How many emails did you get this week? How many hand-written notes or letters did you receive? I suspect most people have no idea what the answer is to question #1 since the number is so large. I suspect the answer to question #2 is zero but no greater than one. We are all grappling [...]
Have a Purpose for Your Next Sales Call
There seems to be a fair bit of confusion on how to effectively run a sales call (meeting). A couple of years ago my partner, John Orvos, introduced me to a very simple format for running sales meetings that I now use every time I am in front of a prospect. The format is: Introduction [...]
Sales Pros – How are your Writing Skills?
I have been reviewing resumes recently for sales positions at one of my clients and I cannot believe how poorly written some of them are. About a third of the resumes contain glaring and repeated spelling and grammatical mistakes. The two most extreme examples of poorly written resumes went far beyond pure mistakes in English: [...]
The “S-Myth”
The cover story from June’s issue of Sales and Marketing Management magazine is making me feel uneasy (a paid subscription is needed to access this article). It’s not so much the explicit subject of the article – which is about hiring – but the implicit idea that companies should only be looking for sales stars [...]
Are Your Sales People Just Going through the Car Wash?
I often ask sales people what sales methodology they use…and I often get greeted by a blank stare. So then I ask which sales training they took over their career is the one they use on a day-to-day basis. The answer to this question is often a list of four to five, often well known, [...]
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 [...]
Are your sales people Witch Doctors?
Sales is a process. This is one of my most basic beliefs about sales. I have never understood why so many people treat sales as if it is some form of “black magic”. In every other job you are expected to follow a process but in sales this expectation is somehow waived. I cannot imagine [...]
How Many Cold Calls would you like to make today?
Is cold-calling a waste of time? Last month I wrote about Frank Rumbauskas and his program “Cold Calling is a waste of time” This week a saw some data from an article written by Ernest Nicastro that puts Frank’s hypothesis into context. In his article in Marketing Profs, Ernest references some research conducted at Harvard [...]
Do you need an Aspirin after your sales meetings?
What kind of job may require you take an aspirin after a particularly good meeting? Answer: sales. During the last 24 months I think I have held some of my best sales meetings (this is reassuring since I am always trying to improve my own sales skills). Thinking back on these particularly well run meetings [...]
Has your proposal gone to Neverland?
I was reminded the other day of one of the “classic” problems that is experienced by so many people during the sales process – proposals that have “gone to Neverland”. The scenario goes like this…you meet with a prospect and they ask for a proposal; you spend a considerable amount of time developing a proposal [...]
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