Sales Excellence Blog

This is a question we hear from just about everybody who’s responsible for outbound business development – for reaching out to customers as opposed to just responding to inbound leads and inquiries. How do you sell past the executive assistant?

Because of the broad variety of measures and metrics that businesses use to track and report their performance, leaning the language of business is an ongoing process.

This is a subject that is very important in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace. A lot of times when we talk about competitive strategy, the conversation eventually devolves into a discussion of, let’s say, military strategy, where we have two competing armies on a battlefield, although I don’t think that winning business is necessarily just beating the competition. Sometimes I even like to say that if your goal is to simply beat the competition, then you’ve already lost. What we need to think about is helping the customer. To use that military illustration, one thing I have found helpful for salespeople to think about when preparing to compete is what ground on that battlefield they want to occupy and defend. In other words, what is your competitive position going to be? I want to share with you today several different positions that you may take up, occupy or defend as a way of winning business against competitive forces that are aggressively pursuing business themselves. (VIDEO INCLUDED)

These rules may sound basic, but even sea­soned sales pros some­times need a refresh­er. Make sure you’ve mas­tered the process. A num­ber of the many emails I receive each week are request­ing basic “how to sell” infor­ma­tion, espe­cial­ly for business-to-business sales.

Have you ever spent all night – or what seemed like all night – putting the finishing touches on that perfect presentation?

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While sales executives are pressing their organizations to achieve year-end budgets, someone else in the organization is usually planning and creating an agenda for an annual sales meeting.

The process of qualifying sales opportunities requires a huge amount of fact-finding. Some of these facts can be obtained through research from sources outside the prospective client’s company, but many of them will have to be gathered through the questions that you ask.

To many sales professionals, the words “sales presentation” have become synonymous with “slide show.” While some are able to use a laptop and a projector to deliver a message that words alone could never convey, to many others the slide show has become a crutch that serves little more purpose than electronic queue cards.