Learn to say ‘NO’

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Communication, Ethics & Values, Resilience, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Value Proposition & Value Add

Giving away the margin and undercutting your prices because you can’t say ‘NO’ is no good for anyone. It devalues you, your product, and your market. If done on mass then customers expect ‘cheap’ all the time, not fully appreciating the real value of the products or services they buy. All you do is risk devaluing you and your business.

Just look at the ‘perpetual sales’ going in retail all the time. No one ends up making any money and people go out of business.

Let’s face it; there will always be someone offering their products or services cheaper than you. …

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Your pre-call & post-call checklist

By / / Sales Planning, Sales Skills

How well did your last sales call go? Did you achieve what you set out to achieve? Do you know what your next course of action will be with that customer/prospect? Do you have evidence that a real sales opportunity exists?

Using a pre-call and post-call checklist is a very useful process when assessing the effectiveness of your sales calls.

Too many sales people, however, invest too little time thinking about and planning their approach to developing prospective sales opportunities. Many sales opportunities involve a range of variables that need to be accounted for and acted upon if they are to achieve …

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Not all customers are good customers

By / / Business Acumen, Ethics & Values, Sales Planning, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy

Ever had some customers who spend very little with you but take up enormous amounts of your time? Nothing’s ever right, they quibble about every cent and they do not intend to spend much with you anyway.

Or those customers who are really nice and you get along with them very well, but you know they do not have the potential to develop into long-term revenue generating accounts for your business.

What do you do? You need sales, but at what cost to your business? These types of customers, in effect, keep you from working with customers where you can get a …

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Missed & Lost Sales Opportunities

By / / Call Reluctance, Prospecting, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Time Management

Not enough new business coming? Sales drying up? Not making a satisfactory impact when in front of prospective clients?

If this is happening to you, consider your sales effectiveness and your sales efforts from these two angles:

  • Missed sales opportunities.
  • Lost sales opportunities.

    • If market conditions are right, and you have good products or services, then you may want to take a look at your own efforts. Your poor sales efforts may be due to:

    Missed sales opportunities: Put simply, missed sales opportunities are all about a lack of prospecting activity. If there is little or no prospecting for …

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    Costing cutting at the expense of sales? Bad move

    By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Consulting, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Training

    I don’t know about you, but when markets start to tighten or when things feel a bit uncertain, instead of cost cutting and bunkering down, I have found that you need to do precisely the opposite. You need to invest in your sales efforts with good strategy, sales training, good sales management and good sales coaching.

    I have experienced selling in tight markets over the years and found these times to be some of my most successful sales years. Why? Because I took advantage of everyone else’s pessimistic approach as they sat around complaining, and I got out there and learned …

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    Influencing vs Negotiating

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Negotiation, Sales Relationships, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Training

    It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

    Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

    Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in …

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    Changing sales perceptions

    By / / Sales Relationships, Sales Skills

    Stop for a minute and reflect: What is your view of selling? Has your perception of sales changed over the years?

    Your answer is most likely ‘yes’ if you are a customer or salesperson in business to business (B2B) sales. But not if you are a customer of retail. More about that another time.

    Today’s changing B2B and high-end B2C sale practice styles are an adaptation to the environmental forces. The change towards people-centricity is evident in a number of organisational functions, in particular the sales function where there has been a significant shift from product-focused selling to relationship selling.

    To serve their …

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    MYTH: Cold calling is a good idea

    By / / Prospecting, Sales Skills

    In the “olden days” when I first started my business, over 95% of my sales came about through cold calling, which I had learnt to do really well when I worked as a sales recruitment specialist with Morgan & Banks.

    At M&B – and in my business – it was very clear that if I didn’t bill anything I didn’t earn anything. So I got on the phones and I prospected to people I didn’t know – that is, cold calling.

    This was well and truly before the internet was in mainstream use and I had the privilege of learning how to …

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    Motivation or manipulation?

    By / / Ethics & Values, Sales Coaching, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Research, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy

    What is the line between motivating sales staff and manipulating sales staff? How do you make sure you don’t go over the line and place people under extreme pressure to achieve?

    Research both here and overseas shows that high performing sales people identified how important it was to their performance that they remain motivated, which they recognised can be influenced by both internal and external factors, with a sense of self satisfaction found to be the most important contributor to their motivation.

    The recent 4 Corners program on Telstra staff and a bullying culture that is supposed to be being cultivated in …

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    Exceeding customers’ expectations?

    By / / Communication, Sales Consulting, Sales Culture, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Teamwork

    If I hear “Oh let’s exceed our customers’ expectations” one more time I will scream.

    Usually my response is: ‘Why don’t we just meet their expectations in the first place?’ Too many times the marketing hype (the promise) does not always connect with the sales expectation set up by the sales team, which doesn’t always translate into a service experience we were promised in the first place.

    We are often left disappointed, jaded and, if it happens more than once, cynical.

    Too many of us have stories of where we have been let down by businesses not fulfilling our expectations. We see broken …

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