Are You Aligned With Where Your Customer Is In Their Buying Process?
A friend called me for advice today. He’s a great sales person, a big deal hunter. He wanted to review a deal strategy and call plan he was making on a CTO at a very large, fast growing prospect. His colleagues had been working with the CTO’s team. By far, they were the front runners for their first piece of business with this customer. By itself, it was a big order, but his colleagues saw a lot more potential in the account.
How do buyers buy?
In the Internet age, the power of information has shifted from seller to buyer. In the past, buyers needed to contact sales people for product information. Today, massive amounts of product information is available online. Buyers can educate themselves without sellers knowing about it, and competition is global.
Why Generalized Sales-Training Programs Don’t Work
In my opinion, hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide are wasted every year on irrelevant, unnecessary or inappropriate sales-skills development and there are four obvious reasons why.
Playbooks and the automation of deal level strategies
Sales playbooks have become increasingly popular as a way to improve sales enablement and, by extension, sales execution. Before we delve into the details, let’s take a page from Vince Lombardi and start with the fundamental question: What is a sales playbook?
Swahili v. Swedish: Driving Focus in the Sales Engine
What I’m about to say may not sit well with some C-suite folks, but here it goes: What you have to say to the troops might not be what they need to hear. Yes, yes, you are the boss and, like E.F. Hutton (anyone remember them anymore?), when you talk, people listen. And if you’re the typical CXO, your day-to-day concerns are a world away from what a front line seller is concerned about. You may as well be speaking Swahili and the sellers Swedish.
Scania Mining: a systems approach to the complex sale
More and more products and services are becoming commoditized. In a world of web shops and Amazon, the online automation of transactional sales continues to reduce the need for sales people.
