What’s your biggest competitor? If you’re in IT sales is it IBM. Apple, Google, Wipro, some dudes in Bulgaria? Probably not. You’re biggest competitor is Status Quo Inc. Boy those guys are tough to beat! The thing is a lot of the time our prospect will choose the status quo, aka do nothing vs. any [...]
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Prospecting the Hard Way
I’m not that keen on banging my head off walls. But some sales people are. Mostly sales people that have been trained in “old school selling techniques”. The ”old school” maintains that “sales is a numbers game” and the numbers that matter are all about effort. All about volume. One of the key indicators of [...]
Customer 2.0 – What’s Changed?
Are your customers behaving differently now than they were 5-10 years ago? Is Customer 2.0 real? Are they super-frazzled? What say you? I’d love your opinion. I’m not sure if it’s because I just read SNAP Selling again or because I keep seeing the words Customer 2.0 on InsideView’s blog but I’m starting to thoroughly [...]
Customer 2.0 has Different Shoe Sizes
I’m into smart prospecting. I believe we should find out as much as we can before we call someone. Our ability to know more before the call is increasing all the time as the tools that can inform us are constantly improving. But there is a limit. These tools are all drawing from the pool [...]
Startling New Prospecting Research: The Product You Sell Matters (a Lot)
We are keen on data here at Sales 2.0. In our telesales operation we recently reviewed conversion data for some of our projects. From that analysis I can reveal to you today that: The product you sell influences your prospecting outcomes — a lot! OK so that’s intuitively extra-obvious. But the way management acts in [...]
Shred Your Sales Books!
My best takeaway from the Sales Skills for MBA’s event in New York was from one of the participants who introduced herself in the Q & A as “not being a sales person”. She made the comment that she now understood that sales is in fact quite simple. “It comes down to being human and [...]
IT Sales Strategies for Financial Services
Ed Sim, VC, is really “hitting some nails on the head” this month in his blog. I saw another great post from him on selling IT to the financial services sector. Ed isolated four strategies for selling IT to major financial institutions: Enter through the CIO (if you are lucky enough to have a CIO [...]
A Buyer Tells How to Sell Him
I saw this post from Ed Sim that succinctly sums up some basic principles for running sales meetings. I want to point this post out because it was written from the buyer’s perspective. Ed is a VC. His post is a set of guidelines to help technology firms when pitching to him for investment. However, [...]
Does Size Matter?
Does size matter? When it comes to prospect databases (a.k.a. “Rolodexes”) the answer is yes, and mostly no. Time and again I see companies who have very large prospect/client databases (a.k.a. Rolodexes) but have very little “relationship strength” with each (or sometimes any) contact in the database. This makes the overall value of the database [...]
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