Getting prospects to talk to you

By / / Call Reluctance, Communication, Prospecting, Resilience, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Self Promotion

Do you take time to really think about why you are calling a prospect or a client? Do you reflect on how effective you have been post the call?

Making prospecting calls to new prospects and existing clients is still one of the most important sales and business development activities you can do on a daily basis. Even with all the electronic communication and marketing options at hand most businesses still need to have someone prospecting for them to build and forge real business relationships. Top performing sales people make sure prospecting is part of their daily repertoire.

Like many things prospecting …

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Does everyone live by selling something?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Education in Sales, Ethics & Values, Marketing, Procurement, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Excellence Acadamy, Sales Leadership, Sales Skills, Teamwork, Vision, Mission & Purpose

‘Does everyone live by selling something?’

My desire to seek answers to this question was ignited back in the late 1980’s when I came across the quote ‘Everyone lives by selling something’. The quote was coined by Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist, poet, travel writer and author of ‘Treasure Island’, in the late 1880’s some 100 years earlier.

It is interesting to note that Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was also greatly admired by many authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because …

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Exceptional Prospectors

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Call Reluctance, Competition, Networking, Prospecting, Resilience, Sales Pioneer, Sales Psychology, Sales Relationships, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Talent, Sales Tips, Self Promotion, Social Media, Social Sales, Success
  • “My most important appointment is prospecting and I do it first up every day.”
  • “I qualify all leads I generate and have an approach to handle those that aren’t ready yet.”
  • “People appreciate a professional sales approach and are able to make an informed decision to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ because I clearly explain, up front, my reason for contacting them using a customer centred approach. They need only say ‘no’ if they’re not interested.”
  • “I have a list of categorised prospects or influencers and a set approach for each category.”

    • Is this what you say, and how you feel and act about prospecting?

    These …

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    An ideal sales week

    By / / Prospecting, Role Clarity, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Pioneer, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Self Development, Time Management
    • Are you finding that you are over servicing your existing clients and not bringing in new business?
    • Are you running out of time each week to do the important sales jobs such as prospecting?
    • Are you at risk of not meeting your sales budget?

    In my many interactions with sales people I have found that many find they have problems prioritising their week. They often get caught up in activities that do not produce revenue, leaving them vulnerable.

    Let’s look at the key activities that should feature as priorities in most sales people jobs:

    Revenue Generating Activities
    Direct

    • Prospecting (phone calls, etc.)
    • New business client meetings (with …

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    Some Good News Sales Stories

    By / / Negotiation, Sales Relationships, Sales Skills, Success

    You don’t have to discount price to win good business and good customer relationships even in tough markets.

    I mentioned earlier this year my team and I are working on a large sales fitness training assignment in the finance sector around Australia. These guys are hard up against it when it come to ‘price’ being a key target at the moment. A number of their competitors are trying to buy market share with discounted prices. The market is being hammered with ‘discounting’ of all sorts – some clear, some not so clear and some very dubious.

    Many people have commented ‘Is this …

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    Practice, Practice, Practice then Play

    By / / Brain Science, Coaching, Mindful selling, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Sales Talent, Sales Tips, Sales Training

    In the sporting world it is expected that athletes make the time to practice, practice, practice and then go and compete or play the game. Through regular practice they hone their skills, behaviours and attitudes to ensure they are ‘match fit’ and ready to compete at the highest standards.

    A sports team needs to make sure that when they are in the thick of the game they can draw upon those skill drills and practice sessions to perform well as a team and perform well under pressure.

    When an individual athlete is neck and neck with a competitor racing for the finish …

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    Create your own opportunities

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Networking, Prospecting, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Strategy, Value Proposition & Value Add

    Just one idea can positively transform your life, career, income and wealth.
    As I have written before, in uncertain times, we can let the negativity of current events and others consume us or we can continue to look for opportunity. Excessive worry, however, can often cause us to lose sight of our goals and can limit our creativity and problems solving capabilities just when we really need them.

    These tough times call for us to be even more innovative, inventive, creative and persistent. Some of the most successful sales people are the most adaptive and creative people you can …

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    Take Note

    By / / Communication, Mindful selling, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

    I would like to focus on something, that at first glance, may appear rather trivial. In fact it might seem so inane that you are wondering why I am even writing about it.

    It’s ‘note taking’.

    I learnt a very salient, if not embarrassing, lesson in my early 20’s. When in my first sales consulting role I turned up to a sales meeting with a prospective client with no obvious note taking materials. Up until that time I had never been told to take notes by my managers. I hadn’t thought about talking notes myself. I relied …

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    Daring to be Different (part 2)

    By / / Assessments, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Assessments, Sales Management, Sales Skills, Sales Talent

    Here is the second of two articles about recruiting top performing sales people and daring to do so from outside of your industry.

    Even though I have not worked as a traditional recruitment consultant for more than 14 years many of my long standing clients still talk about those ‘out of the box’ placements we made. Was it just the recruitment approach that made the difference. Well NO. What these savvy mangers is did was make sure the culture and the business could accommodate these ‘new’ types of people.

    They took their current team along on the journey to …

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