If you complain about price being a barrier, wear a bicycle helmet

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Procurement, Prospecting, Sales Tips

Salespeople who complain about price as a barrier need to wear bicycle helmets.

As a salesperson, the next time you feel you are losing deals because of price, take your prospect to a cycle shop and ask them if they were to ride a bike, which one of the helmets they would buy – the one that’s on sale for $10 or the sleek, ventilated $150 model that promises it meets all testing standards?

The bet is they’ll opt to buy the $150 model. Why? You need guaranteed protection from a helmet in a crash; as a cyclist you need good ventilation; …

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Solution versus Product Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Tips, Solution Selling

Today it is almost impossible to meet a product salesperson in the business-to-business sector. Everyone sells ‘solutions’ hoping they can charge a premium or perform some miracle that will instantly differentiate them from their competitors.

And management – often ignorant of the subtle differences between selling products or services and selling solutions – become frustrated when they find that the expected boom in sales doesn’t materialise; that their salespeople continue to face pressure for lower prices, better service delivery and a wider range of offerings.

The challenge is understanding what selling a solution requires. The real starting point, for a truly solutions …

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Are customer surveys useless?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Customer Service, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Strategy

There is no doubt that automation saves time and money. It improves efficiencies and very often eliminates human error. But what happens to companies when they try to automate all of their customer interactions in an attempt to cut costs and yet still give the appearance of caring? In other words, what bad business decision-making drives otherwise well meaning, customer-centric companies to send out post service customer service questionnaires and then fail to act on the feedback they get, or even to acknowledge them?

Over the past few weeks I had 8 such questionnaires, each asking me to rate the quality …

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Sales Trend 1 – New Metrics

By / / Sales Management, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Results, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 1 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report is about sales metrics.

What do we measure now?

When we talk about sales metrics we usually think units, volumes, quota, members signed, calls made. Generally speaking, these metrics would have been put in place in an organisation at the time that the sales team was established, and (maybe) changed from time to time, usually from quota to number of calls or units, and so on.

The current state of flux of markets and most industries is quite different from the time when the use of these metrics was best practice. …

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12 Sales Trends for 2017 – Going from ordinary to extraordinary

By / / Sales Trends

We are pleased to release our 8th annual 12 sales trends report. 2017 Sales Trends focuses on – Going from ordinary to extraordinary

In times of major change, uncertainty and upheaval we have two choices: 1) bunker down, keeping our heads low, waiting for things to pass and settle down back to normal, or 2) embrace the change and ride the waves towards the future creating a new normal.

Opting for option 1 is dangerous and potentially foolish as we are likely to be left behind achieving only obsolescence.

Opting for option 2 is also potentially dangerous but more likely …

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How to reach prospects and keep the door open

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Innovation, Prospecting, Sales Tips

So how do we reach  prospects and keep the door open?

While everyone is trying to go big – go small and use innovation to capture share of mind.

Imagine you are at home opening your mail and you find an unsolicited brochure about some product or other. What do you do? Chances are you drop it in the trash. Well, the vast majority of leads to whom you send your brochures, flyers or emails to are going to do the same thing.

When you want to get access to decision makers –particularly decision makers in big companies– product emails, brochures, …

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Selling Professional Services

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Tips, Success

Even the once exclusive professions of accounting, medicine, law and engineering have come to realise that they can no longer survive on referrals and reputation alone; that marketing the firm, whilst it stimulates awareness and interest, is not enough to generate the levels of new business needed to cover the costs of running a professional practice.

Decades ago these professionals relied on their network of referrals. They developed a reputation amongst a select group of their friends that made them an attractive option that brought business to their door. Those days and that situation has however changed.

Today, with universities turning out …

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How to avoid the discount trap

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Solution Selling

Do you frequently discount to win business? Does your brand seem to matter less to customers today? It’s no wonder. Customers can do a Google search of your product or service and, within minutes, learn about your product, your competitors, what customers think of you, and find the lowest prices. So, with this kind of information at their fingertips, why would they need to meet with a salesperson?

It’s a critical question in today’s selling environment – and one you need to think about if you want to sell better.

In recent observations done by Barrett we noticed a …

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Why self-discipline and being organised pays

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Self Development, Success

Being organised makes good dollars and cents.

To be on track with your sales quota you need to be organised, have a plan you stick to, and use a system for effective selling.

It’s never too late to start, regardless of where you are on the road towards realising your sales targets. All it really takes is some thought and self-discipline to organise yourself.

Probably the single biggest reason we see sales executives struggle to make sales targets is simply a lack of organisation or discipline to stick to a system of selling. We are not talking about a formula, but rather the …

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Why online prospecting is often lazy and very annoying

By / / Call Reluctance, Prospecting, Sales Relationships, Social Sales

This week’s article comes off the back of last week’s topic ‘ Getting prospects to talk to you’.

It will take a different approach. I have documented the conversation John Smibert and I had in relation to online prospecting. Here it is. Enjoy.

John: “…I was thinking that subject to the particular company, products and industry that maybe a phone call is not always the first contact these days. The reason this came to mind is that with the advent of social selling many salespeople are having considerable dialog with potential customers before making a phone call – many are …

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