Sales Trend 3: Human Centred Selling – designing Empathetic Customer Centric Cultures

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Collaboration, Communication, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Customer Service, Emotional Intelligence, Sales Culture, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 3 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2018 is about Human Centred Selling.

Bestselling author and business icon Stephen Covey once said: “When you show deep empathy toward others … That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems”.

In this hyper connected world it’s easy to gain access to information and make simple online purchases that are transactional in nature; items that we know how to use ourselves. However, today there is so much information and so many choices available that many customers are finding making buying decisions overwhelming, especially when things move beyond the …

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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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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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Why engineers, technicians & scientists might make the best salespeople in the 21st Century

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Innovation, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Pioneer, Sales Talent

It has been a long held belief that extroverts made the best salespeople; the gift of the gab, being charming and persuasive, telling a good story, people oriented and friendly, and all that. However, given the complexity of our world and the ever increasing need to make well informed decisions and manage risk before we buy, our warm, chatty, convivial friends may need to learn a lesson or two from the more ambiverted/ introverted types many of whom are deep thinking techies, geeks and nerds. More about the value of introversion in next week’s piece.

Let’s look at the merit of …

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Sales Trend 6 – The Sales Curator™

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Sales Skills, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 6 from the Barrett 12 Sales Trends for 2016 Report is ‘The Sales Curator™’.

A new sales capability is required in this information overloaded world. No longer are salespeople seen as the purveyors of information they once were in the 20th century, 21st century salespeople now need to be experts at sifting and sorting information for their clients and prospects.

They need to have in-depth knowledge about what they are selling, how it fits into a system, how it affects their clients and what is and isn’t relevant to each client situation. Like an expert museum …

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How buying patterns have changed

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Procurement, Sales Results, Social Sales, Value Based Selling

Salespeople everywhere are faced with demands to meet increasingly high quotas in the face of growing market complexity and relentless financial pressure. There is also more competitors with Me2 products –just as good as brand names–, and an increased pressure on margins with buyers reluctant to make early commitments. Salespeople are facing demands like they never had before.

Current research from the Behaviour & Economic Research team at NAB¹  states that forward orders (in 2014) were very patchy for both big businesses and SMEs, making it very hard to forecast sales and manage pipelines. This only confirms the reticence of buyers …

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20 years of improving sales teams & operations. What’s changed?

By / / Collaboration, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, CRM, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Social Media, Vision, Mission & Purpose

The 9th January 2015 marks 20 years in business for Barrett Consulting Group.

Twenty years of helping companies, sales leaders and their salespeople improve their sales operations and their sales capabilities.

Twenty years of helping salespeople and buyers have better, more mutually rewarding experiences, setting a fairer exchange of value.

As I moved toward this 20th anniversary, I started to muse upon what the sales world was like 20 years ago, compared to what it is like now. Here are just some of my initial musings and observations.

A lot has changed in the sales world over the last 20 years, some changes for …

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The History of Sales Methodologies

By / / Business Acumen, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Education in Sales, Sales Culture, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Research

Have you ever wondered just how many sales methodologies are out there and which ones work and which ones don’t?

Maybe you haven’t given much conscious thought to this subject but then again maybe you have.  Either way, if you are in sales or run a sales team or business and want to be more effective and successful it’s critical that you know what sales methodology will work best for you and your customers.

Unfortunately, the business world has been littered with more dubious sales methodologies than there are effective ones. Our business, at Barrett, is to …

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