The Competitive Advantage

November 17, 2020

Your Sales & Marketing Focus Is All Wrong!

When you think about sales & marketing, what comes to mind? For most business people… it’s about acquiring new clients – about building awareness in the markets or industries they serve, then generating sales leads that lead to new business.

And that’s wrong!

The fact is, when you think about sales & marketing, your first priority – the primary focus of your strategies and planning – should be to maintain and grow your current client base.

November 10, 2020

The Hardest Thing To Do When Selling

Whether you’re a professional, full-time salesperson or a newly-minted seller-doer, it doesn’t take long for you to figure out that the hardest thing to do when selling is convincing a company to do business with you the very first time. That is, to acquire a brand-new client.

Think about it… first, you’re ‘stealing’ them from a competitor, one where they presumably have had a pretty good relationship for a period of time. And two, your sales pitch – by definition – is basically, “I know you’ve been working with my competitor for a long time and have a good relationship with them, but I want you to forget about that and take a chance with us… a company you have absolutely no history with!” OK, I’m exaggerating… but not by much.

November 3, 2020

How to Define Sales Territories for Larger Sales Teams

I started my career as a technical sales rep for the DuPont Company (a long, long, long time ago). Back then, the de facto way of structuring a sales team was to give each sales rep his/her own territory. And those sales territories were almost always built around geography… whether the company was selling regionally, nationally or globally. It made it easy for ‘road warriors’ to visit a lot of clients and prospects on a single road trip.

But today, with so many geographically-dispersed companies working virtually – and so much selling being done by phone and on tools like Zoom™ – defining sales territories by geography is not your only option. It’s also likely not your best option.

October 28, 2020

Sending cold emails? Then take the time to do it right.

I received a cold email this morning from a company pitching its products. It happens all the time. But this one was especially bad.

First of all, it was like so many of the other cold emails I’ve received over the years – selling products or services I simply don’t need. This happens so much that I started writing about this phenomenon as early as 2016 (read the first post here). This salesperson was just lazy. They likely found my name on an industry list somewhere and assumed I needed what they’re selling. Uh-h-h… no!

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 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.