Rick Page's Blog, page 4

Sales 2.0: Leverage For Your Sales Team Or A Treacherous Minefield?

Much has been written about Sales 2.0 and how it can help your sales team be more effective.  But in my opinion at this point there are still a lot of opinions on exactly what Sales 2.0 really is, and the discussions in many cases have created more questions than answers. But there are some key benefits for sales teams as well as some cautions in this Brave New Selling World.

Everyone today, every VP of Sales down to every individual salesperson, is looking for competitive advantage. ...

Creating Demand, Why Senior Sales People Won't Do It

By Scott Miller, Principal, The Complex Sale, Inc.

In this economy – we are finding that marketing alone is not enough to secure a healthy pipeline of business. In response, senior sales people are asked to go from reacting to demand to generating it on their own. With this new dynamic, I think the hardest thing for sales management to understand is that their BIG GAME Hunters are unprepared and unwilling to handle this new responsibility.

Without any direction outside of a mandate to...

Closing the Dreaded Stalled Deal

Please accept my apologies for the blogger lag but I got absorbed into a large customized sale of our training services to major software company. The good news is we won the deal and had a very successful delivery.

One of the things that we have observed in this down economy is that ROI (return on investment) will not drive a deal to close. In the research we did last year with CSO Insights, we found a stunning revelation that less than 50% of forecasted deals actually close. Of those that...

From Rapport to Trust

The bad images we get about salespeople come from those that want to sell you one time and then disappear. But in business, sustained profitability comes from repeat bsiness and that depends on trust. If we don't deliver to meet and exceed the customer's expectations, we will inoculate each customer. People that do this are sales prevention people not salespeople.

Trust can be built on several pillars:

Default trust – Some people are naturally trusting until proven otherwise.

...

One More Time: Solve Bigger Problems for Bigger Bucks

I had the pleasure the other night to have dinner with one of our clients, Steve Balk, VP of Sales for Dataflux, a software company with data management solutions.

He related a familiar story of a $100,000 deal that wouldn't seem to close. The sales rep was resisting coaching help saying that a close was imminent. Steve called the client himself to see if he could do anything to move the sale along.

The Dataflux solution is for managing large databases from disparate sources for...

Relationships - From Alignment to Rapport

Alignment is the gateway to a relationship. It's like lowering a drawbridge to the other person. Without it, all your messages about your wonderful solution or company end up in the moat.

To get off to a good start, assuming you can align humor, body language, familiarity, and culture, the client will then judge the salesperson by several other factors:

Knowledge - of your solution and company
Responsiveness - do you return calls the same day or within 24 hours
Industry knowledge - do you...