Sales Trend 8 – Ordinary Sales Organisations Do More. Extraordinary Sales Organisations Achieve More

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Collaboration, Marketing, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Trends, Social Sales

Sales Trend 8 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 explore how extraordinary sales organisations can work with marketing to achieve more.

With the help of technological disruption, buyers in the past 10 years have dramatically changed how they identify opportunities, evaluate alternatives, and purchase solutions.

What has changed?

Buyers are no longer calling the vendor to learn what’s new or to request information like they did before. They have become self-educating; consuming online information whenever they wish.

  • Buyers rely less on initial telephone / in-person meetings with vendors and more on consuming information online.
  • Buyers rely less on tradeshows / networking events and …

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2017 Sales Trend 7 – Sell and Deliver Value or Commoditise

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Business Acumen, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Results, Sales Strategy, Sales Trends

With business becoming much more complex and value harder to discern in product sales alone, Sales Trend 7, Sell and Deliver Value or Commoditise, sees business leaders making serious decisions about how to do business. In essence, they have two choices in terms of the way to run legitimate operations:

  • Run a business that sells unique solutions or customised products/services and generates reasonable margins and delivers real value beyond product. This means stepping up their game, building out their sales team’s business acumen and solution selling capabilities so as to stay relevant to their clients, add real business value and ROI, …

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    2017 Sales Trend 6 – Where are All the High Performance Sales Coaches?

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 6 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report is about sales coaching.

    This sales trend focuses on how sales coaching is still lagging behind business coaching as a standard business discipline, but how the best sales leaders are using coaching to transform their sales teams and sales performances to maximise success. So what’s going on with sales coaching?

    A lot has been written about coaching, specifically business coaching, over the years and the proof is that coaching, like anything if applied effectively, does work. For instance, the International Coach Federation (ICF) conducted a worldwide survey …

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    2017 Sales Trend 5 – Salespeople at Risk of Becoming Obsolete

    By / / Sales Trends, Solution Selling

    This is our Sales Trend 5 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report.

    The proliferation of internet-based sales channels, that offer everything from simple items such as a toothbrush to some fairly complicated services including insurance, banking and even major items in the B2B sector means that the traditional role of product focused salespeople has changed. Sadly, some companies and quite a few salespeople continue to ignore the encroaching tsunami.

    So just what has changed?

    Probably the single most important change (or lack thereof) in sales, with the most dramatic impact, is the fact that those companies that continue to …

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    2017 Sales Trend 4 – Learn to Embrace and Manage Complexity

    By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Strategy, Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 4 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report explains why to have extraordinary sales teams and operations, we have to embrace complexity.

    As John Lord[1] said “Perhaps a greater understanding of what I am saying might be obtained by exercising a greater willingness to think more deeply”. 

    Regrettably, most organisations ONLY view their sales operations as tactical linear functions of the value chain—and while sales teams need to get up close and personal on a tactical level with customers, if sales is only viewed through the overly simplistic lens of “foot soldiers selling products” then …

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    Sales Trend 3 – Mapping the Buying–Selling-Delivery Process

    By / / Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 3 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report is Mapping the Buying-Selling-Delivery Process.

    If you want your sales team and your business to move from ordinary to extraordinary when it comes to client engagement and better sales results, it pays to do what the smart companies are doing and map your entire buying-selling-delivery process—the client value chain—and make sure everyone in your organisation understands what it is, where they fit in and how they all support the buying-selling-delivery client experience.

    Sales Trend 3 points out that in the hyper-competitive and transparent business world of today we need everyone …

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    Sales Trend 2 – The Silent Majority

    By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Talent, Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 2 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report is about the new salesperson stereotype.

    The history of sales methodologies and sales people is full of twists and turns. With a few excellent –or at least well-intentioned– ways of selling and many others that are the complete opposite.

    There was a time when the salesperson was the only one with information about new products—from the end of the 19th century to mid-20th century; they were the experts and customers were in their hands when it came to make a buying decision. This produced a situation where many sales …

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    Sales Trend 1 – New Metrics

    By / / Sales Management, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Results, Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 1 from our 12 Sales Trends for 2017 report is about sales metrics.

    What do we measure now?

    When we talk about sales metrics we usually think units, volumes, quota, members signed, calls made. Generally speaking, these metrics would have been put in place in an organisation at the time that the sales team was established, and (maybe) changed from time to time, usually from quota to number of calls or units, and so on.

    The current state of flux of markets and most industries is quite different from the time when the use of these metrics was best practice. …

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    12 Sales Trends for 2017 – Going from ordinary to extraordinary

    By / / Sales Trends

    We are pleased to release our 8th annual 12 sales trends report. 2017 Sales Trends focuses on – Going from ordinary to extraordinary

    In times of major change, uncertainty and upheaval we have two choices: 1) bunker down, keeping our heads low, waiting for things to pass and settle down back to normal, or 2) embrace the change and ride the waves towards the future creating a new normal.

    Opting for option 1 is dangerous and potentially foolish as we are likely to be left behind achieving only obsolescence.

    Opting for option 2 is also potentially dangerous but more likely …

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    2016 Sales Trend 11 – The Renaissance Sales Manager

    By / / Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Trends

    Sales Trend 11 for our 12 Sales Trends Report for 2016 is The Renaissance Sales Manager.

    The logic follows that senior executives determine the Grand Strategy for the entire business, divisional executives determine what strategy they need for the segments they service so as to make the grand strategy work, and then sales managers need to deploy, direct and control the sales resources to make the strategy(ies) happen. Sales managers should play a pivotal role in making strategy happen and delivering results.

    Yet, for some time now where big data has been, and still is, a big focus …

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