Using ‘Intelligent Practice’ to enhance Sales Mastery & Results

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Education in Sales, Sales Coaching, Sales performance, Sales Process Maps, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Sales Training

In a time poor world, many people including sales leaders and salespeople often bemoan the fact that they cannot seem to make time for important things like continued professional development, coaching, and thorough planning thus leaving their evolution and sales results to chance.

Rushing through the day, responding to ‘urgent’ matters and deadlines, getting in and out of sales meetings as quickly as possible, doing the bare minimum with CRM and reporting, with little or no time for reflection or developing mastery in their core capabilities seems to be the lot of many sales teams today.

When we rush through tasks, client …

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Some key guidelines for Negotiations in Sales

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Negotiation, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Solution Selling

We are regularly asked by sales managers to provide negotiation skills training for their salespeople. However, after talking with them about their team’s situation and development priorities, it is quite clear, 90% of the time, that their people do not need negotiation skills training, what they really need is consultative solution selling skills training instead.

The reason many sales managers and sales teams find themselves in this situation is they think every time their salespeople hit an objection they must negotiate. Far from it. The easiest way to eliminate objections is by taking the time to understand your …

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7 things you need to know about the Craft of Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Resilience, Sales Essentials, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Sales Training, Solution Selling
We can agree:

Everybody lives by selling something – whether it be ideas, initiatives, visions, products, services or solutions.

Selling is ubiquitous – ever present in our daily lives, internally and externally. 

Selling is the vehicle that allows opportunity to flourish and people to prosper.

Nothing happens until something gets sold.

However:

As ever present as selling is in our daily lives, most people learn how to sell by default, not design.

Often thrown in the deep end, they work it out as they go, feeling their way by trial and error, hoping to be on the right track.

This means that more people fail …

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6 Tips on How to Sell Value and Reposition Price

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

One of the most widely reported reasons for a sale to stall is price. Salespeople often get stuck in the price conversation that only leads to the selling organisation discounting their offer, or the prospect going with another provider. But it needn’t be this way.

Clients and prospects get into these conversations because there’s nothing else for them to perceive as value besides the number next to the dollar sign.

The price is an arbitrary figure with no inherent value in itself; it’s just a number and means absolutely nothing until it is made relative to something of value. Clients don’t see …

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Is your sales team Sinking or Swimming?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Role Clarity, Sales Coaching, Sales Essentials, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Training

Even with the wide availability of information, sales training resources and systems to get salespeople up to speed and selling, too many salespeople are still being thrown in the deep end without any support or induction, and are expected to sell.

Now, if you are an experienced salesperson you would probably navigate your way fairly quickly – that is if you actually know what you need to know, do and say.

If your organisation is like most companies, some effort is usually invested in product training but not usually in ‘how we sell around here’.

Selling is an unusual profession in …

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I’m really frustrated because we could all achieve magnificent sales results if only…

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Essentials, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Training

I am, by nature, a realist optimist who looks at what we can do, how we can make things better and so on. But I don’t do things on a whim, my team and I study what is best practice and look to design, build and weave the various ingredients together to create cost effective, human-centred, strategy and process driven transformation frameworks and journeys that deliver magnificent results and highly capable people when it to comes to selling better.

So effective – cost wise and results wise – that it becomes a no-brainer.

Yet, too many business and sales leaders opt for …

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

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Innovation, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Leadership, Sales Pioneer, Sales Process Maps, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Tips, Strategy, Success

I know, I know, I know.

How many times have we seen the ‘Secrets to Sales Success’ plastered over the internet only to be left disappointed?

Usually, these ‘secrets’, once you look into them, either leave you feeling duped because of the unethical biases they take, or you are left with lots of little bits and pieces of advice that are ok but they are not coordinated in a manner that you can manage and move forward with them.

Like the diet and wellness industries, you could spend a lifetime trying to work out what you should do to improve your chances at …

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Sales Trend 9 – Learning Agility

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Management, Sales Process Maps, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Sales Trends

Sales trend 9 from our 12 Sales Trends Report for 2017 explores how salespeople can navigate the difficult situation of being in a complex sales environment and the need to simplify things for their clients.

Salespeople traditionally find themselves in conflicting spaces. A classic situation is the challenge to bring the diverging interests of clients (e.g. lower prices, discounts) and the organisations these salespeople are representing (higher prices, better margins) together. In that capacity, they have to be skilled as mediators, translators, and problem solvers.

Currently, a very different polarity is demanding attention from salespeople as well as sales managers …

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