Tag Archives: sales process
What Is a Solution Anyway?
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 […]
Asking Questions vs. Making Statements
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 […]
Business Goals vs. Business Problems – Focusing on the Positive
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 […]
On Qualifying Opportunities: Bad News Early Is Good News
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 […]
Selling – Is It an Art, Science or Both?
The debate over art versus science in sales has been running for decades. A popular myth about selling has that it’s an art, which can be practiced successfully only by sales people born with the “gift of gab” and that science has nothing to do with it. But when you look at world’s top sales […]
Making Pipelines and Forecasts More Accurate
Even with today’s sophisticated CRM and SFA systems, sales forecasting is still more of an art than a science. Even after a sales manager has spent hours upon hours questioning her sales people about whether the deals in the pipeline are really going to close when predicted, it still involves a lot of guesswork. Because […]
How Has Sales Management Evolved in 80 Years?
Sales management today has many nice-sounding methods and systems that create an illusion that sales management would have developed by leaps and bounds in recent years and decades. But it ain’t necessarily so. Instead, a lot of sales management methods that we consider modern are in fact close to a 100 years old. This Chevrolet […]
3 Things All Top Sellers Have in Common
Salespeople need a lot of different working habits, qualities and skills to succeed at their job. Some of the requirements of course strongly depend on the nature of the task. Large account manager role definitely needs different skills than a new customer acquisition or “hunter” role. However, there are some basic characteristics that I think […]