Back in 2016, I penned an article for SellingPower that addressed selling and opening the sales call in the new digital era where we are inundated with apps, devices, and instant price comparison.
Continue reading
Salespeople pursuing a single point of contact when prospecting is like an engineer designing a system with a single point of failure. One mishap and your whole project crashes!
My director of technology once told me about an experience he had in the early creation days of our call center. He said he had called into a local manufacturing company and was hooked up with the director of sales. He had done everything right, moving the relationship towards selling a set of training programs for the company’s sales team.
Continue reading
This post on cold calling was originally published on Oct 6, 2015 and updated on June 26, 2019.
When making cold calls and opening sales calls on the phone, you need guideposts, touch points of some kind to help guide your interaction. Now, some sales trainers would say you need a script when cold calling. However, I think a cold calling script is too rigid. A sales rep must be flexible and address people where they find them mentally and attitudinally, not where the script says your prospect should be.
One of the main points we make in our training and coaching is that throughout your sales process, from prospecting to close and beyond, you have to be able to get out of your head and see things from your prospect or client’s perspective.
This post on cold calling was originally published on Dec 19, 2016 and updated on June 19, 2019.
I was reading a blog post put out by another sales trainer titled “7 Ways to Make Cold Calling Easier”. It got me wondering, where do these tips come from? Were these ideas formulated by this trainer or were his insights rehashed from basic advice you can find anywhere? Was his advice based on empirical data, or was it based on opinions from his experiences in sales? And at that moment, I had an epiphany. This wasn’t the first time I came across a basic ‘tips to cold calling’ post. And it wasn’t the first time I was turned off by an article like this.
Continue reading
Throughout my time in sales, I’ve researched numerous complex theories, process descriptions, tactics, and strategies. In addition to these, I have also come across a number of quips from sales gurus who try to encapsulate sales success in a simple phrase that can be easily understood, even by a 5th grader.
For example, Zig Ziglar was famous for saying, “Either you’re green and growing or you’re ripe and rotten.”
Previously, we reviewed a few of the classic sales closes and how they don’t work in our current sales environment. There are two other classic closes that we should review to understand how they fit into our new global sales environment.
Continue reading
To close the sale, you don’t need special skills. Now, back in the day, companies trained specifically on the sales close. In fact, some companies had sales manuals dedicated to special closing tactics. There were even sales training programs that focused on special closing techniques.
Continue reading
In the last post, I recounted a study from Mutual of Omaha that examined and challenged this myth about the sales close.
If you recall, out of 1,000 really good leads who were poised to say “yes” to the deal, only about 7% closed because the salespeople didn’t ask for the sale.
Continue reading
This post on sales responses was originally published on Oct 21, 2016 and updated on May 15, 2019.
When we get our prospects to clarify their objections, we want to get them to specifically identify the problem or challenges they are finding with our solution.
Remember, our overall goal is to get the prospect to say something. You’ve got to get them to say either yes, no, or maybe.
And for the record, maybes suck. Continue reading