The Competitive Advantage

July 14, 2020

12 Touchpoints While Waiting to Hear Back from a Sales Prospect

I signed-up a new client last week. Pretty excited about it, too. And it only took 2 years to make it happen! :-0

Do you have clients and prospects that are slow to respond? OK, maybe not 2-years-slow – and that was certainly an anomaly for us – but waiting to hear over a period of weeks, or even months, can be very challenging and incredibly frustrating.

May 12, 2020

Do you have a defined sales process? No?! Ignoring it is a HUGE mistake!

Imagine you have responsibility for revenue growth at your firm and you finally decide to pull the trigger and convert a couple of your senior Project Managers to the Seller-Doer role. Congrats!

Now what? Well, one of the items you’ll need to cover in their training is to help them understand your firm’s ‘sales process.’

Sales process?! It’s not a term or a concept used very often in our industry… but it’s critical to your selling success. And here’s why…

June 25, 2019

Don’t sell to companies that can’t buy from you. Qualify your sales leads first.

Have you ever gotten deep into a sales conversation with a potential buyer – maybe even over the course of weeks or months – only to find out that they will never become a buyer? That your firm is just not the right fit with what they really need… or that they can’t afford your services?

Scenarios like that – which happen all too often – are incredibly frustrating. And a colossal waste of time!

So, what can you do? You need to qualify your sales prospects before moving forward. Here’s how…

January 23, 2019

Don’t Treat Your 2019 Revenue Goal Like Your New Year’s Resolution!

Raise your hand if your New Year’s resolution is to “lose weight!” It is, by far, the most common option for that annual tradition of ‘personal goal setting.’

While I don’t know the actual statistics, I’ll bet well over 90% of those with that goal don’t achieve it. Maybe 95%!  And there’s a pretty simple reason why that happens…

You can’t just ‘lose weight.’ You can’t will it to happen. You can’t stand in front of the mirror and hope that the fat will go away.

January 15, 2019

I’ve Got an Accountability Partner… and You Should, Too

One of the primary responsibilities of a business owner is ‘accountability’… to make sure our employees are doing their jobs and making progress toward company goals. We hold our project teams accountable by getting feedback from clients. We hold salespeople accountable by monitoring selling activity and – of course – tracking revenue. We hold our financial team accountable by requiring timely completion of P&Ls, balance sheets and AP/AR reports.

But who holds us – the owners – accountable?

January 1, 2019

Marketing & Sales for ‘Old’ Business Owners, Part 4

“I don’t have the time!”

After “I don’t have the money!”, the second most common excuse I hear from ‘oldsters’ like me for not engaging in any real marketing & sales efforts is “I don’t have the time!”.

To that, I have two responses:

#1. Bullsh**! The reason you don’t “have the time” is because you’re not “making the time”… and the reason you’re not “making the time” is because it’s not a “priority” for you.

It’s that simple.

April 29, 2018

Want to improve your sales results? Sell like a doctor.

For years, while working with providers of market research consulting and technology services, one of my pleas has been (and still is)… “Seek first to help… then to sell.” I believe it is THE most effective selling mindset for winning projects and – more importantly – long-term relationships with clients.

But recently, I heard that same sentiment stated another way… one that, I think, will resonate with most of us: “Sell like a doctor.”

I went through rotator cuff surgery last year. And in thinking back about the interactions with my orthopedic surgeon throughout the process, I thought about his “selling skills” and how they might translate in our industry.

March 27, 2018

For Sales & Marketing Success: Finish What You Start

One of the first questions I ask during an initial exploratory call with a prospective client is, “What kind of marketing and sales are you doing now?” And I generally get the kind of answers you’d expect…

• “We blog once or twice a month.”
• “We network at conferences.”
• “We send out a monthly e-newsletter.”
• “We’re all on LinkedIn.”

And so on.

And it all sounds pretty good on the surface, but once I dig a little deeper, I find that even though many of these firms have taken the first step… they rarely finish what they start. For example…