Sales Excellence Blog

As professional sales trainers, the biggest challenge we face is keeping salespeople and their managers engaged after a group training workshop.

Are the sales opportunities in your current sales 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.

Today we’re going to talk about how do we invest more of our time and spend less of it. When it comes to money it’s really easy to see the difference between spending and investing. We spend money on lots of things; we spend money on cars, on vacations, on clothing and food and a variety of things that we have to buy. But there’s a big difference between spending money on things that we need or that we want, and investing money. When we invest money the expectation of course is that we’re going to buy something that is not only going to hopefully retain its value, but it’s actually going to appreciate in value over time. So, we invest money in let’s say a house. And while we own that house hopefully the value of that house increases and it’s going to be worth more when we’re done. We invest money in stocks or bonds or precious metals or something expecting that we’re going to retain our investment, our initial principal, and get some return too. But let me ask you: do we think about how we spend versus invest our time? (VIDEO INCLUDED)

Let’s discuss the roles involved in a complex buying process… (VIDEO INCLUDED)

There’s a lot to be said about this topic so I’ll only cover a small portion of it in this video segment, but I’ll cover a few things about how to structure your sales proposal to make it more compelling, more interesting, hopefully make it more valuable and more likely that your client will want to move forward with it. (VIDEO INCLUDED)

If you look at your entire market or territory – this would be everyone you could potentially sell to, which could be defined by geography, industry, etc. – however your territory is defined, we first want to take a look at all of the opportunities that might exist in there or could potentially be found in there. (VIDEO INCLUDED)

You could also phrase this question as, “how do I increase my opportunity win rate or my closure rate?” The main problem is that many salespeople don’t put themselves in a position where they can close business. By that I mean that we make several mistakes along the way that put us in the position where we can’t ask for closure. There are a number of things we have to do to increase the likelihood of being in a position to close. (VIDEO INCLUDED)

Many years ago I learned the hard way that customers don’t really want to buy anything. They don’t have any interest in the products and services that we sell…