Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 173

7 Tips to Active Listening

Selling efficiency is a two-way street: You can’t just bombard your prospect with a sales pitch or a speech about all the benefits of your product or service without listening… and listening well. A smart sales professional prepares responses to all possible objections and listens carefully to his or her prospect. Here are seven things to keep in mind in order to listen actively:

22 Tips to Writing the Perfect Email

Catching someone’s attention with an email can be tough.  It’s not unusual for the average professional to receive 100 to 200 emails a day, maybe even more.  As a result, email is quickly dismissed.

Guidelines to Creating the Perfect Sales Presentation

When you’re preparing a sales presentation, remember that your listener doesn’t necessarily want to be educated.  They want to be sold.  They want to be told what to do.  They want to be entertained and motivated to take action.

How to Craft the Perfect Elevator Pitch

The simplest definition of an elevator pitch is explaining in 15 seconds or less how you can create value for your prospect.  Sounds simple, right?  Sometimes that isn’t the case. 

How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More

What is expected from us as workers?  In a word: work.  Most folks think that if you don’t succeed, the answer would be to work harder, longer, or ideally both.  In fact, add more hours to your day to get your work done.  Or commit yourself to getting more done in a smaller amount of time.  

Weekly Recap, July 14, 2019

Here are our favorite sales-enhancing tips from this week's Selling Energy Blogs...

Check Your Vocabulary

Considering how much we communicate in person and in writing, there is a tendency to assume the meaning of certain words and how to use them.  We often don’t realize that we’re making mistakes, let alone who is noticing when we make them.

A Proposal Needs to Motivate, Not Educate

In Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate, she says there are people who produce reports, which are ponderous, comprehensive and certainly difficult to read.  At the other end of the spectrum there’s cinema, which people will pay to see and be entertained.

Make It Multimodal

When you send a proposal, your best bet is to make it multimodal.  If you send an email, accompany it with a voicemail to check in.  Say, "Hello, _____.   I just sent you the proposal as promised.  Please confirm that you've received it.  If I don’t hear from you sooner, I'll get back with you in a couple of days so we can chat through it."

How to Keep a Meeting Agenda on Track

There will be times where you find yourself in a meeting that’s getting off track.  Here are just two examples: