A good sales professional not only finds new win-win opportunities to sell additional products or services to meet the customer’s evolving needs, but also takes personal accountability as the “go to” point of reference for all issues  relating to ordering and delivery of the customer’s requirements. The balance depends on the nature of your product or service, the buying cycle set by your customers, your organisation’s physical infrastructure (eg the presence of a dedicated customer service team), whether the Sales Exec is expected to hunt for brand new customers as well as account manage, the degree to which “service” READ MORE ›

This is the method Taiichi Ohno, pioneer of Toyota production systems, recommended to get to the root cause of a problem. My thought was that this principle could serve well in sales. In specific, it can be used to find out whether an opportunity exists and if it is real and worth your while to win. I am aware that good sales people know the power of questioning buyers over providing them with a laundry list of features and benefits. The ability to ask pertinent questions comes from preparation. Preparation is more than amassing information. I suggest READ MORE ›

Christian Maurer, a Paris-based Consultant, Trainer and Coach, writes... Donal Daily’s Sales 2.0 Network blog says to include 'non-revenue objectives' when judging the success of sales-effectiveness initiatives. One example they use is, ‘better qualification or common sales language across the organisation’. They reason that revenue is a lagging indicator. This is especially the case for long sales-cycles. By the time you notice a deviation from the revenue objective, it is often too late to change the short term effects. You have a better chance of affecting short-term outcomes if you track the behaviour of sales people using READ MORE ›

Glenn Guilfoyle, Founder & Principal of The Next Level, writes... In the B2B environment where core products and services are becoming more and more commoditised, more often than not, customers make their supplier choices on the process outputs that are most tangible and visible to them. Therefore, as suppliers, we live and die daily by the output performance of these critical and inter-related processes, as perceived by customers. The degree of inter-dependency between these two processes often lies in how well the order-to-delivery (or service fulfilment, for the services organisation) is operating.  If it is streamlined and READ MORE ›