Posts with Category "Buying Process"

5 Ways Strategic Account Management and Selling Are Different

By Mike Schultz

What are the differences between Strategic Account Management and Selling?

Ask the question, “What needs to happen at your company to maximize your success with your strategic accounts?” and you’re likely to get answers like this:

• The leaders at the account need to know about the value we can bring them besides what we’re doing for them right now.
• We need to penetrate different divisions of the accounts.
• Our relationships need to be deeper if we want to keep competitors out.
• We need to work directly with decision makers at the enterprise level.

Nice list, but not unique to strategic account management.

Indeed, the answers tend to be the same as those to the question, “What would you like your salespeople to do more of?"

Company leaders often ask the question, look at this list, and decide, “Okay – looks like we need sales training. Let’s put something on the agenda.”

This is a mistake.

While on their face, many of the outcomes of strategic account management and sales are the same (e.g. higher revenue, higher margins, longer contracts, deeper penetration, more mindshare, stronger relationships) and some of the concepts are the same, the paths to get there can be quite different.

Here are 5 areas where these differences stand out...

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1 Comment Topics:

• Sales Performance Improvement,
• Buying Process

8 Strategic Account Management Roles Every Company Needs to Know About

By Mike Schultz

Is your account team playing all the right roles?

Ask leaders at companies how much more they believe they could be selling to their strategic accounts and you don’t hear 5%, 10%, or 20%.

It’s usually more like, “We should be selling 2 times…3 times…even more.”

Ask what’s in their way, you’ll often get this answer, “Our strategic account managers just aren’t doing what they need to do to penetrate the account, cross-sell, and keep the competition out so we can truly grow our accounts their potential.”

The reasons vary why this is the case. But when it comes to the strategic account management team, eight of the reasons are predictable. This is because there are eight distinct roles that must be played for strategic account management initiatives to deliver at peak potential.

Few companies define the roles and play all eight well.

The first step to changing this is to know what these roles are. So here you go.

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0 Comments Topics:

• Sales Performance Improvement,
• Sales Knowledge,
• Buying Process

Using the Power of Why in Needs Discovery

By Mike Schultz & John Doerr

Why - a powerful word in uncovering need.

"It’s not that they can’t see the solution, it’s that they can’t see the problem.”

- G.K. Chesterton

One day the production line stopped suddenly, and the whole plant shut down.

It was horrible!

The company lost tens of thousands of dollars an hour by not turning out widgets as the staff stood idly by and waited.

The problem was in the ViperAssembly machine. No matter what they tried, they just couldn’t fix it for good. They replaced the McGurnkney nut and it worked for about a day. Then it stopped again. Then they tried realigning the Johnson rod, and that fix only lasted 3 hours.

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8 Comments Topics:

• Sales Conversations,
• Sales Mistakes,
• RAIN Selling,
• Buying Process

Is the “Wuss Factor” Hindering Your Sales Success?

By Bob Croston

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:

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

The 8 Buyer Personas (and How to Sell to Them)

By Mike Schultz

Warp 9 Walt is a change agent with a strong sense of urgency. He's just one of the eight buyer personas...

A while ago at a conference I had dinner with two people. The first, (we’ll call her Janine) I had known since we worked together six years earlier. The second person (Ed), Janine and I had just met.

Janine described a sales challenge she was facing. She’d been working with two prospects at two different organizations, one for over a year and one for almost two. The typical sales cycle is 6 to 9 months, and these were both well beyond. She felt she was nearing a sale with both, but for all she knew, “nearing” might mean a year or two to go.

This is a fairly common sales challenge: The sale looks good, but it’s taking forever. Janine happened to be facing two at the same time...

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14 Comments Topics:

• Overcoming Objections,
• Sales Conversations,
• Sales Mistakes,
• Sales Knowledge,
• Buying Process