Leader's Beacon

Details are the finishing touch that bring back your customers for future business.  A colleague of mine manages nearly forty commission sales people.  The “best of the best” make huge income and are revered in the top 100 of a large, multinational company. What is their secret? Make the customer feel special – like they [...]

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To persuade, motivate and influence you need to use the right words in your presentation and your presentation materials. To maximize your impact, try adding these words the next time you have a presentation. Other articles you might like:Employees Listen With Their EyesLanguage, Words and Phrases that Destroy RelationshipsNetworking For Life50 Ways to Creating Enduring [...]

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In my early years of selling, whenever I got an objection, my heart would sink, my stomach would go into turmoil, and my mind would shift into overdrive trying to figure out how to deal with it. All my early sales training and all the sales books I’d ever read made a big deal about [...]

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Often when I suggest to salespeople that they do some telephone selling, a panicky look comes over their faces and you’d think that I’d suggested they pick up a hot poker and put it to their ear! Part of this fear and disdain comes from exposure to extremely poor telemarketers who are blight on professional [...]

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It’s been almost ten years since I last went on a rant about the sales “profession” and what we can do to make it even more professional. So, here I go again! First off, I want to say that I’ve been in sales for over thirty years and I’ve been proud to call myself a [...]

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No, I’m not referring to a prospect that buys long-distance telephone services. This is about the buyer who is out of reach, the one you can’t contact directly because he or she is too distant. Sometimes this distance is due to geography — the key decision maker is located in some other city or country. [...]

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During our recent TeleSeminar on Handling the (Dreaded) Price Objection, I was asked a really good question by one of the attendees — How do you handle situations where your main competitor is always undercutting you by 20 percent or more? It was a dynamite question and one that might be asked by many salespeople [...]

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No one likes sticker shock, not you and certainly not your prospect. The last thing you want when you mention your final price is for the prospect to gasp, clutch his heart and keel over. That’s why it’s wise to prepare your prospect for what’s to come in terms of the financial investment he will [...]

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Any marketing person will tell you that sex sells. Well, I’m here to tell you that sex doesn’t sell; sex simply gets your attention. After your attention has been aroused, it’s one of the other two primary motivators, or dominant buying motives, that drives you to buy. Those two dominant buying motives are desire for [...]

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Here’s the scene. You want to buy a service from someone but you’re not quite sure if he or she is going to do the job to your satisfaction. What do you do? This isn’t an unusual situation. You’re about to deal with someone or a company you’ve never dealt with before. Maybe it’s time [...]

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You only get one chance to make a good first impression and what you wear has a lot to do with the impression you create. In this day and age of excessive casualness, it’s easy to cross the line and lose a sale, all because of what you’re wearing. Here’s an example. The salesperson was [...]

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I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find it fascinating to listen in on other people’s telephone conversations, at least the half of the conversation I can hear. I was sitting idly in the office recently when my partner took a phone call from a salesperson. I knew it was a salesperson because after [...]

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This article is for those of you who have been in sales for some time. Those of you for whom the glow of the job is beginning to dim a bit. Some non-salespeople think that salespeople lead an incredibly busy social life, full of free meals and days on the golf course. That we get [...]

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Every salesperson eventually falls upon slow times. Whether it’s a regular seasonal slump, marketplace readjustment, or economic downturn, it happens to all of us. What salespeople do during these slow selling times is what separates the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, and the professional from the amateur. Slow Time Blues In [...]

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If you’ve been in sales for any length of time, it’s highly likely that you’ve had a run-in with at least one “nibbler.” No, a nibbler isn’t a person who nibbles on your ear (don’t you wish!); it’s someone who nibbles at the deal you’ve just made. Nibblers are different than hagglers. Hagglers want to [...]

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Why in the world would you want to take your prospect’s temperature? You’re not a doctor. Well, it’s not your prospect’s body temperature I’m suggesting you take. It’s your prospect’s buying temperature. Testing the Water Just like you might test the water before you jump into a swimming pool to see if the water temperature [...]

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