6 Tips on How to Sell Value and Reposition Price

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

One of the most widely reported reasons for a sale to stall is price. Salespeople often get stuck in the price conversation that only leads to the selling organisation discounting their offer, or the prospect going with another provider. But it needn’t be this way.

Clients and prospects get into these conversations because there’s nothing else for them to perceive as value besides the number next to the dollar sign.

The price is an arbitrary figure with no inherent value in itself; it’s just a number and means absolutely nothing until it is made relative to something of value. Clients don’t see …

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Is your organisation your worst ‘Sales Blocker’?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Customer Service, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales performance, Sales Results, Strategy, Success

Many articles have been written about the many, many excuses salespeople come up with as to why they haven’t hit their sales targets, why they find it hard to sell, and so on.

The accusatory finger always seems to be pointing at the salespeople. And sometimes this is fair, however, there are many reasons why it’s not always the salesperson’s fault.

There are many reasons why salespeople are prevented from carrying out their sales duties effectively. This article is about highlighting the blockers or blockages in their way – intended or unintended.

Let’s explore these blockers and see how we can remove them …

Is your organisation your worst ‘Sales Blocker’? Read Post »

Is your sales team Sinking or Swimming?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Role Clarity, Sales Coaching, Sales Essentials, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Training

Even with the wide availability of information, sales training resources and systems to get salespeople up to speed and selling, too many salespeople are still being thrown in the deep end without any support or induction, and are expected to sell.

Now, if you are an experienced salesperson you would probably navigate your way fairly quickly – that is if you actually know what you need to know, do and say.

If your organisation is like most companies, some effort is usually invested in product training but not usually in ‘how we sell around here’.

Selling is an unusual profession in …

Is your sales team Sinking or Swimming? Read Post »

Sales Leadership – the power of preparedness, curiosity and courage in times of flux

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Emotional Intelligence, Sales Leadership, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 7 from the Barrett’s 12 Sales Trends Report for 2018 is about leadership, in particular, which characteristics are key for leaders in times of flux.

The state of flux we are experiencing, is bringing about a shift in the top key qualities required to be an effective business executive and leader.

It’s not necessarily a completely different set of qualities, but a change in their order of relevance for navigating a changing, ‘fluxy’ kind of world.

Douglas A. Ready, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the founder and president of ICEDR, says “We need to …

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Why Purposeful Optimism is great for business

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Innovation, Life Skills, Opportunity, Optimism, Resilience

I want you to imagine that you are a 24 year old graduate going for job interviews. In this instance, you are being interviewed by a multinational who takes you to the next stage- completing a range of psychometric assessments followed by an interview with a psychologist. Imagine if you will, that this psychologist starts his interview with you by saying you are ‘too optimistic’, that you are a ‘Pollyanna’, that ‘you are unrealistic in seeing the world in such as positive light’, claiming there is something really wrong with you.

How would you feel? Well, this scenario happened to me …

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Is a Net Promoter Score a valid predictor of customer loyalty?

By / / Uncategorized

In your business travels you may have heard of the acronym NPS. It stands for Net Promoter Score.

Developed by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company and Satmetrix in 2003, NPS is a management tool designed to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth. In short, it is a single question measure that asks customers to rate their intention of referring a business on to others. The rating scale is 0-10.

Clients who give scores of 9/10 or 10/10 are regarded …

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What are YOU doing to create space for opportunities?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Life Skills, Opportunity, Optimism

In recent months, I have deliberately chosen to start each week by writing down this statement:

‘Be open to great opportunities’

This statement appears at the top of my To Do list book that I take with me everywhere.

It is handwritten and highlighted with yellow highlighter.

I have chosen to do this for several reasons:

  • It keeps me focused on moving forward and being open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, new people and markets, new opportunities with new and existing clients, and so on
  • It stops me from falling into ‘group think’ and being drawn into unproductive spaces, and negative and ‘fake …

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    Are your salespeople stumbling at hello?

    By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales performance

    We all want better sales performance and, as I mentioned last week, there are different ways to get there. A good starting point to understand what your team needs to sell better and improve their performance is assessing where they need help.

    For example, through an attitude and activity based questionnaire you can measure if people avoid making phone calls to prospect, if they hesitate to prospect, and self-promote for new business. You can also identify how much initiative, energy and drive an individual devotes to proactive sales prospecting and the amount of energy spent …

    Are your salespeople stumbling at hello? Read Post »

    We all want better sales performance, but what works best?

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales performance, Sales Results, Success

    Most of us will agree that as sales leaders we want better and more consistent sales performance. The approaches on how to get there, however, vary greatly.

    Some tactics offer a temporary lift in sales while other strategies deliver more sustainable changes and lifts in performance over the long term.

    We’ve outlined three different approaches organisations take to improve sales performance and their impact.

    Annual sales training session/conference – 1 or 2 day workshop

    Effect
    Result score out of 10

    Popularity
    9

    Long term effectiveness
    2

    Team building
    7

    Risk
    5

    Return on investment
    3

    This is by far the most popular choice amongst sales managers and business leaders. However, the question that needs to be asked …

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    Trust is the heartbeat of business, sales and society

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Communication, Competition, Ethics & Values, Sales Culture, Sales Relationships

    I have been writing about Trust in sales and business for many years; however, this year has seen a rise in my output on this topic, especially with the fallout from the Banking Royal Commission with posts such as:

    The Flight to Ethical Selling – how the banks can avoid a royal commission

    What does Selling Better mean for customers and shareholder return?

    What are the biggest issues facing CEOs and sales leaders today?

    Yet, trust is the heartbeat of business, sales and society.

    Without this life force pumping vitality through our collective systems every day …

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