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The Seller's Command CenterTM
The latest tips to help you sell larger deals, exceed your quota and beat the competition.
Categories: B2B Buyer | Differentiation | Podcasts
We often write about the importance of discovery. Our facilitators frequently say that deals are won and lost in discovery. It's critical that you use this time in the sales process to uncover needs, and at the same time, align your differentiation to what the buyer needs. As a salesperson, you need to think about why people choose your solution and how you can get that criteria into every buyer's decision criteria.
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Categories: Sales Messaging
If you are trying to move a sales opportunity forward, there is no better way than to ensure you're linking a solution to an issue that's mission critical to an organization.
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Categories: Podcasts | Sales Conversation | Sales Messaging
Metrics can be a tricky concept for salespeople, especially those who are new to our Command of the Message® methodology. Typically we find these sellers are using metrics in the wrong way in the sales conversation. Metrics are important, but they're not the whole story. They don’t necessarily solve the Positive Business Outcomes or the Required Capabilities.
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Categories: Sales Planning
One of the greatest aspects of my job is the ability to speak to sales leaders / CROs / VPs on a regular basis and learn what their sellers do well and where they need to improve. One common theme that often comes from these conversations is the need to improve forecasting accuracy and eliminate “slipped deals”.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
We’ve done hundreds of deliveries around our Command of the Message® methodology and there’s one topic that frequently comes up in our initial facilitation, even when we do refresher sessions for experienced reps. People continually struggle with defining the metrics in a sales conversation.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
The role of the Sales Development Representative (SDR) has become more relevant today than any other time in the past. Organizations are investing in this resource as they recognize that SDRs can handle the “front end” of the sales cycle, freeing time for Account Executives or field Reps to focus on advancing the opportunities forward. This division of labor is effective.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
There are several milestone achievements the SDR/BDR attains during the front end of the sales cycle. One is to successfully prospect, engage and finally qualify a potential prospect who will consider buying a solution to solve one, or many, of the problems they might have. You are wrapping up the call, reviewing the next steps, and confirming a date and time for the next meeting. Done!
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Company Alignment
Effective discovery can make the difference between closing a great deal and consistently missing your quota. Uncovering business problems provides you, as a salesperson, the ability to effectively map your solutions to the customer's required capabilities. The key is to prepare, ask great questions, listen and effectively play back what you heard to the customer.
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Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Process
When you hear "audible-ready", the first thing you probably think of is football. Specifically, when a quarterback steps to the line and changes the play call to one that takes advantage of weak defense . In a matter of seconds, the quarterback analyzes the defense and changes the play. Being able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the defense is crucial to how successful the offense will be. In football, making the correct audible calls can be the difference in winning and losing a game.
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Categories: Sales Productivity
We are asked frequently about handling request-for-proposals, especially by our Command of the Message Alumni. What if you're late to the RFP process? What if you know your prospect is going to issue one, but hasn't yet. How can you be ready?
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Categories: Qualification
In the fast-paced world of sales development, you’re often confronted with hot inbound leads that need follow-up fast. According to research, your odds of qualifying a lead decrease by 21 times after the first five minutes. However, despite the need for speed, you want to have background on the prospect before trying to engage them to ensure you can provide value even during your initial connection. To strike that balance, use the 3x3 approach.
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Categories: Sales Discovery Process
Discovery is the most important part of the sales process. This is where you lay the groundwork for all future interactions with the client and build a relationship that will provide value over the long term. Some salespeople have a tendency to rush the discovery process, anxiously trying to get the order. Pushing the process leads to bad habits. Instead, focus yourself on being more efficient in uncovering key business issues that lead to great deals. Here are a few questions to use that will help lead a conversation to a business impact discussion.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Discovery Process | sales challenges
Every sales team strives for the same essential goals: More deals, larger deals, faster closes. We all know that whom the sales person speaks to and how they move the customer through the sales process profoundly impact these goals. But in an ever-shifting B2B buying landscape, and more decision makers as part of the process, it can be even more difficult to engage the people who have the authority to allocate funds for a pricey purchase. It boils down to a salesperson’s ability to attach to the customer’s largest business problem. Salespeople who speak to low-level problems will be delegated to low-level employees. If the salesperson talks like a network administrator, they will find themselves only selling technical solutions. When you’re bogged down with conversing back and forth with those who have fixed budgets, you may close opportunities but you won’t gain any traction increasing your deal size. Remember:
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Sales opportunities are often won and lost on the ability for the account team or individual rep to uncover the business pain and the financial impact of the pain. The most successful salespeople are the ones who execute great discovery conversations as part of the sales process. Elite salespeople know how to use those conversations as a way to drive next steps.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Even the most successful salespeople have to remind themselves about sticking to the fundamentals. When we've had some selling success, it's easy to rest on our laurels and forget the basics that helped drive our numbers in the first place.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Building Positive Business Intent should be a goal with every one of your customer contacts. It’s a simple concept, but it’s not always easy. There’s not a cut and dry method to achieving it. Rather, it needs to be an underlying component to how you conduct business.
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How would you answer the question, "Why do you sell?" In our trainings, we often challenge sales reps to reflect on why they do what they do. Having a passion for what you do gives you the confidence and conviction you need to solve large, complex business problems for your prospect.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
There have been so many times in my life when I’ve admired the resiliency in others. The ability to recover quickly despite loss, hardship, or other difficulties is no easy feat. The quality is not to be underestimated. This past year showed me my own resiliency. 2017 was a difficult year for me. I experienced personal loss of family and friends which took the wind out of my sails. Even in their final days, each of these people stood in the face of incredible pain and their own mortality. It was so admirable and forced me to reflect on my own resiliency. I asked myself, “How resilient are you?” I didn’t necessarily have an answer and still don’t, but have found some clarity in reflecting on the topic recently.
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Categories: Sales Messaging
Accelerating growth is not always about closing new opportunities. It’s also about getting more out of the opportunities you have. That’s why focusing on cross-sell and upsell strategies is essential to leverage established client relationships for more profits.
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Categories: Sales Planning
Like it or not, the end of a year is a good time to start thinking about your plan for the next year. Have you drained the pond this year? How are you stacked up for success next year? What's your plan to make the plan?
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Categories: Sales Negotiation
There isn’t a salesperson out there who hasn’t dreaded a meeting with procurement. After all, that’s where opportunities you’ve worked for months on may hit some serious roadblocks. However, best-in-class salespeople understand that dealing with procurement is just like dealing with one more decision maker. The professional buyer has specific interests and value drivers just like everyone else. It’s simply up to you to understand, influence and align those factors with your value and differentiation.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Years ago at Xerox, I remember sitting at my desk late at night. In my hand, was my commission statement for the 4th quarter. This commission check would be the largest of my sales career. I absolutely blew the doors off of my business. I was the number one rep in the region for the year and I earned another trip to Hawaii.
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Categories:
Do you feel like you’re stuck in a sales rut? Are you taking the same steps with each prospect, without seeing any improvements to your sales success? It’s easy to take high-level strides to improve your overall sales process. But, making time daily to optimize your approach and sharpen your skills is difficult when you have dozens of emails to respond to or prospects you want to contact. If you want to get real results for your sales efforts, it’s time to add a few new tools to your sales arsenal.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Sales Discovery Process
If you want to find the business issue with the largest impact, you need to be able to execute an effective discovery process that enables you to drill down on a business issue and demonstrate your own positive business intent. You need solid questions, if you want to effectively map your value to their business problems.
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Categories: Differentiation | Sales Conversation
Closing opportunties faster is easier when you can tailor your sales conversations based on what your buyers need. Sellers that exceed quotas excel at actively moving conversations forward by articulating value and differentiation in a way that ties their solutions to their buyers' most pressing business challenges.
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Categories: Competitors | Sales Discovery Process
Opportunities are won and lost on discovery. The ability to ask great questions in the discovery phase is one of the most critical abilities for successful salespeople. The greater your depth of awareness of the prospect's problem, the better equipped you are to sell a high-value solution to match. Still many salespeople struggle with getting prospects to truly reveal negative consequences and challenges with significant business impact. We've pulled together some of our best practices for executing a great discovery process:
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Categories: Competitors | Sales Process
If you've sold for any amount of time, you know that there is always a competitor in the sales process. It may be another vendor, or even the dreaded "do nothing" or "do it internally". Any of these options can stop a deal in its tracks. Without the ability to clearly differentiate your solution, and understand its value, a buyer's decision is arbitrary and often price-driven. We pulled together some key tips to help you beat the competition in your sales process. Use these concepts as ways to help you prepare and execute meaningful and winning sales conversations.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Have you ever been at a party, and the person you were talking to couldn’t stop talking about himself or herself? One-sided conversations like that can be really off-putting. And, it’s no different in sales conversations, either.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Sales professionals are under constant pressure – tasked with taking on bigger territories, facing higher quotas and making more customer contacts than ever. You’ve probably felt this stress, and like many others, you might struggle with the high demand and need to improve sales performance.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Every salesperson has worked with a prospect that has dragged their feet on making a final decision. You may be working with one right now. There’s that one deal (or maybe several) that you’ve grown tired waiting around to close. If it’s not moving forward like you expected, here are some questions to ask yourself as it relates to where you may need to go back and reassess.
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Categories: Qualification
Losing a deal to your competition is frustrating, but sometimes, losing to no decision is even worse. Since it’s usually much easier for clients to stick with the status quo, every salesperson has lost a deal to no decision.
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Categories: Deal Size
Do you have healthy sales habits that enable you to close large deals? When you adopt the right sales approach, you’ll increase your client base and build long-term relationships that enable you to consistently achieve and exceed your quota.
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Categories: Deal Size
Every salesperson is focused on closing deals. But, are you working towards closing the type of deals that allow you to charge a premium and solve the pain point with the greatest business impact? Larger deal size often means larger commission and a greater chance to exceed your quota.
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Categories: Sales Discovery Process | Sales Messaging
We often say that opportunities are won and lost on effective discovery. It's difficult to close a high-value deal if you haven't clearly uncovered the business pain to which to tie your solution. However, one of the most-often overlooked components to executing a great discovery call is to finish strong.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
One of the most succinct pieces of advice our sales performance experts often share with reps is to go in curious. If you're curious, you're listening to your customer, you're asking great questions and you're more likely to uncover pain points and the negative consequences that are resulting from them.
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Categories:
Vulnerability is a topic that has gained some attention in recent years. You may remember Brene Brown's Ted Talk on The Power of Vulnerability which has been watched nearly 30 million times. This idea is clearly one to which people can relate. Have you ever thought about how that concept can help you as a sales leader or even as a sales rep?
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Categories: Sales Leadership | Uncommon
In complex B2B sales, research shows that more and more decision makers are involved in purchasing decisions. Several sign-offs can be seen as a challenge or an opportunity for a salesperson.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Customer references are a critical component to your sales conversations. Your customers want to know that you can really do what you promise. Hearing third-party evidence can provide the necessary validation to turn an opportunity into a closed deal. Our own proof points have won us and our clients some significant opportunities. They’re one of our favorite parts of the sales conversation.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Determining what exactly your customer needs in a solution is a pivotal component to successfully closing an opportunity. Your customers have a set of a required capabilities for whatever purchase they’re considering. These are the minimum solution requirements that are needed to solve the business problem and achieve the positive business outcomes.
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Categories: Social Media
Good social selling can be broken down into several different components, and no matter who you talk to, social listening is a consistently vital component of the mix. Here are 5 questions to ask when considering your B2B social sales listening strategy:
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Finding a customer problem is the first step to winning the business. If you uncover a problem that has business implications, you set the stage for closing an opportunity that’s hinged on value. Remember, there is no value without a customer problem. The way to uncover that problem is by asking great questions that drive an effective discovery session. Here are five components to executing an effective discovery-based conversation and uncovering new business opportunities.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Effective sales conversations take practice. Even our most seasoned sellers on the Force Management team take the time to do pre-call planners, role play conversations and prep for important discussions. Taking the time to practice can make you audible-ready to dig deep on business pain and prevent missed opportunities. At the same time, it’s critically important for sales managers to reiterate the fundamentals with their reps. Here are five areas of focus to help your and your team and command the sales message: 1. Your Elevator Speech People love the question, “What do you do?” That's probably the question we are asked the most. Make sure you have an answer that demonstrates your capabilities, uniqueness and the value you provide your customers.
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Categories: Negative Consequences | Podcasts
In B2B sales, every prospect account in your pipeline involves critical factors that will turn that open opportunity into a closed deal. Uncovering problems that are having significant impact on business helps elevate your solution to high-level decision makers.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
We know a lot of work goes into a sales presentation. For many salespeople, the deck drives the conversation and is the one tool you may leave behind for your prospects to socialize internally. For all those hours spent belaboring the deck, here’s one critical question to ask yourself that will drive success in your next sales conversation.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Salespeople who have the ability to ask great questions and use the answers to benefit their sales conversations are able to drive larger deal sizes. When you’re able to uncover the largest business problem and at the same time, create a sense of urgency in the sales process, you’ll create great value. That value prevents discounting and transactional commodity selling.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Social Media
There’s no question that the buying process has changed and that social media has become a very important channel to stay connected with your buyers during traditionally dark periods in the sales process. With so much information about any product or service online, what it means to be a sales person has entirely changed. What does exactly does this mean?
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Sales Execution
If your sales team is responsible for closing complex enterprise deals, you know that the process can be lengthy and complex. You’re probably also painfully aware that it can be fraught with peril. Anything from an unexpected objection to a shift in leadership can undo your team’s progress and kill the deal. High-performing sales teams, understand that the key to closing more deals lies in a critical understanding the buyer’s process. These high performers leverage that understanding to anticipate obstacles and effectively drive the process to completion. Here are six questions to help your team members gauge the strength of an opportunity.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Industry Insight
The pace of change continues to accelerate in the B2B sales landscape. Corporate buyers have increasingly greater access to information, across multiple platforms, and in many formats, placing them in greater control of their purchasing process than ever before.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Social Media
We often tell our Command of the Message® reps that there is as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell.
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Categories: Sales Execution
The ability of your sales teams to sell higher in an organization is driven by a value-based selling rhythm that drives a shorter sales cycle and bottom-line impact. What sales leader doesn't want a team that's selling more deals, more quickly? The key is to ensure your sales team has the ability to create urgency.
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Categories: Sales Discovery Process | Trap Setting Questions
There is no value without a customer problem. That premise is one of the most basic sales principles. Finding a customer problem is the first step to winning the business. The second step is effectively demonstrating why your solution is a better one than the competition's. Trap-Setting Questions help you steer a discovery session toward your differentiators. We call them "trap setting" because they trap your competition. They highlight the value that a customer will receive with your solution and the components they won't have if they choose your competitor.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Social Media
The odds are that your organization is spending fist fulls of dollars on inbound marketing and generating qualified leads, many of which do not close that quarter, or the next. That’s because qualified doesn’t necessarily mean “ready to buy today!" SiriusDecisions has found that 70% of the qualified leads that make it to sales get disqualified or discarded by sales, sent back to marketing or nowhere at all. Here’s the catch: Up to 80% of those “dead end” prospects will ultimately go on to buy from you – or from a competitor – within the next 18 – 24 months.
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Categories: Champions | Sales Process
We received a lot of great feedback from our “Building Up Your Champion” podcast that we published last month. So much so that we wanted to provide some additional resources for you to further leverage the Champion relationship.
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Categories: Customer Verifiable Outcomes | Sales Process
The competitive nature of salespeople mean that they hate to lose. Giving up an opportunity to make a sale just isn’t in the typical salesperson’s DNA. Like a bad relationship, salespeople can linger too long hoping they’ll be able to change the circumstances. Sometimes though, you need to focus your time and energy on an opportunity that’s worth your time.
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Categories: Sales Discovery Process
We write a lot about executing an effective discovery process on The Command Center. It’s one of our most popular blog topics, likely because it’s one of the most important components to a value-based sales conversation. If you want to elevate your sales conversations to high-level decision makers, you need to be able to map your solution to a problem with real business impact. Without a pointed discovery process, uncovering that problem is nearly impossible.
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Categories: Podcasts
Champions can be integral to your success in an account. When you have a true champion, you have an advocate who is invested in your winning the business. However, the relationship shouldn't end with closing the initial opportunity. Best-in-class salespeople lift up their champion in a way that demonstrates business value.
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Categories: Competitors | Differentiation | Sales Conversation
There’s hardly an opportunity that doesn’t come with some sort of competition. Whether it’s an established vendor that has the upper-hand, or you are dealing with some internal forces that are making it hard to move your opportunity forward. Today, The Command Center breaks down how to deal with significant obstacles in your opportunity.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | Sales Process
If you are selling in complex B2B sales, you know there are critical factors in every opportunity that could influence whether or not you’re able to close the deal. The key to commanding your message is to make sure that you are uncovering that important information in your sales conversations through effective discovery and a value-based sales conversation.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Execution
A Champion can be a pivotal component to your successfully closing an opportunity. A Champion... has access to the Economic Buyer possesses organizational credibility, influence and power actively sells on your behalf, when you’re not there Remember Champions sell for you because they have a vested interest in your success. Because they contribute to your success, it’s important that you build that relationship.
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Categories: Podcasts | Sales Discovery Process
When salespeople excel at discovery, they sell larger deals. Your ability as a salesperson to effectively move a complex B2B opportunity through the pipeline demands you know how to uncover high-level business issues.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Discovery Process
Opportunities are won and lost on effective discovery. As a salesperson, you need solid questions if you want to effectively successfully map your value to your prospect’s business problems. When you are trying to drill down on a business issue with the largest impact, you need a great sales discovery process that demonstrates your perspective and positive business intent. Solid thought-provoking questions help you effectively map your value to a prospect’s business problems.
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Categories: B2B Buyer | sales challenges
Coca-Cola recently made news by eliminating their company voice mail system. Now, instead of being asked to “leave a message after the beep,” callers hear a message encouraging them to “call back at a later time.” As this Hubspot blog points out, Coke’s decision is indicative of a change in buyer behavior. Given what we know about B2B buyer behavior, relying on a single channel of communication in today’s connected world is detrimental to success. Your sales team needs the ability to connect with buyers through a variety of modalities. Help them focus on building a robust network, and initiating connections on the buyer’s terms.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Snapshot
Effectively executing your sales conversations is the cornerstone to your success quarter after quarter. It may sound simple, but human behavior is heavily influenced by the words we use. Knowing the right words to remember—and which ones to forget—can make the difference between a conversation that moves an opportunity forward and one that stops it in its tracks.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
It’s all too common for salespeople to get caught in conversational limbo while the “gatekeepers” of a prospective company relay messages to and from the actual decision-maker. This form of selling is inefficient and stifles your revenue momentum.
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Categories: Sales Consumable Tools | Social Media
Effectively using search tools can gain you that coveted access to decision makers in your prospective accounts. Our partners at rFactr recently posted this blog on maximizing "boolean" search for social sales. It provides some great tips for those of you who want to gain an edge over your competition. Each social network contains a highly detailed database of professionals that savvy salespeople can access to create targeted lists of prospects through social search. While that is great news for salespeople, search engines on social networks are also very robust. As such, it is important to familiarize yourself with social search best practices to ensure you are taking full advantage.
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Categories: Social Media
With the astronomically fast rise of social media and the increasing number of social media gurus and firms promising to help those who don’t understand these new tools, it’s no wonder that many B2B organizations are still reluctant to consider social selling a viable part of their selling process. Do these comments sound familiar? “It’s too new.” “It isn’t proven.” “There’s no way to measure it.”
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Categories: Sales Conversation
There’s as much differentiation in how you sell as there is in what you sell. The most successful salespeople don't stand out from the competition by touting features and functions of their latest product. Rather, they are diligent about selling fundamentals and following key sales best practices. A salesperson who focuses on value and solving problems with business impact will make a lesser competitor nervous every time. Use these best practices to differentiate yourself with your prospects and stand out from the competition: 1. Uncover Your Prospect’s Largest Business Issue and the Impact
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Discovery Process | Sales Process
A lost sales opportunity hurts the bottom line, but it can also provide a valuable teaching lesson for your sales team. There is usually a quantifiable reason that the sale wasn’t made. Identifying what went wrong gives your team an opportunity to understand how not to make the same mistake twice. Help your team recover from the lost sales opportunity quickly and effectively. Here are four questions you can ask your salespeople that will help them learn from their mistakes.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | sales challenges
The B2B sales conversation is a complex dance between seller and buyer. One misstep, and the whole conversation can be knocked off balance. But sellers who are able to maintain a steady selling rhythm and keep value at the forefront during the conversation are far more likely to succeed in closing the opportunity. Below is a list of four common personas that show up during a sales conversation, taking it down the wrong path quickly. We’ve also included tips on how you can help steer your salespeople away from becoming these types of sellers.
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Categories: Social Media
Most professionals now have a LinkedIn profile. The company boasts more than 100 million registered users in the United States alone. Many B2B salespeople are also now leveraging Twitter. Unfortunately, many people who use these sites are not using them to their maximum advantage. For example, most B2B salespeople have LinkedIn accounts, but they’re only leveraging them as a contact database. They’re likely connecting with key players and finding decision makers at prospective companies, but that’s where their LinkedIn use ends. We call that the “business card” approach. If you only use LinkedIn as a connection tool, it’s just like going to a conference and gathering business cards. Sure, you have people’s contact information, but you aren’t doing anything to capitalize on that relationship.
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Categories: Social Media
In today’s digital world, B2B buyers are more engaged and digitally informed. The rise of the connected buyer means your sales organization needs to account for a buyer who is more educated and researched than ever before. They’ve done their homework on your solution – and your competitors’ solutions as well. When they finally contact a salesperson, they’re ready to talk price. In order to move beyond regular vendor status, you’ll need to take action.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
Your Challenge We’ve all been in this conversation at one time or another in our sales careers. Your prospect may understand some of the value you can provide, but is also considering using internal resources to achieve the same result.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Your Challenge Understanding the best way to differentiate against your competition is critical to being an effective salesperson. The “Do Nothing” competitor is always one of the toughest. Who has instant access to the decision maker? Who is always part of the sales opportunity whether you are or not? The dreaded “Do Nothing.”
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Categories: Social Media
It’s no longer a bold statement to say that your organization needs to be in the social game if you plan to achieve optimal sales productivity. Social media helps sales organizations drive pipeline by (1) engaging with buyers earlier in the sales cycle, (2) maintaining relationships with current customers and (3) demonstrating valuable market insight. Eighty-seven percent of decision makers in B2B sales organizations spend time researching products and services on social media. Just like having a website in the 1990s, buyers are now judging the legitimacy of an organization based on their presence (or lack thereof) on social media. Research shows that salespeople who use social media are more successful, but how does a sales organization begin to embrace social activities as part of a sales process? The first step is to recognize that social selling isn’t your magic bullet.
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Categories: sales challenges
Even the most experienced salespeople can find themselves in the middle of a challenging sales opportunity that they’re struggling to either move ahead or close. Today, The Command Center breaks down three common sales scenarios and provides some easy steps you can take to correct your course, or avoid the same challenges the next time around.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
Occasionally salespeople will sign up for the challenge of trying to sell me something. This doesn’t always end well, but is usually entertaining. I’ve had a few recent experiences with SaaS software providers trying to sell to me and I found myself thinking about John Kaplan and his comments around Seller Deficit Disorder. (My colleague Brian Walsh did a great job of breaking down the Sales Leader Deficit Disorder in this post.) This common “ailment” encompasses two of the biggest complaints buyers have about sellers: You don’t understand my business. You don’t listen.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Value-Based Selling demands an understanding of the stages of a basic buying process. Articulating Requirements Evaluating Options Committing to a Course of Action The role of the sales rep, then, is to progress the buyer through these stages in a way that leads a buyer towards your solution and away from the competition, and to do so in a way that creates a compelling business case. Your sales process should naturally progress your buyer from his/her pains and objectives to your solution offerings.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process | sales challenges
In complex B2B sales, research shows that more and more decision makers are needed to make the sale. The recent CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization report showed that 76% of B2B deals involved three or more decision makers. Thirteen percent had six or more. This can be seen as a challenge or an opportunity for a salesperson. Sales conversations with multiple buyers can work for you or against you. Here are a couple of scenarios to consider:
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Categories: Sales Planning
When our clients come to us to improve their sales planning processes, they often have a misdirected focus. As a result, they’re dealing with a waterfall of problems: Reps frequently missing quota goals Inaccurate revenue forecasting High percentage of deals closing late in the quarter Inadequate territory & account penetration
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Categories: Sales Transformation | Social Media | Technology
The key to using social media effectively, is to consistently share information of value. If you’re in sales, you likely have a social media network filled with people who are looking to generate more revenue per rep and improve overall sales effectiveness. We’ve outlined five pieces of content that any sales manager or executive can relate to. Use these messages over the next week to show your own value with your social media networks, your colleagues and your own sales team.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process | Sales and Marketing
A powerful customer testimonial may mean the difference between winning and losing an opportunity. That’s why we put such an emphasis on proof points at Force Management. The key to leveraging any testimonial is to use it in a way that has impact, depending on your prospect. Your sales process shouldn’t be a cookie-cutter approach. Rather, it should align with what your buyer needs and how he/she buys. You need to look for the right opportunity to have the greatest impact. How do you know when the timing is right?
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Discovery Process
When I deliver Command of the Message®, one of the questions I am asked the most involves discovery. I think one of the keys to effective discovery is preparation, but I also believe there are some learned skills that help salespeople master the discovery component of a sales process. I’m from Cleveland (Go Browns!). And, like many college-aged students, I worked at Cedar Point in the summer. (For those of you who may not be aware of this Ohio wonder, it’s a giant amusement park, consistently voted #1 in the world.) It was a great place to work, especially when you were young.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Discovery Process
In real estate, it’s a commonly used phrase that the three most important words are location, location, location. In sales, I would argue the three most important words are preparation, preparation, preparation. One of the most overlooked components of many sales methodologies is the importance of discovery. It’s extremely difficult to align your solution with your prospects biggest business challenges if you aren’t able to effectively uncover what those pain points are. The key to effective discovery is PREPARATION.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
When you’re pursuing an opportunity and you earn that coveted time with a decision maker, you have to be ready to uncover their needs and articulate your value. Often times, you only get one chance to get it right. Ensure you hit the right target in your next sales conversation. Here are five ways to make sure you maximize your prospect’s time and guarantee a follow-up conversation.
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Categories: Technology
Even the most seasoned social media users hit a wall sometimes when it comes to prospecting new opportunities. Much like the traditional sales process, social media has its ups and downs, and occasionally you may find yourself feeling as though you’re stuck in a social selling rut. Use these LinkedIn-specific tips to generate new leads or to invigorate old ones.
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Categories: Industry Insight
New research shows some significant changes in organizational priorities for IT buyers. McKinsey Global’s eighth annual survey on business technologies indicates that executives are looking beyond merely cutting IT costs and plan to increase budgets for new investments. Executives ranked the following as their top three organizational priorities: Improving effectiveness of business processes Improving cost efficiency of business processes Providing managers with information to support planning and decision making
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process
Positive Business Intent is one of the most important assets a seller can leverage throughout the sales process. The point was driven home when, after announcing a career change, a client said to me, “With your departure, we’ll have to reevaluate our relationship with your company.” The client went on to say that my approach of always putting his business first was the key reason they did business with me and my company. I never forgot that lesson.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process
There are many sales organizations that are focused on ways to arm sellers in the new B2B buying process. Research from SiriusDecisions shows that nearly 70% of the buying process is done digitally. By the time these buyers speak to a salesperson, they aren’t interested in having a conversation. They’re ready for price quotes. This buying process shift makes a lot of salespeople nervous. It shouldn’t. Think of it as a positive; they’re interested!
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Effective value-based selling starts with a sales conversation focused on solution value and differentiation in a way that ties back to the customer’s required capabilities. Remember, you don’t have to wait for a big sales presentation to get those points across to a prospect. Start with your next meeting or call with a customer. Whether it’s a cold call, a LinkedIn message or a brief email your initial sales contact should be succinct and impactful.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
In complex B2B sales, it can be difficult for even the most veteran of salespeople not to walk into a meeting or conduct a call with a new prospect and immediately start discussing the greatest features of their latest product or software plan. Many salespeople will make this mistake right after their sales kickoff, enticed by this year’s new offerings. Remember, the cornerstone to effective sales messaging is the customer.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
If you want to repeatedly hit your revenue numbers, you need a sales team that can effectively articulate differentiation. Prospects not only need to see the value of your solution, they should also clearly understand why they should do business with your company, rather than your competitor.
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Categories: Sales Consumable Tools
Think about the last great opportunity you closed. Remember the one where it couldn’t have gone better? It was a large opportunity. You earned a nice commission check. But, even better, your solution truly made a business-level impact for your customer. You had unbelievable measurable results and proof points. If each deal was like that, you would sail through every quarter.
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Categories: Social Media | Technology
Time and again, I am asked whether it is beneficial to upgrade one’s account from the free version of LinkedIn to a Premium version. In my opinion, the answer is two-pronged. The first thing to consider is whether you are maximizing the free version of LinkedIn. To start, look at whether or not you have a fully optimized profile.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
The medical marketplace is dealing with unprecedented challenges that demand an audible-ready sales force who’s prepared to articulate value in this formidable environment. Much has been written about the fiscal pressure health care providers are now under, but this recent blog on the New York Times website shows that the fight for a doctor’s time is an added burden.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Social media allows professionals to demonstrate their accountability, successes, and overall value through their account profiles and posts. For sales professionals, showcasing this value, or ‘social influence’, is an increasingly important part of the sales process. Social influence helps you establish yourself as a thought leader and helps build trust with others online, which are two key indicators of social sales success. Listed below are five areas of your social media accounts to focus on to help you demonstrate social influence today.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
The New Year often brings new models, new gadgets, new and improved services and items to sell. Is your sales kickoff rolling out the latest and greatest function and feature of the product you’re selling in 2014?
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Understanding your customer’s minimum requirements and decision criteria is a fundamental component to any successful sale. If your buyers want to achieve specific Positive Business Outcomes, then there are a set of Required Capabilities that need to be in place with any solution they consider. Consider a deal you are working on right now. Ask yourself these three questions:
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process
Sales organizations around the world are plagued with sellers who lose deals due to no decision or failure to articulate value. They spend their time talking about product features, and when it comes time to close the deal, they end up negotiating on price and losing margin.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
In complex B2B sales, there’s always a competitor in the sales equation. Even if your biggest competitor is “No Decision,” effectively articulating your differentiation and the value you provide to your customer can make the difference between a closed deal and a lost opportunity. The most successful salespeople know how to demonstrate their differentiation in a way that aligns with the positive business outcomes their customers are trying to achieve. Having a solid grasp on how your products, services and company are different and better than the competition creates the opportunity for you to show value to your buyer.
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Categories: Sales Consumable Tools | Sales Conversation
There are many components to a sales conversation: Discovery Questions, Buyer Needs, Value Drivers, Differentiators, but in order to ready yourself to command your sales conversation, you need to do the work up front to make sure the meeting is a successful one. Here are three ways you can prepare for success and ensure a great outcome for your next prospect meeting:
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Categories: Industry Insight | Sales Conversation
Healthcare is one of the most rapidly changing industries in existence. If you are selling in this dynamic marketplace, you know the success of your sales organization depends on your sales teams’ ability to have value-based sales conversations that speak to larger business problems. HealthLeaders Media just published an article on the top concerns for hospital and health system CFOs. After gathering input from nearly 40 CFOS, their most-pressing challenges were:
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
If you’ve been in the selling game awhile, you’ve likely received your share of sales advice. We recently started a LinkedIn discussion asking for the best sales advice you've ever received. Here’s a list of some of our favorite responses:
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Process
In B2B complex sales, every prospect account in your pipeline involves critical factors that will turn that open opportunity into a closed deal. If you can’t uncover those key components in your sales conversations, you’ll struggle to get that signed contract. Before you make your next sales call, ready yourself to command your message.
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Categories: Execution | Sales Process | sales challenges
Sellers hate to lose. They have a competitive nature, and giving up a deal just isn’t in their DNA. But sometimes, as a seller, you have to know when to walk away. We talk a lot about using Customer Verifiable Outcomes to build qualification into the sales process. These buying indicators help provide your sellers with the necessary information to advance the opportunity to the next stage of the buying process. They may include things like (1) the organization has to invest resources around a new product or a recent acquisition, or (2) your prospects may have documented pain points that they’re under pressure to correct.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Attaching yourself to the largest business problem is a critical step towards achieving trusted advisor status within your accounts. Putting a process behind gathering your proof points can give you the all-important metrics, but understanding the role your solution played in achieving the positive business outcomes is just as important. Even with Force Management’s own proof points, it’s important for our sellers to understand the story behind how our clients achieved those results. What were the before scenarios? How did they build alignment and buy-in to achieve the after scenarios?
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
Earning the buy-in of C-level executives is a critical step to improving margins and increasing your average deal size. Gaining access to top-level decision makers means you have to be skilled in (1) attaching your solution to the largest business issues and (2) understanding what influences their decision process.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
There is no value without a customer problem. That premise is one of the most basic sales principles. As our own John Kaplan would say, “It’s Egypt old.” It’s also the catalyst to selling on value over your product’s features. Finding a customer problem is the first step to winning the business, and also the part of the sales conversation where many reps struggle.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
The Force Management Marketing Team receives a lot of calls from vendors. From content curators to graphic design teams to social media agencies to the logo koozie companies (Have you seen our audible-ready mints?!), we hear from vendors a lot. I’m sure those of you who have ever worked in marketing can relate. Given the business we're in, we appreciate a skilled seller, someone who can effectively articulate the value they provide to our business, and how their solution may be different than other vendors we may be considering. At the same time, we have little patience for someone who can’t.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
What are two of the biggest complaints buyers have about sellers? You don’t understand my business. You don’t listen. These are the main causes of an affliction we call Seller Deficit Disorder. If you’re a seller, you’ve likely suffered from it at one point or another in your selling career. It’s one of the most prevalent sales challenges, and a primary reason many sellers lose deals.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Best-in-class sellers know how to effectively articulate differentiation in a way that builds a connection back to the positive business outcomes their customers are trying to achieve. Having a solid grasp of how your products, services and even your company are different and better than the competition creates the opportunity for you to show your buyer value.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Nothing closes a deal like a sales conversation that’s focused on the fundamentals. If you want to command your message, you need to practice and zero in on the basics, consistently. Improve your sales messaging with this quick refresher of three things to remember every time you make a sales call:
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Customer testimonials are an asset to any sales conversation. Providing tangible points of reference on how your solution provides the results you promise strengthens your message. You can talk about how you are better than your competitors all day long, but putting evidence behind those claims helps your potential buyers see the positive business outcomes they can achieve through your solutions.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Many sales leaders are challenged with a sales force that consistently calls too low in the customer organization. As a result, their reps fail to gain access to the customer executives who make the buying decision. Their deal size suffers, and too many of their reps miss quota.
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Categories: Execution | Sales Process
An effective sales process maps to and facilitates your customer’s buying process. Don’t assume that one size fits all. It’s likely that your market has different segments of buyers, and these segments have different needs. As a sales leader, make sure that your sales process is on target to align with the needs of your buyers.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | sales challenges
One of the most critical things you can do during a sales call is to get the customer to establish decision criteria (required capabilities) that are in your favor. If you arrive late to the sales process and are faced with decision criteria that have already been set, you need to determine two things:
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Technology
Once you’ve optimized your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to take your engagement to the next level. LinkedIn can help you communicate to prospects, share your subject matter expertise and articulate the value of your solution. We compiled some of the best LinkedIn tips for engaging your prospects, and put them in this “sales consumable” list. Use these five tips to maximize LinkedIn's benefits and increase sales:
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Technology
Top sellers know LinkedIn drives results. Harvard Business Review blogger, Steve Martin says that more than 40 percent of top users have increased sales just by upping their LinkedIn game. If you’re a seasoned seller who’s already using LinkedIn, you likely know the basics (e.g., optimize your profile, build connections, follow your competitors). So, we went to the experts to find some of their best tips to get even more out of LinkedIn. Here are five things you can do today to maximize your profile:
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Categories: Execution | Sales Process
An effective sales process hinges on how well it’s aligned to your customer’s buying process. Building this alignment with customer Verifiable Outcomes shortens the sales cycle and improves your win-rate. Customer Verifiable Outcomes build qualification into the sales process, and allow sellers to qualify opportunities based on what the customer is doing at a particular buying stage.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Solving business problems for your customer is easier when you can adjust the sales conversation based on what your buyer needs. Audible-ready sellers excel at actively moving conversations forward by articulating value and differentiation in a way that ties their solutions to their buyer's most pressing business issues.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales and Marketing | sales challenges
We all know that even a savvy salesperson can sometimes get drawn into a conversation that focuses on product features. Preserving margins may be the goal, but if a conversation spirals into product features too early, the final deal will come down to price. Sales organizations that understand how to shorten sales cycles and preserve margins rely on a sales strategy that uncovers customer needs, articulates value and minimizes the price-only discussion. Talking about the latest and greatest product feature can cripple a seller’s opportunity to attach a solution to the customer’s biggest business problem. Sales conversations that aren’t focused on problems and solutions are quickly on their way to losing margins.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Effectively articulating the value and differentiation of your products and services can make or break a deal. When a sales force is consistently expressing how their solutions solve customer problems better than the competition, the impact is clear. They’ll achieve:
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Be More than Just a Vendor In my buying career, I’ve always had an aversion to sellers who showed up unprepared. What buyer doesn't? However, I'm not just referring to having the right brochure to show me, or the right PowerPoint slide. I’m talking about a seller’s failure to do the prep work necessary to understand my organization’s business strategy and challenges.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Think about your last sales presentation. Did it contain the slide that talked all about your company? When you started, how many employees you have, the number of customers, your locations all over the globe…. 'Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Customer – Look at our logos!' If my experience tells me anything, I’m betting you showed it right after the introduction slide. Guilty? I was too, for a long time. It’s a classic seller mistake.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Effectively articulating the value and differentiation of your products and services can make or break a deal. If you can’t describe to your customer how your solution provides value and how it is different or better than your competitors, one of two things will happen:
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation
Many of you will be watching some of golf’s greatest compete this week at The Masters. The top golfers in the world know that without practice, they won’t come anywhere near a green jacket. No matter your field (or fairway), practice is a vital component to your success.
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Categories: Industry Insight | Sales Conversation | sales challenges
Today’s blog post comes from Force Management Delivery Partner Tim Caito. Caito has more than 30 years of sales, management, and business consulting experience. He has consulted with some of the largest companies around the world, including AT&T, Fed Ex, Symantec, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Walmart and American Airlines, on both the seller and buyer side. In Ten Reasons Salespeople Lose Deals, Harvard Business Review Blogger Steve Martin listed the top challenges sellers felt were keeping them from gaining new business. At Force Management, we hear the same challenges from sellers every day.
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Categories: Sales Negotiation
It’s true. When it comes to sales negotiations, you can make procurement your ally rather than your chief enemy. When you approach negotiation as a process that’s centered on value and aligned with your organization’s strategy, procurement will see the value in your solution.
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Categories: Sales Negotiation
We expect the feedback to come rolling in about this blog topic. We know what you’re thinking. You’ve spent whole quarters with procurement hammering out costs. You have a hard time believing that price isn’t their one and only focus. But really, just hear us out. Procurement has to care about more than just price if they want to be effective. It’s your job to find out what else is driving their deal strategy.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales Negotiation
Flying items, slamming fists, playing hard ball to prove a point. . . It can be difficult for sellers and buyers to keep their cool when trying to close a deal. A recent Harvard Business Review article offers interesting insight into the role emotions play in negotiations.
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Categories: Sales Negotiation
The best way to minimize a price-only sales negotiation is to provide choices to your customer. Presenting multiple options is a critical component to an effective negotiation process. You create business value by expanding your offers to include choices for customers that provide them value and also advance your organization’s growth strategy. Multiple options also help provide solutions to the multiple factions in the customer’s organization that may have conflicting interests. It helps provide solutions to address these multiple interests. These choices allow the customer to recognize there are several ways to resolve differences, even within their own organization.
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Categories: Blog Posts | Sales Process
To truly understand procurement, you’ve got to understand where they come from. They’ve likely been to the same negotiating trainings as you. They’re experienced and they know all the tactics sellers use. They recognize Seller 101 and if they feel they are being manipulated, they’re going to put up the walls. When in doubt, they default to price.
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Categories: Sales Negotiation
Using tactics as a way to win a power struggle is an old-school way of negotiating. It’s time to broaden your view and make sales negotiations truly effective for your organization. Viewing negotiation as a tactical event won’t help you execute a broader organizational strategy that’s based on value. Centering a negotiation strategy on tactics doesn’t help provide the foundation for a repeatable process. It creates a fire drill with every account.
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Categories: Blog Posts | Sales Process
I had an economics professor named Father Hohmann. He was a Jesuit Catholic priest with short white hair that still managed to be unkempt, a smoker’s gravelly voice and a wicked Boston accent. He approached the principles of macro-economics by contrasting the commodities of “guns and buttah." He was also fond of saying “econawmics is nawt an exact science." Well neither is sales and it’s all the customer’s fault.
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Categories: Sales Consumable Tools | Sales Conversation
If you’re like most salespeople, cold calling probably resides at the top of your "Most-Hated" list when it comes to sales messaging. Even with a referral, making that initial contact with a prospective customer isn’t always easy. To help structure a succinct initial sales conversation that gets results, remember the 3 P’s: Purpose, Process, Payoff.
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Categories: Sales Consumable Tools | Technology
Google Alerts is a fantastic, and free, resource to help you keep extra eyes on your prospects, clients, competitors...and even on how your own firm is being written about on the web. I was initially hesitant to start using this tool because I am overloaded with far too many blogs and email newsletters. However, I gave this a ten-day test period and came away a big fan.
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Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Conversation | sales challenges
Some people don’t like to be persuaded. Among them -- your potential customers -- who don’t want to be told why they should buy your product or service. The more you try to persuade them to buy, the more they will resist you. But the more they understand how your value and differentiation solves their problems, the more they will persuade themselves that you have the right solution for them.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
Too many times, sales reps rely on a “magic bullet” product feature to set their products apart from the competition. They’re constantly touting that knock-out function that makes their solution stand out in the eyes of the customer. Sadly, product uniqueness is fleeting. Today’s unique feature is tomorrow’s expectation. Good ideas are copied by the competition.
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Categories: Sales Planning | Sales Process
Healthy sales pipelines and accurate forecasts are grounded in structured territory, account and opportunity planning processes. Think about your most critical account this year. Do you have an effective plan set up around that account? Are you coaching your sales rep to improve your organization’s position around these critical accounts? Positioning is made up of the knowledge you have surrounding your customers and the relationships you’ve built with them. These relationships are also affected by the critical landscapes (Economic, Political, and Competitive) surrounding your positioning.
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Categories: Sales Conversation
If you’ve worked with us at Force Management, you know that we pride ourselves in providing clients with sales consumable tools, items that sales representatives can use immediately with their current and prospective accounts. What good is a training session if you can’t walk out of it with something you can actually use day-in and day-out? Here is a post that is sales consumable. Read these three steps and use them on your next sales call.
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Categories: Sales Conversation | Sales and Marketing
CSO Insights' 2012 Key Trends Analysis reported that fewer companies are “exceeding expectations” when it comes to differentiating their services from competitors. The report cites a possible cause of this may be skepticism on the part of the consumer. This means your potential buyers may not be convinced your product provides the value you promise.
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