Selling is a difficult career in which to make a living; it is not uncommon to have the commission check denied before the salesperson even gets a chance to win. Analysis of thousands of sales situations has made it phenomenally obvious that most salespeople begin their sales campaign so late in the decision-making process that …
If a team cannot identify five reasons why the prospect has a gap between where s/he is and where s/he wants to be, there is a high likelihood that there will not be an order. You need to take it off the Commit List and put it on the Upside List. Organizations do not buy because of pain (“I wish we didn’t have to deal with this problem”); they invest because they want to change their situation – a “needs gap” between where they are and where they want to be (“We absolutely need to do this so that we can achieve nirvana”).
Read More If You Don’t Have Five Reasons To Buy Then Take It Off Your Forecast
Brian Burns interviewed me for his podcast, The Brutal Truth, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/c/BrianBurns/videos. This version of the video doesn’t have the automatic transcription of the original podcast. I have created a better transcription below. I encourage you to read it here. Brian’s podcast was titled The Top 3 Things You Need To …
I typically do not do a lot of writing about specific tactics that will work. Instead, I tend to write about more prominent strategies you can leverage to increase your commission. Unfortunately, plans will fail if your tactics fail.
For years, articles have advised us that a PS (postscriptum) is the most read part of an email. While their advice is not wrong, it is not the most straightforward way or the best way to get the reader’s attention.
Top leaders at your prospects do not make decisions in a vacuum. While there are cases where the executive overrode the team and made a decision that everyone hated, most of the time, the boss tries to build consensus in the group. If a highly respected person in the department doesn’t like a purchase, it is infrequent that the leader goes against that advice. If you want the top person to decide in your favor, you first need to get that highly respected person to decide in your favor.
Read More There Is No Single Decision Maker In Enterprise Sales
Too often, a salesperson will try to “make something happen” by offering to do another event. Maybe that event is a “lunch and learn” for more people. Or perhaps that event is mini-demo of an individual feature not adequately explored in the original demo. If the prospect requests those new events, then, by all means, qualify them and do them to educate your prospect. But if you propose those new events as the salesperson, you may have a problem.
Read More Too much event-based selling hurts your ability to close
Almost daily, you are presenting to your prospects from one of your favorite presentation decks. The ubiquitous question at the end of the presentation is, “Can you send me your deck?” Don’t do it. While you should say that you will be sending the deck, you shouldn’t do it. Few things are so poorly understood …
The candidate wants to know about you as the sales leader. Have you been personally successful? What kind of things are you going to teach a new salesperson? How are you going to help that new salesperson be successful? Your personal resume is a great selling tool during the recruiting process. Use it to convince the person that you want to join you and make your company a success.