Sales

Cold calling can be hit or miss for many service professionals. Some professionals swear by it. Others hate the idea of calling people up and pitching their products or services. Personally, I don’t advocate cold calling in most cases because it can be an expensive, time consuming way to market yourself. And while it can work, calling someone who has never heard of you or expressed a need for your services almost always leads to rejection. continue

If you’ve been promoting your services for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced at least one time when your prospect seemed to drop off the face of the planet. You thought things were going well. You were in talks and coming close to closing the deal when suddenly, your prospect stops taking your calls or responding to email.

The worst part about this failure to communicate is not knowing what happened. Did you do something wrong? Is the sale lost? And what is the best course of action since you don’t want to be perceived as a pushy salesperson who never knows when to give up. continue

Author: Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano
Publisher: Business Plus
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
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If you’ve read Now, Discover Your Strengths and you are in sales, check out The Gallup Organization’s book on how to Discover Your Sales Strengths. Unlike most sales books that are written from a salesman’s perspective, this book is based on Gallup research of sales people who were consistently in the top 25% of their company’s sales forces and sold 4-10 times more than average performers. The research is based on interviews with 250,000 salespeople, over 1 million customers and 80,000 managers. continue

Author: Jeffrey Gitomer
Publisher: FT Press
Year Published: 2006
Rating:
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Jeffrey Gitomer is known as a top motivational sales author and trainer. If you’ve ever heard him speak, he’s extremely energetic and tries to make sales fun. In the Little Red Book of Sales Answers, Gitomer sticks to his fun theme, putting together what feels like a sales book for the attention-deficit with large red headlines, blue bolded lettering to draw attention, cartoons, and freebies you can access on his website. continue

Author: Rick Page
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year Published: 2003
Rating:
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If you deal with complex sales - sales that take months to close and often involve multiple decision makers with different motivations - then you know they can be chaotic. Perhaps no one is calling you back, or they’ve introduced new requirements, or you can’t seem to talk with the decision maker, or your prospect just can’t seem to make a decision. You’d like to put on your rose-colored glasses and “hope” everything will be ok, but something seems wrong and your prospect won’t tell you what that might be. continue

Author: Neil Rackham
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year Published: 1988
Rating:
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Marketing can only get your foot in the door. Selling is what closes the deal. Yet when most people think of selling, they think of pushy ‘used car’ salesmen who are only out to suck more money out of their wallets. continue

There was an interesting article in Pepper & Roger’s 1to1 magazine this month on the effectiveness of the sales force and how your sales team must go beyond pitching prepackaged solutions to prospects and instead, “diagnose, design, and deliver” solutions that match their specific needs. The article mentioned Jeff Thull’s approach to selling, something I’ve blogged about in past posts. His approach (along with Neil Rackham’s Spin Selling ) is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to understand how to sell to clients in this era. continue

This was actually in last week’s MarketingProfs.com newsletter, but Jeff Thull wrote a great overview of his “complex sale” process. Complex sales are sales where it takes people a long time to make a decision. There may be many competitors, decision makers, and stakeholders, and the sale is worth a fairly large sum of money - as compared to a sale you might buy on impulse because you so happened to pass it at Walmart as you were heading to the checkout and thought wow, what a great item! I really need one of those! So you put it in your cart because it’s on sale for $13.95 and if you never use it, oh well, you spend $13.95… continue

Today’s MarketingProfs.com had a great article on Lead Generation by Stephen Diorio. In it, he cites a fairly large number of statistics to support his belief that fixing the lead generation process is a great place to generate new growth. Some stats include: continue

I received a cold call today from a sales guy who seemed very new to the business. He started by asking if I would like to set up a meeting with his boss. I asked why I would want to do that, especially since I had no idea what they did or why I needed their services. He replied that’s why he wanted to set up the meeting. So I told him that without knowing anything about the services he provided, I had no way to gauge whether this meeting would just waste both my and his boss’ time. Instead, I asked him to send me information so I could take a look at the company, or at least send me a URL. At this point, I sort of felt bad for the guy because it was pretty obvious he was new and no one trained him on how to set up appointments. Still, there was no reason for me to take a half hour or so out of my day to meet with someone whom I knew nothing about, nor did I know what services he provided. continue