The Competitive Advantage

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.

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.

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.

June 23, 2020

Make Role Playing the Centerpiece of Your Sales Training. Here’s Why.

True story: My first job after college was as a sales rep for the DuPont Company. While much of the 3-month training program was technical in nature, we also spent a good deal of time developing our selling skills. And on one particular day, we were tasked with doing some role playing (and it was to be videotaped!). My training scenario was that I was visiting a client (played by the Sales Trainer) who started complaining vehemently about the terrible quality of our product. After 30 seconds of being berated by the client and trying to respond appropriately, I just froze up, looked at the camera and said, “Help me!”

May 4, 2020

Selling Success Requires 2 Things… a Good Sales Rep and a Better Sales Manager

8 Keys for Effective Sales Management

I was chatting with an industry colleague this past week and he mentioned he had just repositioned two of his Project Managers into Business Development roles… one as an account manager and one to go after new business.

And then he said something that really surprised me and even made me smile. He said, “This process has made me realize that I’m no sales manager!”

Wow! He is literally the first person in Market Research I have met who has said that. Out loud. Don’t get me wrong… there are a ton of really bad sales managers in our industry – he’s just the first one to admit it.