Sensemaking for Sales

The amount of product and service information available to B2B customers—reports, blogs, display ads, email marketing, and more—has become overwhelming, leading to indecision and a sharply reduced likelihood of making a substantive purchase.

The best reps have turned this conundrum into a prime selling opportunity. Above all else, they help buyers make sense of the information they’ve encountered. Their approach is a form of sensemaking, and it encompasses three broad activities.

Read More

Embrace Customer Complaints To Up Your Customer Experience to Excellent

"Embrace customer complaints" is probably a cringe-worthy idea to some of you. The thought of negative feedback may trigger something inside of you that frankly, makes you want to crumble up all the papers on your desk or just throw your laptop against the wall. Wait, please, help is on the way.

At my company, we LOVE to get negative feedback. It's rare and candidly, if there was a lot, maybe my team wouldn't embrace it as much. My company is able to do well even though we don't have a gold standard service method like The Ritz-Carlton hotel or follow ten core values like Zappos.

Read More

How to Respond to an RFP With No Fear

Receiving a request for proposal (RFP) can be a great opportunity to grow your business.

But, for a lot of business owners, RFPs are complicated, overwhelming, and downright terrifying.

In this article, we’ll give you 11 practical tips to improve your business proposal writing skills and show you exactly what to do the next time an RFP lands in your inbox.

Read More

Lessons Learned From Talking to 53 Sales Managers

I surveyed 53 sales managers, asking them (among other things) what essential skills their top-performing salespeople possess. Okay, it wasn’t an actual survey.

However, our team at Sales Readiness Group (SRG) recently completed rolling out a sales training program from a large sales organization, and I was reviewing my notes from interviews with frontline sales managers as part of the customization process.

Read More

An Agile Approach to Change Management

The business world has arguably seen more disruption in the last nine months than in the last nine years, bringing new and urgent demand for change. Initiatives are being launched by the dozen, adoption can’t happen fast enough, and the stakes are higher than ever. In the midst of a Covid-induced recession, and with some industries on the brink of extinction, change isn’t about fine-tuning — it’s existential.

Read More

Why Empathy is The Most Important Selling Skill

Microsoft’s chief executive officer, Satya Nadella, often speaks of how his career — and his company — have been shaped by empathy. Nadella views empathy as a quality to be consciously cultivated, practiced and applied — “not just as something nice to have but (it) is core to (the) innovation agenda in the company,” according to a Quartz India article. In addition, he believes empathy can be a differentiator when working with clients.

Read More

Building a Coaching-based Mindset: A Success Story in Developing a Sales Culture

There is no doubt that coaching is an effective tool for developing people and teams. Research shows that training and coaching can lead to an 88% increase in productivity, versus 23% from training alone, and an organization’s return on investment (ROI) in training increases from 22% to 88% when supported with coaching. The question is, how do you use coaching in your organization to really make a difference?

Read More

Can You Find The Perfect Sales Candidates for Your Sales Team?

From time to time, I help clients recruit for key roles. Unlike recruiters, I don't work on a contingency because I take responsibility for the entire recruiting process from soup to nuts and then the client makes the decisions on who to hire. They pay a fee for services. I specify the requirements, write the job postings, attract and source candidates, take the initial application, get them through Objective Management Group's (OMG) accurate and predictive candidate assessments, review resumes, conduct the first interview and then recommend candidates who are perfect fits for the roles.

Read More

3 Time-Honored Sales Tactics that No Longer Work

Pre-pandemic sales people used personal contact (a firm handshake, wining and dining, etc.) to build customer relationships. Now that it looks likely we'll be living with some form of Covid for the next few years (and maybe forever), a winning face-to-face personality will get you absolutely nowhere. Ditto with the "I'm successful so you should buy from me" personal semiotics, like the tailored suit and the Rolex.

Read More