Posts with Category "Professional Selling"

5 To-Dos When Selling to Senior Executives

Want to make more sales? Start by having better conversations.

Think about it. You spent months chasing a senior decision maker or prospect, making calls, and sending e-mails, and they finally agreed to sit down with you. You invested significant amounts of time, effort, energy and—sometimes considerable—resources to win them over.

And now you find yourself in a room with a senior executive. Now what?

In this video, I explain my five-step process for ensuring you have great sales meetings that are virtually guaranteed to lead to a next meeting.

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Seller-Driven Demand: the Greatest Untapped Opportunity in Key Account Sales

By Mike Schultz

Imagine for a minute you sold everything you should be selling across all of your firm’s capabilities to your existing clients. If all the buying centers bought all of the capabilities they should be buying, how much would your key account sales increase?

When people spend time analyzing this carefully, they find the potential to expand sales to existing clients is huge.

Given the great potential for growth, many companies give proactive key account sales quite the effort, but few achieve the results they should. The problem is they can’t, or for some reason simply don’t, create their own opportunities.

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3 Steps to Communicating Your Value in Professional Services Sales

By John Doerr

One of the greatest difficulties in professional services sales is helping potential clients understand what outcomes they will achieve when they work with you. Creating a picture of what outcomes are possible with the solution you present is imperative for two reasons. First, prospects need to be convinced of the outcome and that you can achieve it or they likely will not purchase. Second, if they do not fully understand what you are able to do for them, they cannot communicate it to the rest of the influencers in their organization and your sale may get stuck in endless internal discussions.

Helping prospects to understand the value of the services you provide is an exercise in teaching and learning. Prospects need to understand what will be different for them and their company if they purchase your services versus if they don’t, or if they purchase services from a competitor. In the end, prospects are not interested in buying your services; they are interested in what your services will get them.

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Accountability in Strategic Account Management

By Mike Schultz

In our 5 Keys to Maximizing Sales with Existing Accounts report, we noted a number of different ways that organizations can shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to maximizing account growth. Compensation alignment and accountability are two big ones.

In our Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management, we found that high performers were more than twice as likely to have compensation and reporting structures aligned to support account growth. And, as well, high performers were much more likely to hold teams accountable.

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Your 6-Step Guide to Setting and Achieving Sales Goals: You Can Get There From Here

By John Doerr

Achieving your goals isn't a slam dunk. Can you do what it takes to meet them?

I recently started going to a personal trainer. At the beginning of our very first session, she asked, “So, what are you trying to accomplish?”

“To get in better shape?”, I hesitantly answered.

“Well, without a clear goal, you will not be able to see your progress, you will lose momentum, and we won’t be able to see if the training is paying off.”

“In that case, to fit in my suits from last year and to grab rebounds in my basketball games without getting pushed around.”

“Now, we are talking.”

Over the years I’ve seen many salespeople (and sales managers and companies) get goal planning, action planning, and commitment right, and I’ve seen many fall short. Without a clear goal they don’t know where they’re headed, so any path will get them there.

In my experience, only two things set apart those who live by goals and those who don’t. Salespeople who live by goals: