Today, nobody seems to be around to answer their phones. You spend time cold calling, and all you get are voice-mail messages. You know people don’t bother calling back if they think it’s a sales call.

Because I kept running into this situation, I decided I had to leave a voice-mail message that would encourage prospects to call back. I found the best results came when I called people who are members of identifiable groups like the Chamber of Commerce. I could reference the group and gain some legitimacy for my …

There are quite a few pieces to the sales performance improvement puzzle - face-to-face selling skills, management style, coaching, account strategy, and so on. One piece that doesn’t get much attention is the sales process. The simplest definition of “sales process” is “a linked group of tasks that together create customer value.”

by Maxey
Some sales processes are more effective than others. In his book, Rethinking the Sales Force, Huthwaite founder Neil Rackham asks seven questions that can help you evaluate your organization’s sales process:

1.
Does your sales process reflect your customers’ …

Whether you sell face-to-face, by telephone, or in combination, there are eight basic steps in the process. By Helen Berman. Before the sales call, you will want to do your homework: review the account history, their market niche, sales and marketing goals, your current sales position and best initial strategy.

by Dan & Erin Sweeney
If you choose not to use each of the eight steps in a single sales call: you might break the stages of the sale into more than one call. For a new prospect, the opening and statement …

I could have used this post last week.

Learn how to ask the right questions that will help you complete each sale like a star.
Typically, when I talk with my students on a one-to-one basis, they ask me a lot of questions about how to close sales. That’s to be expected because it’s the positive end result all salespeople seek in any contact with potential clients.

In most situations where sales aren’t closed, it’s usually because the salesperson didn’t ask the right question. In all my training, you’ll hear it …

Here are eight steps to make your software sales calls more effective:
Before the Call
STEP 1. Rethink your role. A software sales call is not an opportunity to “pitch” – a monolog that attempts to convince a customer to buy. Instead, a software sales call is a rapport-building dialog between the right salesperson and the right customer. The subject matter of the call should be how your software can address key business issues – not the software and its features and functions.

STEP 2. Do your homework. You’ll never understand – or …

Of course price is important to buyers, but if your product isn’t the cheapest on the market there are ways of getting around the price objection. The next time you hear your price is too high, use one of these strategies to prove that you and your product are worth it.

Determine needs to establish value. The better you know your prospect’s needs, the better you can explain how your product will meet those needs. Address price objections at the end of the presentation, after you have already discussed needs, value …

Does that title sound like a gimmick? It’s not. It’s about the numbers. If you truly want to double your sales, you simply need to double a key aspect of your sales performance, asserts Stephan Schiffman, sales trainer and prolific author, in his newest book, Sales Essentials (Adams Media, 2008). His advice is rooted in the theory that when you measure and focus on a certain area, you’ll see improvement in that area. Here, he says, are five ways you can double your sales:
If you enjoyed this post, make sure …

If you’re in sales you have come across many sales coaches, books and even podcasts about closing techniques. With all the information out there on them, do they work?
Jill Konrath writes in her blog:
The inability to close is a direct result of poor needs development. It is the symptom of the problem, not the actual problem itself.
The very best salespeople don’t employ any special closing techniques at all. They simply focus on understanding their customer’s business and helping them achieve their desired outcomes.
I tend to agree. sales is a …

The deal in your pipeline was huge and considerable time and resources were devoted to bring it to close – yet it fizzled out and fell through in the end. To make matters worse, this seems to be a trend, and everyone from the sales rep to the executive suite wants to know why.Large deals create high-impact revenue as well as long-term relationships that can generate additional sales down the road. Understanding how to improve win-rates on large deals is an investment that pays off through more deals closed, additional …

SalesMotivation.net put together a two step solution to the common objections of pricing. This s a great post on how to handle these objections and I recommend going over to SalesMotivation.net to see the wealth of information they have available.
Step 1: Count to three!

Whenever you’re faced with a difficult question or objection, the first thing you need to do is take a deep breath, make eye contact with your prospect and silently count to three.
It is amazing how many clients will answer their own objections, or at least give you …

What Is Stopping You from Closing All of the Sales You Deserve to Close?
Buyers and sellers have different jobs: buyers need to solve a business problem; sellers place product. Before you can sell, buyers must manage all of the internal, historic, and idiosyncratic elements that created their “Identified Problem.” And sellers have had no way to help them manage this hidden process. Until now. Buying Facilitation leads buyers through an unbiased search for the policies, relationships, historic issues, and initiatives that have created and maintained their status quo,…read more.

If …