Deals rarely slow down then close. Deals that close have momentum. The pace of the communication accelerates as you get near closing. The prospect has questions. They are about to make a commitment. As they draw closer to making that commitment questions crop up in their mind. They want to be sure they are making [...]
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Don’t Propose. Close.
I don’t care how many proposals you have out. Truth be told you probably don’t really care either. What you care about is how much money you are going to put in your bank account this month, this quarter and this year. Proposals are not going to get you there. Deals are. Closed deals.
Has Your Proposal Gone to Neverland (Part II)?
In a previous piece about proposals I said that you should try to avoid producing proposals without selling all the decision-makers in the sales process first. I thought it might be useful to say a little more about how to correctly develop a proposal (actually a “statement of work” – see my previous post for [...]
Sales Calls: 14 Preparation Tips
An IDC study from last year revealed only one out of six sales professionals were “extremely prepared” for an initial meeting with a customer. 57 percent were either not or only somewhat prepared. Ouch! Even cutting ourselves some slack this is a pretty poor result for us sales professionals. Clearly we have some making up [...]
Top 20 Sales Books for a Sales 2.0 World
It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot over the last few years. “What are the best sales books?” Here’s my top 20 sales books somewhat in order (putting them in order is super-tough for me as it’s like choosing between children but I took my best shot). If there’s enough interest I’ll dig down [...]
As the Market Drops, Don’t Be a Closer
The sky is falling. Well, the stock market and many of the great behemoth financial firms that I have sold to over the last dozen years are. Let’s say many of us are not in the most upbeat mood right now. And how does this “macro economic tension” tend to show up in sales organizations? [...]
What is a Sales Cycle?
How long is your sales cycle? How do we shorten our sales cycle? Interesting questions but how do you answer these if you don’t know what your sales cycle is? I’d like to be a bit odd as usual and define a sales cycle my own way. My definition is a little different to the [...]
Empty Your Sales Pipeline
When I last held down a real job I worked in a small sales team of senior sales executives selling high-end, high-cost technology projects to Wall Street banks. Like most sales teams we would have weekly sales meetings where the team and our sales manager met in a conference room and reviewed our sales pipeline [...]
Go to your next Sales Meeting Naked
I went on a sales call a couple of weeks ago where the rep arrived and spread out about 15 products all across the prospect’s desk. Then she just started talking (and talking) about the products. All the poor prospect could say was “ah ha”…”ah ha” as the sales person kept talking and talking about [...]
The Sales 2.0 Process
A key difference between Sales 2.0 and Sales 1.0 (aka “old school selling”) is where sales people should spend their time and energy in the sales process. The graph opposite illustrates this point (click to enlarge). The graph shows the time and energy sales people need to put into the sales process graphed against the [...]
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