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Category Archives: Sales Best Practices
Professional service sales – leveraging the power of the team
Team selling does not guarantee success. As a matter of fact, teams are frequently misused and ineffective. On the other hand, some organizations have cracked the code and consistently leverage the power of team selling.
This can be a particularly important competitive advantage in the professional service sale. For many companies, selling as a sales team simply means two people going on a call. In professional services, there are field-based engineering and technical support staff, or implementation managers that are on site and have unique perspectives about the customer.
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Has your sales team been trained to be futurists?
What if you trained your sales team to not only uncover and develop existing needs but to also discuss where the customer wants to be in the future, how they want to get there, and how you might help? First of all – that type of sales training is feasible. Second, if you did do it, you might not have to worry about predicting the future because you could invent it. Continue reading
Sales excellence – understanding the clutch player – An STC Classic
Best practices for sales managers working with clutch players – to achieve sales excellence. Continue reading
Sales managers – stop assuming majority rules works best
It’s easy to manager a sales team when there’s consensus on where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. But what happens when there isn’t consensus? That’s when sales managers face some challenges. Randall Peterson, a professor at the London Business School, found that when dealing with small groups, majority rule doesn’t work – it simply makes for an unhappy minority. “They have nothing invested in success and often have something invested in failure,” Peterson says. “Particularly for a group under the size of 10 people, majority rule is a bad way of going about business.”
Since many sales managers deal with sales teams with around 10 sales reps, we were intrigued with Peterson’s recommendation – “qualified consensus” – where everyone has to at least agree they can tolerate the outcome; they can live with it Continue reading
Selling value – the bar has been raised
Company knowledge and product expertise have been and are critical components of any sales rep’s success. Today, however, customers expect sales people to know more about each of those plus be knowledgeable about the customer’s industry, their competition, and how they can bring greater value. They expect the sales people to understand how their products can help deliver a better solution.
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Medical device sales – the book of knowledge is expanding
For medical device reps updating their command of the Book of Knowledge is critical. Not to sound melodramatic but in some cases, like cardiology devices, life and death decisions can depend on it. Being up-to-speed is the key to providing value – to your customer’s and to their customer’s – whether patients, physicians, or administrators. The good news is although the Book of Knowledge is bigger – the resources for learning it are better than ever. Continue reading
Posted in Global Sales Training, Health Care Sales Training, Sales Best Practices, Sales Training
Tagged health care sales training, health care sales training articles, health care sales training blogs, healthcare sales training, medical device sales training, medical device sales training articles, medical device sales training blogs, medical devices sales training, medical sales training articles, medical sales training blogs, sales best practices, sales training articles, sales training blogs
Sales success: getting the comfort–risk mix right
In today’s competitive markets staying in one’s comfort zone may avoid failure – unfortunately it may also prevent success. While it is true that too much of anything is probably not prudent. It is also true that achieving top performance involves some risk taking. So the challenge may be developing the where-with-all to take “smart risks.” Let’s take a look within a sales context at some of the considerations that might go into achieving that goal. Continue reading
The sales prime directive
In the major account market, miscalculations around qualifying leads can have significant consequences either due to opportunities missed or to wasted time and money pursuing bad business. Developing specialized training to help account executives improve their skill set for qualifying leads is money well invested. Continue reading
Selling mistakes – five corrections for getting back on track
Sales reps dread dealing with mistakes. At best they get you off track …at worse they lose you the sale. Regardless of how clever the sales strategy or how much value the sales rep brings to the customer, all that is easily forgotten when mistakes emerge. Furthermore, if not handled properly it’s not uncommon for sales reps or their company to be “branded” as risky to work with or non-responsive, or unpredictable. There is no way to avoid mistakes completely so learning how to handle them is a worthwhile undertaking. Continue reading
Sales leaders – how they unknowingly hinder innovation
Sales – companies are unlikely to prosper if they view improvement simply as doing a better job doing what they are doing – innovation is required. However, if companies are going to take innovation seriously and do more than just manipulate the status quo, then new technologies are just part of the solution – not the entire story. Because of the scope of the change on the buyers’ side of the equation, a comprehensive perspective of innovation is required: sales force designs need revisiting – sales processes should be reviewed – roles and responsibilities deserve a new look and that is just the short list. When it comes to implementing sales innovation it is a safe bet to say it starts with the senior sales leadership team – VP of Sales and Regional Directors. Continue reading
