One of the most fruitful (and enjoyable) things you can do is to prioritize being in relationships with people you enjoy. Even if none of them are or work directly with your target clients, they each represent hundreds, if not thousands, of people they know. And chances are, people within their network are, or work with, your ideal clients.

What are customer needs? Answering that question may not always be easy – but it’s crucial for business success. After all, knowing what the customer wants is the starting point for creating winning products and services. Just as importantly, it’s the basis for forming long-lasting relationships. The State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 62% of customers expect businesses to anticipate their needs, and 73% expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.

In the age of social media, it’s not hard to picture what an engaged customer looks like. They’re the superfans liking and commenting on every post a brand puts out there. You know the ones; Apple, Disney, Starbucks, American Girl Dolls (for those of you with kids of a certain age), and so on. They’ve built a passionate base of engaged customers who’ll talk your ear off, online and in real life, about every ‘exciting’ new thing.

It is easy to get caught up in the importance of sales when you are running a business. After all, sales are the lifeblood of any business. However, the truth is that there are many other factors that contribute to the success of a business. Increasing sales is probably high on your list of priorities. But, if you want to build a successful business, there is another critical area that you cannot afford to ignore – financial management.

In managing customer relationships — or relationships with any key stakeholders — it is critical to manage the balance of power between the company and any one customer. This can be done by diversifying the customer base, understanding (and be willing to use) customer pressure points, and (in the case where a company is locked into a single key relationship) ensuring that the customer is as dependent on the company as the company is dependent on the customer.

According to data from Objective Management Group (OMG), which has assessed more than 2.4 million salespeople, 95% of the very best salespeople emphasize listening over talking, but more than half of the worst salespeople take the opposite approach, emphasizing talking over listening. While the primary skill to prioritize listening is asking good, timely questions, only 28% of all salespeople ask enough questions. Even worse, that drops to just 4% of the worst salespeople.

When I have an unreasonable customer, I have no problem encouraging them to do business elsewhere (again, after making reasonable attempts to satisfy them). The investment of time and emotional resources are often not worth trying to satisfy such a person. Better to lose one out of 50 customers--especially if that customer is taking 10 times the time and effort to deal with.

You hear about disruptions in industry, in tech, in art. Something or someone who comes along and makes the world abruptly shift, seemingly overnight. Well, there are disruptions in sales calls, too. Questions, actions, and behaviors that have the power to change the conversation and how the client sees you.

Choose the Best Time and Strategy for Cold Calling. Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. While these six rules of thumb are a good place to start, you may find different strategies work better for your business. Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

"I am fine with my current product lineup..." is one of the worst things that a salesperson can hear. They are happy with what they currently have, and if they are already using a solution of yours you have to tread very carefully to ensure that you don't lose a current customer in pursuit of a higher package or price tag. So today, I wanted to share with you a few responses

Selling original or quirky products is often an uphill battle. However research that involved an analysis of quirky products sold by some 7,000 craft entrepreneurs on Etsy suggests that effective storytelling that helps people relate to such offerings can turn them into successes. This article shares three storytelling techniques that work.

People today are bombarded with messages from morning until night. We can't check email or drive to the store without seeing flashing banners, mostly aimed at selling us something. Today's consumers are experts at tuning these messages out, leaving salespeople with an important question: Do you ensure your message is seen and heard? Connecting with clients today is often about building trust.

Last week, I posted an article on the Impact of Relationship Building Challenges in Sales. The article explored what happens to salespeople who are skilled at selling, but aren’t very good at building relationships, as well as those who are great at building relationships but aren’t very skilled at selling. While there were some terrific insights, the one thing that was missing from the article was what great relationship builders do that everyone else fails to do.

Although the marketing world has been changing drastically over the years, some things have stayed the same. I'm talking about human psychology. There are tried and true tactics that win every time based on how we behave and what signals our subconscious behavior and emotional triggers. According to McKinsey & Co., 80% of consumers want retailers to personalize their experiences — so when you use sales psychology, your audience will believe you understand them and their needs.

Sales prospecting is hard for many reasons. Perhaps the hardest – millions of other people are doing it as well. Meaning, it can feel almost impossible to stand out. The key is leaning into your unique personality and finding out what works for you. But, sometimes, it helps to have some inspiration.

Six in 10 of today’s tech buyers are millennials, and they hold the largest number of decision-making roles in corporate buying. If you haven’t already learned how to sell to millennial buyers, it’s past time to get caught up. Millennials are the first generation to grow up with computers and internet access, and their habits are shaped accordingly. Millennial buyers spend more time researching online, abhor phone calls, and are socially conscious.

Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

Self-reflection is the gateway to learning from sales experience, for both sales professionals and the people responsible for coaching them. The tricky part is finding the time to invest in self-reflection, but also—and this could be the real reason it happens less in sales—having a reliable way to do it. Sales self-reflection takes learning from experience to a whole new level, extracting the real gems from a sales interaction, and developing valuable skills that can be refined and applied in other situations.

Sales must be a top priority if you want your business to thrive. It's not enough to simply have a great product or service; you need to market it effectively and convince potential customers that it's worth their time and money. As we approach the year's final quarter, business owners across various industries are feeling the pressure to close out the year with high financial numbers.

Surveys. They're supposed to take the pulse of a company's performance through the eyes of their customers. However, they frequently deliver the opposite -- a veiled and biased pile of data that is used only for your monthly performance reports. This happens because many organizations are prone to customer deafness. Surveys are constructed based on what companies want to hear, rather than on what customers need to say.