With business becoming much more complex and value harder to discern in product sales alone, Sales Trend 7, Sell and Deliver Value or Commoditise, sees business leaders making serious decisions about how to do business. In essence, they have two choices in terms of the way to run legitimate operations: Run a business that sells […]
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 […]
When sales start to dry up or the business doesn’t seem to be getting traction with customers, many small to medium (SME) sized businesses will usually turn to Marketing in the first, and often only instance, as their preferred solution to fixing poor sales results. Why? Because many people have been taught to think they […]
The sad passing of David Bowie this last week has brought a huge wave of emotional outpouring from many parts of the world including myself. I grew up with David Bowie. He has been in my life as long as I can remember. He was, I admit, my most favourite music star of all. I […]
Product differentiation is getting harder, Me2 products are flooding the markets, quality is being commoditised, and as a result margins are being squeezed and value is at risk of being shed if we don’t know how to articulate the real value we deliver beyond product and price and demonstrate our competitive edge. With so much […]
As I have previously written one of our biggest issues in running effective sales operations and executing effective sales strategies is the persistence of ‘point’ or ‘silver bullet’ solutions that mislead and distract. If you recall, a point solution solves one particular problem without regard to related issues and unfortunately, point solutions often don’t deliver […]
This series of ‘Survival of the Adaptive’ articles will look at the key things we need to do as sales teams to contend with the many changes afoot in our 21st century world and market place. Part 2 is all about developing a well-informed sales force A decade ago, when traditional product-pushing sales were all […]
It is a harsh reality – product demand and brand scores are down. Some contributing factors to this decline are: bad experiences with retailers or suppliers, poor responses from intermediaries, mediocre service levels, automated procurement practices, stripped down pricing, and an increased number of competitors with products that are just as good and brand names […]
Many of us have been there and some of us are yet to experience the gut wrenching experience when we finally, consciously realise that our sales pipeline and revenue numbers are in drastic decline and we are in deep, deep trouble. We realise all too dramatically that we are having the business and sales equivalent […]
There comes a time when we realise that amidst change we cannot keep living the old way, doing the same old things expecting different outcomes. This time has come for Product Selling. Product or Transactional Selling, especially in B2B and complex B2C, is now obsolete. However, the amount of product companies that are now finding […]
