Selling Power Video

I receive email’s from America’s Selling Power magazine that I often save up for a coffee break and click on their newsletter.  It tends to have a handful of articles and usually one will jump out at me and provide five minutes of thought provoking material and insight.

I’ve blogged before about my affection for Selling Power, especially as all attempts at anything remotely similar in England have floundered.  Their video resource is now burgeoning with circa 5-minute talking heads.  You can forgive the lack of depth they reach because of the way they tend to be structured to have, for example, a book author explain the 4 main facets of their tome.  This let’s you know quickly what they feel important and gives a springboard for when their ideas tempt you elsewhere.

To give you an example of how beneficial just five minutes can be, the clip I watched just now highlighted the CEO of Miller Heiman, Sam Reese.  In just 300 seconds, he suggested these five reasons and characteristics that allow the mere 6% of all sales teams to stand out from the pack as ‘winners’:

• leverage real best-practice of top performers
• work closely with strategic accounts when they conduct their own product and strategic planning
• detailed prospecting and business development plans, not leaving anything to chance
• understand why they win and lose deals to the extent that they make a science of it
• provide plenty of ‘C Level’ (eg: Board member) support to their salesforce, both internally and in front of clients

Then for good measure, he added a couple of extra asides that determine success:

• deploy key scenarios that determine passage through the ‘partition gates’ between escalations of their funnel
• realise that lack of access to senior decision makers is the most common reason for losing accounts

As a footnote, although no details were forthcoming on how that tiny 6% were isolated as the ‘winners’, as that equates to roughly just 1 in every 14 sales teams, there must be great scope for looking at how the aforementioned seven activities can help raise you above the pack.