lead generation is a continuous process that involves targeted messages and campaign management, response management, lead qualification, sales inclusion and customer relationship-building and retention.
Revenues have been the primary measure of sales performance and still are. For marketing departments, the number of leads generated has often been used as the key metric. This can result [...]
Controlling Rhythm, Metre and Pace of Selling Cycles: Lessons from Coach Wooden
Bottom line: Complex selling cycles are as long or longer than a basketball season. Anchoring the coordinated efforts of teams in shared values and treating time not with fear but with an opportunistic mindset makes all the difference. From the Maestro who delivers an excellent performance to Coach Wooden winning 10 NCAA National Championships, to the sales professionals who sell on value and orchestrate their teams to winning new business, all must be anchored in solid, strong values to succeed.
The True Currency of Guided Selling Is Trust
Bottom line: For those companies who have decided to excel at keeping commitments and earning trust, attaining best practices in guided selling and product configuration is the way to do it.
Best Practices in Multichannel Selling in High-tech Manufacturing
If there is one key takeaway from this global recession is that the stronger the channel partnerships a company has, the greater its opportunity to keep profitable and growing.
Yes, I said growing in the face of a recession.
How to Banish the Boring: Eight Ways to Use Animoto Video in Business Presentations
The best presentations are always great stories. Stories that invoke clashing images that open your mind. But, the “State of the Business Presentation” today is pretty lame. Boring. Bullet-pointed PowerPoint ad nauseum. How to get adventurous when giving presentations?
Ten Tips for Being “Good in a Room” in the Complex Sale
Do you know the one skill that’s considered to be an absolute “must have” in the complex sale? To win at the complex sale, one must be a storyteller, master tactician, strategist, cajoler, evaluator, philosopher, psychologist, bean counter and techno-geek. Yup. All rolled into one. But, even with all of that, there is one skill that is an absolute “must have” in the complex sale. Without it, success is always a delayed sales cycle away – with a morbidly high improbability rate of closure ranging from 0 to 10 percent.
Information Confusion: Selling with Dealers in Specialty Vehicle Industry
Selling to-order vehicles would be easier if the engineers who designed them also sold them. But that’s simply not scalable if you want to achieve any type of global selling and service success.
So you are tasked with this challenge as a Director or VP of Channel Sales, Marketing Operations or Channel Management: How to get [...]
A&D: Transforming Customer-Centered Change Into Profits
In 2008, Cincom undertook a study to measure the factors that A&D companies rely on to be competitive in their markets. The results show that A&D is in the middle of a major transition from being long dependent on manual processes to more automated approaches to integrating financial analysis into project management decisions.