Metrics for Measuring Solution Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Performance Management, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Social Sales, Solution Selling

How do we measure sales performance now?

As many formally product-focused companies migrate to selling solutions, most overlook one critical component – the way they measure sales performance.

Sales people, using a solution-selling approach, generally nurture larger, more complex and lucrative deals; they are engaging in business-level discussions with key executives in prospect companies and invest heavily in building long-term, trust-based relationships with key decision makers. But in many instances, their success is still being measured using the old transaction-based sales metrics.

Working with many, many sales leaders and their sales teams since 1995, we understand that while making the …

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Hone your targeting skills to win more sales

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Prospecting

Investing quality time with prospects delivers better margins and displaces your competitors.

One of the time-tested methods for surviving a tough or slow economy is to home in on prospects who match the profile of your most successful customers. This may sound like Sales 101 but it’s worth your attention right now because when times get tough, the opposite happens – namely, desperation can make it tempting to pounce on any lead that ‘wanders in the door’.

Instead, we urge you to invest more energy in obtaining a deeper understanding of your current customer base and then use that understanding as a …

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The rise of networking events – the traps & opportunities

By / / Uncategorized

Networks of well-connected people are critical in business and societies.

Cultivating a network of trusted and reliable colleagues, peers, friends and associates is key to a healthy society. Strong, resilient and trusted relationships need to be found, formed and forged over time.

The likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and other digital platforms have made it much easier to search for and connect with relevant people, be they prospective clients, contractors, new recruits, suppliers, business partners, or friends.

Being social creatures, most of us also like to meet with people in person, get to know them and build something in common. This takes time, attention …

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Sales Trend 9 – Learning Agility

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Management, Sales Process Maps, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Sales Trends

Sales trend 9 from our 12 Sales Trends Report for 2017 explores how salespeople can navigate the difficult situation of being in a complex sales environment and the need to simplify things for their clients.

Salespeople traditionally find themselves in conflicting spaces. A classic situation is the challenge to bring the diverging interests of clients (e.g. lower prices, discounts) and the organisations these salespeople are representing (higher prices, better margins) together. In that capacity, they have to be skilled as mediators, translators, and problem solvers.

Currently, a very different polarity is demanding attention from salespeople as well as sales managers …

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‘How to manage and help salesmen’ – valuable lessons from 1960

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Uncategorized

You might be taken aback by the sexist nature of the title of this article ‘How to manage and help salesmen’.

However, if you take into account that this title comes from a book written in 1960 by Charles B. Roth you might be a bit more forgiving.

I was given this book by my late father a couple of years before he died in 2014. Given my profession and his career as a business owner and chief sales leader of his company he thought I would like to read it and see how much had changed or not …

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No Pain, No Change = No Sale

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

Recently I wrote about wanting to tell clients what to do and why we couldn’t even if we know better. The premise was that what may seem so obvious to us may not be obvious to the client or on their agenda at all.

Why? Simply put, if the client or prospect does not perceive or admit to having an issue, a problem, a challenge, some difficulty they want to overcome, or even an opportunity they want to ignite then they will not perceive the need to change what they are doing now.

And even if they can see …

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Sales Trend 8 – Ordinary Sales Organisations Do More. Extraordinary Sales Organisations Achieve More

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Marketing, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Trends, Social Sales

Sales Trend 8 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 explore how extraordinary sales organisations can work with marketing to achieve more.

With the help of technological disruption, buyers in the past 10 years have dramatically changed how they identify opportunities, evaluate alternatives, and purchase solutions.

What has changed?

Buyers are no longer calling the vendor to learn what’s new or to request information like they did before. They have become self-educating; consuming online information whenever they wish.

  • Buyers rely less on initial telephone / in-person meetings with vendors and more on consuming information online.
  • Buyers rely less on tradeshows / networking events and …

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Is your sales problem really a sales leadership problem?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Education in Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Leadership, Sales Research, Sales Results, Sales Talent

Of course every business wants their sales people to prospect more, close more sales, produce more consistent sales results, achieve their sales targets/budgets, have happy, loyal clients, and so on.

Some of the most common questions we hear from sales managers, sales leaders and CEOs are:

‘How do we get our sales people to sell more, produce better sales results?’

‘How do we find better sales people who can sell?’

If you look at the overwhelming content on the internet about sales problems and issues it focuses mostly on sales people and their performance…. “how to sell more” is the most common search term.

However, …

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Rethinking our economy… How do we sell in a Circular Economy with Doughnut Economics?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Strategy, Sustainability & Environment, Wellbeing

Go out on a limb

It’s hard not to notice that we all have quite a bit on our agendas; lots of things competing for our time and attention; too many things that are likely to leave us feeling overwhelmed, overloaded and often confused.

People are asking lots of questions, e.g.:  Which way to turn? Which way to look? What to do? What is right? What is wrong? Who should we believe? Where do we go?

But, as we always say ‘It all starts with OPPORTUNITY’. So I invite you to go out on a limb with this article. I need you to …

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Why I want to tell you what to do, but I won’t, even if I know better

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

We’ve all been there

How many times do we want to tell our clients what to do?

After only a few sentences uttered by them we, of course, know immediately what their issue is. We’ve seen it 10s or 100s of times before. It seems so obvious to us what they should do.

“If only they would just do this… it would be so much better/ save them so much time/ get them there faster/ make them safer, etc.” I hear you cry.

Welcome to the world of domain expertise when you (potentially) know a lot more about something than someone else does. It …

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