The Competitive Advantage

October 20, 2020

Should You ‘Pivot’ During the Pandemic?

If your firm is like 99% of all other firms, your business in 2020 is not what you thought it would be when you were planning for it a year ago.

Clients are placing a ‘hold’ on projects or canceling them altogether. Some of your clients might have gone through layoffs and are not spending a dime. Perhaps you work in a certain industry vertical that has taken a real hit this year (travel, restaurants, etc.).

And when that happens, as business leaders and managers, we are obliged to take a step back and ask, “Should we pivot and be looking outside of our core business for other opportunities?”

October 13, 2020

Stop the Typical Capabilities Presentation… You’re Wasting the Buyers’ Time

We’ve been in business for 8½ years… and in all that time, I have never given a single capabilities presentation. Why not? Because every prospect already knows what we do. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have been invited in to present. How do they know? Simple… they’ve been to our website, downloaded our materials and checked us out on LinkedIn. They already know who we work with… it’s on our website. They know the areas where we’re subject matter experts. You guessed it… also on our website. So, if they already know all of that, why would we waste their time (and ours) re-presenting it to them?

September 30, 2020

Stop Selling… Start Helping!

I generally empty my spam folder every day, but for some reason, I had skipped a few days… and had a mountain of emails to be deleted.

As I was looking through them and getting ready to hit the ‘delete’ button, I noticed a consistent theme across all of them. Other than a couple of “I’m a barrister in Dubai I need your help to claim $20 million,” every single one of them was a hard sales pitch: SEO services, website design, app creation and so on and so on. And most from companies I had never heard of.

Even though this was my spam folder, I think there’s still a lesson here… if you want someone to take notice of you – in an email, over the phone or in person – stop selling and start helping. Or as one of my clients likes to say, “bring value to the relationship.”

September 15, 2020

To Excel at Virtual Selling… You Need to Master Video Chat; Part 2

For the foreseeable future, using video chat for virtual selling will be the ‘new normal.’ So, if you want to be successful at selling, you’ll need to master one of these platforms. Last week, we explored the fundamentals of video chat. In this blog, will discuss how it applies specifically to the sales process.

To help, here are 9 guidelines to help you become a virtual selling superstar…

September 8, 2020

To Excel at Virtual Selling… You Need to Master Video Chat; Part 1

Even when the pandemic is behind us, the use of video chat platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc. will continue to be an important tool for virtual selling and maintaining client relationships. And while all of these platforms are pretty easy to use, it’s also very easy to do a bad job while you’re broadcasting to a sales prospect or client.

To help, in this blog post (and next week’s, too), we’ll share a number of easy-to-implement actions you can employ to take advantage of video chat technology.

September 2, 2020

“I’m a sh*tty guesser!”

This morning, our monthly enewsletter went out to our database. And as I often do, I ran an A/B test on the ‘subject line’… always trying to find the right kinds and grouping of words that get the highest ‘open rate.’ As usual, as the email was being blasted out, I guessed which subject line would be the winner.

And as usual, I was wrong!

August 25, 2020

How to Build Trust with Buyers

One of the guiding principles of B2B sales is that ‘a buyer won’t buy from you until they get to know you… then like you… then trust you.” It can’t and it won’t happen any other way.

And of those, ‘trust’ is the most difficult to achieve. But ‘trust’ isn’t just about you. Your firm (and its staff and its services & products) also has to be trusted by the buyer. So, how can you help a buyer reach that level of trust in you and your firm?

August 11, 2020

Sales Managers Need to Be Sales Leaders

I struck a nerve last week.

The article I wrote – ‘Why full-time sales reps fail in our industry’ – was one of the most widely-read articles that I’ve written in the past 8 years. It also generated a lot of engagement and comments on LinkedIn.

But there’s more to the topic than was covered last week. So, this week, I want to talk about a couple of common sales tactics that – in most cases – are executed very poorly in our industry. And why that happens.