FOR SALES REPS

Asking the Tough Questions
There is a difference between moving along the surface and getting more facts vs. drilling down to a deeper level of investigation. Most of us are comfortable collecting more facts, but are unwilling to go deeper and strip away enough layers to get to the true impact. Doing so is uncomfortable; but to effectively solve the buyer’s issue, we must understand it at its deepest levels.

A Gift from Dad
I know a 45-year old sales rep who had been an average performer for his entire career. Suddenly, he began knocking the cover off the ball, quarter after quarter. I asked him how he did it. He told me it was simple. His Dad had died and left him a large inheritance, so he no longer had to worry about money.

Avoiding the Void - Eliminate Hope-Based Forecasting
Sales are not always won or lost because of what happens in a sales call, but in the void between calls.

Good Guy Bad Guy - Savvy Buyer Gambit #4
This is a variation of Higher Authority/Lower Authority, where your main contact, the “Good Guy”, portrays someone else as the “Bad Guy.”

Nibbling - Savvy Buyer Gambit #7
Nibbling is continuous chipping away at your proposal over time, taking a little concession each time. It’s also referred to as ‘incremental negotiating'.

20 Best Practices from Top S.E.’s for Technical Demo’s and Presentations
Face to face time (or phone time) with customers is a finite resource in all opportunities, and is often the critical bottleneck. Here are some tips from top pre-sales pro’s to make the most of that time.

Making Cold Calls - The Hardest Part of Selling
Day in and day out, it’s difficult for most professional sales people to exercise the skill and discipline necessary to get in front of enough prospects to create a thriving business. I just went through some old files and notes. I made 8,732 cold calls my first year to get my business off the ground. I hit some low points, which I had forgotten, until I looked at old journal entries.

The Hot Potato - Savvy Buyer Gambit #5
“We really want to do this project, but our budget just got cut by 30%. Can you help us out?” Like the child’s game, they take the problem and toss it to you.

Zombie Deals - How to Bring Them Back to Life
Zombie deals – they’re still on your forecast – but not moving. Are they dead and just don’t know it? Here’s one way to prevent Zombies and one tactic to resuscitate those you can bring back to life.

Time Management - How to Squeeze More Out of a Day
In the absence of clearly defined goals and a plan to reach them, we become slaves to daily acts of trivia.

Too Expensive
My company has recently released a software system that a prospect cannot download to evaluate. Also, the price is not posted on our web site and can vary based on the size of the company.
The issue I am having is that prospects are calling to get a price without going through a demo. So what ends up happening is that they deem the software too expensive without seeing what it can do. In one other case, I had a prospect consider the price "too cheap".
I can't exactly tell a prospect, "Sorry, you have to go through a demo first". So I'm not really sure how to avoid the "cart in front of the horse".
Am I out of luck or is there a technique I could use to avoid giving out the price until after a demonstration?- JF

An Easy Way to Increase Your Poise and Appeal
Early in my training career, a co-worker critiqued one of my presentations and she said, “Steve you light up when you use a story about your daughter, or about a military analogy - something from your personal experience.”
This is true of all of us.

Building Value into Maintenance Renewals
The last time we saw you around here is when you wanted money!

I hope no one has ever said that to you, but I can tell you that some software sales people have heard that complaint.

Coach or Gate-Keeper
I’m not making this up!
We were taught to find a ‘coach’ or internal champion to work the big deals. It’s a good idea, but it’s been turned around on sales people. Buyers go to schools to learn tricks to gain the upper hand.

Dealing with Fact-Finders
In our market (and I assume in others as well) it's a common practice to have a ‘fact-finder’ evaluate competing products and produce a list of recommendations to a boss.
In a lot of cases trying to "sell" to these people doesn't make sense, because often they don't have a full understanding of the business needs and they don't have any decision power.
So here is a question to the veteran salesmen: how do you get to a decision maker in this situation?

Don't Spill Your Candy in the Lobby
If you’re like me, you’ve jumped through hoops for someone you thought was a hot prospect; working late to create a beautiful and detailed proposal full of price quotes, charts, graphs, and glowing testimonials so big it makes War and Peace look like pamphlet.

Make Your Competition Tell the Customer That Her Baby is Ugly
Steve Reznikoff, President of Micro Systems Consultants, has extended the Sandler Selling System concepts to something he calls The White Board Proposal. He made a decision to stop spending hours writing extensive, fancy technical proposals in favor of meeting with the customer to sketch out a proposed solution on a white board.

Checkup from the Neck Up
People tell me they got into sales because, “I am people person. I like people!”

Anyone who thinks selling is a good place to get their personal, emotional needs met on a daily basis will be in for a rude awaking.

First or Last
Do I want to be first or last to present to a buyer who may look at multiple options?

More Painful Pain
It's often effective to use ‘strip lines’ as you work down a pain funnel. The goal is to get the buyer to convince you; not the other way around!
Here are some strip lines you can use as you work your way down the pain funnel.

The Flinch - Savvy Buyer Move #1
What “The Flinch” is:
You state the price and they almost fall out of their chair.
A client once told me she had just been to negotiating training for buyers.
She had the materials and showed them to me. There were eight pages just on different versions of this move.
They had mild, medium and strong flinches.

The Weakest Link
Have you ever wondered, “Why doesn’t my product or service sell?” or maybe it was closer to, “Why don’t these idiots buy my solution?” If you imagine the sales process as a chain, you can narrow your problem down to one of two weak links - it’s either the product or service you’re trying to sell or the way you’re trying to sell the product.

Start with Yourself
“Competitive sports teach us to master ourselves before we attempt to master others.” - Vince Lombardi
Work on yourself and results will follow. For example, Lombardi was one of the first coaches to use game films. It was a lesson he learned from Red Blaik at West Point. Lombardi also watched the prior week’s film with his team every week. He set the standard for where coaching would go in the future.

Building Value into the Biggest Deals
Most companies focus on selling to one functional area in an account (IT for example). The VP of IT might have a pain that she wants to solve, with a specific cost of pain identified. However the IT problem alone is not enough to justify the investment required and the VP of IT is alone in the battle for approval of funds. The project dies.

What You Know Can Hurt You
Don’t Let Your Product Knowledge Kill the Sale -
Sure, you want your sales staff to be able to respond intelligently to your prospects' queries. However, "robo-sellers" know so much about the intricacies of their product or service that they're always anxious to demonstrate every single feature that springs to mind.

Negotiation Exercise - Is Time an Asset or a Liability?
Sales people often see time only as a liability: giving buyers the upper hand in all negotiations. Since this can leave your team feeling a little like the Washington Generals (the team the Harlem Globe Trotters always played) you might want to try this exercise at your next sales meeting.

Presenting to a Group
Darrell sold complicated software solutions to manufacturing companies. His was a complex sale in that several fact-finding meetings were typically required, and the presentation often was to a group of 4-5 senior company executives. Trying to get a commitment with so many involved was difficult, and he always felt like he missed presenting some important information.

Building the Business Case - Getting Your Solution to the Top of the CFO’s List
At a time when capital budgets are tight and buyers are drawing the line between "essential" and "non-essential" purchases, how do you make sure what your solution is seen as essential?

Selling to Groups and Committees
One tendency all buyers have is to want to have options, and then to have a simple and quantitative way to compare those options. An example is the Mutual Fund industry.
Matthew Morey of New York's Pace University found that funds with high ratings from agencies like Morningstar Inc. and Value Line tend to get the lion's share of our attention and money. But as a group they don't tend to perform much better down the road than those with mediocre marks. "Ratings are very seductive because we want to see things quantified simply," says Morey.

Water Your Referral Tree
When you get a call-in, ask how the prospect heard of you. If it was a referral, find out who referred them. Explain that you want to call the referrer and thank them.
Someone who has referred business to you once has the potential of creating a continuous stream of referrals for years to come.

Why the Hot Buyer isn't the Best Buyer
Imagine an iceberg divided into four levels. The top is ready to buy now. The next tier down is going to buy soon. The next level is made up of those who will buy eventually and the bottom level is those who will never buy.

Closing the Sales and Marketing Gap
was at a national sales meeting, and one of the product marketing people was giving a talk on the new version of a product. As I sat there, I noticed an odd dynamic in the room - everyone was listening with strange intensity.

I looked over one of the sales people's shoulder and saw she had a bingo card. She was covering the squares as the speaker used common marketing buzz-words. The sales team had a lottery set up, and the first one to shout “bingo” got the pot.