The Competitive Advantage

July 27, 2021

Hiring Your First Sales Rep? Follow These Steps. [Part 2]

Last week, in Part 1 of this series on hiring your first sales rep, we focused on getting ready internally for the hire, with an emphasis on culture, structure and compensation. In this post, we’ll explore the actual hiring and training of that new rep.

Hiring your first sales rep

Most importantly – and everything else pales in comparison – hire for selling skills and sales experience (communication skills, phone selling, presentations, proven sales success, etc.). You can train them on market research once they’re on board. Yeah, I know… that recommendation is going to rub a lot of folks the wrong way, but remember why you’re hiring them… to sell, not to do research. That’s the job of your ops team. If they have some market research background, great! But selling skills and experience are your first priority.

July 20, 2021

Hiring Your First Sales Rep? Follow These Steps.

If you’re like 90%+ of the firms in our industry, your business development efforts are led by seller-doers… business owners, leaders and managers who, in addition to their primary job, have the added responsibility of growing revenue for their firm.

But if that’s not working out for you and you want (or need) to more proactively grow revenue, you might be considering bringing on a full-time sales rep… someone who’s only job is to grow revenue. If that describes you, this series of articles on how to best do that can help.

July 6, 2021

Improve Your Sales Presentation… Get Rid of ‘About Us’

Take a look at your current sales presentation deck. If you’re like the [vast] majority of firms, it starts with slides labeled ‘About Us’ or something similar. And generally, not just one or two slides, but a bunch of them.

Here’s my advice… delete them all!

When you stand in front of the room – or the zoom – to deliver a sales presentation, never start with ‘About Us.’ Why not? Because no one in the room cares! They already know what you do. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t have been invited to present.

June 15, 2021

If You’re in Sales, Your Job Is Not to Sell!

Yeah, I know… sounds kind of wrong, doesn’t it? But let me finish that statement. Your job is not to sell… it’s to help buyers buy.

This philosophy is based on the premise that ‘people don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.’ Think about your last car buying experience. There’s nothing that feels quite as good as driving off the dealer’s lot in a beautiful, brand new car. But leading up to it, you dreaded going to the dealership because of the pushy salespeople. You didn’t want to experience that sort of pressure or be forced into buying something that wasn’t quite right.

Now think about your role as a sales rep or a seller-doer. If you make a sale, that’s good for you… you win. But maybe it’s not what’s best for the client. However, if you help the client make a good buying decision, that’s a win-win.

April 13, 2021

Stop Using Lousy Salespeople… They’re Killin’ You!

This morning, I participated in a Zoom chat with the senior team from one of our clients… there were five of them on the call. At one point, the CEO mentioned that he was receiving sales calls from this particular West Coast fieldwork firm. And before he could finish his comment, two of his colleagues jumped in with comments of their own.

One of them said, “They call me all the time.”

The other said, “They are ‘relentless!’” [And he didn’t mean that in a good way!]

Then the CEO chimed back in, “The kid calling me was obviously new at this… he was so bad that I almost felt sorry for him.”

Nothing was said about their professionalism, helpfulness, that they shared good information, that they had something new to talk about, etc. Just that they were selling hard and pretty bad at it.

December 8, 2020

Lead Nurturing for Seven Years? It’s True!

I first met with the founder of this particular MR services firm in early 2013. After his initial interest and a few phone calls, he said he was not ready to move forward.

A year later we reconnected… similar interest, a few more phone calls… same outcome.

And again, two years after that.

But now, it looks like it’s finally coming around and will actually happen. The interest, the need and the urgency are all higher than ever before. So, what happened? How did a sales prospect from 2013 finally come to pull the trigger (we think) more than seven years later?

November 24, 2020

Generating Sales Leads is a Waste of Money… If You Don’t Follow-up

Sales leads are the lifeblood of any growing business. In the good ‘ol days… they came from networking at a conference, meeting visitors at your trade show booth and cold calling. Today, they come from hosting webinars, leveraging LinkedIn connections and creating downloadable gated content.

But here’s the problem (today and back then)… the vast majority of those sales leads are never followed-up on. It doesn’t matter if the guilty party is a full-time sales rep or a part-time seller-doer… this is where the sales process breaks down. Happens all the time! I don’t know if it’s because the sale rep gets lazy, gets distracted or gets busy.

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!