Not every salesperson has a natural gift to quickly bond and develop rapport with prospects. Many try to succeed by ingratiating themselves with frequent contact, entertaining prospects, being responsive, reliable and helpful. However, what if you don’t have the luxury of the preceding and you are faced with a reluctant and guarded prospect who resists…
DetailsTo 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.
Here’s one of the great truths of selling — if prospects can’t tell the difference between your product or service and your competitor’s product or service, they’ll make their buying decision on price. Now, this isn’t the only reason for the price objection coming up but it’s a major one. It’s absolutely amazing how many…
DetailsWhether a company promotes a successful candidate from within – appointing someone to a new or lateral role – or selects a candidate from outside the organization, the company has confidence that a new leader’s skills and experience can meet the challenges of the job. However, consider this startling statistic regarding new leaders: estimates of…
DetailsOne of worst techniques you’ll pick up in business is “let’s do lunch.” It sounds like a great device for conducting business, be it a pitch or project work. Often, your offer is accepted, after all, we have to eat! It sounds less ominous than, “I’d like to setup a meeting to come talk to…
DetailsThere are a couple of situations when it makes good sense to include an interview with a sales candidate’s spouse. The first situation is when you’re seriously considering hiring a salesperson from a competitor. The salesperson may be playing you off against his current employer for a raise. Asking to include the spouse in the…
DetailsIn part one I expressed my despair that companies don’t do a more thorough job of selecting salespeople. My concerns stem from my years in the sales training business where I was too often brought into a company and asked to basically train pigs to fly. They wanted to train salespeople who, at best, should…
DetailsWhen hiring for a position as critical as sales, I’m always surprised that companies don’t take the time to test candidates better than they do. I recognize that the HR department is ill equipped to test salespeople beyond the standard personality or temperament assessment but, even then, most seem loath to use these tools. It’s…
DetailsPreviously, we had explained the value of incorporating a change agents network as part of your overall change management program. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Paul Hagen from Forrester contacted me to request an interview for his recent research report titled “How Customer Experience Change Agents Transform Culture.” I provided Paul with firsthand insights from two customer…
DetailsPrice Price is never the real issue for prospects. The real issue is that they may not believe you are worth the price. The reality is that many times your product and service isn’t worth the price. Not because it doesn’t justify itself, but because your prospect doesn’t value it. So instead of constantly fighting…
DetailsOften 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…
DetailsIn 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…
DetailsThe most significant change in the selling landscape in the last 10 years has been the way prospects buy; sadly, not the way salespeople sell. It is just as important to understand and master the prospect’s buying process as it is for salespeople to master a systematic sales process.
Too many companies still insist on pumping their new hires full of product knowledge and then dumping them on unsuspecting prospects, fully expecting the new salesperson to sell up a storm. These “talking catalogues” start running around “telling” instead of “selling” and the expected storm decays to a light drizzle. The salespeople get depressed at…
DetailsThis 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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