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Salesforce Makes a Big Move into Social Media

April 21, 2011 | Author: Petteri Laine

Salesforce, the leader in cloud CRM, announced recently the acquisition of Radian6, a social media monitoring company. Radian6 monitors hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, delivering real-time information. What does this mean in practical terms? In my opinion this means that social media will eventually become integrated to every major CRM system a ... Continue reading

3 Ways to Improve Sales Results by Using Social Media

April 18, 2011 | Author: Pekka Sahlsten

As discussed in my previous post about social media basics for sales people, a lot of your salespeople might not have embraced social media – yet. The more experienced “old school” sellers and sales executives simply might not have understood the value of social media in business and especially in the field of selling. Sellers and executives who come from various backgrounds might also not be technology-savvy en ... Continue reading

Social Media Basics for Salespeople

April 15, 2011 | Author: Pekka Sahlsten

A lot of your salespeople might not be into social media. The more experienced “old school” sellers simply might not have understood the value of social media in business. The might think that social media equals Facebook and minute-by-minute updates of someone’s mundane personal life. Or they might not be technology-savvy enough to master all the various tools and services involved in using social media effectively. ... Continue reading

What Is a Solution Anyway?

April 8, 2011 | Author: Petteri Laine

The word solution has to be one of the most misused words in the English language! Practically every company in the entire world is bragging about their “solutions” in their marketing material and on their websites. But there cannot be a solution without a problem to solve, right? Think about it: who’s got the business problems we are trying to solve? The customer. Can you prescribe a solution before you ... Continue reading

Don’t Let Your Expertise Become Your Enemy

March 30, 2011 | Author: Pekka Sahlsten

How long does it take for a salesperson to become too knowledgable for his or her own good? According to a study conducted at Xerox in the ’70s, 18 months. The renowned sales guru, Neil Rackham, found that the performance of new salespeople increased steadily until about 18 months on the job. After that their performance not only levelled out but actually dropped significantly! The explanation? Rackham found that afte ... Continue reading

Asking Questions vs. Making Statements

March 20, 2011 | Author: Pekka Sahlsten

Remember when you were a teenager? Did you ever do anything the way your parents told you to? I didn’t think so. But this behaviour is not limited to teens. Adults behave exactly the same. In fact it’s basic phychology: no-one likes to be told what to do. Otherwise we would have no over-weight and out-of-shape people. Only after these people find out that their health – or even worse, life – is und ... Continue reading

Business Goals vs. Business Problems – Focusing on the Positive

March 13, 2011 | Author: George Gombas

From a very long experience in practicing complex solution sales we here at Customer Centric Selling Europe have learned that is a lot easier to get a decision maker to share a business goal that to have him to admit a problem in his organisation. Problems are often embarrasing and the decision maker might be reluctant to tell about his organisation’s problems to a stranger he or she cannot completely trust. In fact, ... Continue reading

On Qualifying Opportunities: Bad News Early Is Good News

March 9, 2011 | Author: Petteri Laine

Sales is a funny sport: to win the silver medal is to lose in the worst kind of way. No matter how counter-intuitive this feels, its true. When you compete for some business, go the distance and lose, you are wasting your company’s resources, time, and money while most likely keeping your company from competing for winnable opportunities. There are only two winners in any sales cycle – the one who gets the sale ... Continue reading

You Can’t Sell to Someone Who Can’t Buy

February 27, 2011 | Author: Pekka Sahlsten

Lets imagine your family is looking to buy a new car. To this end you enter a car showroom with our spouse and your children. In this situation, no car salesperson would try to sell a new expensive family car to your 18 year old daughter – even though your daughter probably will use the new car at some point. No, the salesperson would talk to the parents of the family and try to find out who actually makes the decision to ... Continue reading

Don’t Make Concessions without Getting Something in Return

February 19, 2011 | Author: Petteri Laine

This week I was delivering a Business Simulation Workshop™ (BSW) to one of CCS Europe’s key customers. The BSW is a 24 hour simulation game of a complete sales project, where several sales teams compete against each other to win the business from a fictitious customer – portrayed by a team of CustomerCentric Selling™ trained executives from the customer’s organisation. One of the competing sales teams in this ... Continue reading