Posts with Category "Sales Prospecting"

• Sales Call Planning: What to Know Before Every Sales Call

  

  Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen

  Woody Allen’s advice is pretty sound for salespeople as well, assuming you show up prepared.

  We acknowledge that sometimes you do just show up (or—hallelujah—a prospect calls you out of the blue) and you haven't done any preparation for the sales call. It's reasonable to suggest that, on occasion, sales calls are appropriately deemed 'exploratory discussions'; the kind of discussion in which we just talk and 'see where it goes.'

  Take this approach in most business development situations, however, and you'll lose more than your share of sales that you should have won. Interestingly, whether you have a two-thousand- or two-million-dollar price point, to increase your odds of winning new clients, you still need to do the same basic planning and know the same essential information before your sales calls.

  Here are six sales call planning questions you can answer for yourself before every sales call that will help prepare you for business development success...

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Sales Call Planning,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 5 Sales Prospecting Techniques You’ve Probably Never Tried (But Should)

  

  What is the #1 challenge or issue you face when it comes to growing sales for your business?

  When I recently reached out to my network and asked that same question, 75% mentioned sales prospecting as their #1 challenge.

  The problem isn’t that people don’t know what do to; it’s that what they’ve always done no longer works. Want proof? Think about the last time you met an actual decision maker at a networking event, and that conversation led to a sale. How about from a cold call? Trade show? Advertisement?

  The simple truth is this: if you do what everybody else is doing, you’ll get the same results everybody else is getting.

  Which, in a world where prospects are increasingly turning off their phone and turning on their spam filters, isn’t much.

  So, if you want to stand out (and get more meetings), here are five sales prospecting techniques you’ve probably never tried (but should).

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Networking,
  • Professional Selling Skills,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Prospecting

• The New Rules of Selling, Part 1: Play to Win-Win

  Are you playing to win-win?

  Rule #1: Play to Win-Win. (This post is the first in a series of blog posts on the new rules of selling.)

  Win-win is a common negotiating philosophy. The idea is to find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties, and maximize value on both sides. Since repeat business and referrals are so important in complex sales, employing win-win as part of your selling technique and philosophy should be a foregone conclusion.

  However, in the name of "win-win" many salespeople get so tied up in the name of “providing value” during the sales process that they:

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  2 Comments Topics:

  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Prospecting,
  • Value Proposition

• Prospecting with Old “Friends”: Making Outdated Leads Work

  Are you taking the opportunity to reconnect?

  If your firm is like most, you’ve been using CRM software for years now. Name after name, title after title, data point upon data point, you’ve likely stockpiled a huge amount of prospecting information through various lead generation activities. You’ve created countless records and guided each one through your sales pipeline.

  What do you do with those records once you can no longer push them forward? Again, if your firm is like most, you probably leave them languishing in your database, perhaps with a sad “lost – chose competitor” or “dead – no budget” tag attached. But these are more than just dead data...

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 3 Ways to Get Cold Prospects to Talk to You

  Use these 3 techniques, and you'll warm up cold prospects and fill your pipeline.

  Cold prospecting – reaching out to targets you don’t know to generate an initial meeting – is one of the hardest parts of sales. Partly, it’s a numbers game. With decision makers more insulated than ever, it’s getting harder and harder to get past gatekeepers and beyond voicemail.

  But what happens when you do get a cold prospect to pay attention – whether it’s because they picked up the phone, or responded to an email or a direct mail piece? Do you feel like you nail it every time?

  Much prospecting success is determined in this first interaction. Many opportunities die here before you have a chance to engage.

  What can you do to get cold prospects to shift from “go away” to “sounds good, let’s talk?”

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  15 Comments Topics:

  • Cold Calling,
  • Sales Call Planning,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Mistakes,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 10 Ways to Boost Your Sales Success

  Is there a silver bullet key to sales success?

  Wouldn’t it be great if there were a silver bullet that would make you more successful in your sales efforts? One thing you could do to really boost your sales success?

  I hate to disappoint, but the reality is, there is no silver bullet. Sales success takes hard work and commitment along with skill and savvy.

  While there is no one thing that will work for you, there are a number of things you can do to help boost your overall success. You can start by following these 10 sales tips...

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  1 Comment Topics:

  • Sales Call Planning,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Mistakes,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 8 Tips for Selling with Social Media

  There's money to be made in social media if you sell the right way.

  There’s this age-old problem with selling: If we could only get more people to pay attention to us, we could build relationships that lead to sales.

  Fortunately, social media offers an amazing source of business opportunities. If you approach it the right way, you can build many relationships that could be crucial to your business growth and success.

  This article is about successfully selling (not marketing) with social media. And by selling, I mean the “two people getting to know each other and starting up a conversation that might go somewhere” kind of selling.

  Here are 8 ways to strike up social media conversations with people you want to meet...

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  9 Comments Topics:

  • Networking,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Mistakes,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 7 Ways to Build Rapport in Sales and Connect with People

  It's important to build rapport from the initial handshake. Take a look at these 7 tips for building genuine rapport with new prospects.

  Consider this: a CBS News / New York Times poll asked, “What percent of people in general are trustworthy?”

  The answer: 30%. Pretty skeptical we all are, right?

  Not necessarily. At the same time, the CBS News / New York Times poll asked a similar group the same question, but with a slight difference. “What percent of people that you know are trustworthy?”

  The answer: 70%.

  That’s a huge difference. Goes to show you: when people get to know you and people get to like you, people begin to trust you.

  Of course, there’s a lot more to building trust than making a good initial connection with someone, but it’s sure a good start. And making a connection with someone makes them more comfortable sharing with you their aspirations and their afflictions, two things you need to know if you want to succeed in sales.

  When you build rapport in sales, keep in mind you want to make a sincere connection. All too often chit-chat before a sales call seems contrived…because it is. Assuming you want to build solid and real relationships with people, consider the following...

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  4 Comments Topics:

  • Networking,
  • RAIN Selling,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Mistakes,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 16 Principles of Influence in Sales

  I really wanted a new basketball for my 6th birthday - so big sis went to the sidewalk to talk influence strategy...

  When I was 6 I wanted a basketball for my birthday. I didn’t ask my dad for it myself. I sent in the big gun: my sister Allyson.

  I gave her the 411 on what I wanted and why, and we proceeded with a white board session where we mapped out all of the possible ways to get the decision makers to rule in our favor. (OK, as talented an 8 year old as Allyson was, maybe no white board. But we did talk about it, and she was a mean sidewalk chalk girl.)

  Shortly thereafter, we green lighted operation Cedric Maxwell.

  A few hours later, the qualified decision maker (a.k.a. Dad) came to see me. As he tells me the story, he asked me why I sent my sister in to lobby for me.

  My answer, “She’s the better convincer.”

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  6 Comments Topics:

  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Presentations,
  • Sales Prospecting

• Is the “Wuss Factor” Hindering Your Sales Success?

  Is this "wuss factor" dragging you down?

  I had the pleasure of meeting Ed Rendell when he was the mayor of Philadelphia. He was pointed and direct, quite different from the other politicians I have met over the years. So it came as little surprise when early this winter, Rendell, then Governor of Pennsylvania, called NFL officials “wimps” for canceling a game between the Eagles and Vikings due to snow.

  When asked about the NFL’s decision the next day, Governor Rendell made his stance clear: "My biggest beef is that this is part of what's happened in this country. We've become a nation of wusses.”

  This nation of wusses has extended into the field of sales. There’s no hiding that sales is difficult. Day in and day out you face rejection, you must constantly be filling the pipeline with new leads, you have quotas you must meet, and results are often inconsistent. 

  Yet too many sales people use these difficulties as excuses and let them hinder their own success – they wuss out.

  How can you tell if the wuss factor is dragging you down? Look out for the following 5 symptoms...

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  2 Comments Topics:

  • Buying Process,
  • Overcoming Objections,
  • Sales Call Planning,
  • Sales Mistakes,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 6 Keys to Prospecting Success

  Prospecting can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack...

  I recently conducted a webinar for a client on prospecting. Leading up to the webinar, I asked what questions the client had in regards to prospecting so I could tailor the content to their particular challenges. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I only got one response. And that is not because they are masters of prospecting. Quite the contrary. It’s because they do so little of it and were unsure of what questions to ask. Like most sales people (50% according to Dave Kurlan’s extensive studies), they were doing little prospecting at all.¹

  While most sales people will tell you that creating conversations is important and must happen if you want to succeed in sales, the dynamics of how it works continues to baffle many. When sales people seek to understand it better they find conflicting advice. Different situations rightly call for different approaches, so some of the experts themselves are confused about what works and what doesn’t.

  If conflicting advice and lack of understanding is holding you back from prospecting and becoming a great sales person, let me break it down for you to its most simple steps.

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Cold Calling,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 10 Rainmaker Principles and Keys to Sales Motivation

  Tony Robbins, please accept my apology.

  About 15 years ago, when I was a budding manager in charge of my first strategic business unit, I dissed you pretty badly.

  I'm sorry. I take it back.

  My team and I were in a strategy meeting, trying to get something done—something really big that would literally change our fortunes and our lives.

  We knew the goal, and were now trying to figure out what to do to achieve said goal.

  A well-read young teammate of mine was a fan of motivational speakers, and was always looking for ways to increase sales motivation. At one point she shared, "Tony Robbins says, 'If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.'"

  To which I replied, "That self-help stuff…Bah-loney." So I dismissed what Tony said because I generally dismissed self-help gurus.

  Why? At the time I had only been exposed to self-help charlatans spouting useless pap wrapped in cheese blankets. As I fancied myself a serious business person, I was anti-cheese. And thus, by mistaken proxy, I was closed to advice from the self-help world that could help us understand, and enhance, the sales motivations of top performers.

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Networking,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Knowledge,
  • Sales Motivation,
  • Sales Prospecting

• FAINT - The New Definition of a Qualified Prospect

  It's 2001. You work for a new company in the search engine space. Let's call this company Shmoogle.

  Shmoogle has this huge new idea—businesses are starting to grow based on getting found on the Internet. Why not have businesses pay per click to get found? Brilliant!

  You're a sales person at Shmoogle, and you know pay per click will be huge. You start prospecting on the phone.

  You: Hello Ms. VP of Marketing. This is Lamont Sanford with Shmoogle. I'd like to speak with you for a few minutes about our marketing program that's helping companies like yours generate a lot of leads and new business on the Internet.

  Ms. VP (who pleasantly accepts cold calls): Sure. Let's talk.

  (FIVE minutes go by. Conversation goes great.)

  You: OK, then, I think pay per click search engine marketing is perfect for you. How much budget do you have set aside for this?

  Ms. VP: I don't have a budget for pay per click marketing—or a budget for marketing at all right now.

  You: (Thinking to yourself: darn, not a qualified buyer.) Well, give me a call when you have one.

  Of course, only a complete loon would finish a call like that. The wrong turn was the salesperson's fault, though, for asking the question about budget in the first place.

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  1 Comment Topics:

  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• FAINT - The New Definition of a Qualified Prospect

  In this article Mike Schultz shares the new definition of a qualified buyer (hint: you need to stop asking questions about budget).

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Professional Selling Skills,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Negotiation,
  • Sales Prospecting

• 7 Steps to Turn Sales Calls into New Clients

  Selling complex products and services is difficult, and successful rainmakers use a process to consistently bring in revenue. John Doerr explains a 7-step sales process that covers prospecting to conversations to what you should do after a sales call.

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  0 Comments Topics:

  • Cold Calling,
  • Professional Selling Skills,
  • Sales Call Planning,
  • Sales Conversations,
  • Sales Planning,
  • Sales Prospecting

• Sales Prospecting & Appointment Setting

  0 Comments Topics:

  • Sales Seminars & Events,
  • Sales Prospecting,
  • Sales Training