Topic

academy

A collection of 125 issues

Opposite Extreme Bags A Whale

When I first started out reppin’, my (much older) sales colleagues used to talk of landing their “whale of a deal”. Breaking into ‘corporate’ acccounts took up a lot of our idle conversation time. There was often frustration that the highest paid reps would be given named accounts to hunt

Personal Gain Identification

One of my customers recently had a 3-day Miller Heiman [http://www.millerheiman.com] strategic selling course. When I asked them the one thing that they took from it, their answer was unequivocal; uncovering personal gain. Most sales people have heard of the Miller Heiman Blue Sheet philosophy, which is

Deliver Business Case With Conviction

I’ve always enjoyed attending my customer’s workshops that are run by a respected person from elsewhere in their organisation. This is because they have instant and greater gravitas with the reps than an external trainer would, and such reverence allows them to push the reps further. Sessions like

The Power Of One

One of my customer’s sales management team were recently summoned to a European conference where new solution sales techniques were passed down from a central corporate training resource. One particular topic I know they all liked was about talking credible numbers when it came to benefits. All too often,

The 5 Whys simplicity

Commissioned recently by a leading manufacturer/distributor of hydraulic kit to help stimulate sales of a new kind of filtration product, I rolled up my sleeves only to learn that none of the sales team were really selling it. Over the past 18 months or so, only 6 examples of

Closing Yellow Pages Trap Door

One of my recent customers is an extremely forward thinking company from the sales systems and support perspective. Even down to one of their top reps demanding they ran a sales blog of success. That very same fella, John from East Anglia described one of the facets to his account

Sell Money At A Discount

Everyone is familiar with return on investment (RoI) selling. The principle is simple, buy and you’ll either save yourself cash unnecessarily being wasted at present, or make money many times over what you paid from extra opportunity. I find myself constantly referring to RoI when I’m pitching, as

Preventing Dissatisfaction Dip

A sales guy at a customer of mine articulated this issue to me beautifully the other day. A relationship proved to be healthy by the placing of an order for our wonderful piece of kit can deteriorate without us knowing post-sale. Setting expectations whilst prospecting can prevent this. Guiding the

Impact Players

I was lucky enough to just take on a team of Italians in a football friendly that I’ve played against twice before over in Rome. This time the match was at Leyton Orient’s training facilities in North London. With a large squad, banter was flowing before the game

Blue Sky Perfect World

Just a couple of days ago, I had the delightful experience of one of my tekkies showing sparkling sales [http://salespodder.com/informal-requirements-analysis/] skill. And today I had a conversation with a fella of 20 years experience currently selling information to accountants. Amazingly, he uses the same approach to uncovering