Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 4

Weekly Recap, March 3, 2024

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

How Productive People Prepare for Meetings

Meetings are an important part of running a successful business, whether they’re held internally or with clients. There is, however, a fine line between productive meetings and extraneous ones. If you feel that a meeting is worthwhile, do yourself and your counterparts a favor and take some time to plan in advance. Productivity is particularly important in the context of meetings because each wasted minute of meeting time is not just a “minute.” If you have 20 people in a meeting and six minutes are used inefficiently, you’ve effectively wasted 2 hours. From a financial perspective, this can have a detrimental effect on your bottom line.

Make it Easy

In this day and age, people are used to making purchasing decisions in seconds. You can find virtually anything on the internet, see how good or bad the reviews are, and then with one or two clicks or even a single swipe of the finger, buy it and expect to see the item on your doorstep one or two days later. Even people shopping in stores have an immediate way to compare prices and read reviews simply by scanning a product’s UPC code with a clever app on their smartphone.

The Real Reason to Entertain Your Prospects and Clients

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There are many firms and manufacturers that give out free sports tickets, take their customers on hunting and fishing tips, or arrange luxurious dinners and cocktail parties. It’s considered a prize for top salespeople to accompany their customers to these events.

Deal-Breaking Questions

Many salespeople are afraid to ask potentially deal-breaking questions upfront. They think that these questions should be avoided until they know the prospect is ready to buy (and that it won’t matter because they have already made up their mind). What happens when you ask an important question at the end of the proposal process? If the answer to the question is in fact a deal-breaker, you’ve absolutely wasted both your prospect’s time and your own.

Top 10 Sales Skills to be a Successful Sales Professional

Some people say that good salespeople are born, not made. Certainly, there are specific personality traits that top performers share. Steven W. Martin, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business, says his research shows that 70 percent of successful salespeople have personality traits that help them sell, and 30 percent have to learn the skills needed to sell effectively. He also estimates that for every 100 people who enter sales but lack natural selling ability, 40 percent will fail, 40 percent will perform at average levels, and 20 percent will become top salespeople.

Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

Ridding your mind of tasks, appointments, due dates, and so forth frees it up to do more important work. While the “brain dump” is a great (and simple) way to free up space in your mind, it is just one of the many ways in which we can improve our mental functions and abilities.

Weekly Recap, February 25, 2024

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

Separating Work from Your Free Time

Most of the advice I provide in Selling in 6 is related to business practices; however, many of those insights are useful in a personal context as well.

8 Tips for Writing Effective Proposals

In my many years of reading and writing proposals, I’ve come up with some universal guidelines that apply to virtually all types of proposals: