Sales Excellence Blog

AS the business climate improves, the natural inclination of executives everywhere will be to increase their marketing budgets to try to attract new clients. That idea makes perfect sense, of course.

I think we’d all like to have more opportunities in our pipelines. Some of you are fortunate to be getting new leads on a regular basis from your marketing departments or other sources, but for lot of us in the selling profession we have to find our own leads.

One of the biggest challenges for marketing is creating cooperative teamwork between marketing and other departments, especially in the traditionally uneasy partnership with Sales.

The language used by high-level business managers and executives is usually quite different than the language used in IT, R&D, or out on the shop floor. To be effective selling to all the different people involved in a complex buying process, we have to become multi-lingual.

Is your current sales prospect in your current pipeline “moving” or “stopped”? It’s really easy to tell the difference. Take a look at your day planner, or personal digital assistant (PDA), or whatever you use to schedule appointments.

The concept of Think Like Your Customer is the underpinning of the basics we teach throughout our methodology and all of the courses we offer. The more we think like our customers, the better we understand the psychology of why and how our customers buy.

For many sales professionals the question, “Is this deal qualified?” is one they dread to hear. It comes from fellow sales people, from pre-sales and marketing types, from his or her own boss, and from their boss, and their boss, and their boss.

One of our global clients recently shared with us that this year nearly 60% of enterprise-level sales opportunities they are engaged in include a Request for Proposal (RFP) as part of their buying process.

Today I’m really excited to talk about how you maximize your sales performance. This a topic that deserves more than just one segment and in fact we’ve got a whole section for this, and we’ll be talking about this several times as we roll through this series. Let’s address the first piece about how you maximize your performance. (VIDEO INCLUDED)