Distraction

Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter, wanted everything just right when he was at the plate. He wanted to be able to focus on one thing: hitting the ball hard.

I love what he says in The Science of Hitting: “My preference was a light bat…I didn’t want them chipped or discolored, because those are distractions. Just like the uniform — I didn’t want the cap too tight or the pants bagging or the sleeves flapping. I didn’t want any distractions. I often swung with the label down so I couldn’t see it for just that reason.”

And George Brett once said that the secret to hitting a baseball was to “think about nothing.” He went on: “What do you think about when you’re in a slump? You think about where your hands should be, where your feet should be, how well you’re seeing the ball. When you’re going bad, you’ve got all the world’s problems on your mind. But when you’re going good, your mind is blank.”

We are a nation driven to distraction. In some cases, literally driving distracted. In most cases, it’s a self-imposed distraction that is utterly derailing our sales efforts. Read the full post

Pre-call Planning Revisited

The Institute of Management Consultants sends out a daily tips email that’s pretty good. Today’s email question and answer addressed asking prospective clients about the business you’re meeting with and its problems.

An excerpt of the IMC USA answer:

Don’t ask the knowable. Do your research first. Don’t ask how many employees, revenues, product line descriptions, etc. if they are published on their site or in an annual report. Or common knowledge. You are the expert. You should know a lot about them. So…prepare a list of questions appropriate to your consulting specialty that get at the problems, issues, opportunities (especially).

This is solid advice that many companies don’t directly teach their sales professionals. The reason they don’t teach them this is that it implies it’s okay to sit at a computer “researching” over simply making calls and getting deals closed. They would rather salespeople waste buyers’ time asking ridiculous introductory questions they could have found out in another way ahead of the first appointment. Particularly when the buyer works for a publicly traded company. Read the full post

Get the Right Commitment

There’s a good post at Shane Murphy’s blog that reminded me of the importance of gaining some sort of a commitment as the outcome of every sales appointment. You do this not to ultimately persuade someone to buy something they don’t need, but to test how seriously they are taking your discussions.

People often nod their head yes and act as though they agree with what you’re saying, but have already made up their mind that they’re not buying from you, for any number of reasons.
To prevent wasting your time with bad prospects, do these two things:

1. Set realistic goals for how your first appointment should conclude. You’re not going to close too many of these (depending on what you sell), so be reasonable as to what should result from your first appointments.
2. Get the right commitment at the conclusion of any sales call. That “right commitment” should involve asking the buyer to do something active — download a resource from your website, call for feedback from one of your existing clients, get hard data you need in fully analyzing their current situation.

Too often we go to one extreme or the other on sales calls. We leave things too open-ended and we end up chasing the prospect around, hoping to eventually sell them; or we hard-close them too early and we alienate the buyer personally.

Set the right targets and get the right commitments and you stand a better chance of working higher probability prospects.

Manage Your Pipeline, Don’t Just Track Contacts

The Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF):

This post is aimed at solo sales agents and small team sales managers and executives who can make decisions on inexpensive tools that will dramatically impact how they manage their pipelines. Pipelinedeals.com is the featured solution.

The Full Story

You’re not managing your pipeline well.

We all know about Act, Goldmine, Maximizer, Outlook. Bloated software where you COULD store everything. Maybe you’re using one of them. If not, there are free solutions out there–the Palm desktop software can log all of your contacts, give you a calendar and todo list for free. Essential PIM does the same thing.

Then there’s the behemoths such as Siebel/Oracle, Salesforce.com, and others who will help you track it all online. No software to download. Sounds great, but they’re complex as well.

If you work on a large team or you’re a midlevel sales manager, I wish you the best of luck. But if you’re a solo sales agent or you lead a small sales team and can affect change, here are my suggestions. Read the full post

Meet Face-to-Face Each Week

**Note: This is the fourth part in a five-part series entitled, “The Five Principles of Sales Team Leadership.”

Previous articles in the series:

• The Five Principles of Sales Team Leadership.
• Know Your People.
• Spend Time with Your People in the Field.
• Study and Know Your Selling Ratios.

It’s crucial that you meet one-on-one with the members of your local sales team each week. Good communication is important to every person, team and organization. And overwhelmingly, people prefer to meet face-to-face with their supervisor on topics of most importance, rather than receiving written messages or voicemails. And accountability can’t happen via email. Read the full post

Bad, Bad Business 2.0

I try to keep things pretty upbeat around here. Positive suggestions, things to do, things not to do. I try not to call out specific companies or people.

But Business 2.0 has changed that. Here’s the story.

I received a free, six-month subscription for purchasing something over a year ago. I forget what I paid for, maybe this domain name.

Six months later, the subscription expired, and I consciously chose not to renew it. I remember my impression of the latest rendition of Business 2.0 (I was a subscriber when it debuted years ago) was ho-hum. Well, “run out” isn’t in Business 2.0’s lexicon. Read the full post

Quick Directory of Sales Books

I love Amazon.com, but I found this site as a fast directory-by-author of sales books available. Check it out.

Study and Know Your Selling Ratios

**Note: This is the third part in a five-part series entitled, “The Five Principles of Sales Team Leadership.”

Previous articles in the series:

• The Five Principles of Sales Team Leadership.
• Know Your People.
• Spend Time with Your People in the Field.

Here at Salesteamtools.com we target our message at sales managers and professionals in high activity selling industries. Particularly in high activity selling, selling percentages and averages matter. You may not think they matter, but they do. We call them ratios.

Ratios tell you the objective story behind the emotional one you tell yourself, or you tell your sales manager. So, they’re the real story behind the story you get or the story you tell yourself. Read the full post

Getting Your Personal Agenda Straight

What a great start to the week. Two great posts by Dan Tudor at Landingthedeal.com, referencing an article by Robert Cox on how billionaire’s think.

A quote pulled from Dan’s quote pulled from Robert Cox:

When a billionaire enters a meeting, it is all about “We are here to make money.” It’s not about the weather. It’s not about what so-and-so is doing this weekend. It is not about who has the best record in the NBA and who will win the playoffs. (Unless, of course, that billionaire is Mark Cuban.) No. The billionaire is ALWAYS READY to make money.

Read the full post

10 Free Sales Tools and Resources

We’ve got approximately 10 new free sales tools lined up for launch over the next couple of months.

They will be immediately useful and usable, helping you streamline your introductory statement (your offer), glean benefits from features, manage prospects more successfully (version 2.0 of our Prospect Management Report), track your effectiveness on the phone, plan your sales week quickly and productively, and more. Most of these will be downloadable files, while others are physical products you’ll have to order.

Our Resources page lists our free sales tools that you can download after becoming a free member of SalesTeamTools. We’re doing this to better track how our tools and resources are used, so we can request direct feedback and offer similar tools you may not know about.

So, download them without registering while you can and recommend any others you’d like to see!

Next Page »