NOTE: Please read Jim’s update (5/2/17) at the end of this article. His answer to the posted comments. How are you opening up your phone calls, especially when cold calling? There’s a simple four step process you can utilize that will increase your success grabbing a prospect’s attention and positioning the reason for your call. […]
Utilizing Stronger ‘Cold Calling’ Phone Openings MORE »
How strong are your strategic selling skills? Strategic selling involves increasing your competitive advantage by strengthening your ability to communicate your uniqueness, value, and competitive differential to a customer or prospect. How successful have you been explaining your competitive uniqueness and differentiation to your potential buyers? What is involved with strategic selling? So what is
Strengthening Your Strategic Selling Skills to Sell More MORE »
Do you see selling as an event or as a process? Less trained or experienced sales reps tend to see selling as just a series of stand-alone events. They work hard at every selling opportunity but when that sale is complete, whether it was won or lost, they see that sales effort as now being
Find ‘The Win’ In Any Sales Loss MORE »
How high is your competitive awareness? On a scale of one to 10…with 10 being strongest…pick a number you feel most represents your current level of competitive awareness. Most experienced sales professionals identify their competitive awareness level as around a seven to nine…what’s your number? Having a comprehensive understanding of your competition and how they
Sell More With a Strong Competitive Awareness MORE »
Can you increase your persuasiveness when presenting your ideas to customers? A powerful idea that might be of help originally came out of the 1940’s and involves “pencil selling” as a way to get your message remembered and to help you maintain control of your sales presentation. “Pencil selling” simply means using a blank pad
Remember to ‘Pencil Sell’ During Your Sales Presentation MORE »
Natural evolution of a dealership As dealerships get larger each person working there will tend to become more specialized. In the beginning when there are only one to three locations most managers are general managers getting involved in all major decisions. As they grow, usually by adding locations, they will need their top managers to
Reasons to Add a Sales Manager to a Dealership MORE »
Are there valid reasons for recording a salesperson’s travels by GPS? Short term I am sure a team’s sales would increase due to the bottom performers running scared and working harder. But long term I believe a team will lose its top performers (or future top performers) due to their feelings of “Big Brother” and
Are You Managing Your Sales Team by GPS? MORE »
The best sales coaching opportunity is going to be whenever you are riding with a rep for a few days or are talking with them on the phone. On the phone it’s just taking a few extra minutes to ask them about any specific account plans or what they are working on with their most
Using ‘Ride-With Sales Coaching’ and Being a Leader MORE »
As a sales manager, are you spending more times working to solve symptoms or problems from your sales team members? Sadly, most of the sales managers I see spend the majority of their time only working on symptoms and not problems. The majority of all the sales problems brought to me by sales people asking
Focusing on Problems – Not Symptoms MORE »
The reality of today’s buyers is they rarely make decisions alone. A “final decision maker” will still seek opinions and insights from others, even when they alone are the final decision maker of their vendor selection. However, most sales professionals only focus their attention selling to their main buyer or decision maker and see little
Selling to Your Buyer’s Entire Political Culture MORE »
