Posts with Category "Sales Research"

Top 10 Factors Separating Sales Winners from the Rest

For our What Sales Winners Do Differently research, we studied over 700 major purchases from buyers who represented $3.1 billion dollars in annual purchasing power.

One question we wanted to answer was, “Is it the company and offerings that make the biggest difference in the buyer’s purchase decision, or is it the seller and how they sell?”

Guess what: it’s the seller and how they sell that most separate the winners of the sales from the rest.

The following list reveals what buyers say are the top 10 areas where sellers who win outperform those who come in second place...

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Thoughts on the Five Seller Profiles in The Challenger Sale

By Mike Schultz

In this post we noted we often get questions about The Challenger Sale. Perhaps the most common question we get is, “What do you think of the five seller profiles?”

The five seller profiles, as defined by the authors of The Challenger Sale in “Selling Is Not About Relationships,” a Harvard Business Review blog post, are as follows. We list them in order by what they found in their study to be least to most likely to be a top performer in sales:

Relationship Builders
Reactive Problem Solvers
Hard Workers
Lone Wolves
Challengers

So here you are—our thoughts on the five seller profiles in The Challenger Sale...

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On Relationships, Solutions, and Challengers

By Mike Schultz

Having spent two decades in the sales training and consulting world, I get asked all the time what I think about this or that sales approach or book. When I do, it tends to make for productive discussion and learning. Importantly, it helps people decide what’s right for them when it comes to selling.

Until now, I’ve never been asked about the same approach and book on a regular basis. That approach and book is The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon. And now that we’ve published RAIN Group’s major research study, What Sales Winners Do Differently, we’re getting asked even more often.

Since we get asked often—and since it’s getting a bit old copying and pasting the same emails to clients and colleagues—we thought we’d open up the discussion to everyone...

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New Sales Research: What Sales Winners Do Differently

By Mike Schultz

After many months of significant effort, we launched What Sales Winners Do Differently this week. This report reveals data and insight from our in-depth sales research on what sellers do to win sales opportunities.

The results are both surprising and fascinating.

Where selling was just a few years ago, where it is today, and where it’s going: these are pretty hot, and hotly debated, topics.

Quite a few people, most notably the authors of The Challenger Sale, have declared the death of solution selling. You know an idea has gained mainstream credence when the Harvard Business Review publishes an article that takes a firm position on it. In this case, the article in the July-August 2012 issue was titled “The End of Solution Sales.”

No hedging in that title. Story over. The end.

We agree that sales is changing, but the question is how.

When we started this research, our goal was to find out what’s currently working in sales. Is solution selling really dead? If so, what should replace it? If not, since we know selling is changing, what do sellers need to do differently in order to find themselves in the winner’s circle more often?

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Sneak Peek at the Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management with Our SAM Infographic

By Mike Schultz

In our white paper Why Strategic Account Management Fails, we noted that high performers in strategic account management were significantly less likely to face 16 of 19 common challenges in strategic account management. We didn’t, however, have space to go into much detail in this specific area. Since publishing the white paper, we’ve been asked quite a bit for more detail on the specific challenges faced by companies that engage in formal strategic account management, and the differences between high performers and average / below-average performers.

Though access to the full Benchmark Report on High Performance in Strategic Account Management is reserved for one-on-one interactions and for our work with clients, we are happy to share this more in-depth look at some of the challenges that stood out to us...

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