The Holy Trinity of Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Buying, Collaboration, Common Ground, Communication, Ethics & Values, Opportunity, Sales Skills, Sales Talent, Solution Selling

This post has been inspired by my colleague, Ben Shute, who I work arm in arm with bridging the divide between sales and procurement. He wrote about the Holy Trinity of Procurement Skills and so challenged me to do the same for Sales.

Here is my contribution.

The profession of selling requires a whole range of capabilities. It’s hard to know where to begin to define the 3 core elements for sales – the Holy Trinity of Selling.

So I’ll start with the master categories of Knowledge, Skills and Mindset from Barrett’s Sales Competency Dictionary.

Knowledge

Let’s …

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Why Procurement can and should be the epicentre of innovation for business

By / / Business Acumen, Collaboration, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Procurement

Procurement, whether they are aware of it or not, are the epicentre of innovation and leadership of complex systems management within organisations and across the supply chain, or at least they should be.

Their exposure to all elements of the supply chain can and should inform them and in turn other key stakeholders within and outside their organisations of the latest, the easiest, most sustainable, faster, ethical, better ways of doing business.

While they cannot expect to be experts in every area of business, they can and should be experts in systems, managing complexity and managing relationships which is what a supply …

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Tendering and Trust

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Business Acumen, Communication, Sales Trends, Uncategorized

Sales trend 10 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 is about the importance of trust when writing tenders that win.

By guest authors David Lunn and Kelly Richmond, Bidwrite

Building BID BELIEVABILITY

Developing tenders and proposals is key to winning and retaining business through contested sourcing processes. Most buying organisations, government and commercial, use these types of processes in one form or another. So there really is no escaping the need to produce written communications to, at least in part, persuade a client or prospect to choose us.

Data emerging from the USA, …

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Want a viable future? Opportunities abound in the Common Good

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Case study, Common Ground, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Opportunity, Optimism, Selling Better, Sustainability & Environment

What type of board member, CEO or sales leader are you?

  • Are you stuck in the day-to-day looking to meet your monthly and quarterly targets, looking to maximise profit, shareholder return and your bonuses?
    OR
  • Are you looking into the future to see what lies ahead ensuring there is a viable sustainable path for all to follow and participate in?

    • In today’s world everything is up for grabs.

    Old institutions are crashing and dying because they held onto the past and failed to adapt.

    Take Thomas Cook Travel as a current case in point. While their leaders were bathing themselves in 29M pounds of bonuses, …

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    How should I assess a sales recruit?

    By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Talent

    Last time I wrote about what we should be looking for in a good sales recruit.

    This time we will look at how we go about assessing a sales recruit.

    There are a myriad of ways you can assess someone – some are legitimate and purpose built for sales recruitment while other methods wouldn’t stand up in a court of law even if they work for you. 

    Let’s take intuition or gut feel for instance.

    There is nothing wrong with using your gut feelings or intuition; however, using it as your only source of assessment criteria will make it hard …

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    What should I be looking for in a good sales recruit?

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Role Clarity, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

    What should I be looking for in a good sales recruit?

    This is a vexing question for many sales and business leaders.

    And some of the answers we still hear aren’t very helpful either.

    ‘They must be hunters.’

    ‘They need to be hungry.’

    ‘They’ve got to be able to close deals.’

    ‘They must have a mortgage and family so they are ‘motivated’ to sell more.’

    ‘They must have industry experience.’

    Notice anything familiar about most of these answers?

    They are all stuck in the ‘aggressive, self-serving, desperate approach to selling’ paradigm which is not what good selling actually is …

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    Sales – the new team sport

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Role Clarity, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Trends

    Sales trend 9 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 explores the characteristics and benefits of truly integrated sales teams.

    The future of the individual ‘solo’ salesperson is coming to an end for most businesses.

    What is taking their place is an integrated team of people working on sales together.

    Sales leaders do not need teams of individual B2B salespeople, they need people with a diverse range of skills working as integrated teams across a range of sales disciplines and capabilities.

    Teams who can cover areas such as sales and territory planning, account development, CRM & sales pipeline …

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    Why Progress, NOT Perfection, helps us find Common Ground for the Common Good

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Common Ground, Communication, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values

    “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Voltaire

    “The world is becoming very black and white with people striving for perfection where only the best is acceptable. If we continue down this road, then we will lose everything that is human.” Madeline Stuart*

    “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” Winston Churchill

    Our relationship with perfection and progress can be rather fraught.

    In the human world that often promotes perfection or the idealised state, i.e.

    The perfect body

    The perfect marriage/relationship

    The perfect career

    The perfect mind

    The perfect way to be sustainable, and so on…

    We can …

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    Trusting optimism

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Opportunity, Optimism, Wellbeing

    Sales trend 8 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2019 is about the benefits for people and businesses of adopting an optimistic approach.

    By guest author Victor Perton.

    It is said that trust is in short supply in Australia. The Edelman Trust Barometer is trotted out in pessimistic speeches to suggest that Australian leadership is in a state of collapse. However, the Edelman folk are confused by their own findings. Given the current prosperity and wellbeing in Australia, with 25 years of uninterrupted growth, a presentation by Edelman suggested that the place in which Brand …

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