sales tactics Archives

Why you should tailor your sales messages to the buying influences

Every day it's getting harder and harder to get marketing cut-through. Consumers are becoming savvier to sales messaging and advertisements and more reluctant to reach out until later in their buyer's journey. And while it's now easier and cheaper to get your messaging in front of consumers, it's also easier and cheaper for your competitors (and their competitors… and so on). Need proof? You just need to look at some of these recent stats: A global average of 37% of Internet users now block ads 79% of buyers wait until after they’ve fully defined their needs to READ MORE ›

By Alice Antonov|Strategy|

Buyer-centric go-to-market strategy (with a little help from Geoffrey Moore)

This article is something of an essay on my current thinking about buyer-centric go-to-market strategy and has been shaped by a recent conversation with strategy luminary Geoffrey Moore. Why buyer-centric go-to-market strategy? And why now? As a high-school drop-out, I was in a customer service role from 1980 and earned my first sales role in 1983. I was lucky enough to start my career in sales at a company with a deep commitment to soft-skills training, and to work for managers committed to nurturing any skills they'd helped me acquire. I did very well. Not through any READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

How to get Leads from LinkedIn [video]

Hi again, LinkedIn's core value proposition remains pretty much the same. It legitimizes putting your CV online, keeping it up-to-date, and putting your best foot forward for future job prospects, for most people. That's fundamentally its core proposition. A lot of us use it for different purposes, but that's essentially it. That, therefore, means that lots of people keep their profile really up-to-date, which makes it a great source for leads. Today, I want to explore how to get leads from LinkedIn. I've explored great advice from other bloggers, including a couple of our own articles, and READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Tactics|

How to prepare and run the perfect prospect meeting

Imagine that you’re in a prospect meeting. You’re meeting a client (or prospective client) for the first time ever, and you’ve got seven really cracking questions that you’re going to ask them. You might be using Spin Selling (which teaches us to use troubling questions) or Conceptual Selling (which is somewhat more of a bespoke for each opportunity). Still, whatever approach you’re taking, you’re certainly going into that meeting armed with some great questions that are insightful and penetrative. With a breath, you asked your first and wait – using golden silence. Your prospect considers your question READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Sales|

How do you sell to the C-Suite? You don’t

It’s a question that comes up a lot, and sometimes we even ask ourselves: How should you approach the c-suite? How do you get the attention and time of that elusive senior person who you need to get onside early and who, ultimately, can approve your deal? Often, the answer is: you don’t. And you shouldn’t. Let me show you why. Before we sell, we solve – so who is having the problem? Often the person who can approve the deal is not the person who actually has the problem that the deal is going to READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Strategy|

Eight tactics to improve conversion and dominate your market

If you can't make your funnel flow faster, can you lose fewer buyers throughout their journey? We've argued on recent blogs why you can't speed up your buyer just because you have quotas to meet, but that you can improve your conversion rates. We had a ton of email requests for specific tactics. So this week we're making a series of specific tactical recommendations to improve your conversion rates throughout the funnel. Want to receive more content like this? Subscribe to our monthly B2B marketing blog!

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Tactics|

How to calculate your sales conversion rate (II), and why speed kills

In last week's show, we offered 10 steps for calculating sales conversion rate. We also promised to show you why lag is death. In English, why a buyer who has taken longer than normal is unlikely to buy from you at all. So does that mean there is merit in using assertive marketing and sales techniques to speed them up? We all want to speed our funnel up. In a recession like the GFC, sales cycles typically blow out, meaning buyers are taking longer than normal to buy. This could be so - they might genuinely be READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Evergreen, Sales|

Step up your lead generation game with these 5 tips

As we all know, your website is your shop window. In this day and age your website’s look and feel along with its functionality can really turn your customers on or off, there is hardly anything worse than a dated website that gives you a sense of the early 2000s. Nostalgia is a no-go when it comes to your inbound marketing and B2B lead generation. Your website is the tool which lets you attract, engage, convert, close and delight. Obviously, the conversion part is fundamental to this process, but how do you get there? The answer READ MORE ›

By Chris Fell|Sales, Strategy, Tactics|

Are your sales people merely communicating value – or creating it?

One of the problems with creating generic “unique value propositions” is that they are just that - generic. They might be a useful basis for communicating mass-marketing messages, but they are not a suitable basis for a truly productive sales conversation. To be truly effective - and to have real impact - your sales people need to be crafting uniquely customised value propositions for each individual prospect (and often each significant stakeholder). If that sounds like hard work, it is. But here’s why it is worth it… Your prospects are tired of generic value propositions that do READ MORE ›

By Bob Apollo|Sales, Strategy, Tactics|

B2B Marketing Definition

I've not typically been big on the necessity for definitions, but became frustrated recently when a senior marekter threw terms like strategy, tactics around as if they were interchangable. It is not hard to understand what B2B marketing is, nor how it is different from consumer, or B2C marketing. Let's start at the top: B2B marketing can be defined as the planning, execution and measurement of the strategy and the tactics needed to sell a product or service to a business. In this blog, I'll unpack that just a little, argue why the four P's is READ MORE ›

By Hugh Macfarlane|Sales, Tactics|