What does Selling Better mean to sales team’s retention rates?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Customer Service, Education in Sales, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Essentials, Sales Process Maps, Sales Strategy, Selling Better, Uncategorized

What do you make of this statistic?

The average tenure of a sales representative across Europe and USA is currently 15 months.

Ouch!

There are other stats that also show the average staff turnover can be anything around 25-50% per annum, or more in some cases.  Some call centres experience turnover rates of over 70% per annum.

These statistics are alarming because the costs associated with poor engagement and high staff turnover are monumental and can manifest in many ways including decline in sales, poor customer service, loss of reputation leading to more loss of customers and employees, and impaired recruitment. If not addressed, …

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Salespeople beware tire kickers, IP thieves & time wasters

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Coaching, Communication, Education in Sales, Ethics & Values

Selling is a very time consuming set of activities at the best of times. Now with so much choice and complexity, sales cycles are taking even longer –like 20% longer– especially with multiple stakeholders in larger businesses.

So it only makes sense that we want to be sure as salespeople that a real deal is in the offering, that it is properly budgeted for, and we are in good position to win it.

Salespeople can often bend over backwards to please prospective clients, running around getting all sorts of things ready, and putting together comprehensive proposals to impress and persuade these prospective …

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Sales Trend 1 – The Selling Better Manifesto

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Education in Sales, Environment & Sustainability, Ethics & Values, Innovation, Mindful selling, Opportunity, Sales Pioneer, Sales Trends, Success, Uncategorized, Wellbeing

Sales Trend 1 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends for 2018 Report is our Selling Better Manifesto. It talks about the Selling Better Movement and it explains why we have started it.

We have created The Selling Better Movement with the hope it will help people understand that there’s a better way of doing business.

A way in which we can all be prosperous.

The Selling Better Movement is an ethical and human-centred selling ethos underpinned by a practical selling philosophy.

The modern business landscape offers a world of possibility. More and more people are stepping out to unearth …

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Back to sales basics

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, CRM, Education in Sales, Marketing, Prospecting, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Essentials, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Social Media

I like to keep on top of what is current, what is emerging, and what is still an idea. This is why I make time each week to do research as it helps me navigate my way around the present and into the future. However, I am finding there is so much to read, so much to get my head around, and so much to integrate into my business that it can take up a lot of time… and it only seems to be increasing.

This is why I want to get back to basics.

As I wade through all of the …

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Why we can all benefit from thinking like a ‘freak’

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Psychology, Sales Skills, Success

Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, Think like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank, defines thinking like a freak as: “…putting away your moral compass and not worrying about what the answer “should” be, but focusing on what the answer really is. It means thinking hard about causality. It means going beyond the obvious to consider all the possibilities — but still being willing to accept the obvious.”

When businesses, and especially, sales teams and salespeople come across challenges, they usually try to solve them by using the same parameters and approaches they had used in past, but …

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Don’t die wondering, the real secret to sales success – Part II of II: the person

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Education in Sales, Emotional Intelligence, Life Skills, Prospecting, Resilience, Sales Skills, Solution Selling

How many times have we all been tempted to click on a link that offers us ‘the secret of sales success’ only to find a website or article that is promising a silver bullet ‘if only you do this one thing’ which doesn’t help us at all?

As I mentioned last week, the business of sales excellence is like the diet industry, full of tempting offerings that lead us nowhere fast.

It is only natural that people want simple answers to complex problems. ‘The world would be so much easier if only…’ we sigh.

However, “Explanations exist; they have existed …

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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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‘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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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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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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