Posts Tagged ‘Sales’
Are you in love with your customers?
Posted by David Shedd on August 23rd, 2011
Does your company love your customers? The harsh truth is that most companies don’t love their CURRENT customers – they love acquiring NEW customers. New customers are sexy and exciting, so that’s where they spend their money and efforts; that’s where star salespeople earn their stripes. But after the deal is signed, those formerly exciting new customers become “current customers” and are handed off to less experienced account managers for servicing.
Yet your current customers are the most important customers you have. Instead of losing touch or relegating them to second-class status, you need to deepen these relationships. You need to understand their problems, partner with them to find new solutions, and turn them into evangelists for your company.
Stop competing with yourself!
Posted by Rick McPartlin on July 26th, 2011
As a fledgling salesperson, I believed product knowledge, excellent communication and hard work would lead to success.
With a few years under my belt, I believed that the additional processes and skills I learned through training would allow me to achieve even greater success.
Yet when I became a professional salesperson, I discovered a painful truth: no matter how good I was, how hard I worked, or what I tried, I would never be more successful than my organization allowed me to be.
My most difficult competitor was MY OWN COMPANY!
Your sales team shouldn’t be doing road repair!
Posted by Rick McPartlin on May 3rd, 2011
When you’re launching a new offer, everyone is fired up and sees a clear road to success. “The product is great. The market is huge. This will sell itself, and we’ll get top dollar, too. We just have to be ready to meet huge market demand.” So the organization busies itself preparing for huge demand and profits to suddenly appear.
Interestingly, salespeople often don’t see the same easy road the rest of the organization sees. (This fact surprises most of the executives we work with.) A sales team sees gold at the end of a road, but the road they see is long, twisty, challenging and uncertain. It will have potholes, dead trees and dead ends. They also know that they will probably have to build or repair that road if they want to get new deals to close at the end.
The Cost of Chaos – Part III
Posted by Jane Adamson on November 2nd, 2010
Imagine that you have a huge digital billboard in your office. It’s something like the national debt clock, and it’s tracking something that is just as critical to your company’s future. It’s the money your organization wastes while trying to generate revenue: the cost of failed products, excess sales salaries, sales support, ads, promotions, campaigns, [...]
