It seems that all of a sudden the salespeople I work with can’t do anything. The calls and meetings I have with them are filled with negative statements like: “I can’t get appointments.” “No one answers the phone.” “Everyone I used to know and work with is gone.” “Nobody wants to see suppliers.” Some companies […]
Getting Creative With Your Sales Tactics
The best salespeople use techniques they have learned over the years. Some of them are original, some of them have been learned, some have been handed down over the years from one generation to another. Some are interesting, some are a bit hokey, to say the least. When I was a very young sales manager […]
Going Deep With Your Customers
The key to successful salespeople is that they go deep. They go beyond the transactional, the normal steps that salespeople tend to do. Great salespeople have that certain something that regular salespeople don’t have. And customers love them for it. Customers can’t wait for them to visit. Customers hope that they will be asked to […]
Answering The Phone: You Are The Face Of The Company
We’ve all experienced it, we have all suffered through it, we have all cursed it: The way companies answer the phone…if they do at all. This is why Best Buy will go out of business. I called the other day to make an appointment with the Geek Squad. I did this because I learned the […]
What It Takes To Be A Great Salesperson
Great salespeople generate leads. Man, oh man, I heard it again this week. The fingernail on the blackboard noise of a salesperson telling me, “I am long past finding new customers, what I am now is a relationship manager.” OMG are you kidding me? Really, if these were the old days you’d have your straw […]
10 Ideas For Becoming The Best Salesperson You Can Be
The other day someone asked me what I thought it took to be a great salesperson and once again I gave them a litany of my old standbys. After thinking about this for a day or two I thought it was time to dig deeper. To think about this even more. My answers were trite, […]
Back To Basics: The Sales Call
Stop groaning! I can hear you saying “no, please, not that again.” Well, sorry it’s time to review this again. Actually, the other day I was having some one-on-one meetings with a company’s sales reps, and I realized that it was time to review the most important part of the entire sales process, the sales […]
Fear And Loathing In Business
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt Sure, when the four-term president said this, he was in his first term, and he was talking about the depression and as the history books tell us that turned out to be the least of his problems during his time as […]
The Rep-Principal Partnership Part 4: The Solution
Okay so here is what we do. Atticus: “Do you know what a compromise is?” Scout: “Bending the law?” Atticus: “Uh, no it’s an agreement reached by mutual consent. Now here’s the way it works. You concede the necessity of going to school, and we’ll keep right on reading the same every night, just as […]
The Rep/Principal Relationship Part 3: What Do Principals Want?
If you have been following this column for the past few weeks, you know that we have been talking about the relationship or lack thereof between independent sales reps and their principals. Since I started this series I have received a number of comments from readers enforcing the points I’ve been making. Some of them […]