Pareto’s Principle {the 80/20 rule) is vividly illustrated in the sales statistics of most industries, companies and professional service organiizations. Eighty percent of all products or services are sold by just 20 percent of the sales professionals in the United States and Canada. How does this rule effect the overall management of the […]
In general conversation, many people think they can just “wing it” or they “know what they want to say.” On the telephone, however, you have 10 seconds to grab and hold your prospect’s attention, and frequently, you don’t get a second chance. Ten seconds goes by very quickly. Your first impression has to be strong […]
Asking The Best Sales Questions
Effective questioning is a critical sales skill for several reasons. First, our recent research shows that there is a direct correlation between the success of a sales call and the type of questions that the salesperson uses. On average, failed sales calls include 86% more close-ended questions than open-ended […]
Make friends with the gatekeeper! 10 ideas for getting through
on the phone and leaving your competition out in the cold…
Are gatekeepers the bane of your life? You know you have a great product that will definitely add value to your prospect, make him or her money, save time, you name it - if only you […]
I don’t even like saying the word d———g. I have literally obliterated it from my dictionary with a black marking pen. I’ll bite my tongue until it bleeds, before I say the word.
Earlier this week Bernadette, my wife, and I went shopping . . . something I love to do. Just kidding! […]
Many of my clients are turning to speaking at chambers and other networking organizations to generate business. This is a wonderful method of building credibility and gaining free advertising, especially when you are in a creative business that often needs examples and samples to get people to hire you.
Seminars are a great way […]
You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Just like you must have a Road Map for your overall sales success, each sales call must have its own little road map. We’ll call them scripts. You can develop your own script or begin to use one that has been developed by someone else. Your sales script […]
Looking for new leads, new contacts, new business opportunities? Do what nine out of 10 adults do, according to a recent article by the American Society of Association Executives. Join an Association. Choose from over 130,000 associations in the United States alone that represent practically any industry at national, international, regional, state and local […]
Who decides what happens in your day? If you’re a sales professional, the answer should be “me,” but each day you face a blizzard of activities that compete for your time and you’re bombarded by distractions. As a result, you bounce from urgency to urgency, from phone calls to emails and one interruption […]
Recently I stumbled across some notes that I had kept from a project I had been involved in which involved looking at manager behaviours. The aim of this project was to identify “preferred behaviours” in sales managers when they were working closely with their sales representatives. The outputs were interesting and helped my colleagues identify […]