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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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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Metrics for Measuring Solution Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Performance Management, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Social Sales, Solution Selling

How do we measure sales performance now?

As many formally product-focused companies migrate to selling solutions, most overlook one critical component – the way they measure sales performance.

Sales people, using a solution-selling approach, generally nurture larger, more complex and lucrative deals; they are engaging in business-level discussions with key executives in prospect companies and invest heavily in building long-term, trust-based relationships with key decision makers. But in many instances, their success is still being measured using the old transaction-based sales metrics.

Working with many, many sales leaders and their sales teams since 1995, we understand that while making the …

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How Retail Discount Advertising negatively impacts B2B Sales – Part II

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Results, Sales Strategy, Sales Tips, Solution Selling

How to shift the conversation from Price to Value

In last week’s post we talked about how –given that every business executive is a consumer, and the amount of discount sales in the retail sector- the expectation of ‘better price’ is impacting B2B sales.

We concluded that a more pragmatic approach is needed, based on value rather than absolute price.

This is the point we need to understand as sales people and business leaders: the client does not really see a price, they see and are looking for value.  So our real mission as sales people is to find out what …

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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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Solution versus Product Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Tips, Solution Selling

Today it is almost impossible to meet a product salesperson in the business-to-business sector. Everyone sells ‘solutions’ hoping they can charge a premium or perform some miracle that will instantly differentiate them from their competitors.

And management – often ignorant of the subtle differences between selling products or services and selling solutions – become frustrated when they find that the expected boom in sales doesn’t materialise; that their salespeople continue to face pressure for lower prices, better service delivery and a wider range of offerings.

The challenge is understanding what selling a solution requires. The real starting point, for a truly solutions …

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How to avoid the discount trap

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Solution Selling

Do you frequently discount to win business? Does your brand seem to matter less to customers today? It’s no wonder. Customers can do a Google search of your product or service and, within minutes, learn about your product, your competitors, what customers think of you, and find the lowest prices. So, with this kind of information at their fingertips, why would they need to meet with a salesperson?

It’s a critical question in today’s selling environment – and one you need to think about if you want to sell better.

In recent observations done by Barrett we noticed a …

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Why I cannot relate to the typical salesperson stereotype and why we need a new one for the 21st century

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Ethics & Values, Solution Selling, Success, Wellbeing

If you cannot relate to the typical salesperson stereotype you are not alone. Many people we speak to, including many salespeople themselves, have never been able to relate to the fast talking, overly confident and ambitious, competitive, win at all costs, know-it-all, we-are-the-frontline-and-without-us-you-wouldn’t-have-a-job persona that is often portrayed as the ideal salesperson stereotype in the media and business world via films, press, social media, books, articles, and so on.

Today, many people, of all sorts of persuasions – entrepreneurs, start-up founders, professional services (law, accounting, engineering, architects, etc.), technical people, customer service staff, internal teams, membership groups, not-for-profits, even government bodies …

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Survival of the Adaptive P1: focus on changing buying habits

By / / Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Strategy, Social Media, Social Sales, Solution Selling

Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is often misquoted as being ‘the survival of the fittest’ when in fact it is ‘the survival of the most adaptive’. And that is how we need to be if we want to survive and thrive in these ever changing markets – adaptive.

This series of ‘Survival of the Adaptive’ articles will look at the key things we need to do as sales teams to contend with the many changes afoot in our 21st century world and market place.

One of the ways sales teams can adapt and really get ahead of the curve …

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