The Difference Between Selling and Negotiating

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Mindful selling, Negotiation, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Success

Many people, especially sales people, often share the mistaken belief that Negotiation forms part of every sale which is not true. We often hear ‘my people need to be able to negotiate’ when upon further inspection they first need to learn how to sell. The reason many rely so much on negotiating is that their initial sales job was a poor effort. They neglected to properly establish the clients’ real priorities and needs and didn’t demonstrate how they can help the customer achieve results; financially as well as via their products, services, knowledge or intellectual …

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Make Sales Coaching THE priority & coach your way to success

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management

What sales leader wouldn’t like to see shortened sales cycles leading to more comprehensive deals with better margins? These are just some of the benefits of effective sales coaching. ‘Make coaching THE priority and coach your way to sales success’ was voted the second most important sales trend for 2012 from The 12 Sales Trends of 2012 by our readers. This comes at a critical time for business. Selling is now a highly skilled role requiring skilful people to execute sales strategy, win new clients, grow and retain existing …

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Turning Underperformers Into Sales Winners

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Results, Sales Training

Underperforming sales people plague sales managers and organisations in every industry sector. Over the decades business leaders have adopted an assortment of tactics to combat and address this issue, with most showing little in return. Some large businesses have a policy to let go of the bottom 10-20% of sales performers each year and replenish with new sales blood. Other organisations are too slow to address the real issues affecting poor sales performance often tolerating incompetence. Neither strategy is useful, leaving people operating in a climate of fear or mediocrity. …

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What Athletes, Top CEO’s and Pop Stars Have in Common

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Training, Self Development, Success

Elite athletes, pop stars, top selling writers, politicians, Fortune 100 CEO’s all have one thing in commonthey hire coaches to help them achieve their goals faster and become or maintain their ‘number one’ status. Elite performers see the value their coach brings to their craft. They know their coach will help them gain and create insights that transform their performance. The rest of us can take the same approach. Many salespeople see the value of hiring a sales coach to help maintain an edge internally and over …

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Why B2B Buying Decisions Are Taking Longer Than Ever

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Mindful selling, Sales Coaching, Sales Forecasting, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Pipeline, Sales Planning, Sales Relationships, Sales Training

Are companies taking longer to make buying decisions or does it come down to impatience on the part of the B2B sales person, in a hurry to reach their sales targets? It seems nowadays buying decisions are taking longer to make than in previous years. This slow purchasing process isn’t just happening at the enterprise level in large scale businesses, it’s extended right across the board.

Protracted buying is dramatically slowing the sales process. The flow-on effects of such time delays are causing blow-outs in the cost of sale for many

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Signs you are at risk of losing your top sales performers

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Talent, Self Development, Success, Wellbeing

There they are every day bringing in the deals. They’re always prospecting, meeting clients, networking, making suggestions about how to do things even better and they never discount unnecessarily. Best of all your clients are happy. They’re happy with your offering, happy with your service, happy with the sales support they get and your business is profitable.

Sounds magnificent doesn’t it? Your top sales performer(s) require(s) very little work. They self manage, are resilient and are such a breeze to work with. They’re low maintenance and are not temperamental like those

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Is Call Reluctance® choking your sales effort?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Call Reluctance, Coaching, Prospecting, Sales Coaching, Sales Psychology, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Self Promotion

Whether we are working for a private or public company, a “not for profit” or government institution, all of us are in some way competing for access to a revenue source to fund our existence.

How capable people are to take on the responsibility for improving the revenue line of a company is a hot topic in today’s competitive market.

Research shows that no longer can companies and their people rely on their technical competence, passive referrals, reputation, brand or blanket advertising to bring in new business and revenue streams as they may have done in the past. They also need to …

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Creating an effective sales performance management system

By / / Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Talent, Success

Following on from last week’s article about managing and measuring the right things in sales, I thought it would be worth looking at some of the key principles for effective sales performance management systems.

The first place to start is to align your sales performance management system and subsequent key measures to your organisation’s strategy and goals. It’s then the job of the CEO and the Sales Leader to ensure the organisation (that means everyone else who supports the sales effort) is aligned to the sales performance management system. When this dimension is in place …

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Measuring and managing the right things in sales

By / / Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Self Development

Who wants to work with accountable, responsible, and self-directed sales people? Of course we all want these types of sales people in every sales team. Yet, most businesses do not support this by setting up their sales team to clearly measure and manage their sales performance.

Sales performance management begins with accurate role descriptions and perception, data collection, and measurement in line with set goals and strategy, however many organisations measure only one variable, sale results (outputs measures).

This type of approach leaves businesses and sales teams in the dark about how they arrived at their sales …

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Why Sales Coaching Really Matters

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Training

You may recall that I recently wrote about an international study which reported that if Sales Managers were more frequently and better trained and coached, their sales teams achieved higher performance and results. In no other type of sales training was a more positive correlation found between frequency of training and sales performance. This article is dedicated to the importance of sales coaching and what you need to do to be an effective sales coach.

Despite popular opinion, the sales profession is very skillful with many technical and interpersonal skills that need …

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